What new features does Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition offer?

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition offers a broad range of new product features, particularly focused on helping smaller marketing teams do more with less. At a crucial time when brands are racing to achieve new efficiencies with AI, enhance experimentation of user journeys and effortlessly collaborate across teams, new features in Advanced Edition are sure to please. Here’s what to look forward to:

Reimagined campaign home. Like Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition includes a reimagined and reengineered Campaign home. In this new experience marketers can view guidance on building key marketing components. Those include access guidance cards for tasks like creating audiences, creating content, and creating campaigns. Accessing recent campaigns in the new campaign home is easily done as well—just review a list view of your most recent campaigns.

AI-powered features. The Advanced Edition introduces robust AI integration, making sophisticated marketing tactics accessible to SMBs. Einstein Engagement Scoring will enable you to predict engagement to segment and personalize more effectively. Score every individual on their likelihood to open, click and stay subscribed to email and to convert. Then use those scores to create audiences, segments, split paths in Flow, and personalize content. Einstein Engagement Frequency helps ensure you send the right number of messages to optimize engagement. Markers will be able to see a distribution of their email sends and subscriber engagement for a given period of time. EEF will predict the optimal frequency range of emails to maximize engagement goals. This will allow you to adjust messaging cadence based on data, and create data extensions for over and under-messaged subscribers.

Dynamic content creation. With the Data Cloud data graph, marketers can build dynamic content directly within the content builder. This feature, which is also available in Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, allows the configuration of rules that operate against your data graph, ensuring that your marketing material is as dynamic and responsive as your audience demands.

Event-driven messaging. Like the Growth Edition, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition supports event-driven messaging, enabling marketers to trigger communications based on specific events, such as form submissions or commerce purchases.

Two-way conversational messaging. Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition enables marketers with Service Cloud and Digital Engagement to turn one-way promotions into a connected conversation. With help from Data Cloud, marketers gain the ability to respond in real-time with unified data to deliver connected interactions across departments and respond instantly.

Path Experiment. Companies using Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition are able to test up to ten paths to multiple variations of your campaign paths with varied channels, messaging copy, and cadence. Users can remove bias from testing paths by randomly assigning individuals to different paths to ensure fair and unbiased distribution. It is also possible to tailor the distribution of individuals across paths according to your specific testing needs.

There’s even more to look forward to soon. In addition to these Advanced-specific features, Salesforce will continue to build out innovations in both Growth and Advanced Edition, which customers will be able to use in October.

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition addresses key CRM use cases.

Each of these new features are engineered to address key challenges and priorities marketers face today, ensuring their businesses can deliver highly personalized and effective marketing experiences. In fact, according to Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report (Ninth Edition), a staggering 88% of marketers believe they must innovate to meet rising customer expectations—but achieving that is impossible without a unified view of the customer. Here’s how Advanced Edition is designed to enable that use case and more.

Unify data for personalized engagements.

With both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions, marketers can now personalize every customer engagement using a unified data source. This allows teams to create campaigns faster and more effectively with the aid of Salesforce's trusted AI.

Enable collaboration through greater data visibility.

Built on Salesforce's platform, both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions offer brands or companies the opportunity to remove silos in their sales and marketing technology stacks. By choosing Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced you are bringing your core sales, marketing, service and commerce technologies together under one roof. This enables a profound change in the availability of your customer data, already in Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud, to be used by your marketing team. This goes a long way towards realizing the goal of gaining a unified view of your customers. This holistic view supports informed decision-making and enhances the overall customer experience.

Better understand customer journeys through detailed engagement metrics.

The upgraded Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions transition from simply measuring marketing influence through campaign members to utilizing detailed engagement metrics. Both editions will include Opportunity Influence, a feature launching in October, which use engagement data to tie closed and won opportunities and their revenue back to specific campaigns. This shift provides marketers with profound insights into how customer interactions drive sales. By understanding which engagements are more likely to lead to conversions, marketing teams can focus their efforts more strategically, including the creation of multi-channel journeys through both email and SMS.

