This year’s big announcements included re-naming for most of Google’s marketing products. Google AdWords became Google Ads and the DoubleClick products joined the existing 360 suite. The name change is great but the product roadmaps and the discussions we got the opportunity to have with Product Managers at the event was even greater.
Jakob and Johan went to San Jose to listen to presentations, meet peers from all over the world and dive into the latest innovations, insights and cases. Google Marketing Live is a product-focused conference with multiple new official launches and announcements. There were also a lot of discussions and updates that we unfortunately cannot share. But it’s safe to say that we have twelve exciting months ahead of us until next year’s conference.
To start with, we got even more confident about our strategic decision to focus on audiences and the user journey to create better targeted and more efficient digital marketing — ultimately reduce marketing waste and increase value. The development of audience targeting, supported by Machine Learning advancements, and the possibility to utilise Google’s search data is expanding in a speedy rate. This includes new targeting capabilities as well as new ways to analyse the user journey. Examples are; in-market audiences for search, frequency capping cross platforms and the new cross-device reporting in Analytics.
It’s also clear that companies that work hard to find the true value of marketing activities will outbeat competition that do not invest in that research. That is a mind-set we have applied at Precis from the beginning. Half of the marketing game is won if you have a better understanding of the value creation compared to competitors. With that we are of course happy to see that we get an expanded tool box to reach an even better understanding of the customer journey and marketing effectiveness. The capabilities offered in Google Cloud will become an even more important part of digital marketing. It enables us to predict and score visitors based on likelihood to convert, enable personalised product recommendations and to connect offline transactions to the online world. Much of this is supported by Google’s machine learning technologies such as Cloud ML and TensorFlow.
It is also worth mentioning that user segmentation is important to get to a point where you stop optimising toward averages. Once you know your top tier customers and people not likely to buy from your brand, it is obvious that it enables more efficient distribution of digital marketing. This type of segmentation can be activated in your marketing channels by utilising Google Cloud services.
Google is pointing towards two interesting purposes of these efforts. First is to help brands help people. People expect user interactions to be accurate, to understand intent and to be assisted. The second is to drive growth and the companies that will offer the best assistant will drive that growth. That is also what we have seen when working with our clients. The more time we put into relevancy, the better performance from digital marketing activities.
By understanding intent and using the tools that we have to be relevant, it enables us to guide the user in the user journey. We can leverage the fact that the person looking for moving companies might be interested in our remodeling services or home alarm. It is simply a matter of predicting what customers want.
We left the event excited about all the new products and features we will get our hands on, to unlock even better (read “more relevant”) digital marketing campaigns. We will make sure that our clients get the full benefit of this by continuing to push the frontier in digital marketing through utilisation of new features together with more advanced analysis to delivering actionable insights.
Right message, right time has always been a goal of marketing, but now marketers can do it on the audience’s terms. Leading marketers are no longer looking only at demographic audience characteristics or at lookalike audiences. They’re looking for marketing signals that indicate people are at the right moment in life, or when audiences are telling them that they are open to a message ― through search terms, through browsing behavior, and through engagement.
— Laura Beaudin, partner, Bain and Company
Read more here about Google Marketing Platform.
// Jakob & Johan
