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Google Vice President Fuencisla Clemares leads a multinational team of 300 out of her base in Madrid, Spain. Over her career spanning 25+ years, she has specialised in marketing and retail and previously worked at McKinsey & Company and Carrefour.
Google recently put out a call to top marketers: ‘Ask us anything’.
What are you struggling with? What’s keeping you up at night? What are your most pressing marketing and advertising questions?
We want to know. And we want to help.
The response was incredible. Hundreds of people across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) got back to us.
Diving into these questions feels like peering into the heart of our industry’s ecosystem. One question covered the seismic shifts brought about by generative AI in search and how that impacts ads. And there were questions about the nuances of reaching the right audiences, particularly in niche areas.
I’ve enlisted a team of experts to provide answers and offer some clarity about today’s top marketing challenges. They all work within my Go-to-Market (GTM) team. Here’s what they had to say.
Top question No. 1: How is AI going to impact Search and what does it mean for advertisers?
“Humans are innately curious, constantly seeking answers. Developments in AI in search mean people are asking new types of questions to find those answers. No longer limited to text in the Search bar, you can ask your questions with your camera, with your voice, or even with a simple circle (or scribble!) on your screen.
“As a result, Search is becoming increasingly more exploratory as a tool for discovery and decision making. AI Overviews already has more than 1.5 billion monthly users and is now in 200 countries and territories. It helps marketers unpack the many layers of intent, providing them with richer signals.
“This helps make ads even more relevant for consumers. For instance, someone looking for a “business trip packing checklist” might not be relevant to a company selling eSIMs at first glance, but it is an opportunity for AI Overviews to suggest their product to the user, and for a relevant ad to appear next to the summary.
“Marketers seeking ways to bring out the best of Google AI can use Performance Max and will soon be able to deploy AI Max for Search campaigns. I’m excited about this. It will effortlessly help you expand reach into new, high performing queries, create highly relevant ads, and send users to the most relevant landing pages on your website. The ads will better match with user intent and can adapt to new Search experiences, including AI Overviews.
“For example, brands like L’Oréal saw higher conversion rates from net-new search queries like “what is the best cream for facial dark spots?” by turning on search term matching in AI Max with the click of a button.
“For those looking to bring in organic traffic from AI search experiences, I recommend this guide from our Search Relations team.”
Top question No. 2: What’s the difference between AI Max for Search and Performance Max? Should advertisers use them in tandem?
“New Search tools bring new AI-powered opportunities. But it’s important to understand how they complement each other, and your search strategy.
“AI Max for Search campaigns is great for advertisers that want to focus specifically on optimising their Search channel, whereas Performance Max allows marketers to expand campaigns across multiple Google channels, such as Display, Discover, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and also Search.
“AI Max has the same controls as your Search campaigns and the team is rolling out additional controls and reporting, such as visibility over the traffic coming from AI Max in Search Term report and Keyword report.
“Overlapping inventory between the two is not necessarily an issue. We have trumping rules in place to ensure we send the best ad in your portfolio to the auction and your campaigns are not competing with each other.
“Depending on your channel strategy, we believe that a mix of AI Max for Search, plus Performance Max, and a third campaign — Demand Gen — can be an effective move. This combination, which we’re calling the “Power Pack”, can drive incremental results for advertisers looking to maximise performance.
“Demand Gen allows advertisers to blend in Google’s visual surfaces and formats to their campaigns. You can include detailed insights about your audience, your best-performing channels, and a mix of your creatives to Demand Gen. While it runs on the similar inventory to Performance Max, bringing the two together can add 14% more conversions on average.”1
Top question No. 3: How can I drive high quality leads – particularly for niche audiences?
“Advertisers focused on lead generation face unique hurdles compared to advertisers with a more typical e-commerce focus. Their customer journeys are generally longer, more complex, and often start online with final conversions happening offline. We see the most successful businesses follow several best practices to meet these challenges.
“To drive high-quality leads, businesses should map their customer journey and assign values to each step, from initial lead to final sale. The goal is to pinpoint which conversions in the lead-to-sale funnel truly matter and their downstream economic impact. Over the years of working with various advertisers, I’ve seen that it’s best to optimise for a lower-funnel conversion stage, closer to the final sale with sufficient volume.
“Integrating online and offline first-party data is crucial. Top advertisers are using enhanced conversions for leads with Google Ads Data Manager to import their first-party data. This provides a deep understanding of your lead funnel, offers insights for better investment decisions, and informs the optimal signals for Google’s AI-powered solutions.
“Ultimately, marketers need to define what ‘quality’ in ‘high quality leads’ means for their business. Backed up with a strong measurement foundation, you can then begin to scale up those leads much earlier in the consumer journey through solutions like AI Max for Search. It’s exciting to see more opportunities for businesses to find their niche audiences.”
Top question No. 4: How can I cut through the noise and accurately track conversions across all my campaigns?
“Advertisers are turning to marketing mix models (MMMs) like Meridian to determine the overall impact of campaigns across channels. But it’s important to recognise the nuances across the funnel.
“My colleague Nicole mentioned enhanced conversions are useful for mid- and lower-funnel campaigns. I also think that it can be a particularly powerful solution for those with long sales cycles as it enables advertisers to send hashed first-party conversion data and match this back to the ad, long after the initial user engagement.
“Marketers looking to improve data reliability and performance can also turn to Google tag gateway, increasing observable signals by up to 11% by upgrading Google tags to be served from their own website infrastructure.2
“Recent shifts in technology, user behaviour, and privacy regulations have provided new challenges for marketers to understand cross-channel impact. And data discrepancies arise from factors like technological nuances and fragmented user journeys across devices.
“To address these, we’ve made a number of improvements in Google Analytics, such as a ‘(data not available)’ indicator and system-generated annotations to provide context for unexpected data differences.
"’Aggregate identifiers’ are also being introduced to enhance campaign attribution by solving potential over-attribution to Organic when ad click identifiers aren’t retrievable due to consent.
“All of this helps to ensure accuracy in your measurement strategy, meaning you can focus your energy on making your campaigns as effective as possible.”
Top question No. 5: How can I maximise YouTube Ads ROI while balancing brand and direct conversions?
“It all comes down to the details for marketers to strike this balance. There are several avenues marketers can explore to optimise their YouTube Ads. For instance: driving brand awareness through Video reach campaigns and creator partnerships; and growing conversions through Demand Gen and Performance Max with fine-tuned creative assets.
“Marketers should also pay attention to the growing influence of Connected TV (CTV). In the United Kingdom, CTV is YouTube’s fastest growing screen over the last 5 years.3 It’s an opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience on a growing platform.
“Marketers can then turn their focus to creative quality. It’s a major ROI driver for video and display ads, showing a 70% increase with an improvement in quality from ‘poor’ to ‘optimal’.4 The ABCD framework (Attention, Branding, Connection, Direction) provides a guide for effective creative, while marketers can try out video experiments to A/B test concepts or evaluate different ad lengths. All of this is crucial for identifying what resonates best with audiences.
“Content creators on YouTube are also a powerful tool for engagement. An Ipsos survey found that users are 98% more likely to trust creator recommendations on YouTube compared to other social platforms.5 The tried-and-tested rule suggests investing your YouTube budget with a 5:1 ratio of media spend to creator investment to maximise performance.
“Finally, AI is transforming campaign performance. It streamlines creative generation, enhances audience analysis, and optimises bidding and budget allocation. AI-powered campaigns like Video Reach or Video View campaigns can deliver higher return on ad spend (ROAS), and combining different campaign types can further improve results.”6
