Sign in with Google We know that generating high-quality leads at scale is critical to your business growth. And that requires advertising tools designed specifically for unique challenges and goals of lead gen marketers. Here we’ll dive into how the innovations announced at Google Marketing Live (GML), and other recent launches, can enhance your lead generation efforts – in ways that might surprise you.
This includes new experiences and features across Search, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns. You may have heard this campaign portfolio referred to as the AI Power Pack at GML because of the combined opportunities they can offer to connect with people throughout the customer journey. Plus, you’ll find key updates to creative and measurement solutions, all built specifically to help you find more leads, improve their quality, and drive the impactful results you’re aiming for.
Supercharging Search for lead generation
Search is evolving. It’s becoming more than just finding answers – people are searching in ways that are more conversational, visual, and exploratory. As people ask more complex questions, these signals combined with our advanced AI models allow us to move from just understanding what people are looking for, to understanding why. This shift means moving from matching keywords, to predicting what people might need next. This means new and more expansive opportunities to connect with potential leads, from initial discovery to decision making.
Ads in new Search experiences: Monthly, 1.5 billion users are using AI Overviews to get AI-powered snapshots to answer their complex questions. Now, Ads in AI Overviews are expanding to desktop in the U.S. and to most English-speaking countries on mobile. We’re also experimenting with Search ads below and integrated into AI Mode responses when users want to have a deeper, back-and-forth conversation. For example, if someone is researching, “How to build a website for a small business with limited resources”, they’ll get helpful step-by-step guidance and suggestions–and sometimes, this guidance is supported by an ad, which acts as a natural next step. These developments mean you can generate high-quality leads early in their exploration journeys, influencing critical moments and shortening their path to action.
AI Max for Search campaigns: AI Max for Search campaigns is designed to help you find leads you might otherwise miss. It uses advanced keywordless technology combined with broad match to find untapped, relevant searches. It can also automatically tailor your ads and landing pages to better match customer intent and interests. You can choose whether to opt in to search term matching, text customization and final URL expansion or customize to specific features based on your business needs. For example, imagine you’re advertising an online coding boot camp. If someone searches for ‘learn Python for beginners online’, your campaign with only exact match keywords like ‘Python coding boot camp’ wouldn’t capture their query. Even if you’re already using broad match keywords, AI Max can ensure your ad is more compelling by intelligently adapting your ad content and landing page to explain different benefits relevant to the user’s specific need.
You do need to be using a Smart Bidding strategy to enable AI Max for Search campaigns. And for AI Max in Search campaigns to find you high-quality leads, you need to share what “quality” means for your specific business. Tools like enhanced conversions for leads and value-based bidding help you send these important signals.
Advertisers that activate AI Max in Search campaigns will typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS. For campaigns that are still mostly using exact and phrase keywords, the typical uplift is even higher at 27%.1
Australian utility connector MyConnect saw 16% more leads at a 13% lower CPA.
“With the AI-powered creative and targeting enhancements in AI Max for Search campaigns, we were able to drive incremental high-quality leads by unlocking net-new searches and having AI build more relevant content to each user and their query”
BEC OXNAM, HEAD OF MARKETING, MYCONNECT
Smart Bidding Exploration: This new Smart Bidding feature gives Google AI added flexibility to convert more quality leads by winning new, high-performing searches for your business that you might have missed otherwise. You set a flexible ROAS target to enable an advanced algorithm to capture new searches and additional conversions from the traffic you’re already eligible for when using broad match, DSA or AI Max for Search campaigns. Campaigns using it see on average, an 18% increase in unique search categories with conversions.
For digital media company Money Group, Smart Bidding Exploration delivered 46% more lead volume from 26% more unique traffic sources. The feature is now a fast-acting, reliable tool for them to scale campaigns.
“Bidding Exploration allowed us to double leads and sales in some verticals. It’s a great way to nudge Google’s smart bidding to find sales in new places, especially when using broad match keywords and accurate conversion signals.”
JAMES KATSANEVAS, HEAD OF GROWTH MARKETING, MONEY GROUP
Unlocking more potential with Performance Max and Demand Gen
To nurture and convert quality leads across more channels, Performance Max offers unparalleled reach across all of Google’s channels, and Demand Gen provides additional controls and specific audience targeting on YouTube and Google’s most visual and immersive surfaces.
