Google Ads 2024 Recap: With An Eye To 2025 via @sejournal, @adsliaison

This year brought a steady stream of updates in Google Ads that spanned across campaign types and creative, media activation, and measurement solutions – many informed directly by advertiser feedback.

I won’t cover every big update here, but building on a talk I gave at Hero Conf in San Diego recently, I’ll highlight some of the key themes in this year’s launches and the technological and consumer trends driving product innovation in Google Ads. (It was wonderful to catch up with old marketing friends and meet so many new ones!)

Let’s dig into some of the top trends and launches of what’s possible now to help you engage audiences and drive better results – and get a sense of where we’re headed.

Search Is Evolving & Bringing New Opportunities For Advertisers

Google Search is undergoing significant changes – both in the types of questions people ask, how they’re asking them, and in the results Google provides.

For many years, people largely searched with short two- to three-word queries. For advertisers, that meant we could simply target a list of keywords matching those short queries to reach the right audience.

This has been changing.

We are seeing people asking longer, more complex questions.

Queries of five or more words are growing 1.5 times faster than shorter queries (Source: Google Internal Data, Global-EN, November 2022 – April 2023 vs. November 2023 – April 2024). You may notice this in your own search behavior.

This shift is why we continue to invest so heavily in broad match to help ensure your Search strategy can keep up with the complexity and diversity of searches.

AI Overviews in Search combines large language models (LLMs) with Google’s core search systems to provide responses and resources for more complex queries.

AI Overviews is now available in more than 100 countries and territories, reaching more than 1 billion users monthly in six languages (Source: Alphabet Q3 2024 Earnings).

Additionally, visual searches on Google are growing, thanks to huge leaps in multi-modal visual search capabilities with Lens.

Overall, we’re now seeing 20 billion visual searches a month on Lens, and 1 in 4 visual searches has commercial intent (Source: Google Internal Data, Global. Lens, August-September 2024).

To help advertisers connect with consumers in these new experiences when relevant, we’ve introduced Shopping ads in Lens results globally and text and Shopping ads in AI Overviews on mobile in the U.S.

More Personalized Shopping Discovery

Another new experience to highlight is the completely reimagined Shopping tab.

Currently live on mobile in the U.S., the new Shopping tab experience features a personalized feed for signed-in users and a dedicated deals page. It also incorporates features like Virtual Try-On.

Powered by Gemini models, Virtual Try-On lets potential customers see how an item of clothing drapes, clings, and stretches on real models of different sizes and shapes rig by combining the images of real, diverse human models with photos of your garments from Merchant Center.

All apparel brands with a shopping feed and high-quality imagery are automatically opted into Apparel Try-On and can show in both free listings and Shopping ads.

And while we’re on the topic of Shopping, Merchant Center Next (now simply called Merchant Center) rolled out globally this year.

The new interface has feature parity with the previous version, plus more features such as generated performance insights, tailored recommendations, and visual reporting that you generate with plain language prompts.

Launch, Iterate, And Scale Engaging Creatives

Creative generation solutions make it easier for businesses to create and launch higher-performing, on-brand ads.

The conversational experience for Search campaigns expanded to more languages and is available in English, Spanish, French, and German. It’s also now powered by Gemini models.

This feature is particularly helpful for new and small business advertisers.

We’ve seen that advertisers that use the conversational experience in Google Ads are 63% more likely to publish Search campaigns with “Good” or “Excellent” Ad Strength (Source: Google Internal Data. US, English campaigns published after using asset generation vs. published without using asset generation. January 1-31, 2024).

In short, that means they’re launching campaigns that are more likely to perform better from the start.

Image from author, December 2024

We also made continued improvements in our generative AI models and capabilities to make it a whole lot easier to create varieties of high-quality, on-brand image and video assets at scale.

The asset enhancements feature for responsive display ads uses AI to automatically modify your ad with smart cropping to highlight focal points, text assets, and logo overlays on relevant image areas, and improve image resolution and sharpness. It can even animate your static images for more engaging ads.

