Google’s rolling out some new AI updates to its Performance Max campaigns, including improved image generation of human characters, and new recommendations for the types of images that work best with different campaigns.
First off, on image generation. Google added AI image generation for Performance Max assets last year, but now, it’s improved the image generation process, ensuring that it produces better results, particularly for human characters.
As explained by Google:
“With the help of Imagen 3, we’re now rolling out the ability to use text prompts to generate images that contain adult people and faces across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display and Apps campaigns.”
In other words, they *should* all have five fingers only on each hand.
Google says that it’s conducted “extensive user research” to develop this new process, which should result in better quality depictions of human characters for your ads. And with research showing that including people in your ads increases emotional resonance and response, this could be a helpful update.
Google says that you won’t be able to generate images of prominent figures, like politicians and celebrities, children or minors, or other sensitive content with this process, while all generated images are tagged with SynthID to provide transparency into which images were generated using AI.
But with those provisos in mind, you now have a new option to generate a broader range of images for your campaigns.
Google’s also adding new “asset-audience recommendations,” which will provide ideas on how to improve the effectiveness of your images by highlighting themes and elements that resonate with your top audiences.
That could give you an extra kick of inspiration for your campaigns, and ensure that you’re creating the most effective visuals to maximize performance.
Finally, Google’s also adding recommendations for different ad elements in order to maximize performance.
“Last year, we added experiments that let you test changes within your Performance Max campaigns, like testing the impact of using final URL expansion. Now, we’re introducing a beta for retailers who have campaigns with product feeds, but haven’t uploaded additional creative assets. Compare the impact of adding text, image and video assets to your campaign – including assets built with generative AI – against your control configuration with no assets.”
So, essentially, Google’s ad system will now be able to recommend and generate specific creative that will resonate with your target audience, based on its internal response knowledge.
Will that work? Well, it is trained on Google Ads data, so it may well provide better results than you can come up with on your own.
Should lead to some interesting experiments either way.
Google says that the new updates for Performance Max campaigns are rolling out in Google Ads Manager, while the new asset recommendations process is available via your Google account team.
