Google Ads Intelligence: Google Advertising AI Features + Tips

If you’re running an ecommerce business, Google Ads could be one of your best marketing tools. Google Ads puts you in front of shoppers who are actually looking for what you sell. For example, when someone searches for “wireless headphones” or “running shoes,” your search ads for those products can appear right there in the results. Even better, Google Shopping ads let you showcase your products with photos, prices, and reviews before people even click through to your site.

Increasingly, artificial intelligence is making all of these ad types even more effective. AI is foundational to Google Ads and has been quietly helping in the background for years through features like Smart Bidding, which launched in 2016. Now, Google is adding newer generative AI capabilities, like tools that automatically generate ad headlines and images. All of this automation means you can get better performance with less manual work.

Read on to learn more about Google’s bidding strategies, targeting options, and creative tools that can help you grow your brand.

What is Google Ads Intelligence?

You might encounter the phrase “Google Ads Intelligence” in discussions of Google’s AI-powered features, but it’s not an official product or active feature in Google Ads today. In the past, the tech company used this term to describe Google’s AI-driven capabilities in the ad platform. Now, rather than offering a standalone “intelligence” tool, Google Ads simply incorporates AI throughout its features. In other words, Google Ads has become intelligent by default, using machine learning in bidding, targeting, and ad creation.

Despite Google phasing out the terminology, people still sometimes use this phrase when referring to AI capabilities in the Google Ads platform.

Benefits of Google Ads AI features

Google has incorporated AI across its advertising platform, offering a slew of AI-powered tools and benefits to ecommerce businesses:

• Improved targeting. Google Ads AI helps you identify and reach potential customers you might not target manually. For an ecommerce store, this means your Google ads can appear in front of in-market shoppers who are genuinely interested in your products, even if they weren’t explicitly in your original target audience or keyword list.
• Higher conversion rates and better return on investment (ROI). Machine learning algorithms optimize your bids and budgets to focus on clicks that are likely to convert, delivering more sales for each dollar of ad spend. You can see better return on ad spend (ROAS) as Google Ads AI automatically raises bids for high-intent visitors and lowers ad spend on less promising clicks.
• More relevant ads. Google Ads AI can tailor your ad copy and creative collateral to match each user’s intent, making your Google ads feel more personal and timely for the user.
• Time and resource savings. Automated features reduce the heavy lifting of daily campaign management. If you have limited staff, you can let Google Ads AI handle the nitty-gritty of bid adjustments, audience expansion, and ad asset creation.
• Adaptive learning and agility. Google Ads AI constantly learns from real-time data and adapts Google Ads campaigns to changing trends or user behavior. If a new product suddenly goes viral or there’s a change in market trends, Google’s AI can adjust bids, keywords, or ads for a time period to capitalize on that demand.

Google advertising AI features

• Smart Bidding
• Broad match
• Conversational experience
• Responsive search ads
• Optimized targeting
• Generated images
• AI image editor
• Final URL expansion
• AI Max for Search campaigns
• Text customization
• Brand settings

Google’s AI features can determine how much you should bid for an ad click, who should see your Google ads, and even what your ads should say or show. By understanding how these features and AI-powered tools work, you can make the most of Google Ads’ automation while steering your campaigns toward your business goals:

Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding refers to Google’s automated bid strategies, which use AI to optimize your bids for conversions (or conversion value) in Google Ad auctions. Instead of manually setting keyword bids, you choose a goal (like a target cost per action or ROAS) and let Google’s machine learning adjust your bids in real time to hit that goal. It works by analyzing a range of contextual signals (the user’s device, location, time of day, past search behavior, and more) at the moment of each auction to predict how likely a click is to convert, and then it bids higher or lower accordingly on your behalf.

An online shoe retailer using Smart Bidding could have Google automatically bid more when a user searches “buy leather boots size 9” (a query that signals a high intent to buy) and less when someone searches “shoe cleaning tips” (a query that’s more informational than transactional). This maximizes sales within the retailer’s ad spend budget without manual intervention.