Moreover, the feedback loop created by these metrics feeds data back into the marketing system. This allows for more targeted campaigns and sophisticated lead scoring, ensuring that only the most qualified leads are passed to sales. As a result, marketing becomes a more evident driver of growth, enhancing the value of every interaction and elevating the role of marketing within the business.

Is Advanced Edition fit for your team’s specific needs?

When considering whether the Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is the right fit for your business, it's essential to understand who stands to benefit the most from these offerings, how they compare to other Salesforce products, and what your existing Salesforce setup looks like.

What separates Growth and Advanced Edition from other Marketing Cloud products?

Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Edition are streamlined versions of Salesforce's comprehensive Marketing Cloud, specifically designed to be intuitive and accessible. Built on the Lightning platform—the same foundation as Salesforce Sales Cloud—these versions allow new customers to set up and begin testing customer journeys quickly, without ever leaving their salesforce org.

For small and medium-sized businesses who are moving to Salesforce or already use Salesforce, it is in your best interest to use Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced for your marketing. By choosing Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, businesses immediately gain the ability to scale their marketing operations with one of the most cutting-edge marketing platforms available today, all from within their Salesforce instance.

What About Marketing Cloud Engagement?

If you are already utilizing Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement, this announcement does not affect the availability of those platforms. Salesforce will continue to innovate and enhance these existing platforms. While Growth and Advanced Edition both bring new features to the table now, Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement will continue to receive updates that bring each version into greater parity—meaning current customers won’t need to migrate to the new platforms to access future innovations.

Get started with Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition.

Getting setup with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is designed to be straightforward and accessible, ensuring that your team can quickly harness the platform's power. The Advanced Edition is available in November, enabling businesses across AMER, EMEA and LATAM to begin leveraging advanced marketing functionalities without delay.

For current Salesforce customers, upgrading to Growth or Advanced Edition is seamless. Your team can continue operating on a single platform as your marketing footprint expands, eliminating the need for disruptive migrations and ensuring continuity in your marketing efforts. Importantly, all your existing marketing engagement data remains intact, preserving the insights and analytics you've built over time.

I’m excited to see these tools become more accessible to a broader range of businesses, granting them robust, enterprise-level data tools at a pivotal time as we navigate the new AI economy. And whether you're an existing user of Marketing Cloud or just starting with Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced Edition, we are here to help you maximize the platform's features. Let us help you unlock the full potential of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions to ensure that you can seamlessly integrate and leverage these capabilities to drive your marketing success.

This award was established to celebrate customer champions and how they are using Workato technology to transform their teams and build organizational effectiveness. Our innovation experiment leveraged Workato’s integration capabilities to bring together Salesforce, Google Gemini and Slack to enable us the ability to talk to our CRM data. Weaving these technologies together into an intuitive natural language interface significantly simplifies the user experience while streamlining complex workflows and enhancing data accessibility.

My colleague Erin Freeman, Director of Automation Strategy at Monks, emphasized the strategic importance of integrating AI to democratize data access across the organization. She stated, "Our goal was not just to simplify processes but to empower every team member to make data-driven decisions effortlessly. This project represents a significant leap towards achieving that vision."

Enabling technical and nontechnical people both the ability to analyze and extract insights is key to a healthy, modern business. Earlier this year, S4Capital Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell noted that democratization of knowledge was a primary opportunity for AI innovation. He told the International News Media Association, “You will be able, with AI, to educate everyone in an organization. AI will flatten organizations, de-silo them. It will bring you a much more agile, leaner, flatter organization.” Building off of our experience developing end-to-end, AI-powered workflows like Monks.Flow, we sought to experiment internally how we could leverage Workato to help information travel across the business.

Automated data analysis could be as easy as having a conversation.

Imagine a world where you can interact with your business systems as easily as having a conversation. This vision becomes a reality when you bridge multiple systems—like project management tools, NetSuite for financials, and client presentation software—into a unified, conversational interface. Integrating these systems can streamline complex workflows to enhance data accessibility and improve the user experience.

