How Your Business Should Make the Most Out of Google Ads in 2025
Google Ads Is Arguably The Key Platform To Help Your Business Establish a Growth Marketing Framework in 2025
Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, is an online advertising platform developed by Google.
It allows businesses to create and run ads that appear on Google's search engine results pages (SERPs), partner websites, and other Google properties.
The platform operates on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, where advertisers bid on keywords relevant to their target audience.
Why Google Ads is Seen As a Marketing Cornerstone for Growth-Focused Businesses
Google Ads offers numerous benefits for businesses looking to increase their online visibility and drive targeted traffic to their websites.
Highly targeted advertising: Google Ads allows you to target specific keywords, demographics, locations, and devices, ensuring your ads reach the right audience.
Immediate & Measurable Results: Unlike organic search engine optimization(SEO), Google Ads can generate immediate visibility and traffic to your website. With Google Ads, you can track and measure the performance of your campaigns, allowing you to optimize and improve your ROI.
Flexible budgeting: Google Ads allows you to set a budget as large or as small as you would like to start, and adjust it as needed, giving you control over your advertising spend.
For these and other reasons, Google Ads has long been an essential part of a growth marketing framework, largely because it allows businesses to reach their target audience effectively. As technology evolves and user behaviors change, Google continues to innovate and update its advertising platform to provide additional opportunities for business to better optimize their Google ads campaigns for revenue growth.
Google Ads is a powerful online advertising platform that enables businesses to reach their target audience through paid search, display, video, and app campaigns.
With the right strategies and techniques, Google Ads can help you maximize your return on investment (ROI) and should be an integral part of a growth marketing-focused approach.
Why Google Ads should be part of the growth marketing fundamentals of your business in 2024.
With the increasing competition and evolving digital landscape, it is essential to optimize your Google Ads campaigns to stay ahead.
By improving your campaign performance, you can drive more targeted traffic, increase sales, leads, and orders, and maximize your return on investment (ROI).
In this article, we will explore the anticipated changes to Google Ads in 2024 and how they may impact advertisers. Moreover, we will also provide a guide on how best to optimize your Google Ad campaigns in 2024.
10 Things We Can Expect From Google Ads in 2025
It is imperative to understand how Google Ads is evolving so that growth-focused businesses know how to best optimize Google Ads campaigns. With that in mind, here are 10 things we know we can expect out of Google Ads in 2025.
1. Cost Per Lead Increases Across All Industries
WordStream’s recently released Google Ads benchmarks report shows that cost per lead has increased significantly—for 91% of industries. While the average overall increase is 19%, the Arts/Entertainment, Travel, and Furniture industries saw increases of 134%, 69%, and 54% respectively.
There are arguably 2 reasons for this. Factors such as inflation come into play, but the fact that there is an increase in the number of ads showing for low commercial intent queries also has led to a decrease in conversion rates and therefore an increase in CPL.
2) Responsive Search Ads Have Become the De Facto Format of Choice
For the past 22 years, advertisers have been manually writing, testing, and optimizing their PPC ads on Google, including crafting the perfect text ad. Over the years, Google’s introduced several new search ad formats. In 2016, Google doubled the size of its standard text ads with Expanded Text Ads. But after several years of change, Google finally killed off Expanded Text Ads in June 2022 putting an end to the format that defined PPC advertising for years.
Google’s new default ad type is the responsive search ad (RSA), which allows advertisers to provide multiple different text assets for Google to piece together to build the ad that loads on the SERP for every search. It is another aspect of Google’s increasing dependence on AI to drive its platform.
This asset-driven and machine learning-powered ad format has considerable potential to serve over 40,000 unique variations of an ad with enough assets. However part of the problem with that is that RSAs can create some poor combinations and may not always perform well. Moreover, the switch over to RSAs effectively limits the control that businesses have over their ads’ messages and testing processes on the SERP.
3)Google Ads will release more AI-powered features
Responsive Ads are just the tip of the iceberg in this regard. AI and machine learning tools are truly redefining the way growth marketers approach paid search campaigns. This year promises even more sophisticated automated bid strategies, advanced audience targeting, and semi-autonomous ad creation. What’s more is that with predictive analytics, advertisers can foresee consumer behavior, allowing campaigns to potentially be optimized for improved results.
Advanced automated bid strategies already have proven to be a major change in Google’s formerly very manual process of adjusting bids and fine-tuning results. With Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google’s focus on the data-driven attribution model, it is more than reasonable to expect this to continue.
Let us go over some key ways that AI will become more prevalent within Google Ads in 2025.
