Google Marketing Live 2025: Key Takeaways and Strategic Insights

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Google Marketing Live 2025 unveiled a sweeping array of updates that reaffirm the future of advertising is powered by artificial intelligence, creative automation, and first-party data. For franchise brands and multi-location businesses, these advancements represent more than just feature upgrades. These updates mark a shift in how we reach, influence, and convert customers across platforms. At Location3, we see these changes not as challenges, but as strategic opportunities. Our team has been testing, learning, and evolving alongside Google’s most advanced tools for years, and we’re excited to help our partners turn this innovation into measurable growth. Below are some of our key highlights from this year’s event, along with our insights on how we can continue to lead the way in adapting and excelling in this new era of Google marketing.

Reach Customers in Real Time, Across Every Channel
Today’s customer journey is no longer linear. It’s dynamic, multi-touch, and unfolds across search, streaming, social, and shopping platforms. With AI transforming how users engage with Google products, marketers must move from a “keyword-first” mindset to an “intent-first” approach. Our creative, messaging, and landing page strategies must evolve to meet the demands of AI Overviews with concise, high-quality content that communicates expertise and relevance.

Customer Data: Your Most Valuable Signal
First-party data is now the cornerstone of smart bidding and audience targeting. We’re helping clients establish automated, weekly data flows into Google Ads and exploring tools like Data Manager to streamline CRM integration.

Smarter Creative: Asset Studio + Product Studio
Google’s new tools allow advertisers to generate custom visuals, videos, lifestyle images, and optimized copy. Asset Studio centralizes creative tools for use in developing or revamping existing creative, with a feature for image-to-video transformation now available in the Google Merchant Center and coming soon to Ads. Google AI can also expand videos beyond their original frames and is currently available in Google Ads. Currently, the most relevant use cases for this appear to be related to product-specific creative assets.

Product Studio is a free suite of AI tools in the Merchant Center designed to optimize product visuals and copy, generate custom lifestyle scenes, remove backgrounds, boost resolution, and create videos. Now, the new “Generated For You” feature takes this further by proactively analyzing trends to suggest fresh campaign concepts, featured products, and discounts to help products stand out. It also provides title improvements, allowing for content that resonates across Google surfaces and new formats.

Brand Profiles: Shape How You Appear in Search
Retailers can now manage branded profiles through Merchant Center for better control over images, videos, and brand messaging directly within Google Search results.

Performance Max Channel Reporting: Greater Visibility
Now in open beta, this feature provides visibility into how Performance Max campaigns perform across different channels and formats and is likely to be more widely available in Q3-2025. At last, we’ll be able to see and analyze how PMax is performing across formats and channels, opening up a new level of insights and reporting that will empower further verification and credibility of this channel (including visibility into search terms)! This advancement reinforces our proven strategy of incorporating PMax into our recommended three-campaign structure, paired with active audience list updates to enhance conversion quality. Without incorporating those audience lists, we believe PMax will still underperform to expectations.

Creator Partnerships Hub: Influencer Marketing at Scale
Brands can now easily connect with YouTube creators via Google Ads. For co-op campaigns and localized efforts, this offers a cost-effective entry into influencer marketing, with some partnerships that are much more cost effective than have been before.

“Incrementality” Testing: More Accessible Than Ever
Brands can now launch “incrementality” tests with budgets starting as low as $5,000. We’ve helped clients identify underperforming markets using BDI/CDI data and built testing plans that measure brand lift at the corporate and franchisor level previously, but the budget requirements have historically been much higher. We’re excited by the potential to focus these tests on key markets where a brand indexes low in terms of existing visibility.

Ads in AI Overviews: Visibility in Informational Searches
With more than 1.5 billion users engaging with AI Overviews in the first year since release, ads can now appear above, below, or within these summaries. Performance depends on aligning ad copy, user queries, and AI context:

Ads above and below AI Overviews

• Ads are eligible to show above or below the AI Overview
• Ads serve following the existing auction ranking system and signals
• Existing text, shopping, local, or app ads in your Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and App campaigns are eligible to show ads above or below the AI Overviews in all markets where AI Overviews is already available

Ads in AI Overviews

• Ads in AI Overviews are currently available in English in the US on mobile and desktop devices and will expand to select English speaking countries soon
• Both the user query as well as the content of the AI Overview are considered when serving these ads
• Currently, Text and Shopping ads from existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible to show within the AI Overviews

It’s important to keep in mind that searches producing AI Overviews are generally more informational in nature and will likely trigger keywords more similar to long-tail phrases captured within PMax campaigns. For example, if a customer uses AI to ask “why is my ceiling fan not working and how do I fix it,” Google will understand the user query + content to understand the commercial intent for this user. At this point Google could potentially serve Search ads for a local handyman to fix their ceiling fan, or serve Shopping ads for a new ceiling fan. In order to be most effective, we need to continue to test and optimize PMax campaigns, value-based bidding, smart bidding strategies, and dynamic search ads to match the most relevant ad to the query.

 

 

AI Max for Search: Upgrade Without Rebuilding
This opt-in feature suite enhances existing campaigns with AI-powered capabilities and is currently rolling out in Google. This opt-in suite of AI-powered features is designed to help advertisers adapt to the evolving Search landscape without having to rebuild your existing Search campaigns.

Smart Bidding Exploration: Capture What You’re Missing
This new bidding lever helps advertisers reach qualified queries that may otherwise be missed, which is a valuable addition to our Demand Generation strategies and increasing customer acquisition opportunities.

Search + Shopping Video Ads: High-Impact Visuals
Still in beta, this feature shows relevant YouTube videos alongside search and shopping ads. This is a great way to make high-value products stand out but will likely require additional creative. The good news is that the aforementioned advancements in Google’s creative tools may allow us to more easily create videos from product photos. We’re prioritizing tests for high-value seasonal products.

Additional Tools Worth Watching
There were a TON of updates this year at GML 2025, and here are a few more technology updates and advancements that we’re excited about going forward:

• Shoppable CTV: Adds interactive shopping to Connected TV campaigns.
• Promoted Pins in Demand Gen: Drives store visits from local searches.
• Web-to-App Acquisition: Unlocks new app install tracking capabilities.
• Meridian Insights: Helps forecast media investments and optimize budgets.
• Branded Search Interest on YouTube: Measures the lift in organic search after YouTube ad exposure.
• Google Ads Expert & GA Assistant: AI tools to proactively monitor and optimize performance.

In Summary
Google Marketing Live 2025 showcased a powerful vision for the future of digital advertising, one driven by data, automation, and customer-centric AI experiences. At Location3, we’re already testing some of these tools in an effort to ensure our partners stay ahead of the curve while delivering measurable performance. Want to learn how these innovations can drive growth for your brand? Let’s talk.

 

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Image Source: Google Blog