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.