Google announced Google Merchant Center Next, a more lightweight, easier-to-use version of Google Merchant Center at Google Marketing Live. Google added, “while we’re simplifying, the features that larger retailers rely on aren’t going anywhere.”

Merchant Center Next will replace the current Merchant Center slowly by the end of 2024.

Google Merchant Center Next will automatically populate your Merchant Center product feed with the information Google can detect from your website. Google said you can edit what gets pulled in through automation or even turn this feature off.

This is instead of merchants building specialized data feeds or manually uploading products to Google Merchant Center.

Here is what it looks like:

Also, Google is bringing the insights reports into the Performance tab in Merchant Center.

Here is that report:

Google said Merchant Center Next has already started to roll out for new users. Google said it will upgrade smaller businesses over the coming months, with plans to complete the global rollout in 2024.

Google promised to notify merchants when the new experience is ready. So get ready, you will eventually be moved to this new version of Google Merchant Center.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google announced a bunch of new AI features for Google Ads at Google Marketing Live yesterday, including a new conversation Google Ads tool and also improvements to Automatically Created Assets (ACA), amongst some other things, which we covered today on the Search Engine Roundtable.

Conversation Experience In Google Ads

Google announced new AI to help advertisers create ads in Google Ads, Google wrote, “we’re introducing a new, natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads, designed to jumpstart campaign creation and simplify Search ads by combining your expertise with Google AI.”

We saw a glimpse of this a month ago and also in early April but this version is much more advanced than what we saw.

This tool will use Google’s large language models (LLM) and generative AI technologies to help create ads in Google Ads. This includes keywords, headlines, descriptions, images and other assets for your campaign. The advertiser enters the landing page of the website, Google will then crawl it and the AI summarizes the response. There is a back-and-forth conversation where Google Ads will ask you questions and you can answer them so the AI can fine-tune the ad. You can, at any time, edit the ad and modify it, before you decide to publish the ads.

You can continue to prompt it to generate alternative ads as well.

Plus, Google said this aims to improve your ads’ overall ad score so they perform better.

Here is how it looks:

Here is the headline creation part:

Here is the description creation part:

I did ask if there is a limit in the number of back and forth you can go with the questions in the tool and I was told no, by Brian Burdick, Senior Director, Search Ads Automation. So you can go on and on talking to the conversation experience ad creator. Although these things may change over time…

Automatically Created Assets

Then on the automatically created assets (ACA), which is not new, but being improved with AI. Google said ACA will use “generative AI to more effectively create and adapt Search ads based on the context of a query.”

The example Google provided was a search for “skin care for dry sensitive skin.” “AI can use content from your landing page and existing ads to create a new headline that aligns even more closely with the query, such as “Soothe Your Dry, Sensitive Skin.” This helps you improve ad relevance while staying true to your brand,” Google said.

Greg Finn does warn advertisers, “While this technology can greatly improve your ad’s relevancy, it might not be the best bet for highly regulated industries or brands with stringent compliance standards.” “By giving up complete control to AI, Google will be the final say on what is displayed on your ads,” he added.

Oh, I did ask if these AI-generated ads would be labeled as AI generated some how and the answer is not today but maybe in the future, who knows.

Up next, how the Google Ads will look in the new Google Search Generative Experience.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google showcased some additional Google Ads sponsored search ads in the new Google Search Generative Experience yesterday at Google Marketing Live. Google made a point to say these ad positions and features will likely change as Google continues to experiment with this new search experience.

When Google first announced the Search Generative Experience (I like to spell it out), Google showcased how ads will be displayed, and we covered that over here but now Google showed us an additional ad position within the actual conversation of the AI generative answer in the new experience.

Here is a GIF of it in action, which you can click on to enlarge and see a larger version:

Let’s zoom in a bit and you can see how the “sponsored” labels at the top pretty much look similar to the traditional Google Search result ad slots:

Then the new ad slots are within the generative answer, as you can see in these screenshots both for desktop and mobile:

And Google will also place sponsored search ads below the AI generative answer:

As we said before, advertisers cannot opt out of showing their ads in the new Google Search Generative Experience. This is because this is a labs experiment and Google has not yet built in controls for advertisers yet. Google wants to continue to experiment and see what ad positions work and which do not.

Google also would not share any click through rate differences because again, this is an experiment, labs only right now. But Google may share these in the future, maybe.

In the announcement, Google wrote, “over the coming months, we’ll experiment with Search and Shopping ads that are directly integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode. We’ll also experiment with new formats native to SGE that use generative AI to create relevant, high-quality ads that are customized to every step of the search journey.”

So we will be following these experiences and tests closely as soon as we gain access to the new Google Search Generative Experience.

We also covered the new conversation experience for creating Google Ads. And there is a lot more, more than all the stories we covered, so check out both Search Engine Land and this from Google.

Forum discussion at Twitter.