So make sure you have a Google My Business account to manage your location information and use local inventory feeds to provide data to Google about your locations' prices and inventory. Google has now also opened up the possibility for developers to create Shadow Making actions so that in response to a conversation, the assistant can perform a transaction with the user. The example given by Google is a frequent business traveler who asks his assistant Shadow Making about the next flight. Knowing that she flies from SFO to LAX every week on United, she could give information about the price of the next flight and even book the ticket, all by voice. I suspect that support for Google's Buy Buttons, which they call Google Shopping (managed in Merchant Center),
Will also become a way to prepare your online store for voice transactions. Is this the year AI replaces account managers? Every ad I've covered here has a connection to machine learning and artificial intelligence. So where do we all stand in this evolution Shadow Making toward ever-increasing complexity, where humans can no longer hope to achieve great results without the aid of enormous computing power? This question made me think of Lee Sedong, the Go champ who lost to Google's DeepMind in 2016. The part of the story that didn't get as much coverage is how Lee Sedong said that being instructed by the machine had taught him how to be a Shadow Making better player. Wired magazine said the game's central play was also when machines and humanity finally began to evolve together.While the move that set up the winning machine was confusing to humans, it opened Lee Sedong's eyes to strategies he hadn't considered before.
So how can we as marketers learn from what the Shadow Making AdWords machine does? Google's Paul Muret, one of the founders of Urchin (now Google Analytics), explained to me that Surveys 360 can help us get insights. The idea is that with the new integration between Surveys 360 and remarketing lists, we can survey users who have interacted with our site and ads so that we can ask them what features they wanted or what made them want them. buy or not. During last week's ppcchat on Twitter, many people agreed that Surveys 360 can only be as effective as the questions Shadow Making asked. I gave this example: If airlines asked consumers a question about what they wanted most and didn't label it as price, they would be placing more seats than anyone would want to buy. Conclusion It's clear that AdWords will continue to be a major force in online marketing in 2017 and beyond, and I'm excited to try many of the announced features as they become available. While I'm a big fan of automation, I sincerely hope AdWords finds a way to add some transparency to what its AI is doing so we can learn from it and grow together.