When it comes to CRM adoption, a longstanding challenge has been simplifying interactions for end users who are unaccustomed to complex concepts like Opportunities and Stage Lifecycles addressed by their platform of choice. Traditionally, navigating through these systems involves convoluted click paths, prompting the question: what if simply conversing with your system was the norm?

A few years back, Salesforce took an interesting step toward this vision with Einstein Voice, which aimed to connect Amazon Alexa to Salesforce. While those conversations were very scripted and limited, they showcased the potential of conversational interactions with business systems. But today, the rise of large language models (LLMs) are inspiring new ways of supporting sophisticated conversations with Salesforce.

Automating CRM insights is as easy as one, two, three.

To bring this innovative solution to life, we began by leveraging the robust capabilities of Salesforce as our core CRM platform. Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management platform, providing comprehensive tools for sales, customer service, marketing, and more. Despite its robust capabilities, navigating through its vast array of features can be daunting for users who are less familiar with CRM. Our goal was to simplify interactions with the platform by enabling natural language communication.

We then turned to Workato to bridge Salesforce with other essential systems and services. Workato's powerful integration capabilities allowed us to create seamless workflows, enabling data flow and process automation across platforms. By configuring Workato, we ensured that Salesforce could communicate with Google Gemini and Slack, forming the backbone of our conversational interface (more on those immediately below).

The integration of Google Gemini's API was a pivotal step. With its advanced language understanding and generation capabilities, Gemini allowed us to embed natural language processing into our system. This enabled users to perform complex Salesforce operations simply by conversing with the system, transforming user interactions into intuitive experiences.

Finally, we chose Slack as the prompt interface, taking advantage of its widespread use and intuitive nature. By developing a Slack bot, we created a familiar environment for users to interact naturally with Salesforce. Slack's robust communication tools allowed users to issue commands and receive responses effortlessly, making complicated CRM operations as simple as a chat.

Here's how this innovation works in practice. Imagine the typical start to Carli's day, a project manager at an advertising agency. Previously, beginning her morning routine involved logging into various systems, sifting through multiple tabs, and deciphering complex dashboards just to get a handle on client projects. Now, with her morning coffee in hand, Carli simply opens Slack and types a message to the integrated agent: "Hey, what are we doing with Acme?" Instantly, the system, powered by the Google Gemini, replies, "We are currently in the proposal stage with Acme, with a scheduled presentation next Tuesday."

This seamless interaction illustrates the transformative power of integrating conversational AI with business systems. Gone are the days of cumbersome navigation and overwhelming interfaces. But the benefits don't end there. Later, when Carli needs to update the status of the Acme project, she simply types, "I sent the proposal to Acme.” Immediately understanding the context of what to do with that information, the system swiftly processes her request, triggers the appropriate workflow in Workato, and updates Salesforce—all without her having to leave the Slack interface. These interactions not only demonstrate ease of use but also highlight the enhanced efficiency and strategic insights that conversational interfaces can provide, freeing Carli to focus more on her strategic role rather than the mechanics of data entry.

This is only the beginning of what we can do with AI in CRM.

The journey towards democratizing data and fostering seamless information sharing is far from over. Empowering users with the ability to interact naturally with their business systems transforms how information travels across an organization. This democratization not only enhances organizational effectiveness but also aligns with the vision of creating a more agile, de-siloed business environment. Looking ahead, the potential for expanding this conversational interface into additional systems is immense.

Imagine integrating financial management systems like NetSuite to offer real-time financial insights, making the complex world of accounting as simple as asking a question. Or consider connecting project management tools such as Jira, where tasks, deadlines, and project progress can be managed through straightforward conversational commands. Moreover, the ability to seamlessly access and update presentation software could redefine client interactions, allowing for effortless preparation and presentation without the need to juggle multiple platforms.

The integration of Salesforce, Workato, Google Gemini and Slack represents a pivotal step towards the dream of conversational business systems. This proof of concept not only highlights the transformative potential of advanced conversational interfaces in enhancing CRM adoption and usability but also sets the stage for a future where interactions with business systems are more intuitive and user-friendly than ever. As LLMs continue to evolve, we anticipate even more powerful and seamless interactions, paving the way for a new era in enterprise software. By incorporating additional systems into this ecosystem, businesses stand to gain unprecedented efficiency and accessibility, heralding a future where managing complex operations is as effortless as having a conversation.