Semi-autonomous ad creation
For years marketers had to manually test everything associated with a campaign. AI removes that heavy lifting by being able to test multiple ad copy variations, suggest keyword inclusions based on search trends, and even optimize visual elements in an ad for maximum engagement.
This is especially true within Performance Max, which Google is increasingly keen to have advertisers use. If you are unfamiliar, Performance Aax allows advertisers to access all of Google’s ad inventory (YouTube, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps) from a single campaign. With Performance Max, ads are created through inputs. Text assets can currently be created through advertiser inputs with the quick development of AI-generated imagery
Enhanced audience targeting
Advertising platforms have already begun to incorporate AI into the process of audience segmentation. By analyzing users’ search histories, site interactions, and even social media behaviors, AI-driven platforms can predict user intent with impressive accuracy. This means ads can be displayed to users who are more likely to convert, similar to how the automated bid strategies work now, just taking that concept to the next technological level.
Two ways that Google will be doubling down on this will be with Performance Max and the broadening of keyword match types which broaden the range of both text and visual campaigns to get more data quickly while simultaneously optimizing campaigns more efficiently.
Predictive analytics in campaign optimization
Rather than merely reacting to past data, AI will enable proactive campaign management using predictive analytics. By evaluating past campaign performances and current market trends, AI enables the ability to forecast potential pitfalls or opportunities in future campaigns.
Continuous learning and improvement
The true power of AI lies in its ability to learn continuously. Machine learning models refine themselves with every piece of data they encounter. In the context of paid search, this means that AI-powered tools become more attuned to an advertiser’s goals and the target audience’s nuances over time. We already have seen this trajectory with PMAX and smart bidding. Expect this trend to continue.
From Google’s point of view, the increasing blend of AI and paid search heralds a future where campaigns are smarter, more responsive, and, importantly, more effective. While AI will handle much of the heavy analytical lifting, the role of the marketer will shift to more strategic decision-making, creative endeavors, and leveraging AI’s insights for maximum impact.
Automation and smart bidding will become more popular
Along the same lines as the AI-powered features we covered above, smart bidding strategies like Target CPA and ROAS will continue to be popular, leveraging AI for efficient campaign optimization.
Smart bidding has already proven itself to be effective. As an example, max conversions, target CPA, and target ROAS have all been beneficial to advertisers, especially once they gather enough learning data. Over time, these bidding strategies can only help to improve an already well-structured campaign.
4. Increased emphasis on Performance Max:
As alluded to earlier, Performance Max will continue to increase in prominence. Performance Max is a campaign type that can show ads across all of Google’s advertising channels: Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discovery, Gmail, and Maps. For that reason, you can choose to look at Performance Max as being sort of a Google Ads smorgasbord.
The idea here is that increased reach, more placements, and enhanced automation will allow for a significant increase in conversions while lowering CPA (all the while removing the considerable hassle that comes with managing more campaigns.
Google’s use of both prescriptive and predictive analytics can certainly help to enhance Performance Max-based campaigns. However, similar to Responsive Ads, the lack of control of the message and assets in their entirety, as well as the lack of analytics regarding campaign copy as well as the channels and placements that work best, make it easy for advertisers to question whether Performance Max campaigns can be fully optimized.
There is a mix of opinions around Google Ads Performance Max, but all in all, given the relative simplicity of ad messages, e-commerce businesses are more likely to benefit from Performance Max immediately. B2B and SAAS businesses that rely on lead generation and lead nurturing should invest less in Performance Max until they have more data or until the tracking becomes more nuanced and sophisticated to reflect the multi-stage nature of marketing that is part and parcel of these businesses
Moreover, don’t even think about testing Performance Max unless you’re prepared to spend at least $50-100 per day for at least a month. Without it, it’s unlikely you’ll generate enough data and learning for the format to work properly.
5. More emphasis on broad match
Google has been encouraging advertisers to use broad matches more for the last couple of years. The reason behind this as briefly alluded to previously in this article lies in their confidence in smart bidding and AI’s ability to learn and optimize for results over time. So in essence, the more data you give the machine (which broad match will provide) , the more it will be able to adapt to the goal that you have specified.
However, the lack of transparency inherent in AI-oriented campaigns makes this rather troubling here. Given how useful using various match types (phrase, exact, etc.) and negative keywords are in honing in on the specific queries of interest that ultimately helped improve campaign performance, it is understandable to feel skeptical about how effective the enhanced use of broad match will ultimately be.