Demand Gen: We launched more than 60 AI-powered improvements on Demand Gen last year – thanks largely to advertiser feedback. This includes giving you greater precision: channel controls let you choose exactly where your ads appear across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, even tailoring campaigns exclusively for YouTube Shorts. We’ve also implemented nearly a dozen updates designed to enhance creative editing capabilities. Advertisers using Demand Gen are, on average, now seeing a 26% year-over-year increase in conversions per dollar for goals like generating leads.
Audi leveraged Demand Gen to connect with in-market, custom segment, and lookalike audiences across a multi-format creative strategy on YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. This strategy drove 2x more leads at a 55% lower cost per lead and a 40% lower cost-per-click compared to social campaigns.
“Simply put, this Demand Gen campaign has delivered exceptional results for Audi Polska. Double the leads, significantly lower costs — it’s a winning formula that demonstrates the power of data-driven marketing.”
PRZEMYSŁAW SCHWARZ, CMO, AUDI PL
Performance Max: You’ve likely noticed the many recent updates and announcements to provide you with greater transparency and more levers to steer AI towards your best leads. New channel performance reporting provides clear visibility into how each channel – like Search, YouTube, or Display – and even specific ad formats like video contribute to your lead generation goals. It offers performance summaries, visualizations, and downloadable tables with key metrics such as lead volume and cost per lead at the channel level. Alongside these insights, we’re also rolling out crucial new controls: age-based demographic exclusions, campaign-level negative keywords and full search terms reporting to help you guide AI towards higher-quality leads.
Improving creative variety and velocity with AI
You can now use text prompts to generate images that contain adult people and faces across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, and Apps campaigns. Visually demonstrate how your business supports people through pivotal life moments – from a parent’s proud moment handing over the keys to their child’s first car at a dealership, to a student’s exhilarating first steps onto a university campus (a process I’m going through now as a parent). From prompt to promotion, you’re in control of the creative process and able to approve every image before it goes live. As early user Matthias Wenninger of Mediaplus Performance Germany put it, “The potential to significantly shorten the production cycles of creatives is no longer a fancy futuristic theory. It’s already here. Today”
For example, a cooking school could generate images using a simple prompt like “person cooking” or get more specific with a prompt like “middle-aged man chopping carrots”.
Fueling peak performance by enhancing measurement and offline data integrations
Connecting the dots between your customer touchpoints as they move across your website, your physical store, or your app is crucial for lead generation. We’re helping you connect all your first-party data - regardless of the source - to help you achieve peak performance.
Google Ads Data Manager: Combining your first-party data – from CRMs, apps, and offline sources – with your Google Ads campaigns is the foundation for using AI to its full potential. Google Ads Data Manager was developed to make it easier for you to pull in and leverage your first-party data to drive performance and measurement. You can easily connect data from sources like MailChimp, Zoho, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Shopify, Salesforce, Google Sheets, BigQuery, and more.
By connecting their HubSpot data for enhanced conversions, human resources platform Multiplier Technologies was able to cut their cost per lead by 15%.
For advanced users, we’re also consolidating all our APIs into one Data Manager API to help you connect all your data sources across Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google Marketing Platform.
Improved Enhanced Conversions for Leads (ECL) Diagnostics: We’re rolling out the next evolution of our ECL diagnostic tool, making self-service implementation and troubleshooting simpler.
Our new Google tag gateway for advertisers makes it easy to upgrade your tags to serve from your own website infrastructure — helping improve performance and resilience of your measurement signals for deeper audience understanding and added control of your data.
Better Lead Gen measurement in Google Analytics: We’ve launched recommended events and default reports specifically for lead generation businesses in Google Analytics.
Meridian for better budget allocation: For those using Marketing Mix Models (MMMs), we’re launching an API for simpler, more frequent access to granular Google data from the MMM data platform — such as reach and frequency, query volume — plus an interactive Meridian scenario planner to help optimize spend across the channels generating the best leads for your business, without needing to interact with code.
Beyond these headline features, we’re constantly refining our systems for faster campaign ramp-up and to improve traffic and lead quality. To take full advantage of these ongoing refinements and model improvements, make sure your campaigns are set up with Lead Generation conversion goals.
We’re committed to building AI-powered tools that are designed to provide more control, better insights, and ultimately, drive more high-quality leads for your business.
