Google Ads Highlights of 2025

A new era of Search is here. From discovery to decisions, in 2025 we ensured your business could find, engage and convert your next best customer across new experiences, supercharging campaigns with the power of Google AI in a single click and with bidding strategies that maximize ROI.

Access new AI-powered ad formats

• Get consumers from discovery to decision faster with Ads in AI Overviews. Last year, we introduced Ads in AI overviews in the US and this year, we expanded to desktop and more countries globally. By integrating ads into helpful, AI-powered responses, you’ll be able to bring your expertise straight to your customers and help them make an informed purchase decision.
  
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• Connect in new moments with AI Mode. We’re testing ads in AI Mode in the US, giving advertisers the opportunity to connect with people asking deeper, more complex questions - previously untapped moments on Search. Where relevant, ads may appear below and integrated into AI Mode responses.

Drive stronger results with AI in a single click

• Supercharge campaign performance with AI Max for Search. Currently the fastest-growing AI-powered Search ads product, AI Max offers a comprehensive suite of targeting and creating features to help you reach a new level of relevance, reach and performance.
  
  • Get greater control and smarter optimization with the latest AI Max features. We’ve rolled out AI Max experiments and will be expanding the text guidelines beta to all advertisers in Q1 next year to give you more creative control. We’re also rolling out text customization to all languages and verticals before the end of the year.
• Capture additional valuable conversions within your reach with Smart Bidding Exploration. This allows you to use flexible ROAS targets to explore new traffic. Campaigns using Smart Bidding Exploration see, on average, an 18% increase in unique search query categories with conversions and a 19% increase in conversions.¹

Expand your reach with improved Search Partner Network placements

• Get more visibility, performance, and control. We’ve expanded full placement reporting on Performance Max, Search, Shopping, and App campaigns, giving you more visibility into your performance on the Search Partner Network. We’ve also upgraded how Smart Bidding strategies work with the Search Partner Network. To give you more control, third party exclusion lists (curated by DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and Zefr) ensure brand safe placements and enhanced geo-targeting better allocates your spend and reduces traffic from undesirable locations.

For fans and brands, there is only one YouTube. It puts brands at the epicenter of culture, where viewers move fluidly across every screen and format. They stream on TVs. They scroll through Shorts. They research and shop. YouTube offers brands unmatched reach across the whole journey, from discovery to decision.

Reach viewers through connected TV

• Enable your audience to shop right on the big screen with Shoppable Connected TV (CTV). Viewers can browse and engage with products directly from the big screen or use the send-to-phone feature to continue browsing on mobile.
• Maximize the viewing experience with the immersive design for Masthead. This design expands cinematic, edge-to-edge creative to give you more real estate on the YouTube homepage and drive maximum attention on the biggest screen in the house.

Boost brand association and capture attention during key events

• Be at the heart of cultural moments with YouTube Sponsorships. When cultural moments unfold, fans flock to YouTube for the full experience–before, during, and after. The new Cultural Moments Sponsorship package bundles Spotlights, Takeovers, and Brand Integrations to allow brands to surround key moments in a 360° way, reaching viewers in all the ways they’re watching YouTube.
• Engage with sports fans using the College Sports Lineup and YouTube TV Women’s Sports Lineup. With these new lineups, you’ll be able to effectively capture attention during thrilling moments, reach the right fans at the right time, and drive measurable results.

Scale collaborations with YouTube creators

• Streamline and scale your creator marketing efforts with the creator partnerships hub. The creator partnerships hub is a new central place in Google Ads for managing collaborations with YouTube creators. It provides tools for sponsored creator video discovery, paid and organic reporting for linked videos, and creator search and outreach.

In the past year alone, Demand Gen has seen a 26% increase in conversions per dollar driven by 60+ AI-powered improvements to ramp time, bidding and other updates you may not have heard about.² Let’s dive into what some of the top Demand Gen updates have been.

Unlock new ways to grow performance

• Reach prospects with new customer acquisition goals. New customer acquisition goals help you optimize your campaign to attract new or high value customers.
• Optimize for clicks with target cost per click (CPC) bidding. If your main goal is to drive clicks and traffic to your website, you can use clicks as your campaign goal, along with target CPC bidding.
• Experiment with different bid strategies. All Demand Gen bid strategies are now compatible with the “Custom” experiments flow, allowing you to test the effectiveness of your desired strategies against one another and determine which drives the strongest outcomes for your business.