6) Video advertising will grow
This is especially true, not just where long-form YouTube Ads are concerned, but more specifically in the realm of short-form video ads. YouTube Shorts are Google’s answer to TikTok and Meta’s Reels. Now, you can run ads targeting Shorts as a placement. However, with the increased advertising competition on both TikTok and Instagram, there will be a lot more attention going towards Shorts in trying to encourage advertisers to utilize them as a placement. Moreover, YouTube is heavily relying on AI to help advertisers more easily create ads, thereby adding to the likelihood that video advertising will grow in popularity.
7) The phaseout of Similar Audiences
The success of rival Facebook’s lookalike audiences caused Google to double down on its Similar Audiences. Since then, they’ve become a cornerstone of many advertisers’ Google Ad campaigns. However, new privacy standards have hit both Google and Facebook’s audience solutions hard, which is the impetus behind the fact that Google announced that it plans to transition away from Similar Audiences for “more powerful and durable” audience solutions.
By around August or September 2023, Similar Audiences were removed from all campaign targeting.
Google recommended that all advertisers make a habit of relying on their first-party data, such as Customer Match data, to create new audiences for their campaigns. Moreover, smart bidding strategies and optimized targeting need to be emphasized more to continue optimizing campaign performance.
Interestingly, Microsoft does not seem to be following Google’s lead in this. Microsoft Advertising announced it would be rolling out its Similar Audience solutions to more markets internationally.
8) New competitor advertising insights on the SERP
Understanding your competitors' strategies and performance can provide valuable insights for optimizing your own Google Ads campaigns.
In 2021, Google announced that it would expand its advertiser verification program and offer greater ad transparency to users who see targeted ads on and off the SERP. With those efforts, Google launched My Ad Center in October, allowing searchers to explore how competitive advertisers reach consumers of interest.
This powerful new tool within Google Ad Center is called Advertiser Pages.that lets users see all the other ads that a particular advertiser has run over the past 30 days.
To view a company’s Advertiser Page, you’ll need to click on the three stacked dots next to an ad. From there, you can view details from Verified Advertisers, including seeing more ads by this advertiser. From here, you can see all the ads that the advertiser has been running over the past 30 days. You can even filter these results between text, image, and video ads.
9) New voiceover features for video ads
In part driven by the rapid rise of TikTok and its easily accessible editing features, Google introduced new features for its video ad content this summer. Among the improvements, advertisers can now add a voice-over to their existing YouTube video ads without additional editing. According to Google, including a voice-over in these ads can increase ad recall by 25% What is more is that including a voiceover can lower the cost per lifted user by 50% compared to the original advertisements.
10) Audio ads hit YouTube & Smart Speakers
As streaming content becomes the norm for most consumers, many advertisers are beginning to pivot their strategy and budget. Google recently announced that it would be meeting this demand on its growing audiences of music and podcast listeners across YouTube earlier this year with its new audio ad campaigns.
This new video campaign subtype is designed for advertisers to reach users while listening to music or podcasts, where highly visual video content wouldn’t typically perform well.
As a best practice, it is recommended to use a static image or simple animation while focusing on sound quality, a conversational tone, and a short effective call to action.
To further optimize this new Audio Ad format, Google also rolled out targeting for new content placements across YouTube. This includes placement types such as Music Mood Lineups and Podcast Lineups so that advertisers can target their audio ads to the placements where they’re most likely to find their target audience listening.
6 Additional Google Ads trends to watch for in 2025
Now that we have put forward 10 Google Ads directions that we know are guaranteed to occur in 2025, we need to look at what might start to happen in 2025. The following are occurrences we feel are reasonable to expect, especially given the already established direction that Google Ads has already started to take. Here are six such examples that may not become fully established in 2025, but may begin to trend in that direction:
1. The integration of augmented reality
2025 could see the beginning of the full shift of Augmented Reality (AR) being integrated into Google search ads. Imagine pointing your phone at a product and instantly seeing how it looks in your space or how it works. Implementing AR in ads could allow users the convenience of interacting with products in a virtual environment directly from the search results, offering an experience beyond image or text ads.
2. Dynamic image ads
Instead of simply seeing static images, dynamic image ads could easily be emphasized. These ads would change based on user behavior or preferences. An example could involve showing different product colors or styles based on the user’s past browsing history, essentially a form of remarketing that attempts to capitalize on the interests of users based on their past browsing history.