Starting today, Media.Monks will transition its services into two fully synchronized Practices: Marketing services and Technology services, both powered by Monks.Flow, the industry leading, AI-powered, intelligent marketing and workflow platform. These offerings will be underpinned by a consulting group that will offer end-to-end services ranging from strategy to implementation. Effective immediately, Media.Monks also becomes simply Monks, marking a significant milestone in its evolution as a business and setting the stage for future growth and innovation beyond media.

“Many of today’s agencies are wrestling with the pace of change in a world profoundly transformed by technology. It's always been our ambition to disrupt the legacy model and today marks another important milestone in that journey,” says Sir Martin Sorrell, S4 Capital Founder and Executive Chairman. “With this shift in the way we deliver our services to market, we are better able to help clients transform the economics of their businesses and are well-positioned to develop and define the future of our industry.”

Monks' nine capabilities will remain in place, now focused in just two Marketing and Technology offerings, enabling clients to accelerate revenue growth, transformation and automation, while outpacing their competition:

• Marketing services will encompass a comprehensive suite of creative, content, media, social and data-driven marketing solutions, leveraging the Monks’ award-winning capabilities in storytelling, audience engagement and performance marketing to deliver outcomes that resonate with consumers and drive measurable results.

• Technology services will concentrate on the company’s technology, user experience, product engineering, data, digital transformation and consulting services. It will focus on robust digital infrastructures, next-gen digital products and consumer experiences and advanced data and analytics solutions that empower clients to navigate and thrive in the digital age.

A number of our senior Practice, capability and regional leaders wanted to comment on these important changes:

“This evolution reflects our unified cross-discipline teams, who bring the grit and the diversity of thought needed to help our clients accelerate growth and navigate the transformation of operating models,” says Scott Griset, EVP Consulting.

“Our aim is to simplify and accelerate the possibilities of technology and creativity for our clients and that starts with streamlining our offerings and identity,” says Brady Brim-DeForest, CEO, Technology services.

The new Monks brand emphasizes the cross-vertical and end-to-end capabilities offered by an integrated portfolio of services designed to maximize client revenue growth, innovation and reach.

“By dropping ‘media’ from our name, the new operating brand more accurately represents our integrated global team, unified expertise and diverse communities,” says Kate Richling, Chief Marketing Officer.

“Our refreshed brand embodies our team's synergy and versatile skills, committed to crafting impactful solutions for our clients’ challenges,” says Michelle McGrath, SVP Data.

“Our most innovative, impactful work has been powered by the intersection of our core teams and technology. Now, we have a brand that is reflective of that core ethos to carry us and our clients, into the next phase of evolution,” says Victoria Milo, SVP Media Solutions and Emerging Technology.

The Monks brand also emphasizes the dedication of our approximately 7,600 people to their craft.

“Placing a focus on the talent behind the work, the evolved Monks brand is designed for transparency and people—particularly in the age of AI—signalling the importance of having ambitious innovators in your corner for seamless implementation of emerging technologies,” says James Kinney, Chief People Officer.

“Our new name puts a spotlight on our talent, who excel in blending diverse specializations and cultures with a shared ambition to change the world,” says Deborah Heslip and Laura Davis, Co-Chief Client Officers, Marketing services.

“To be a Monk is to champion empathy, transparency, and diversity, driving us to create human-centric solutions for clients who are eager to authentically carve their place in culture,” says both Wesley ter Haar and Bruno Lambertini, Co-Chief Executive Officers, Marketing services.

Organizational and reporting structures to support the new services model will launch in 2025.

Stay up to date on the latest here or on LinkedIn.

Recapping what Google is rolling out this year.

AI Overviews are designed to provide users with summarized, informative answers directly on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). These overviews are aimed to offer a general response to the user's query and display clickable sources for deeper exploration. Beyond just answering queries, they will allow users to continue the interaction, refine their search and dive into specifics without leaving the SERP, or to view and click into the specific sources that informed that AI response.

