Sign in with Google There’s a moment every marketer tasked with generating leads knows well. You’ve optimized the bid strategy, refined the targeting, and the form fills are coming in. Then the sales team calls. Some of the leads are spam, some are tire-kickers. The pipeline looks full yet the business isn’t thriving.
This isn’t a sales challenge. It’s a measurement, quality, and design challenge. That’s why instead of building purely for volume, we’re building solutions that create and capture intent.
These 42 innovations are designed to close the gap between a person in search of a solution and the business best positioned to serve them.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Optimizing the conversation that leads to conversion
How people search is changing. Someone looking for a contractor who specializes in historic home renovations, or a law firm with specific employment law expertise, isn’t just looking for a link; they have questions.
Business Agent for leads changes the dynamic by enabling a real conversational exchange directly within Search Ads. A prospective client can ask specific questions about your business at any hour, and get accurate answers grounded in your website content. It captures lead data even when your team is offline, filters for better prospects through interactive dialogue, and removes the friction of finding out more. The lead who arrives after that exchange is fundamentally different from one who clicked a headline and filled out a basic form.
Going beyond the browser, Message Ads with RCS for Business will transform the standard click to message experience into SMS outreach with rich, AI-driven experiences directly through iOS and Android. You can use a Gemini powered agent to respond in a personalized way to messages at scale, suggest actions, and send on-brand information. This accelerates intent into actionable business results.
If calls are the way you prefer to connect, we’ve improved click-to-call ads. Now, you can use Gemini to understand whether a conversion happened, automatically rule out misdials and low-intent calls, and trace each qualified call back to the specific campaign that drove it.
We’re also testing Ads in AI Mode, which surface verified details and relevant offers at the exact moment a user is working through a decision, while still clearly labelling these as ads.
Building for more quality leads
We’re piloting a number of new features to support you in delivering high quality leads. For small businesses, Leads in Google Ads will act as a centralized command center for managing Google-hosted form leads, giving sales teams a built-in lightweight CRM so no prospect falls through the cracks. Building on that foundation, lead intent scores will help surface which leads are most likely to close while filtering out the spam and low-intent submissions that drain sales team time. And lead journey mapping will give you a visual picture of your full funnel; it’s a simple way to see where leads are stalling so you can fix friction points.
Journey-aware bidding takes this further. By sharing your full lead to sale journey with Google Ads, your bidding will learn from every goal along the path, not just the final conversion event, eliminating blind spots and uncovering new opportunities.
Unified Enhanced Conversions brings web and lead conversion data into one framework, using securely matched first-party data to recover conversions that would otherwise go unobserved. This matters enormously in industries like automotive or finance, where someone may see an ad in January and take action in March; that connection shouldn’t disappear.
Of course, high-quality leads start with high-quality traffic. That’s why we’ve significantly upgraded our systems to catch invalid activity before it hits your pipeline. By transitioning to a much more proactive filtering model, we now block these interactions faster and have raised the bar for what qualifies as an impression across our network. When invalid activity does bypass initial protections, our backend infrastructure detects and addresses it with much greater speed. We’re continuing to invest in making sure your budget is spent only on real, meaningful engagement.
Budgets that reflect the real world
Tax season, open enrollment, back-to-school: these cycles are predictable in their overall shape and unpredictable in their momentary peaks. Demand-led budget pacing uses AI to follow interest in real time, capturing more volume on high-intent days and pulling back efficiently when demand dips, all while staying within monthly limits. For moments where timing is everything, we recently released campaign total budgets, which lets you set a fixed spend across a specific date range. This is ideal for short-term promotions, new launches, or enrollment windows, removing the need for daily manual adjustments and ensuring the budget lands exactly where it was intended.
If you’re looking to find more opportunity, Smart Bidding Exploration is now available in both AI Max and Performance Max campaigns and helps you convert on search terms you’re eligible to reach but are missing out on due to your ROAS targets. By giving the system added bidding flexibility, you can tap performance from a wider range of unique search categories and scale conversion volume while maintaining efficiency on the queries you’re already reaching. Crucially, scaling this volume doesn’t mean sacrificing lead quality; when paired with Value-Based Bidding, the system is empowered to actively seek top-tier prospects.
Case in point: Banking institution BBVA used Smart Bidding Exploration with a 20% ROAS tolerance alongside AI Max, and were able to achieve a 155% surge in new high-quality leads, all while decreasing their cost per lead by 3%.