3. 360-degree product previews
In 2025, search ads could offer 360-degree views of products, allowing users to explore every angle before making a decision. This feature would be particularly beneficial for high-value items like electronics, vehicles, or furniture, where detail and perspective are crucial. Since Facebook/Meta already has a 360-degree creative feature, it is reasonable to expect Google to work towards something similar for its ad platform.
4. Video integration in search ads
The integration of short, auto-playing videos within search ads could become more prevalent. These videos would offer quick glimpses or demonstrations of products, such as appliances, and show what they can do and how they operate. Videos, in such circumstances, implicitly provide a richer understanding and experience than images alone.
5. Interactive ads
Interactive ads are ads that allow users to engage directly from the search results. From simple games to quizzes that lead to personalized product recommendations, these ads could increase user engagement significantly and improve brand awareness and recognition.
6. Voice-activated ads
With the rise of voice search, it is easy to envision how voice-activated ads could soon become a reality. Users could interact with ads using voice commands, making the search experience more accessible and hands-free. These ads would capitalize on the increased popularity of voice search and provide advertisers with another avenue to capitalize on profitable long-tail search terms that would complement the rise of broad match.
While there is no guarantee of any of these above 6 potential occurrences becoming reality, it is easy to foresee these becoming an increasing part of search and search ads as AI becomes increasingly incorporated into the user experience.
12 Key Ways Growth Marketers Can Optimize Google Ads Campaigns in 2025
Key Google Ads Tactics to Consider to When Optimizing Your Growth-Focused Marketing Tactics
Now that we have established some trends for Google Ads in 2025 as well as some future directions or features that make sense given the way the Google Ads platform is evolving, here are some tips to best optimize your campaigns in 2025.
1. Save time and money with automated bidding.
Google’s automated bidding will help novice and experienced Google Ads advertisers save both optimization time and unnecessary advertising spending.
Taking the guesswork out of Google bidding, automated bid strategies have been created to help you match your campaign bidding to your specific e-commerce business goals.
In short, it should be your number one Google campaign optimization hack. As a rule of thumb, you should always optimize Google Ads campaigns based on your business goals.
For example, if your goal is to increase sales, you should optimize your campaigns for conversions. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you should optimize your campaigns for dominating impression share or for the lowest CPM. The most commonly used smart bidding strategies used by most businesses are however maximizing the number of conversions and optimizing for a target CPA.
In general, it is best to start your campaigns with “maximize conversions” without setting a target CPA value. Leave the campaigns running for a few weeks and monitor the Cost Per Conversion value.
If the average cost per conversion starts to fall within acceptable levels and is consistently decreasing over time, you can safely set a “target cost per action” and increase your daily budget to at least double your CPA value.
2. Put effort into creating an increasingly sophisticated keyword strategy
A robust keyword strategy is an absolute must for ensuring your Google ads are performing at pro level.This includes keeping a close eye on your campaign metrics to mine for possible keywords, using negative keywords to stop irrelevant clicks, implementing brand keywords strategically, and using a combination of short- and long-tail keywords to account for campaign goals.
The reality though is that to ensure your Google Ads campaigns are truly optimized, you want to ensure you’re continuously tweaking and optimizing your keywords.
With that in mind, here are some tips to help ensure that you’re optimizing your keywords and therefore building an advanced keyword strategy:
Regularly use Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Suggest, SEM Rush, Ahrefs and other research tools to find new potential long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific keyword phrases that typically have lower search volume but higher conversion rates. By targeting long-tail keywords, you can reach a more qualified audience and increase the chances of generating conversions.
For example, instead of targeting "shoes," you can target "buy men's running shoes online.Keep a close eye on your negative keywords list and consciously add terms that are hurting your CTRs or resulting in irrelevant clicks. Negative keywords are vital to not only ensuring you’re reaching shoppers who are looking for what you’re selling but also that you are ensuring that you aren’t wasting your precious ad budget on non-targeted traffic that’s very unlikely to convert or move up to other sales funnels like email marketing lists.
Use Google’s search terms report to update your keyword lists based on what people were searching for when they saw your ads and clicked them. Moreover using the search terms report allows you to be able to ditch those poor-performing keywords.
Even though the broad match is what is currently being emphasized by Google, it is important nevertheless to experiment with advanced keyword match types for better control.
3. Use RLSAs to breathe life into dying ad groups.
Equally, if not more important than targeting is retargeting, which too many advertisers neglect to do even when they are eligible. Google says that only 2-4% of site visits result in a transaction, so it’s imperative to retarget those who visited your site to drive them back to your page to hopefully make a conversion.
