Every spring Google takes the stage at Google Marketing Live and announces a pile of new advertising tools. Most of the coverage is written for brands spending millions. We watched it with a different question in mind: what changes for a business spending a few thousand dollars a month?
1. AI Brief: tell Google who you are in plain English
AI Brief lets you describe your brand, tone and priority audiences in plain language to guide AI Max campaigns, with Performance Max to follow. Think of it as a creative brief for Google's AI. For smaller advertisers this is genuinely useful, because the alternative was hoping automated campaigns figured out your business on their own.
2. Ask Advisor: one place to ask what is wrong
Ask Advisor is a conversational assistant that connects Google Ads, Google Analytics and Merchant Center. You can ask why conversions dropped or where budget is being wasted and get an answer that looks across all of them. Useful, but treat its suggestions like advice from a new hire: check before you act.
3. Asset Studio: images and now video from a prompt
Asset Studio generates ad images, and now video, from simple descriptions and your existing brand materials, with one-click A/B testing. This lowers the cost of fresh creative a lot. Quality still varies, so a human should approve everything before it runs.
4. Business Agents for Leads inside AI Mode
A new ad type lets people ask questions about your business inside AI Mode and then submit a lead form. It is starting with automotive, education and real estate, and it requires AI Max or Performance Max. If you are in one of those categories, it is worth testing early.
5. Google Tag Gateway got simpler
Not flashy, but important: routing your tags through your own domain for better conversion data is now much easier to set up. Better data means better automated bidding.
The common thread: Google wants you to hand more decisions to its AI. That can work well, but only if your conversion tracking is accurate and someone with judgment is watching the results every week.
What we are changing for clients
- Writing an AI Brief for every account running AI Max
- Auditing conversion tracking before expanding any automated campaign
- Testing Asset Studio creative against our own, side by side
- Watching search terms closely, because broader AI matching can drift into irrelevant searches fast
If you run Google Ads yourself and are not sure which of these to turn on, ask us. Some of it is a quick win and some of it can quietly burn budget.