Broad match

Broad match is the default keyword match type in Google Ads, and it uses Google’s AI to match your ads to a variety of relevant searches—even if the search query doesn’t contain the exact keywords. Broad match casts a wide net, looking at the intent behind the user’s query to trigger your ad on related terms. It takes into account factors like the user’s recent search activity, the content of your landing page, and other keywords in your ad group to determine relevancy.

An ecommerce company selling furniture might use broad match on “sofa” and have its ad show up on searches like “couch for small apartment” or “loveseat deals,” reaching customers they might have otherwise missed. Broad match is most effective when you pair it with Smart Bidding, which ensures you bid aggressively only on the relevant matches that are likely to convert.

Conversational experience

The conversational experience in Google Ads is a new chat-based feature that lets you build or improve Google Ads campaigns by having a conversation with Google’s AI. When you create a new Search ad campaign, you can enter a few prompts. For example, provide your website URL and some product info, and the Google Ads AI will suggest tightly themed ad groups with the right keywords and ad copy—all through a chat interface. It understands your inputs in plain language and responds with recommendations (like keyword ideas, headlines, descriptions, even images) as if you were chatting with a human.

An owner of a yoga gear store might type in, “I want to advertise yoga mats and blocks,” and the Google Ads AI would guide them through the ad creation process, helping generate an ad group for mats and another for blocks, complete with keyword lists and sample Google ads that the owner can refine.

Responsive search ads

Responsive search ads (RSAs) are an ad format that uses Google’s AI to automatically test and serve to users the most effective combinations of ad headlines and descriptions. Instead of creating one fixed ad, you provide multiple headlines (up to 15) and descriptions (up to four). Google then mixes and matches these assets in various combinations and learns which combinations perform best for different search queries. Over time, RSAs help you deliver more relevant messages to potential customers by adapting to what they’re searching for.

With the RSA format, an online fashion retailer might input headlines like “New Summer Collection,” “50% Off Sale,” and “Free Shipping on Orders $50+,” along with several description options. Google will then test different pairings—maybe showing an ad that highlights the sale to one user and an ad that spotlights free shipping to another user—to determine which draws more clicks and conversions, ultimately prioritizing the most successful combinations.

Optimized targeting

Optimized targeting is an AI-driven targeting option that helps you find new audiences that are likely to convert, beyond the specific audience segments or keywords you may have manually selected in Google Keyword Planner. Google looks at the conversion data from your campaign and expands your reach to people who share characteristics or behavior patterns with those who have already converted. It examines signals like the content on your landing page, your ads, and real-time search trends to predict who else might be interested in your products.

Say you run an ecommerce store selling running shoes and you regularly target fitness enthusiasts who search for things like “workout shoes” or “gym gear.” Optimized targeting might start showing your Google ads to people who are searching for “marathon training tips,” even if you didn’t specifically target keywords related to “marathon.” As a result, you would acquire new customers who fit a converter profile that you might not have initially recognized.

Generated images

Creating high-quality image ads can be time consuming, so Google Ads now offers generated image tools that automatically create visual assets for you. With this feature, you can input a text prompt or let Google use your website content to generate images that fit your ads. Google Ads AI can produce new images quickly—for example, blending your product photo into a lifestyle background—to give you more ad creative options without having to hire a designer.

You remain in control by reviewing any AI-generated images and choosing which ones to add to your Google Ads campaigns. As a store owner, you can then pick the generated image that looks best and use it in a Display ad or Performance Max campaign, saving the cost of a photoshoot but still producing a compelling ad image.

AI image editor

Google’s AI image editor is a built-in tool that helps you quickly edit images for your Google ads using AI. It’s especially useful for making bulk edits—you can make changes to up to 100 images in one go. Use the AI image editor to do things like replace backgrounds or add new objects to your photos just by typing in a description of what you want.

For example, if you have a catalog of product images on a white background, you could use the AI image editor to replace all those backgrounds with something more attractive or contextually relevant (like “a kitchen countertop” behind a blender, or “a model wearing the jewelry on a beach at sunset”). After generation, you review the results, keep the ones you like, and discard or tweak the rest.

Final URL expansion

Final URL expansion is a feature that lets Google’s AI override the final landing page URL you set for an ad and replace it with a more relevant page on your site if it determines the replacement page is more likely to improve conversions.