Before you kill an awareness ad group or sub-par keyword, you may want to try using these campaigns with RLSA (remarketing lists for Search ads). By adding remarketing lists, which offer secondary targeting for your keywords, you’re creating campaigns for people who are already familiar with your brand. What this does is help to ensure the chance of better ad performance. Keep in mind though that to be able to use RLSAs, your online store will need to have at least 1,000 active cookies.
Advanced tip
If you’re already familiar with and using RLSAs for optimized Google campaigns, here are three expert strategies we recommend to fully capitalize on RLSAs.
a)Message Coordination: RLSAs are more effective when messages are coordinated to encourage someone to re-visit your website based on their first visit. For instance, when someone visits your online store and engages with one specific product. The idea here would be to create RLSAs that target groups of shoppers who viewed that specific product with ad messaging highlighting the benefits of the specific product they already engaged with.
b) Abandoned cart targeting for shopping campaigns: Combining the power of Google Shopping interest and intent with remarketing can be incredibly lucrative in terms of sales. Add that to specifically using RLSAs based on cart abandonment behavior and you could optimize your Google campaigns into a sale-generating machine in no time.
c) Pairing remarketing lists and broad terms: If you’re quite comfortable with Google Ads by now, you’re probably aware that broad terms tend to be a lot more costly due to high competition. However, by combining broad terms with RLSAs in ad groups, your ROI can potentially maximized. Ideally, to test this Google Ads optimization hack, you’ll want to clone an exact match campaign, then adjust it to follow a broad match campaign style, while integrating RLSA targeting into it.
4. Target the right audience
When optimizing your Google Ads for maximum ROI, it’s important to use audiences and location targeting. This allows you to reach certain demographics or prospects whose online behaviors are typical of your ideal customers. This way, you can reduce irrelevant traffic and low-quality clicks. Different audiences can be set up to build awareness, influence consideration, or drive action.
As alluded to earlier with our point on Similar Audiences, audience targeting is a huge subject and something that changes frequently because of the user privacy issues involved.
What is important to understand from an optimization perspective is what audience targeting is and when to use it in your campaigns. You can base audiences based on browsing behavior, customer behavior, and customer data (for ex; customer email addresses, custom audiences that focus on those who have bought from you to find those similar to these individuals), as well as psychographic and demographic tendencies. By being aware of these characteristics, you can maximize for those who are likely to buy from you while minimizing (via exclusions) those who are far less likely to buy from you.
5) Monitor the performance of your Responsive Ads
The next item in your Google Ads optimization checklist is to optimize your responsive search ads, which as we alluded to earlier are going to have far greater prominence. Responsive search ads have a lot of benefits but they are a bit tricky to optimize.
The first thing to remember is to leave your ads running for a reasonable period (at least 30 days). This will give enough time for the system to gather data about your ads. Next, you can analyze the performance of each of your responsive search ads and make the necessary optimization changes. According to Google, responsive search ads usually need around 5,000 impressions over 30 days to display a rating of low, good, or best in the Performance column.
Just as important is to provide as many headlines and descriptions are possible. Currently, advertisers can add up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Make sure you provide text for all of them. Moreover, it is important to differentiate the text of descriptions and headlines and avoid repeating the same text in both places. Use the descriptions to provide additional information about your products or business.
That being said, advertisers can re-use content from your existing text ads if they already have non-responsive text ads that are performing well. Besides looking at the asset details report, you can also edit your ad and view the recommendations provided by Google.
6. Keep Your Google Ads campaign optimization score as close to 100% as possible
When you view the CAMPAIGNS report, you’ll notice the Optimization Score column. This shows an estimate (from 0% to 100%) of how well a campaign is expected to perform.
The score is calculated based on several factors and its purpose is to help you increase your campaign’s performance and optimize your account to perform at its full potential.
You can click the RECOMMENDATIONS option from the left menu to view personalized recommendations on how you can increase your optimization score.
Google will make several recommendations to improve your optimization score. That being said it is imperative NOT to blindly follow and apply all recommendations. Only apply them if they are relevant to your business.
7) Ad Copy & Creative Optimization:
The ad copy and creative elements of your Google Ads play a crucial role in attracting clicks and driving conversions. Google Ads rewards advertisers who provide high-quality and relevant ads to users. Google assigns a quality score to each keyword-ad combination, which affects your ad's position and cost-per-click (CPC). Higher ad relevance as indicated by higher Quality Scores can lead to better ad positions and lower CPCs.
Here are some tips to optimize your ad copy and creative, and ultimately your Quality Score:
Compelling Headlines and Descriptions