Access new assets and inventory, while controlling where you appear

• Stay top-of-mind with image inventory across the Google Display Network. Google Display inventory has now been added to Demand Gen campaigns, letting you reach customers wherever they are browsing visual-first content across the web.
• Auto-generate videos. With auto-generated videos, you can effortlessly increase your reach on YouTube with the help of Google AI.
• Choose where your ads appear with channel controls. Precisely choose where your ads appear across YouTube, Discover, Google Display Network, and Gmail—including the ability to tailor your Demand Gen campaigns to serve specifically on YouTube Shorts.

Optimize for online and in-store shopping goals

• Use product feeds in Demand Gen to turn your image or video ads into a virtual storefront. Customers can browse and instantly access full product details directly from your ads, moving them from discovery to purchase.
• Maximize your omni-channel strategies with omni-channel bidding. With omni-channel bidding, you can optimize for both online sales and in-store visits.
• Engage your customers with special occasions and in-store offers. Promotion assets let you highlight your sales and promotions, while local offers showcase in-store offers to nearby shoppers.
• Provide a seamless checkout experience for your customers with checkout links. Users can go directly to your checkout landing page or add products to cart from your ad listings.

Understand performance in a powerful way

• Measure your Demand Gen campaigns in a way that matches other platforms using the conversions (Platform Comparable) column. Integrating directly with existing reporting views, the conversions (Platform Comparable) column enables you to compare Demand Gen and non-Google campaign performance for better cross-channel marketing decisions.

With Performance Max, you can get the full power of Google AI across channels all in one campaign. We introduced new controls and increased visibility to Performance Max.

Dive deeper into your performance with more reporting

• Understand channel-level performance. You can see how your Performance Max campaign is delivering results across Google’s full range of channels and inventory. You can drill into specific channels to understand how they are driving performance and to find potential areas of improvement. You can also find key format level breakdowns, in-depth metrics, and diagnostics that surface potential issues on different channels. We’ve added ROI columns, a cost toggle, bulk reporting and downloads, and segmentation. And you can now access the channel performance report via manager accounts (MCC).
  
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• Refine your Search performance with full search terms reporting. You can get the same granularity of Search reporting you do for Search and Standard Shopping campaigns, right in Performance Max.
• Get richer asset metrics with asset-level reporting. Asset-level reporting now shows not only conversions, but also impressions, clicks, and cost.
  
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• Discover new ways to optimize your asset mix by segmenting your asset reports. You can break down your asset performance by devices, time, conversions, and networks.
  
  
• View your new customer acquisition cost. In campaign reporting, you can now add a column that lets you see your new customer acquisition cost when using the new customer acquisition goal for both new customer only mode and new customer value mode.
• Find new customers and bid more effectively with enhanced customer acquisition cost reporting. With the improved ability to estimate a customer’s status, you’re not getting “Unknown” conversions in reporting anymore. Not only are you getting a clearer understanding of who your new customers are, but this will also help you bid more effectively for them.
• See all assets created with text customization and final URL expansion. You can also remove them if you no longer want them to run.

Steer Google AI with new controls

• Exclude queries you don’t want to show on with campaign-level negative keywords and negative keyword lists. You can apply a maximum of 10,000 negative keywords to a Performance Max campaign. Negative keywords apply to Search and Shopping inventory.
• Expand your search results with more search themes. We increased the limit of how many search themes you can add from 25 search themes to 50 per asset group. This lets you grow your reach even more and unlock new, relevant traffic based on the information you provide about your business.
• Reach your audience with more precision using demographic and device targeting. With device targeting, you can customize your targeting to mobile, computer, or tablet traffic. And you can also apply demographic targeting controls as well.
• Bid more for lapsed customers with retention goals. You can also specify which customers have higher lifetime value, so Performance Max can prioritize bidding on your most valuable lapsed customers.

Drive more in-store sales with Ads in Waze

• Reach customers on the go with Waze ads inventory in Performance Max for store goals campaigns. For US advertisers using PMax for store goals, your business can now appear as a ‘Promoted Places in Navigation’ pin on a user’s map.
  