We also expanded generative creative capabilities beyond Performance Max to other campaign types this year.

Image asset generation is available in Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, and App campaigns. It is now powered by Imagen 3, Google’s latest text-to-image model that generates crisper, more lifelike images for your ads.

To generate on-brand image assets, you can upload image references to help generate multiple image assets that better match your brand’s visual style.

Image editing got more capabilities this year as well and is now available in Performance Max, Demand Gen, Search, Display, and App campaigns.

During campaign construction, you can remove, add, modify elements, and extend backgrounds in your image assets, as well as adjust images to fit any size, aspect ratio, or orientation.

Pro tip: Image editing can be great for moments like seasonal campaigns to make sure your assets are on-trend with different holidays and moments during the year so they resonate strongly with audiences.

Note that image editing is different from Product Studio, which is where you can edit your product assets in Google Merchant Center and the Google and YouTube app on Shopify.

Product Studio also now supports reference images to create assets that reflect your brand’s visual style. And with image-to-video animation, it can quickly generate videos from your existing product images.

Speaking Of Video . . .

Image from author, December 2024

Creating great video assets for all the inventory options on YouTube can be challenging for businesses of all sizes.

This fall, we introduced video enhancements, which use Google AI to automatically create additional flipped and shortened versions of your existing videos.

These new ads go through extensive quality review before going live. You can remove generated assets you don’t want or opt-out (if desired) at the campaign level.

Voice-over is a new self-service feature available globally in the asset library in Google Ads. Simply add your script, choose the voice option you want, and then click to generate a voice-over for any YouTube video ad in more than 12 languages.

Long-form content is still extremely popular on YouTube, of course, but Shorts now see 70 billion daily views and an audience of 2 billion signed-in users monthly. And Shorts views on connected TVs more than doubled last year.

This year, we launched branded QR codes on YouTube connected TV. Viewers can scan the code on their phone to visit your website, make a purchase, or learn more about your product or service.

In Video View Campaigns, we introduced new format buying controls with the option to run ads on Shorts inventory only.

And if you’re interested in tapping the power of YouTube creators, Partnership ads powered by BrandConnect are now available in Google Ads globally.

You can use videos made by a creator and promote them as ads, then create new audience segments based on viewers of those videos.

A new video-linking API is also available to link creator videos to your Google Ads account at scale.

New Controls. More Transparency.

We all know that when using AI, better inputs lead to better outputs – and outcomes for your business.

Google AI doesn’t automatically know the definition of better results for your business – only you do. That’s why we’ve continued to add more ways to tell Google what’s important to your business.

In Search campaigns, brand inclusions allow you to use broad match, while still constraining your brand campaigns to serving on specific brand or related product queries.

Brand exclusions are now available for all match types and Dynamic Search Ads to prevent your ads from serving on certain brand queries, including misspellings and variants.

We also rolled out these highly requested updates for Search campaigns:

• Negative keywords now take misspellings into account. Just add one negative keyword to exclude traffic from all misspelling variations.
• The search term report shows 9% more search terms on average by reporting misspelled queries with the correctly spelled query.

Image from author, December 2024

You can also see this focus on controls and transparency emphasized in many of the Performance Max updates this year, such as:

• With Brand guidelines, you get to tell Google about your brand colors and font to generate on-brand visuals.
• Campaign-level negative keywords – a top ask – are in beta and will be rolling out soon.
• IP exclusions are supported, and account-level placement exclusions now also apply to the Search partner network.
• A new experiment allows you to test the impact of final URL expansion to let Google AI select the most relevant landing pages and help you match to additional relevant search queries.
• To give you more flexibility when managing both Performance Max and Standard Shopping together, Ad Rank is now used to determine which campaign serves when you have product overlap between them.

In addition to controls, we’ve also added more insights for Performance Max, including:

• Asset-level conversion reporting.
• Impression share reporting.
• Demographics in audience insights.
• New target pacing insights.