Google is also bolstering AI Overviews with related features fed by its AI technology, Gemini. Among the notable new features rolling out over the coming months, their announcements included:

• "Simplify" and "Break it Down" to make complex answers more digestible
• Multi-step question handling, to tackle more intricate queries
• Organizing search results into AI-curated categories
• Enhanced planning features, to generate complex answers for leisure and travel activities
• Integrated video search using Google Lens

With the announcement of ad placements for AI Overviews, marketers finally had confirmation of how ad placements would be affected by the rollout of the generative content above-the-fold. The ads will include both search and shopping results; the algorithm will coordinate the chosen ad variant or chosen SKU with the user’s query and the content generated in the AI overview, prioritizing relevance. The ads eligible to serve in AI Overviews will be selected from brands’ Broad match search campaigns and Performance Max (PMax) campaigns (which they’re terming “the Power Pair”).

Google also shared that at first, AI Overview Ads will be more focused on retail, travel, home improvement, moving, and similar consumer verticals—this is unsurprising given these are industries that rely heavily on feed-based data, giving the algorithm more data to assess ad relevance from than just some ad copy and a landing page.

With AI Overviews rolling out for both organic and paid search results, marketers are facing several key questions about how to position their brands best and avoid getting knocked down below the fold. Here’s everything you need to know about setting your brand up for success.

Will AI Overviews push my ads lower on the SERP? Not necessarily.

The announcement of integrated ad placements within the AI Overviews section of the SERP changes the initial understanding that many marketers had after Google I/O earlier in May. We can see now that AI Overviews do not inherently push paid results lower on the page, but will fit them into a new context, as part of the generated response. Since the public launch, regular ad placements have been continuing to serve below the AI Overviews as well.

We currently see in our testing that ads appear with the same frequency as before, but we are seeing more experimentation from Google post-GML. We’ve recently seen examples in the wild of AI Overviews showing below-standard ad units (i.e. ads that are not integrated into the AI Overviews content), as well as AI Overviews content serving for mid- and lower-funnel queries (more on that below, see our example images). Marketers should expect ad positioning to keep evolving this year and beyond.

Since ad placements are dynamic to each search, Google itself is continually gathering data about what layouts lead to more engagement and satisfaction from users. The launch of all the new ad features will keep impacting this; therefore, it remains to be seen how ad placements will be affected when AI-based search categories and multi-step answers roll out later in the year.

What about organic results? Yes, expect to appear lower and expect traffic decreases.

This has been one of the chief concerns from publishers and marketers since SGE was first announced: if users are getting information straight from the SERP, won’t that mean less traffic to my site? Yes, zero-click content from AI Overviews will take up real estate on the SERP, meeting some searchers’ needs directly.

However, this is part of a longstanding trend of SERP layout changes, from the shift of Shopping results from the right rail to the top of the page, to expansion of Knowledge Graph content like Featured Snippets, People Also Ask (PAA), and other panels. Because of this, “traditional 'Top 10' organic ranking positions no longer exist,” says Dang Nguyen, Sr. SEO Strategist at Monks. “Webpages ranking below the fifth position will be pushed even further out of searchers’ view, and inevitably will see a drastic drop off in CTRs.”

However, there will be more chances for brands to get content to appear in the AI Overviews, to balance out for the decrease. “Since Google is providing multiple links to sources in AI Overviews, there are more chances to get included compared to Featured Snippets, which only provide one source link,” says Nguyen. “If users want more than the brief AI Overview summary, they’ll click through.” This shifts the focus for SEOs and brands to optimize to what the AI Overviews algorithm seeks. More on that below.

Will this affect all queries? Mostly upper-funnel terms…for now.

Our testing shows the most impact at the top of the funnel. Our team has been monitoring key terms for our clients in both the Labs environment throughout Q1 2024 and now in the public SERP. In our live testing, we’re primarily seeing AI Overviews serve for head terms and informational queries; they’re typically mapping to users in a top-of-funnel research journey. For the last few months, we have seen less frequent use of AI Overviews when queries are more “consideration” oriented (typically aligning with mid-funnel or bottom-funnel searches), or especially when users seek out a particular brand.

