New features and controls for your AI-powered campaigns

Google Ads helps you find and connect with your customers — no matter where they are on their purchase journeys. And AI-powered campaigns are continuing to deliver big results for businesses large and small.

But we’ve heard your feedback — more controls and insights remain your top request when it comes to using AI in your advertising. And with generative AI tools, you want more ways to shape the outputs to align with your brand.

Today at DMEXCO, one of Europe's top digital marketing events, we explored how we are putting our best AI to work for your best ROI. We’re using AI to support every part of the advertising process, and today we’re sharing our top five announcements from the event:

1. Gemini models now help you build better Search campaigns in more languages

Google Search matches consumers with the right businesses who can offer what they want, right when they’re looking. This creates huge opportunities for businesses to connect with customers in their moments of need to drive results and ROI. The conversational experience for Search campaigns has already helped hundreds of thousands of businesses build high-performing Search campaigns using generative AI. The results speak for themselves: small business advertisers that use the conversational experience in Google Ads are 63% more likely to publish Search campaigns with ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ Ad Strength.¹ We want even more businesses to have access to this technology so, in the coming months, the conversational experience in Google Ads will expand to German, French and Spanish languages.

2. More ways to fuel your creative vision with generative AI

Consumer purchase journeys are anything but predictable, and your ad strategy needs to be equally nimble. Performance Max is fueled by Google AI end-to-end, dynamically optimizing your budget to help you multiply conversions across Google’s full range of channels and audiences. In MMMs run by TransUnion among Retail & Consumer Electronics advertisers in the U.S., Google Performance Max campaigns drove 19% higher ROAS in 2023 than AI-powered and automated performance campaigns on the largest social platform by share of spend.²

To connect with consumers who may not be actively searching, but are open to discovering, Demand Gen campaigns are your answer. They create and convert demand using immersive, visual-first storytelling on YouTube and non-Search inventory. And Demand Gen campaigns allow you to customize your Google AI strategy by channel, audience and creative to tailor messages for the customers you care about most. On average, advertisers who added Demand Gen to their Search and/or Performance Max campaigns saw 14% more conversions.³

Across all AI-powered campaigns, a high volume and diversity of creative assets are essential. To help, we're expanding AI-powered image editing to new campaigns beyond Performance Max. You can now enhance image assets in Search, Demand Gen, App and Display campaigns as well. You can even spotlight your own products by selecting and editing images directly from Google Merchant Center.

And we're making asset generation available in six new languages: German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian. More advertisers will be able to easily generate a wide variety of ad copy and images for your Performance Max, Demand Gen, App and Display campaigns – and wherever else you choose to use them.

3. Scale and optimize your assets while remaining in control

AI will unlock new ways to enhance human creativity — not replace it. That’s why we’re building new ways for you to shape this creative process. You can now provide up to five reference images along with a prompt, and watch as AI generates new images that align with your brand's aesthetic.

To give you more control, brand guidelines for Performance Max are also moving to full, general availability next month. Define and upload specific brand elements including fonts, colors and logos to ensure that your brand identity is visually consistent across ad formats.

Furthermore, we’re making Demand Gen creative preferences available to all advertisers. This will allow you to pin video assets to specific formats and surfaces, ensuring your most impactful visuals appear exactly where you want them.

4. Performance Max: Deeper insights, better results

Building high-performing creative takes ongoing optimization, and a deep understanding of what’s working and what’s not. Our latest creative reporting will help you chart a clear roadmap to excellent Ad Strength. We’re continuing to improve asset reporting, including introducing conversion metrics for each asset. And starting next month, new asset coverage reporting in Performance Max will help you pinpoint underperforming asset groups and receive specific recommendations to improve them, such as “add 2 long headlines” or “add 3 square images”.

We're also giving you better visibility into your campaign performance, starting with an overhaul of performance insights. No more digging through multiple reports. We've combined insights, explanations and recommendations into a single streamlined view to help you understand and address campaign fluctuations. Plus, with target pacing insights, you can easily track progress against your CPA and ROAS goals. Understand if a campaign is on track to deliver results within the expected bid target. If not, seamless integration with explanations reveals the contributing factors — whether it's bid strategies adjusting to recent market shifts or budget limitations influencing results. From there, leverage tailored recommendations to steer your campaigns back on course.

Impression share reporting is coming to Performance Max for the first time as well. See how prominently you’re showing up for text and Shopping ads on the Search results page to understand the competitive landscape and if you have an opportunity to increase your reach.

5. Media management, your way

We've been listening closely to your feedback on wanting more controls in AI-powered campaigns. Today, we’re announcing the beta launch of campaign-level negative keywords in Performance Max. We’ll start rolling out this highly-requested feature by the end of the year to ensure your ads align with your specific brand and audience needs on Search inventory.

New optimization levers are also coming to Demand Gen campaigns. Omnichannel bidding will be available in beta in the coming months to help you maximize both online and in-store conversions.

Finally, in October, we'll roll out support for buying Demand Gen campaigns in Display & Video 360, giving you even greater flexibility and reach within your existing workflows.

And in case you missed it, last week, we just introduced confidential matching, a leap forward in secure data processing. It’s built with confidential computing technology to transform how businesses securely manage their first-party data.

We are bringing you the best AI so you can deliver your best ROI. We hope you’re as excited as we are about these new innovations and the possibilities ahead with AI-powered advertising.