It’s been a huge week at Google This Week with many announcements coming out of Google I/O, including new language software LaMDA and MUM, a preview of cookieless product launches, new ways to keep track of products, new features to improve app campaigns and new bidding features in Google Ads.
ICYMI, here’s what happened at Google This Week.
- Preview Cookieless Product Launches
- YouTube Rolling Out Clips to 10x More Channels
- Google Unveils MUM, 1000x More Powerful than BERT
- Google Rolls Out ‘About This Result’ Worldwide
- Google Adds New Ways to Keep Track of Products
- New Key Moments Structured Data for Video
- Google Bringing Page Experience Ranking to Desktop
- Google Ads Rolling Out New Bidding Features
- Google Unveils LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications)
- Google Adds New Features to Improve App Campaigns
Preview Cookieless Product Launches
Google has released a preview of some of the product launches around privacy they will be sharing at Google Marketing Livestream next week, including easier options for working with consented data, more first-party conversion data and more machine learning in Google Analytics.
- Google is adjusting how Google tags operate based on user consent. When users don’t consent to cookies, Consent Mode will use conversion modelling to recover, on average, more than 70% of ad-click-to-conversion journeys. Implementation will soon be enabled directly from Google Tag Manager.
- Google has also announced enhanced conversions to allow tags to use consented, first-party data. The first-party data is hashed to protect user privacy. You’ll receive aggregated and anonymised conversion reporting.
- Google is also extending their advanced machine learning models to behavioural reporting in Analytics. “For example, if there is incomplete data in your User Acquisition report due to cookies not being available, we’ll now use modeling to help fill gaps for a more complete view of the number of new users your campaigns have acquired.”
YouTube Rolling Out Clips to 10x More Channels
YouTube is expanding the rollout of Clips to 10 times more channels. Clips, allow users to make a short snippet of creators’ content. The feature is currently in limited alpha testing but now YouTube is expanding the test to more creators.
Google Unveils MUM, 1000x More Powerful than BERT
Google has unveiled MUM (Multitask Unified Model) to better understand more complex questions and needs in search. Like BERT, MUM is built on a Transformer architecture, but it’s 1000 times more powerful and can multitask.
“MUM not only understands language, but also generates it.” It is trained across 75 different languages and many different tasks and is multimodal so understands text and images.
Google Rolls Out ‘About This Result’ Worldwide
The About This Result feature which provides details about a website before you visit is now being rolled out to all English results worldwide, with more languages to follow. Google will also be rolling out more information later this year, including how a site describes itself, what other sources are saying about it and related articles.
Google Adds New Ways to Keep Track of Products
“Because shopping isn’t always a linear experience, we’re introducing new ways to explore and keep track of products.” Now, when you take a screenshot, Google Photos will prompt you to search the photo with Lens so you can shop for the item.
On Chrome, you can now keep track of all your shopping carts so you can resume your shopping at any time. Google is also working with retailers to surface loyalty benefits earlier and they’re introducing a simplified process to help Shopify merchants make their products discoverable on Google in just a few clicks.
New Key Moments Structured Data for Video
Google has announced two new types of structured data that it supports to make the most of Key Moments. Clips markup allows you to provide segments to Google (name, starting time and URL) and Seek markup enables Google to use machine learning to automatically set key moments in your video.
Google Bringing Page Experience Ranking to Desktop
Google has announced that while the Google page experience update is initially only going to roll out to mobile pages, they’re also looking at bringing it to desktop as well. Jeffrey Jose announced the update during Google I/O.
“I am happy to announce that we are bringing page experience ranking to desktop. While we’re launching page experience on mobile soon, we believe page experience is critical no matter the surface the user is browsing the web. This is why we’re working hard on bringing page experience ranking to desktop.”
The rollout will not occur in mid-June with the page experience update. Google said they will update us on when the desktop version will be live so you’ll have time to prepare.
Google Ads Rolling Out New Bidding Features
Google is rolling out several new features in Google Ads. Google is adding top signals in the bid strategy report to give you more insights into Target ROAS and Maximize conversion value. Currently, you can only view top signals for campaigns that use Target CPA and Maximize conversions.
You can now also apply seasonality adjustments at the manager account level and there are also new opportunities on the Recommendations page, making it easier to opt into Maximize conversion value bidding. Google has also added Target Impression Share simulators so you can better predict performance. This was previously available for conversion and click-based bid strategies but is now available to Search campaigns using Target Impression Share.
Google Unveils LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications)
Google has unveiled LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. LaMDA is a machine learning model designed for dialogue and built on Transformer, a neural network architecture.
“We think that this early-stage research could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful applications.”
Google Adds New Features to Improve App Campaigns
Google has added a range of new features to improve app campaigns. Starting next month, Google is expanding the reach of App campaigns on Android to users in the desktop versions of Google.com and the Google Display Network.
Google also now offers “event creation and modification directly from the Analytics interface so you can configure the right in-app events based on your marketing objectives – without requiring any code updates.” Meaning you can change event tracking without the help of a developer.
Google’s new deep link validator also helps improve deep linking implementation. Google unveiled two new tools to help with deep linking, the deep link validator and impact calculator.
“Marketers can use these tools in Google Ads to see which types of deep links they have, how to fix ones that aren’t working and estimate the ROI opportunity of implementing deep links.”
Thank You for Reading
Have you noticed any changes from Google this week?
Check back next Friday for the latest from Google This Week.