This is an area we are actively focused on. Stay tuned for more in 2025!

More Bidding Options Tailored To Specific Goals

Another area I want to call out is the continued focus on expanding and improving bidding capabilities tailored to advertisers’ specific goals.

Here’s a look at some of the work happening in this area:

For retailers with both online and physical stores, omnichannel shoppers tend to spend more.

In Demand Gen campaigns, Omnichannel Goals is now in beta to give those retailers the ability to optimize towards both online conversions and Store Visits.

For lead gen advertisers, the customer journey can be complex. And, of course, not every customer has the same value to your business.

I’ve talked a lot about value-based bidding for lead gen advertisers this year, including a series of short videos followed by deeper dives here in Search Engine Journal.

Continuing to make value-based bidding easier to understand and execute will continue to be a focus area because we’ve seen the positive results it can drive for advertisers.

Lifecycle goals offer additional options to optimize toward your most valuable customers:

• Last month, we added the ability to use custom experiments in PMax (in beta) and Search to test new customer acquisition.
• The new retention goal is currently in beta for Performance Max. It allows you to optimize your campaign to win back lapsed customers to reduce churn rates.

And lastly, bidding to profit has also been a top ask from customers.

The new gross profit goal is in beta in Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns. It pulls in profit data from sources you already have, like Merchant Center, enabling you to bid to profit with Smart Bidding.

You can also easily switch between revenue and profit goals without disrupting performance.

Data, Measurement & Privacy

Image from author, December 2024

While advancements like image generation may capture attention, the solutions that provide Google AI with the necessary data are equally vital.

Your first-party data is the foundation for better performance and measurement. It helps drive better results and safeguard your campaigns against the impact of privacy changes and signal loss.

We’ve developed a number of privacy-centric solutions that enable durable measurement and allow you to make the most of your first-party data.

Google Ads Data Manager is a big step forward in simplifying the process of connecting your first-party data sources to your account and keeping your audience lists and conversion data complete and accurate.

This fall, we introduced confidential matching for Customer Match in Google Ads Data Manager. It securely processes first-party data for use in Google Ads.

This happens automatically in the background so you don’t have to think about it other than knowing your data remains encrypted and unseen by anyone – including Google.

We’ve also launched the option to encrypt the data yourself and receive proof that your data is processed as intended. And, we are currently running a closed beta to enable confidential matching for enhanced conversions for web.

Tag diagnostics for the Google Tag is available in Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, and Google Analytics to help you quickly identify and troubleshoot potential issues.

Measurement diagnostics for Enhanced Conversions for Leads is also fully rolled out in Google Ads. Use it to monitor your setup and ensure you can take action against the offline data you share with Google.

While we’re on lead generation, new lead funnel reporting for lead gen gives you added visibility into offline conversions when you share qualified and converted leads with Google.

Lastly, advanced consent mode includes two new parameters for sending consent signals needed for ad personalization and remarketing purposes to Google.

The easiest way to enable and maintain advanced consent mode is to work with a Google CMP partner.

The new integrated CMP setup in the Google Tag UI makes this even easier with select partners. Just connect your CMP and configure consent settings right within the Google Tag UI – no code editing needed.

Looking Ahead

AI’s power comes in helping you dynamically adapt to market shifts and create better experiences – and ultimately better outcomes – for your customers and your business.

When you put AI to work with good data and inputs about what you know about your business and goals, you can spend more time focused on, well, the joy of marketing.

In the year ahead, you can expect us to continue building on these capabilities to help you create and measure engaging experiences that drive incremental value for your business.

Keep the feedback coming, and be sure to check out the full recap of top launches across each campaign type in Google Ads this year!

More Resources:

Featured Image: Ginny Marvin/Google

Using Google Merchant Center Next For Competitive Analysis via @sejournal, @gilgildner

In Google Ads, where every click can be a potential sale, understanding your competition isn’t just strategic, it’s also absolutely necessary for creating a profitable ad campaign.

