5 Google Ads Updates You Need To Know for Q1 2025
Google Ads is constantly evolving, and the first quarter of 2025 has already brought some noteworthy changes for advertisers.
Not all of these changes have been fully rolled out across accounts yet, and we recommend testing as much as possible when given the option to do so.
1. Performance Max Negative Keywords
Long-awaited and most-requested.
Campaign-level negative keywords were finally announced back in January but we still haven’t seen this feature rolled out to all of our ad accounts yet. Advertisers will be able to add up to 1000 negative keywords per campaign (up from 100 in the initial roll out!).
This will be a great addition to help keep Performance Max on the right track and ensure your campaigns match to fewer irrelevant search terms.
2. Search ads with increased asset flexibility
Google is looking at new ways to serve up text ads by allowing more flexibility in assembling headlines, descriptions, and other assets.
The goal is to deliver the most relevant message to the right user in the right format, potentially even omitting certain elements like description lines if it leads to better performance.
This increased flexibility builds upon a previous update from 2024 to responsive search ads (RSAs), where a single headline could appear within the description. Now Google is taking this further by allowing up to two RSA headlines to serve in the space previously reserved for sitelinks when predicted to improve performance.
While Google's testing indicates increased user engagement with this change, we suggest advertisers approach these changes with caution. It will be crucial to monitor performance closely and conduct thorough testing to understand the impact on their specific campaigns and ensure that the AI's choices align with their marketing objectives.
It's important to note that Google says they will still respect pinned assets, ensuring a degree of control for advertisers. The combinations report will also allow advertisers to see how their assets are being combined, including instances where headlines serve in the sitelink format.
Does this increase the use of pinned ad copy? Only time will tell.
3. Performance Max Search Themes Usefulness Indicator
Search themes help steer Google’s algorithm in the right direction by adding keywords and phrases that you know your customers are using to look for you or your service, while helping to increase your reach.
It has been challenging to determine the impact of these search themes on your campaigns beyond the audiences assets, feeds, and landing pages that Performance Max already uses to predict performance.
With this change you now can see whether queries are coming from Performance Max’s keywordless targeting or from the search themes you’ve added.
This takes some of the guesswork out of the Search Themes feature and allows advertisers to move faster on changing themes out if they’re not actually contributing to the overall performance of the asset group.
4. Landing Pages & Navigation Now Play A Role In Ads Quality
In February 2025, a new AI prediction model was announced that helps Google’s ad quality system better understand the navigation experience on the website you’re sending users to.
While landing page content has always been a key aspect we look at, this update emphasizes the importance of relevant content and easy-to-navigate landing pages….
If you are an advertiser, and your landing pages are not currently navigable, we recommend improving navigation on your site to enable people to get where they want to go….
Essentially, if you’re sending users to an “unexpected destination and doesn’t offer other helpful navigation options” this would be considered a negative experience and your ads will serve less.
As an agency we haven’t seen any significant changes that would obviously be attributed to this change, but you should already be following website UX/UI best practices and if you’re having trouble scaling and losing impression share due to rank, this is another element that may be contributing to that.
Landing pages without navigation has become commonplace in digital marketing over the years and this could be Google’s vague way of saying to stop it.
5. Display Network Reach & Quality Standards
Google announced a series of updates regarding their Display Network (or GDN) including excluding parked domains automatically and more notably, they’ve opened up this network to Demand Gen. This feature is not mandatory and can be turned off in campaign settings.
This is the perfect opportunity to test the Demand Gen Experiments feature to see if you can increase your reach and overall conversions. Google reported a 16% increase in Conversions during a 2023-2024 test with GDN inventory enabled.
As with everything, never blindly accept those reports. Always test when you can.
For now and regardless of improvements, GLD will continue to go out of our way to use Content Suitability settings for all of our client accounts.
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