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This year for Apps, we introduced improved measurement, new ways to connect your Web and App advertising, and more tools to optimize your campaigns—all to help you unlock better performance.

Get more comprehensive measurement

• Improve iOS campaign optimization and reporting with on-device conversion measurement using event data. We’ve expanded our on-device conversion measurement solution to use de-identified app event data for improved campaign optimization and reporting—all in a privacy-preserving manner.
• Get more accurate attribution of your iOS App campaign performance with Integrated Conversion Measurement (ICM). This solution provides more real-time and comprehensive reporting directly with your third-party App Attribution Partners.
• Measure App installs from Web campaigns with the new Web to App acquisition measurement feature. You can measure how your Search, Standard Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns are driving app installs that lead to valuable in-app conversions.

Connect your Web and App advertising

• Drive clicks directly to your app from YouTube Ads, Hotel Ads, and Demand Gen campaigns. Web to App Connect is now available in all these new inventories and formats on both Android and iOS, in addition to Performance Max, Search, and Shopping campaigns.
• Boost your campaign’s performance with your app. We’re integrating app insights more deeply into Google Ads workflows, providing seamless opportunities to optimize for both your web and app touch points.

Maximize the ROI of your App campaigns with new tools

• Acquire high-value iOS users profitably with target ROAS bidding. Fueled by the latest improvements to our AI-powered campaign models, target ROAS bidding is now available for iOS App campaigns.
• Get the most conversions or total value with maximize conversion bidding: This Google AI-powered strategy automatically sets bids to drive maximum in-app action volume or total value within your budget.
• Include view-through conversions in your Android app install campaigns: View-through conversion optimization helps advertisers reach new audiences cost effectively and drive increased conversion volume.

We introduced new ways to stand out and to help you create meaningful connections with shoppers. New AI-powered insights help you better understand customers and build a brand that appeals to them.

Establish a compelling, unified brand presence

• Connect with shoppers on Search by showcasing your brand’s unique story using your merchant brand profile. You can create a visually compelling, on-brand profile by adding lifestyle image assets, showing videos, editing business descriptions, and showing offerings right on Search. You can also boost sales by highlighting key purchase drivers like promotions, shipping details, and return policies directly on Google Search.
• Manage your brand toolkit across Google and YouTube with new brand management tools in Merchant Center. This will help you keep your brand assets fresh and consistent.

Quickly scale product visuals with Google AI

• Discover new, generated assets that fit your brand. Powered by generative AI, Product Studio now recommends “Generated for you” assets, which can help you showcase your product and brand.
• Maximize the impact of your product and brand videos in Merchant Center. New tools enable you to seamlessly upload, organize, and directly connect your shopping videos to corresponding product listings, maximizing their retail impact.

Discover insights, optimize performance, and drive loyalty

• Engage and retain your most valuable customers with loyalty features in AI-powered campaigns. You can now highlight member-exclusive pricing and shipping benefits directly in your ads, and tailor your bidding to reach high-value customers using the new retention goal.
• Understand your past and ongoing promotion performance. With new smart snippets in Merchant Center, you’ll get insights into the performance of your promotions, along with recommendations for new promotions.

Get an improved Merchant Center experience

• Manage your Merchant Center accounts and showcase your products with ease using Merchant API. You can now programmatically manage your Merchant Center platform and product data to amplify your presence on Google.
• Prioritize high-impact fixes to boost product visibility and sales performance. The “Priority Fixes” tab in Merchant Center helps merchants view, prioritize, and resolve high-impact product issues to drive additional traffic and revenue. You’ll also see potential click uplift and be able to leverage automatic fixes for common issues.

Effective measurement is foundational to business growth. We’re seeing more and more businesses adopting AI solutions, but AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. That’s why we launched new, innovative measurement solutions to help you create a strong foundation, deliver better ROI, and prepare you for the future of AI.