For our ecommerce clients, Google Merchant Center has long been a critical tool for managing unwieldy amounts of data.

When some ecommerce clients can stock thousands of SKUs or maybe even millions of SKU iterations, it enables us to manage shopping campaigns that would otherwise be impossible.

With new evolutions of machine learning and AI-powered Shopping on the horizon, making sure your store remains competitive in the massive landscape of ecommerce advertising is more important than ever.

Enter Merchant Center Next, which is the next evolution of Google’s product listing management tool. It’s designed to give ecommerce retailers a sharper edge in the competitive arena.

Here’s how you can use this tool not just for managing product feeds, but also for identifying huge opportunities in your competition.

Merchant Center Next is an upgraded platform that allows ecommerce stores to manage how their products appear on Google Shopping, both paid and organic.

But for this post, we’ll focus more on its analytics and insights features, which are a gold mine for competitive analysis.

How To Use Competitive Analysis Features In Merchant Center

First, you need to make sure your account actually has access to Merchant Center Next.

Although Google first announced a full rollout by September 2024, not all accounts have access yet. The integration with Google Ads is seamless, so it’s an easy click.

Second, take a look at the competitor visibility section. This section is reached by navigating to Analytics > Products, and then looking at different content tabs, labeled Traffic, Competitors, Popular Products, Pricing, and Promotions.

This shows you cards that highlight how your products stack up against the competition in terms of overall visibility. You can see who among your competitors is getting more clicks, where their ads rank, and how your own traffic compares.

Third, take a look at price competitiveness. Google Merchant Center Next provides insights into how product prices align with the overall market.

Are your SKUs priced above, similarly, or below the average price across the internet? The data within this section will help you adjust your pricing strategy easily.

Researching Price Competitiveness Within Google Merchant Center. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Next, look at search trends. This section allows us to have a closer look at and to understand what consumers are looking for in aggregate.

It’s not just about products or individual SKUs, but also entire categories and product niches you may not be aware of.

Doing a deep dive into product performance can be massively valuable.

Best Sellers allows you to identify products flying off your virtual shelves. If competitors are selling items you don’t currently offer, this is a good indicator to consider product line expansion.

Out-of-stock Insights gives you a heads-up that you may need to restock a product – inventory management is always a huge issue with popular ecommerce stores.

How To Interpret Data For Real-World Use

One of my favorite metrics in Google Merchant Center Next is the Ad/Organic Ratio Analysis. This metric tells us how much of the traffic per product is paid versus organic.

You can infer competitor ad spend from this. If you can see a competitor has a high ratio of paid to organic, it means they’re possibly spending a lot more on ads than you, so it might be time to ramp up your Google Ads spend (something you’ve likely heard from plenty of Google reps).

Ad/Organic Ratio Analysis in Google Merchant Center. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Since Merchant Center isn’t only about paid traffic, you can also use search term insights in the Analytics > Summary tab to help with your ecommerce store’s SEO performance.

Use these insights into keywords to refine product titles, descriptions, or even URLs. If a competitor’s product with a similar title is ranking higher, this can indicate possible opportunities for improvement.

Continuous monitoring and adapting to the current market are critical. Nothing seems to change faster than the digital advertising landscape.

Using Merchant Center Next to identify market shifts means you can discover new entrants, changing consumer preferences, seasonal trends, and more.

Using Merchant Center Next to identify changing product trends. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Using this newly available data within Merchant Center can help you outsmart the competition – spotting gaps where you may be able to see that competitors are missing out on certain categories or price points.

If you can see that no other competitor offers free shipping, or aren’t bundling products in unique ways, these are all ways to leverage the data for your own benefit.

More Data Is Coming For Shopping

One of the biggest complaints over time has been that Google Ads seems to continually remove granular data from our fingertips, making it harder to optimize and improve campaigns.

This is especially important to ecommerce advertisers who often have unwieldy amounts of SKUs and transaction data to analyze.