However, we are seeing early shifts since AI Overviews moved from Labs to public usage: recently, more AI content is appearing for consideration queries, especially those comparing different types of product/service offerings or seeking instruction. See the example images below, captured only days after GML.

Most of the other features announced at GML 2024 focused on queries with high commercial intent; advertisers should expect that brand queries and bottom-funnel queries are more likely to be impacted by Visual Brand Profiles, for example, than AI Overviews.

Should advertisers be concerned about brand safety?

No, not enough to justify any resistance to these changes. With the public rollout came fresh scrutiny, including inaccurate AI responses going viral, causing a stir in the marketing and tech worlds. It’s not surprising that an LLM would generate some buggy content while being brought up to scale for the first time, or when the user base expands so broadly (from Labs users likely testing it for professional purposes, to any user) that it would need to adapt more human elements, like satire. At the end of the day, marketers should remember:

1. The generated content is not a black box, for a reason. Google’s search results and Featured Snippets have always relied on user input to validate that they’re serving the right content, and this is no different. No matter what, AI Overviews list sources so users have full access to the original information, and can judge what source sites they trust.
2. Google is incentivized to improve this product. Since other tools like Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity AI are regularly making headlines and receiving favorable reactions, Google has a competitive need to ensure AI Overviews are meeting users’ needs as quickly and seamlessly as possible—otherwise they’d be jeopardizing their search revenues in the long run.

How can marketers optimize their SEO to appear as sources for AI Overviews?

With the recent SEO algorithm "leak", uncovering documentation about Google’s ranking factors, marketers everywhere are buzzing with “gotchas” about how to hack the organic ranking algorithm; however, at its heart, content SEO is still about understanding your target audience’s needs and buying journey to produce valuable content that they will seek out. Even when AI-generated content was rolled out last year as the Search Generative Experience, we were already talking about how it doesn’t change the fundamentals for a strong SEO strategy as much as people might assume.

First, technical SEO principles are still critical for Google to even be able to effectively find and interpret your site’s content, and must always be addressed first. But beyond that, here are tips to evolve your content strategy for the AI-first SERP:

1. Focus on depth and own your niche to be considered a topical authority. While many brands are leaning on generative AI to churn out surface-level content quickly and cost-effectively for a wide variety of keywords, Google will be more likely to view your content as meaty enough for the LLM to learn from if it goes deep and offers unique value. “Now more than ever, publishers need to provide much more value-add to their content to succeed,” says Nguyen. “Brands should produce niche-relevant content that doesn't exist anywhere else, eg. new knowledge and facts, interviews with industry experts, verification of accuracy and fact checking, etc… basically everything that good journalism represents.” Websites that show a deeper level of knowledge and expertise will thrive in the new Google search landscape.
2. Instead of a discrete list of keywords, built content around topics in a hub-and-spoke model based on the buyer journey and natural language. Google touted at GML that searches are continually getting longer, as users query the search engine with more complexity. As searching becomes a more immersive experience, this behavior will be reinforced, until searches more closely mirror conversations. For example, instead of users searching “smartphone with best camera,” in the future they will be more likely to query “currently have a google pixel phone and looking for something better, price point max of $1,000, and a device where I can take great landscape pictures.” Basic keyword analysis won’t cut it anymore in that environment. “It’s important to understand the entire customer journey and how it relates to the user’s intent in that moment, then offering that exact information they’re looking for,” Nguyen adds. “Ensure that your content is covering the entirety of the customer journey.”
3. Don’t neglect third-party credibility. Brands must reinforce overall site authority with good backlinks from other highly relevant and authoritative sites. This doesn’t just include press coverage and classic backlinking tactics, but also engaging where users are already having conversations. “Don’t forget to distribute content across various social platforms and UGC forums (serving the appropriate format), like Reddit.com and Quora.com,” Dang Nguyen suggests.
4. Learn from the AI-generated content itself. Unfortunately, at this time Google Search Console won’t differentiate the traffic coming from AI Overviews specifically, but we can learn from the answers they receive when performing our own searches. Marketers should engage with AI Overviews themselves. On a recurring basis, see what content serves for your most relevant queries and analyze AI Overview responses to identify gaps and opportunities for enriched content creation.
   
