New creative updates to help advertisers generate lifestyle imagery
As an advertiser, your creative is often the first impression potential customers have of your brand. You need to make sure your assets are as visually engaging and varied as possible so they resonate with the different needs of your audience and help you achieve your business goals. That’s why we’re introducing new creative capabilities in Google Ads so that you can create a higher variety of effective assets to drive performance in your campaigns. We’re bringing you:
- Generative AI capabilities that let you generate images of adult people
- Asset audience recommendations
- Asset testing for feed-only Performance Max campaigns
Richer, more engaging lifestyle images
Since we first announced asset generation in Performance Max, we’ve continued to grow and improve our technology so that you can generate high-quality assets that resonate with your customers and deliver strong results. Last year, we expanded asset generation to six new languages, introduced it to new campaign types, including Demand Gen, and upgraded our image generation model.
With the help of Imagen 3, we’re now rolling out the ability to use text prompts to generate images that contain adult people and faces across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display and Apps campaigns. We’ve conducted extensive user research and developed protocols and safeguards to meet advertisers’ high expectation for quality, while adhering to Google’s rigorous product and design principles and clear Ads policies. For example, you won’t be able to generate images of brand-named products, prominent figures like politicians and celebrities, children or minors, or other sensitive or explicit content. All generated images are tagged with SynthID to provide transparency into which images were generated using AI.
This new capability means that you can create compelling lifestyle imagery to better engage customers. For example, if you’re an instructor who wants to drive leads for cooking class enrollments, you could use a simple prompt like “person cooking” or be more specific with “middle-aged man chopping carrots.” If the initial images you get don’t meet your expectations, you can generate more variations or add more descriptive details to the prompt like age, gender, race, ethnicity and nationality to customize further. If you don’t like the images generated, you can “Hide” them and provide feedback to help our AI improve. From start to finish, you’re in control of the creative process and able to approve every image before it goes live.
You can generate images of someone cooking using a simple prompt like “person cooking” or get more specific with a prompt like “middle-aged man chopping carrots”.
"We can easily generate images tailored to specific audiences within the campaign creation process. The potential to significantly shorten the production cycles of creatives is no longer a fancy futuristic theory. It's already here. Today."
— Matthias Wenninger, Group Head Performance Marketing Manager, Mediaplus Performance Germany
More ways to improve your asset mix
If you’re looking for new ways to scale and improve the variety of your assets, we’re introducing asset-audience recommendations. These give you new ideas to improve the effectiveness of your images by showing you the themes and elements that resonate with your top audiences like “nature” and “ocean” scenes. In the coming weeks, you’ll also start seeing AI-generated image suggestions to help you implement fresh ideas without having to create new assets from scratch.
Asset-audience recommendations show you which elements and themes can resonate with your valuable audiences. In this example, a travel site is discovering that their images of destinations that contain “Nature”, “Sun”, and “Ocean” from their account perform well with their key audiences.
New asset testing capabilities
We’ve continued to invest in experiments for Performance Max that help you test the impact of different changes and optimizations. We started with experiments to let you test the uplift of adding Performance Max campaigns to your existing campaign mix. Last year, we added experiments that let you test changes within your Performance Max campaigns, like testing the impact of using final URL expansion. Now, we’re introducing a beta for retailers who have campaigns with product feeds, but haven’t uploaded additional creative assets. Compare the impact of adding text, image and video assets to your campaign — including assets built with generative AI — against your control configuration with no assets. If you’re interested in this beta, contact your Google account team to sign up.
With these new creative capabilities in Google Ads, you can craft more compelling and effective campaigns, ultimately driving better results for your business. We encourage you to explore these features, experiment with different approaches, and provide feedback.