Google Merchant Center Next actually seems to be bringing some of this data back into the fold. By leveraging this data – specifically the competitive analysis tools – you cannot only keep up with the rest of the ecommerce market, but also maybe even jump ahead.

Plus, Google Ads has been making some major strides in consumer-focused customized experiences within Google Shopping.

These AI-powered custom shopping experiences are still in their infancy, but making sure your campaigns are fully optimized within Merchant Center Next is the first step to staying competitive even through these new changes.

After all, the data that Google uses to train these new experiences come directly from stores just like yours (which can sometimes feel like a double-edged sword, to be sure).

All indications seem to be that this data will continue to increase. Not only has Performance Max been offering more and more data recently, but shakeups at Google Ads seem to indicate that more granular data may be coming to us from more than one platform.

Ecommerce knowledge and data aren’t just power – they are profit!

More resources:

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

Tips For Running Paid Media Campaigns In Highly Regulated Industries via @sejournal, @timothyjjensen

For those of us working within strict industries, managing paid media campaigns involves added layers of work that may not be included in less regulated companies.

Healthcare, finance, and political organizations are potential examples here, although many industries have their own quirks both in internal policies and ad platform restrictions.

According to EMARKETER, in 2023, the financial services industry made up 11.4% of U.S. digital ad spend, while healthcare & pharma entailed 7.3%.

With these highly regulated industries entailing close to 20% of spend together (not counting other categories), that means many paid search marketers have touched or will touch campaigns in these areas at some point in their career.

In order to manage campaigns successfully in these niches, you need to think about both how to efficiently work through processes in your own organization to ensure assets are approved and ready in a timely manner, as well as know what to expect after setting your campaigns live in the platforms.

In this article, I’ll share a few tips to help, applicable both to those in-house at highly regulated organizations and to agency partners managing ads.

Plan Ahead

Work the expected timeline for approvals and edits into your planning for a campaign, and be realistic about how long it could take.

When ad graphics need to be designed and also go through compliance and legal review, you can’t promise to have a campaign active in a week.

Think through all the pieces you need to build out a set of campaigns:

• Ad copy.
• Images (created for all sizes needed).
• Videos.
• Keywords.
• Audience lists.
• Landing page.
• Documentation of targeting criteria, if that needs to be approved.

Then, you can work through a conservative schedule for the creation of each of these items, as well as planning to submit for approval and allowing additional time for edits and final approval.

Additionally, think through other items that may be outside of your immediate control as a paid search manager, such as landing page development and additional approvals needed for that.

Document Ad Formats & Use Consistent Templates

Often, the individuals within your organization reviewing your paid media assets are not at an “in the weeds” level understanding of how ads will display.

You can make the process smoother both for them and for yourself by clearly documenting individual ad formats and explaining nuances such as character limits and responsive ad functionality.

Provide screenshots of possible ways that ads can display and provide links to platform previews where relevant.

Building out an ad without activating it can provide an option to view it in multiple potential formats, especially for ad types like responsive display ads and Google Demand Gen that can appear in many different layouts.

Meta’s Creative Hub is also a useful tool to build out sample ads and grab screenshots.

Set up templates that you can use in the future, including guidelines directly in the documents, as well as formulas to flag issues such as going over character count.

These can be created in Excel documents, shared Google Docs, or proprietary tools within your organization.

Approve Multiple Variants At Once

In organizations where the wheels of internal approvals move slowly, getting multiple text and image variants approved at once can help ease the process of updating ads in the future.

This process may require some extra work upfront but will allow for more efficiency over time.

For instance, you may launch a Meta campaign using one text variant and four image variants.

When you’ve reached significance and are ready to move on to the next test, you can choose the best image and test it with multiple text variants.

Having those text variants approved ahead of time will allow flexibility in being able to roll out this next initiative immediately when the prior test has wrapped up instead of having to wait for additional approval.

Use Pinned Headlines And Descriptions

Often, regulated industries require you to include a precisely worded disclaimer in ad copy. Pinned assets in responsive search ads are your friend here, as you can ensure that they will always show.

