Google recently launched its conversational AI experience in its ads. What it does is allow for the formulation of Ad campaigns via a chat-based experience. All one needs is a website URL and the Google AI tool will commence the creation of optimized search campaigns that consist of the required ad content which includes the relevant creative and keywords.
Driven by the Gemini AI model, research conducted early on in the tool’s roll-out has found that it yields better quality search campaigns for advertisers, resulting in better Ad Strength scores.
What is conversational AI?
This is a type of Artificial Intelligence that can imitate human conversation. The capability is derived from natural language processing or NLP, which is a branch of AI that gives computers the ability to understand and process human language and Google’s foundation models that produce new generative AI competencies.
These AI systems are fed large amounts of data that include speech and text. This data is utilized to train and inform the system about how to comprehend and process human language.
This knowledge is used by the system to interact with humans and will use these interactions to better the quality of its communications over time.
How it will work
The tool will enable advertisers to design strong and creative images through conversational suggestions that use generative AI and images from business landing pages. Advertisers will have the opportunity to approve the images before the campaign goes live. The images will be invisibly watermarked using SynthID, and also have open standard metadata that will help identify that the image was generated by AI.
Users can also insert a digital watermark directly into the AI-generated images or audio, which will be undetectable by humans, but will nevertheless be detectable for identification.
In addition, advertisers can also request the tool to produce various versions of their ad copies, and it would be able to point out very specific language that matches search interests. Coming up with Ad headlines will also be easier, as it will reference its database of other effective Ad campaigns and cross-reference those against advertisers’ own products.
The entire experience will be finetuned over the next few months. The tool is part of the company’s newest measures to exploit the increasing interest in advertising using AI.
The numbers look good
According to the marketing platform BrightEdge, it is expected that as much as 84% of queries on Google Search will be strengthened by generative AI, which in turn is projected to influence more than $40 Billion per year in Ad revenue.
Industries that are thought to be most impacted by the new technology are e-commerce, healthcare, and B2B technology industries.
It’s what advertisers have been waiting for
The conversational AI in search Ads was first launched in May last year. The beta version will be accessible to English-language advertisers in the UK and US. Then the global rollout will happen in the weeks ahead, while additional language support is also expected in the months ahead.
Generative AI of this nature has been hotly anticipated as it is a powerful tool that leverages Google’s huge database of information that will point out the most searched and relevant terms for advertisers.
Boon or bane?
At the moment, this is a definite boon for advertisers.
However, Digiday, the online trade magazine says that consumers are somewhat concerned about the misuse of such AI-generated content. It quotes Gartner which says that 70% of consumers have “some trust” in search results supported by GenAI, but only 20% have said they have “a great deal of trust.”
However, as much as 79% of consumers who were surveyed have also said that they will use GenAI-based search even in minute ways during the next year.
Even though the watermarked content gives some sort of protection against misuse, this does not fully guard against the overall misuse of AI-generated information.
Still, as with all forms of technology, this too seems to be a work in progress, and the finetuning will happen over some time. The foolproofing of any new technology is an arduous and challenging task and is something that the experts grapple with each time.
Until then, proceeding wisely and cautiously will be prudent for anyone using the tool.
(Anouk De Silva)