“The use of Smart Bidding Exploration with AI Max on Search campaigns was key to solving the problem of scaling efficiently and achieving our growth targets.”
Guido Ekizian, Head of Acquisition, BBVA
Scale your creative capabilities with Asset Studio innovations
Advertising creative drives nearly half (49%) of incremental sales and remains the most critical driver of advertising effectiveness by a wide margin.1 And that’s exactly why I’m excited about the updates we’ve made to Asset Studio. It’s becoming the creative home base in Google Ads; a single place to organize, build, and test everything.
First, with multimodal capabilities in Asset Studio your teams can generate creative by providing a URL, marketing brief, and goals, transforming a single core concept into a library of tailored, on-brand static ads, each built on your performance data. Multimodal video creation in Asset Studio, powered by Gemini, Veo, and Nano Banana, extends this to YouTube ad production, so you can increase your video output without increasing production costs. And for businesses managing thousands of ads, we’ve opened these capabilities up through asset generation in Google Ads API to help businesses scale instantly.
To help with testing, one-click save and set experiment in Asset Studio turns any ad or asset group edit into a structured A/B test instantly. Creative Capabilities in Ads Advisor deliver real-time diagnostics on individual asset performance and thematic coverage. Asset Optimization and insights for Demand Gen goes further: Gemini proactively reviews creative and suggests improvements, with one-click AI fixes that don’t require a trip back to the design team.
Better brand control
For anyone advertising in sectors such as insurance, finance, or healthcare, you know that ‘let AI optimize’ is never the complete answer. There are compliance requirements, legal reviews, and messaging standards that exist for good reason. That’s why we’re building more controls to help you create and manage your campaigns, your way.
To better guide AI with your expertise, we’re introducing AI Brief: a new way to steer AI Max campaigns using your own words. Through messaging guidelines, matching guidelines, and audience guidelines, you can tell Google’s AI exactly what your ads should and shouldn’t say, which searches to pursue or avoid, and how to tailor messaging for specific audiences. It’s a nuance AI previously couldn’t receive, in natural language.
Need to include specific text in your ads? Previously, doing so meant you couldn’t use final URL expansion. Now, our new text disclaimers guarantee your required text always appears, even with final URL expansion enabled. This makes it easy to stay compliant while using AI to send customers to the best landing page.
For creative, new Asset Studio Ingestion capabilities let you anchor the entire workflow in your brand’s own materials; it accepts PDF uploads of brand guidelines, pulls existing assets from YouTube Studio, and connects to platforms like Adobe and Canva through third-party asset integration. Everything AI generates starts from what you’ve already built, and you have full control over what you use and what you leave on the editing room floor.
More creative support, creator enablers and measurement for Demand Gen
Think YouTube and Demand Gen campaigns aren’t a fit for lead generation? Think again. For many of you, the biggest hurdle isn’t just finding a lead; it’s building the trust necessary to help people make high-stakes decisions. YouTube is uniquely positioned here because of the credibility creators have with their viewers.
The credit reporting agency Experian recently paired brand ads with creator content on YouTube Shorts and saw 3x the watch time, 2x the interaction rate, and a 33% increase in conversions.
“We saw meaningful impact across the funnel—from awareness to conversions. This experiment proves that native, engaging creative truly drives performance.”
Bryan Johnson, Digital Marketing Specialist, Experian
And now we’re making it easier to leverage that native content through Demand Gen.
Creator partnerships boost allows you to turn organic creator content into ads, and with creator videos in asset picker now surfacing relevant videos for you, finding the right partner takes much less effort.
Beyond video, we’re helping you to reach high-intent users while they’re actively navigating or exploring locally by expanding Demand Gen into Google Maps, using non-disruptive formats like Promoted Pins.
Plus, to help you get started on Demand Gen faster, AI-assisted campaign creation can now auto-populate settings based on your existing Performance Max campaigns.
There’s also been improvements to measurement for Demand Gen. Campaign Type Attribution now captures both immediate and downstream conversions for Demand Gen independently of other campaigns. For those who need even more rigorous proof of your campaign success, Uplift Experiments allow you to isolate the incremental value of your investment, making it clear exactly how Demand Gen is contributing to your overall account performance.
Making measurement easier and more actionable
This is one of the most persistent frustrations: you run a YouTube campaign, someone books an appointment months later, and there’s no way to connect those two events. Leadership cuts the awareness budget. The pipeline suffers quietly. We get that you need timely signals to prove exactly what drives your business.