Use the first or second headline position or the first description position, as beyond that, assets may be cut off.

To pin an asset in a Google Ads search campaign, click the thumbtack symbol that appears when you mouse over a headline or description field.

You can then select the number position to pin it to (1, 2, etc.). Note that if you pin multiple assets to the same position, Google may pick any of those assets to show.

Screenshot from Google Ads, September 2024

Unfortunately, campaign types such as Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Display don’t allow you to pin headlines, so you’ll need to be more careful in providing copy that contains your desired disclaimers for those formats, or you may decide they are not workable with your requirements.

You can also discuss allowing for a “one-click rule” that doesn’t require a disclaimer in ad copy as long as it appears on the landing page when users click through.

Review Automatic Optimizations & Recommendations

When every word of your ad copy needs to be approved by your organization to run, you need to be particularly careful about features such as Google’s automatically created assets, which can insert text you didn’t want in your ads.

Be sure to turn these off for each campaign, before your boss or client contacts see them applied in the wild.

To do so in bulk, go to the Campaigns section and navigate to Settings. Select all campaigns.

Screenshot from Google Ads, September 2024

Click the Edit dropdown and scroll until you find “Change automatically created assets settings.” You’ll then see the form below, where you can select “Off” and optionally provide a reason to give Google feedback.

Screenshot from Google Ads, September 2024

Additionally, watch for settings that modify images in unexpected ways, such as Meta’s image optimization features, which can result in unapproved graphic variants being out in the wild or even the addition of animation and music.

Look for the Advantage+ Creative section in ad set settings, and you’ll see an option to edit and turn off unwanted variations.

Screenshot from author, September 2024

In general, be mindful that platforms are constantly testing new ways to automatically optimize and add assets. Watch for updated settings and checkboxes that you may not have seen before.

Familiarize Yourself With Industry-Specific Guidelines

Ad platforms often have their own stricter guidelines for sensitive industries, and you’ll need to be aware of what ad content and targeting settings can trigger disapprovals.

For instance, Google does not allow certain demographic targeting for finance or healthcare. Remarketing is also banned for some industries.

On the Meta Ads front, housing, credit, and employment ads are particularly restricted, with limitations on available targeting criteria. Political ads also require a verification process before being approved to run.

You can keep up with these updates in a variety of ways:

• Visit ad platform support pages, where they will provide updates on upcoming policy changes. Here are a few links to current policy resources, each of which outlines technicalities for restricted content:

• If you have platform reps, they can share additional guidance, often with more detailed documentation not publicly available on the web, and can reach out to internal contacts to clarify specific questions you may have.
• While it’s not the ideal path to go, you’ll inevitably learn do’s and don’ts for your industry through trial and error as ads and campaigns are flagged in your accounts. Be sure to make note of disapprovals you’ve encountered and how they were resolved.

Often, ad platforms will provide a notice in the platform showing the specific policy violation or restriction that’s triggered for your ads.

However, particularly in sensitive niches, there are cases where ads may not run or be limited from running without clear notice.

In these cases, it’s helpful both to be as familiar with policies as possible when negotiating with support, as well as working directly with a platform rep if possible.

Use The Ad Platform Appeal Process

If you’ve complied with ad platform policy for your industry but are still facing disapproval issues, you can generally appeal for support.

The Google Ads Policy Center (Tools > Troubleshooting > Policy Manager) offers a hub where you can track the status of appeals, and other major platforms also offer options to monitor the status of appeals.

This is also an area where reps can sometimes be helpful in pushing through ad reviews or providing feedback that’s not showing in the ad platform interface.

Start Adapting Your Approach

If you’re managing PPC campaigns for a highly regulated industry, think through these tips to see where they can help improve your processes.

Do you have the internal steps for campaign planning, approval, and execution documented?

Are you fully familiar with how the ad platforms approach your industry?

Take the steps to meet with your team or client and determine how you can apply these tips.

More resources:

Featured Image: VideoFlow/Shutterstock