AI Overviews and What They Mean for Paid Advertisers
Artificial Intelligence is quickly creeping into paid search, and what a great time to be one of the first to embrace AI in this space! In fact, at the Google Marketing Live 2024 event, Google teased some upcoming AI products and features, most notably AI Overviews.
In this SEO Premier Blog, we’ll discuss what AI Overviews is, as well as its implication to paid advertisers.
Understanding AI Overviews
For users, AI Overviews is a Google Search feature designed to give searchers a quick and informative summary based on their search term without flipping through the many websites on the results pages. While the overview carries relevant links if the user wants to probe deeper, AI Overviews saves the user time by providing key points to a query up front.
As of today, Google is still rolling out AI Overviews, particularly in some parts of the US, but it has already been used billions of times during testing. This is a welcome development, as users appreciate the ability to get a quick grasp of a subject without sifting through multiple websites.
AI Overviews, Notes for Advertisers
Because AI Overviews practically provides users with a snapshot of the information they’re looking for, eliminating the need to explore such answers from individual websites, there’s a growing concern among advertisers about the consequent drop of traffic from their domains. SEO Premier Blog compiles some of the ways advertisers can work around their paid ads campaign with AI Overviews in mind:
Adopt broad match for keywords
In recent months, we have seen a decline in the efficiency of phrase match and signs point to better outcomes for broad matches. In the last 15 years, brands have had too many pains from broad matches and the historical performance borne from them. It appears that Google’s engineering resources are being funnelled into broad match algorithms. For most verticals, you can slowly ease yourself into the strategy by conducting tests in small batches and tightening your negative lists.
Employ value based bidding
On top of broad match, advertisers must learn to bid right. Unless there’s data to support it, don’t begrudge the potential loss of traffic from your pages. In reality, a drop in traffic means more targeted users are being redirected to your site, which means they’re more qualified to engage and undertake the desired action because of how the bid is set up. Value-based bidding connects you to the right users looking to complete the conversion at the right time.
Use triangulation in your measurements
To get the most precise picture of your campaigns’ performance, it’s always ideal to employ multiple sources of measurement to understand their performance, optimise on the go, and maximise your budget. If you can afford 3 tools that will work in tandem to provide insights into data-driven attribution, in-platform measurement, and cross-channel measurement.
AI Overviews may lead to lower click-through rates, so to make the most out of your budget, it’s recommended to heavily consider static impression shares and the measurement of increments of paid media, whether on video or non-search placements.
Embrace Performance Max and Demand Gen
Gone are the days when paid search is just about exclusively text ads. Google categorises Maps, YouTube, Gmail as part of its ecosystem and now more than ever, users are searching for information on traditionally non-search platforms like TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest and a score of other social media sites.
For you to gain advantage in the search landscape, it is important to include Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns in your future media plans. Through this approach, brands can have access to a level of automation that can empower more of their campaigns. Working with value-based bidding, these campaigns will support AI Overviews in matching queries to consumers with the right audience signals and conversion actions.
Promote transparency
It is our duty as advertisers to promote transparency by advocating for more granular levels of reporting within Performance Max and Demand Gen. We hope that this will nudge Google to be even more transparent, as well as so we can learn to make informed decisions in our ad campaign regardless of the platform. Brands must have full access to discover what our ads are serving against and how or landing page content appears against searches.
