Our team had a great time in New York recently, hosted by our partners at Google. With an amazing location in Chelsea, and backdrops of the Hudson River and Statue of Liberty…Google’s latest event digs can’t be beat!
We were joined by clients from the Tri-State area and beyond, with our furthest guests traveling from Germany just to attend this event with us. Clients representing a variety of vertical markets were in attendance, both those that focus on B2C audiences, as well as B2B.
During our panel discussion, moderated by yours truly and including team members from both Google and MoreVisibility, there were several key points made about 2018 takeaways and 2019 strategies. They include:
- Video, video, video. The opportunities are vast to advertise within YouTube, the second largest search engine behind Google (yes, people really do go to YouTube and search for things that provide them visual video results). There are options to advertise in text over a video, based on a contextual similarity, or do a quick pre-roll ad before someone watches a video. So, it isn’t a requirement to have video to advertise here, although we have seen some great results from it. If you try it out, ensure the video is short and sweet and branded. The first 5-15 seconds should be the most impactful because they will be the most watched.
- Attribution was a huge topic of conversation in 2018 and Google will make some big announcements in this area during 2019 to help marketers create unique attribution models based on individual campaigns. This is very important given the differences you may want to have for tracking branding efforts against broader service/category like terms and efforts. Stay tuned for some expanded opportunities here.
- All of the panel urged attendees to start trusting Artificial Intelligence (AI) for decision-making within their Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) account. The technology will allow for so many combinations of messaging tests to be run, without much human interaction. It also expands the options of finding the precise target audience for your products or services, through predictive behavior and patterns, as well as customer modeling.
- Start planning for voice search, if you haven’t already. As you can see from Google’s Keynote presentation in the picture above (right side of image), that’s the future.
