Google Ads Strategies for Success in 2025
In response to the growing influence of Artificial Intelligence and digital advertising now accounting for over 80% of the £38 billion of total ad spend in the UK1, Google Ads budgets need to stretch even further with data-driven strategies.
In 2025, successful Google Ads campaigns aren’t about starting from scratch—they’re about building on a strong foundation and evolving with intelligence.
What AI Overviews mean for Google Ads in 2025
With AI Overviews now appearing in 42.5% of search results2, businesses must go beyond keyword optimisation and align their websites more closely with user intent. This means strengthening the connection between what users are truly looking for and what your business offers.
Don’t let AI do all the heavy lifting. Instead, use AI strategically to enhance an ad account structure that’s already optimised.
While this deeper site-wide optimisation can take time, it’s crucial not to lose visibility in the interim. When both ads and AIOs (short for AI Overviews) show on a search results page, ads are the only guaranteed way to secure prime, above-the-fold visibility. In this evolving search landscape, your ads are your frontline presence.
Reaching Customers Everywhere With Performance Max Ads
Performance Max (PMax) campaigns continue to be the type of ads that get the most visibility for your budget in 2025, while still meeting conversion goals and demonstrating strong return on ad spend. Since their launch in 2021, early adopters have benefited from years of optimisation, feeding Google’s machine learning with rich conversion data and high-quality audience signals.
These campaigns allow businesses to reach target customers across Google’s entire advertising network — including Search, Display, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, and Discover (Google’s mobile app) — making PMax a powerful, all-in-one solution for digital visibility.
Refining Ad Strength and Performance Score to Win More Impressions
Many of our clients have been with us for years, benefiting from a well-established account structure that consistently delivers increased revenue and higher return on ad spend year over year. In 2025, our focus is on enhancing ad strength and performance scores to encourage Google’s AI to give the ads more impressions, creating more opportunities for sales.
At ThoughtShift we're making strategic, incremental improvements to ad copy and developing high-performing variations of image and video assets, all rated as 'Best' by Google, to maximize results.
Small Feed Tweaks, Big Shopping Impact
For Ecommerce clients, we have been analysing the Google shopping results to identify opportunities to optimise our own shopping feed and boost visibility.
Key Questions for Reviewing Your Shopping Feed
- Are product names optimised for the most commonly searched terms?
- Can important elements of the product name be moved closer to the start for better visibility?
- Are essential details that help users determine if the product meets their needs included in the name?
With prompts and filters now appearing in Google search results, consumers can refine their searches without needing to enter additional terms. As AI helps users find what they want more quickly than ever, the key to success in 2025 is ensuring that our ads make it easy for consumers to quickly decide whether or not to purchase from us.
Ad Strategies that Deliver Real Returns
2025 has proven so far to be a year in which high Google ROAS and increases in ROAS continue to be overshadowed by external economic factors which limit or prevent the overall revenue growth for businesses. While businesses worry about changes in the demand of goods and services and taxation3, there’s greater emphasis on making existing campaigns convert better to compensate for fluctuations elsewhere, no matter their current level of ad performance, and at ThoughtShift we’ve been doing this by reviewing account structures and focusing on improving our audience targeting.
Using AI Strategically
The way you structure your ad campaigns – and your shopping feed if applicable – combined with how you manage those campaigns to consistently achieve higher ROAS targets, are two of the most significant factors impacting your ROAS. In 2025, it’s time to think beyond the limitations of Google’s Recommendations. If you haven't already, stop relying on single campaigns that target all products. Don’t let AI do all the heavy lifting. Instead, use AI strategically to enhance an ad account structure that’s already optimised to drive more traffic and sales, helping you achieve even greater results.
You Know Your Business – Google Doesn’t
At ThoughtShift, when creating Performance Max campaigns that use a shopping feed, we focus our time on identifying high-performing products by analysing conversion data alongside total website revenue, and we also consider price competitiveness to ensure that we’re putting budget behind products that are going to win us the ad click, drive traffic to the site and opportunities for sales.
Use the AI to evaluate the countless signals it has that we do not, rather than to calculate what we can and already know are high performing. Don’t forget that we know more about the bigger picture than the AI does, how the business is performing as a whole when all channels are considered, online and offline, and the AI does not. You should be in control of your Google Ads strategy, not Google AI.
Stability Is Key with Automated Bidding
Campaigns using automated bid strategies require a more deliberate approach to campaign management. Avoid making dramatic changes to campaign budgets. This allows Google’s machine learning to function at its best. Instead, develop a clear budget allocation plan for each campaign — one that accounts for both underspending and potential increases in budget.
Stick to this plan as consistently as possible, even as metrics like ROAS fluctuate throughout the month. When performance dips, resist the urge to reallocate large portions of budget from one campaign to another. Instead, identify the elements dragging performance down and move them to a lower-priority campaign.
The key to thriving in 2025 lies in not just following trends, but in leading the way with smart, tailored strategies that adapt to the evolving digital landscape.
As we move further into 2025, the landscape of digital advertising continues to evolve rapidly. We hope this helps you better understand how to optimise Google Ads for advertising success in 2025. Remember, feed the AI, but lead the strategy.
At ThoughtShift, we’re committed to helping our clients navigate these changes with agility, ensuring their Google Ads campaigns remain effective, efficient, and capable of driving real, measurable results.
To find out more about how Google Ads could help you, follow my contributions to the blog or contact us for a free consultation.