We are announcing two powerful new signals: Attributed Branded Searches (ABS) for the short term, and qualified future conversions for the long term.
ABS proves the direct link between your customers seeing or engaging with an ad and searching for your brand. It’s the clearest signal that an ad created intent.
Next, we’re introducing our most powerful ad effectiveness metric yet in qualified future conversions. These analyze key actions like follow-up searches, video views or site visits and then use AI to connect these signals to future sales, well beyond typical look-back windows; they can predict value up to six months in advance.
Of course, signals like ABS and qualified future conversions are only powerful if they actually talk to each other. That’s why we’re unifying them with actual conversion data through Meridian, our open-source MMM. We’re also launching Meridian GeoX, an open-source geo incrementality solution, which enables the testing of multiple tactics against a common control.
But we know that building and maintaining an open-source model isn’t for everyone. For a powerful, turnkey solution, we’re bringing the intelligence of Meridian directly into Google Analytics. No more data silos. No more manual coding. In just a few clicks, you can unify your ads data from Google, Meta, and TikTok with first-party insights from Snowflake, Oracle, and BigQuery.
To help you turn that data into proactive growth, we’re also rolling out a new Scenario Planner in Google Analytics 360, natively powered by Meridian. And to make acting on those insights entirely effortless, we’ve connected this to our new agentic experience, Ask Advisor in Google Analytics. It functions as a personal data analyst tailored to your business, answering complex questions through natural conversation, generating visualizations, like funnel analysis, on demand, and surfacing hidden opportunities to guide your next move.
But bringing the data together is only half the battle. How do you actually make sense of it without being overwhelmed by reports? We’ve built cross-channel planning and budgeting in Google Analytics to help. It automatically refines the data from your MMMs, your platform level attributed conversions and even your own external lift tests into one clear view of ad performance, so you don’t have to piece together conflicting dashboards.
Now, even the most sophisticated planning tools are only as good as the data feeding them. To ensure the right signals are reaching your measurement, we’ve introduced Google Tag Gateway. This routes conversion data through your own server, improving accuracy and security, with confidential computing built in by default. Plus, upgrading your tag requires no changes to your existing code.
Once your online foundation is secure, the next challenge is enriching it. Importing post-lead events, like when a prospect becomes sales qualified or finally converts, is key to driving high-value outcomes for your campaigns. You’re training Google Ads on the leads that actually move the needle for your business, not just raw inquiries. The impact is significant: advertisers connecting offline and app data using Data Manager see a 26% average increase in incremental ROAS.2 That’s why we’re making it easier to bring this data into your campaigns by launching new direct data integrations in Data Manager including Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, and Google Drive. You can also work with partners who enable connections via the Data Manager API like Adswerve, Bloomreach, Datahash, Treasure Data, TripleWhale, Scowtt, Stape, Zapier, Zeotap, and many more.
As you pull in more data sources, it’s naturally tougher to know what’s actually fueling your campaigns; so we’ve built Map View into Data Manager to give you a visual audit of where your data is being deployed.
Supporting your app strategy
For those of you with an app, there’s been strides in this space too. Deep Link AI Agent automates the technical implementation of in-app deep links, reducing what was once a multi-day engineering task to minutes. And App Connect in Ask Advisor brings proactive, agentic guidance to the full web-and-app journey, helping you to fix misconfigured deep links and optimize measurement without requiring a specialist on staff.
The real competitive advantage
Reading through a list of 41 new capabilities is a lot to digest. But behind all of this is one simple goal: helping you to generate more high quality leads. And you don’t have to figure this out alone. our 42nd launch is here to help: Ask Advisor is an end to end agentic partner that can support you through the full Google marketing ecosystem. It can help you create campaigns, implement bid and budget recommendations in one click, troubleshoot policy issues, and explain the ‘why’ behind your performance, finding pockets of new opportunity for you.
We’re building AI powered solutions that allow you to qualify leads, pace budgets, generate mass amounts of creative, and optimize bids better than manual management in most scenarios. Every advertiser will be able to leverage these, which means execution alone isn’t a differentiator. What will make a difference is the quality of the signals you share, the depth of your brand context, and the clarity of your strategy.
The businesses that will win in this next era of lead generation are the ones who bring the magic that the algorithm can’t manufacture on its own. These 42 launches are built for exactly that kind of partnership.