Scale performance with powerful insights

• Get true incremental ROI with Meridian. Bring greater transparency and accuracy to your strategic budget planning with Meridian, Google’s open-source Marketing Mix Model (MMM). Meridian goes beyond basic modeling by incorporating powerful, granular signals across video and Search for a more realistic view of media performance, and enables calibration with your incrementality experiments to measure what truly moves the needle. Learn more.
• Confidently measure your true business impact with more accessible incrementality testing. Proving the causal results of your marketing is essential. With recent improvements, you can now measure the incremental lift of your campaigns at lower spend and conversion minimums. We are making incrementality experiments easier to implement, more robust, and deeply integrated into your measurement strategy.
• Understand your incrementality better with improved conversion lift thresholds. Conversion lift now works at lower spend levels and conversion volume—so you can better understand incrementality by testing an entire manager account or specific campaigns at the same time.

Build your Data Strength to boost your ROI

• Connect and manage your data sources in one centralized place with Data Manager. Build data strength and drive the best ROI by unifying all your data from your website, app, physical store, and CRM platforms in Data Manager. Our latest improvements this year make it even easier for you to improve your data setup and deliver the best results across Google Ads, Search Ads 360 and Campaign Manager 360.
• Get more accurate measurement with Google tag gateway for advertisers. Google tag gateway for advertisers significantly improves the accuracy and security of your measurement signals so you can gain deeper campaign insights and drive stronger performance. Advertisers who configured Google tag gateway for advertisers saw an 14% uplift in signals.³

Dive deeper into your performance in Google Analytics

• Import cost data from campaigns running on other platforms to Google Analytics. You can directly bring in campaign data from Meta, TikTok, Snap, Reddit, and Pinterest.
• Assess the success of your lead generation strategy with new lead generation reports and suggested audiences. New reports give you key business insights on the success of your lead generation initiatives, while new lead generation audience templates help you better define and find users at each stage of the lead generation funnel.
• Find which channels and campaigns contribute most to your performance with cross-channel measurement. Cross-channel performance reporting gives you a single view of the contributions your paid and organic channels had on the business outcomes you care about. This report has rich new metrics (e.g. return-on-ad-spend, cost-per-acquisition, revenue) and now includes additional dimensions for slicing-and-dicing.

Launching high-performing creative assets has never been easier! Thanks to Google AI, you can now create and enhance your assets in just a few clicks. And this year, we’ve made this process even easier by introducing Asset Studio, a creative destination directly in Google Ads.

• Bring your creative ideas to life with Asset Studio, now powered by Nano Banana Pro. Asset Studio is the one-stop-shop for your creative needs, right in Google Ads. Now Generative AI tools in Asset Studio supports your entire creative workflow, helping you develop, review and share high-performing creative. Whether you want to edit and generate images, or videos, our newest genAI tools are now free and available to all Google Ads users. Capabilities include:
  
  • Ask to edit and create with natural language. Easily prompt Nano Banana Pro with the edits you want to be made to your uploaded asset, and the new model can rapidly create seasonal variations, and test new creative concepts without starting from scratch.
  • Showcase your product in action. Generate new images of your products with incredible fine detail and photo realistic accuracy. Instantly create lifestyle scenes or product showcases featuring up to five of your products together. Nano Banana Pro now renders complex textures and eye-catching graphics for professional visuals.
  • Edit images in bulk. Provide the images, and the model composes a natural, visually engaging scene to promote your catalog.
  • Get feedback faster with Shareable Assets. Select any image, video or text assets in Asset Studio and generate a unique, shareable link for your teams to review.
  • Visualize your ads with upgraded Ad Preview. You’ll now see a more diverse set of previews showing how your ad appears across formats and channels, for any campaign type. You can also now create a sharable link for Ad Previews, making it simple for others to review.

Google Ads agents are here to partner with you and provide guidance on your business outcomes. These agentic tools help marketers confidently optimize campaigns—from onboarding to troubleshooting—by learning from expansive datasets, landing pages, assets, and historical performance to eliminate guesswork.

• Partner with Ads Advisor to help manage and improve your Ads campaigns. Ads Advisor can help improve performance, troubleshoot policy issues, create new campaigns, and analyze performance.
• Converse with Analytics Advisor to learn more about your entire customer journey. Analytics Advisor is an in-product assistant in Google Analytics that handles broad, top-funnel inquiries, mid-funnel behavior questions, and also low-funnel, action-oriented queries. The advisor maintains conversational memory, allowing users to ask natural language follow-up questions to compare current data against prior insights for a continuous and iterative workflow.