AI tools are everywhere. There’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Poe, Perplexity, Midjourney, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, Pika, and the list goes on. They can help you write emails. They can help you correct your grammar. They can do marketplace research. They can brainstorm ideas for new marketing strategies. They can create images and even short videos. And now Google Ads and Google Merchant Center are both starting to embrace the proliferation of AI tools within their own interfaces without the need to access these other tools at all. These AI tools can help you create compelling ad copy for your ads and even generate images for your Performance Max (PMax) campaigns or for your product backgrounds. In Google Ads, you can now select the “Generate headlines” option to have the system’s AI tool generate headline variations for you. Let’s face it: coming up with 15 unique headlines for all your Performance Max Ads can be mentally taxing and mentally challenging, as well as time-consuming in this time-pressure-cooker world we now live in. Once the pace of something accelerates, it’s hard for it to slow down. The good ol’ days are gone, and they ain’t never coming back. We need to be fast, and we need to be efficient. AI tools can take a process that might have taken you an hour prior and knock off 30 minutes, if not more. You can select the “Generate long headlines” option to have the system’s AI tool generate long headlines. This will give you a variety of headlines you can choose from. We’ve found some of these system-generated headlines to be quite excellent, whereas others are not so great and are not a good fit for our products. As always, with anything generated by an AI tool, thoroughly review the choices given to you before accepting any. You can select the “Generate descriptions” option to have the system’s AI tool generate descriptions. In this example, I gave the AI tool a general overview of the business, and the system generated numerous descriptions for me to use in the Ads. You can even select the “Generate images” tool to have the system’s AI tool generate images for you. As with all the AI-generated items, it’s user beware for the images the system can generate. We will sometimes get some practical and useful images from this tool, but we’ve also seen some generated images that are absolutely NOT appropriate for our products. Do not blindly accept these auto-generated images given to you, so definitely scrutinize these images for anomalies, weird physical features, and other elements that might be off-putting to a potential customer. However, if you are pressed for time or simply don’t have access to a graphic designer, this could be a viable tool for you to use to create a few images you can utilize in your campaign. Google Merchant Center Next (GMCN) is the next iteration of Google Merchant Center. They have an experimental tool called Product Studio, which is now available within the GMCN interface under the Products tab. This tool allows you to “Transform your product images with AI by quickly generating lifestyle scenes, removing backgrounds, and improving image resolution.” So if your product has a boring white background that you want to give some life to, but you don’t have access to a high-end photography studio or expensive photo-editing software, you can give this tool a try. Take a plain pathway light, for example, and give it an outdoor background by giving some guidance to the system of what you want to see (see below). If you do not see what you like, you can also regenerate the image to see if it will give you a background more to your liking. Google is clearly embracing the transformation of the Ad copy creation, image creation, and image editing processes within their own interfaces. Play with these AI tools. Use them constantly. Learn how to become efficient with them. They are not going away. It’s also important to note that the previously mentioned tools outside the Google Ads and GMC interfaces are CONSTANTLY changing and upgrading their capabilities, so don’t be surprised if your favorite AI tool is superseded by the next hot thing tomorrow morning. I’m not exaggerating when I say things are changing daily in the AI space, so you do need to pay attention to what is happening with this unending proliferation of AI tools. To learn more, read Kelly Spryszak’s blog, The Effects of AI on Search Engine Marketing.
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