    

How can advertisers serve in AI Overview Ads, and what’s the “Power Pair”?

AI Overview Ads are not fueled by their own campaign type the way Demand Gen and Performance Max campaign placements are. Instead, eligible ads come from the “Power Pair”— PMax campaigns and Broad match keywords in search campaigns. Therefore, it’s critical for advertisers to lean into both tactics, prioritizing budget allocation and testing to increase your odds of serving. To make sure you’re hitting performance goals when leaning into the Power Pair, advertisers should:

• Pay attention to the top and the bottom. Monitor your top-performing keywords for any immediate performance losses across core KPIs as AI Overviews roll out. This would signal that users only sought a surface-level answer and didn’t get added value from clicking to your site. Also, reinforce your foundation by continuing to monitor for poor-performing queries on your Broad terms, maintaining robust negative lists.
• Share knowledge more frequently. Continually align on cohesive keyword and topic strategies with SEO to share learnings about which paid keywords perform best and to supplement any burgeoning site content with paid ads.
• Check ad strength, and perform more copy tests as needed. To combat expected decreases in CTR, ensure your ads have strong ad strength or you’ll risk serving even less frequently. If strength ratings aren’t as high as you’d like to see, launch new RSA tests that prioritize relevance (more directly work in the query to the ad copy and landing page experience).
• Maximize audience signals to feed the algorithm. To thrive in this new landscape, brands must feed the ever-hungry algorithm as much data as possible. First-party audience data from a CRM or CDP is worth its weight in gold, in addition to increasing the number of (meaningfully different!) creative variants, and making your product feeds as robust as possible. All of these signals will point the algorithm the right direction towards users most likely to convert.

What other changes do advertisers need to make to gain a competitive advantage?

Nimble advertisers who can act quickly in these other areas will have the most to gain:

• Utilize more visual ad formats to stand out as Google makes the SERP layout even more dynamic. Enhanced personalization means marketers must compete even more for relevance.
• Establish new performance benchmarks. With CTR and traffic volume likely to shift rapidly, it’s important to update the SEM/SEO KPIs you measure against, to proactively understand MoM and YoY differences. Google Search Console won’t necessarily shed light on this directly: “At this point, clicks and impressions shown in GSC will not discern between regular SERP clicks and AI Overviews clicks,” says Nguyen. Therefore, to quantify the impact of zero-click content, leverage incrementality testing, such as matched market tests or holdout tests. Historically, most SEM marketers have focused their holdout tests on Brand terms, but with AI Overviews impacting terms at every stage of the funnel, it's now crucial for broader categories.
• Combat rising CACs from lower traffic with CRO. While we anticipate a decline in CTR and click volume, the clicks that do occur will likely be of higher intent, leading to better conversion rates (CVR). To bolster this, brands should invest in conversion rate optimization, A/B testing their landing pages and site experiences to reduce friction or leaks in their conversion process.
• Consider the impact to other media channels. For example, with lower site traffic from some search terms we can expect remarketing pools to decline; to avoid oversaturating your consideration audiences if they shrunk, set frequency caps on your remarketing campaigns.

The SERP of 2024 and beyond is personalized and interactive; are you ready to embrace the change?

Google's rollout of AI Overviews marks a significant evolution in the search experience. This AI-driven shift promises a more personalized and interactive SERP; if this pays off with  enhanced user satisfaction and engagement as Google projects, it’s ultimately a win for marketers hoping to reach engaged audiences. To benefit from this, it necessitates strategic recalibration for both advertisers and SEO professionals. Embracing this change with innovative approaches and enriched content will be key to thriving in the evolving search landscape. Welcome to the future of search—where AI Overviews lead the way.