Google Marketing Live 24 - The Biggest Updates Impacting Multifamily

Here are some of the main highlights that relate most to multifamily:

1. Paid Search and Performance Max:

• Continued Emphasis on Automation: They are calling Paid Search and Performance Max the "Power Pair." Google claims that if you add Pmax to paid search that uses broad match and automated bidding, you should see better results from Pmax.
• Improved AI Performance: Google claims that its automated bidding and targeting, which utilize AI, has improved by an estimated 10% from previous iterations.

2. AI-Powered Creative Tools:

• AI Image Editing: Advertisers can now use AI to edit images by adding or removing objects and adjusting backgrounds and sizes to fit different ad formats. You can even use illustrations instead of standard photos. This feature will be integrated into Performance Max campaigns.
• Animated Image Ads: Automatically generated animated images from product feeds can be used in Demand Gen campaigns on platforms like YouTube Shorts.
• Brand Standards Integration: Advertisers can provide brand guidelines (e.g., colors, fonts) to ensure AI-generated ads are consistent with their brand identity.

3. New Ad Placements:

• Ads in AI Overviews: Search and Shopping ads will start appearing in AI-generated overview boxes on search result pages, providing new opportunities for visibility. We recently wrote about Generative AI and Google SGE in this blog post.

4. New Ad Placements:

• Ads Data Manager: This tool is now available to all advertisers. It enables better aggregation and activation of first-party data across various platforms like YouTube and Google Ads for more effective campaign management.
• Performance Max Reporting: New reporting features will provide asset-level performance data, helping advertisers understand the effectiveness of individual ad components. This announcement received a loud ovation, as transparent reporting and controls for PMax have been notoriously lacking to this point.
• Similar Business Benchmarking: In GA4, you will be able to benchmark your performance against similar businesses. When rolled out later this year, this feature will help you understand how your performance stacks up against businesses similar to yours. Hopefully, multifamily will be included in this feature rollout.

5. Lower Data Thresholds for First-party Lists:

• One of the GML highlights for us was that Demand Gen campaigns have lowered their first-party list threshold requirements to 100 list members, down from 1000. This opens up the ability to be used in more multifamily campaigns since most active prospect lists for single apartment communities are under 1000. Demand Gen is also the only Google Ads campaign type that allows look-alike audiences.
• Dyverse hopes that Google will lower the threshold for other campaign types soon. In this blog post, we recently discussed the limitations that Google's first-party list threshold causes.

These updates indicate Google's focus on leveraging AI to enhance ad creativity, expand ad placement options, and improve data utilization for more effective advertising campaigns.

For more detailed information, you can refer to the full roundup of updates from GML provided by Google.