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

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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!

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