For example, a compression socks brand sets a final URL for a landing page dedicated to athletic compression socks; however, Google observes that a user has searched for “compression socks for nurses.” Final URL expansion would let Google swap the athletic compression socks URL for a page on the brand’s site dedicated to compression socks for health care workers. By serving a final URL that satisfies the user’s query, Google Ads AI increases the odds of that user converting (making a purchase) after they click on the brand’s ad.

For an ecommerce site with lots of products, final URL expansion means you don’t have to manually create Google Ads for every single product. If someone searches for a specific SKU, for example, Google could automatically direct them to the exact product page for that item, even if your ad was originally set to send traffic to the product category page.

AI Max for Search campaigns

AI Max for Search campaigns is a new (beta) option that bundles all of Google’s latest AI enhancements into your Search campaigns. When you enable AI Max, your campaign gets improved search term matching, using things like broad match and even keywordless AI matching to find relevant queries you might not be bidding on. AI Max also turns on automatic features like text customization (more on this below), which generates additional headlines and descriptions for your responsive search ads, and final URL expansion. The goal is to simplify campaign management while letting AI handle more decisions in real time.

Imagine an ecommerce fashion boutique running a standard Search campaign that switches on the AI Max functionality. Google’s AI would start expanding the brand’s reach by showing Google Ads on new search queries related to their products (even if those queries weren’t explicitly in the brand’s keyword list) and dynamically adapting ad headlines to better match those queries. Google AI Max implements all of this while still giving the advertiser control over its brand settings (more on this below) and access to its reporting analytics.

Text customization

Text customization (formerly “automatically created assets”) is a Google Ads AI feature that automatically generates additional ad text for your responsive search ads, based on your website and ad content, to improve ad relevance. When you turn on text customization, Google uses your domain, landing page copy, existing ad text, plus keywords to create new headlines and descriptions on the fly that can exist alongside your own written ads. It’s like having Google’s AI copywriter add a few extra variations to help your ad better match what each person is searching for.

Brand settings

Brand settings allow you to control how your Google ads appear in searches related to specific brand names, using Google’s AI to recognize brand terms. You can create brand inclusion lists, which tell Google to only show your ads when the query includes those selected brand names, or brand exclusion lists, which prevent your ads from showing if a query contains a certain brand name. This ensures your Google ads show up for your own brand (or brands you resell) and don’t show up for competitors’ brand searches, if that’s what you want.

A midsize electronics store might exclude the brand name “Amazon” to avoid wasting ad spend on searches like “Buy iPhone at Amazon” because it knows it is unlikely to win over a user who’s showing a high intent to make their purchase through Amazon. Google’s AI also automatically handles all the variations and misspellings of brand terms.

Best practices for Google AI advertising

• Set clear goals and track conversions accurately
• Provide high-quality data and creative assets
• Use AI features together
• Use your knowledge to set AI guardrails

AI can improve your Google Ads performance, but you’ll get the best results when you work with the AI thoughtfully. Here are the best practices to keep in mind:

Set clear goals and track conversions accurately

Ahead of taking your Google ads live, define what success looks like and make sure you’re measuring it. Google’s AI optimizations are only as good as the data you feed them, so you must have proper conversion tracking in place. For an ecommerce site, that means tracking actions like purchases (with revenue values, if possible) or add-to-cart events, and verifying that this data is flowing into Google Ads correctly.

Ensure you’re already recording all sales (and perhaps even newsletter sign-ups or other micro-conversions), as the AI needs this data to learn which clicks turn into paying customers. When you pair this reliable data with clear conversion goals (like a target cost per acquisition or ROAS), you enable Google’s machine learning to take effective actions (like adjusting bids and targeting audiences) to maximize your results.

Provide high-quality data and creative assets

Even though Google Ads can generate content and find audiences automatically, you’ll get better results if you feed the system quality inputs. Make sure your product data feed is complete and accurate. For Shopping campaigns, include clear product titles, detailed descriptions, correct pricing, and attractive images. For Search ads, write a variety of headlines and descriptions to use in your responsive search ads, and insert keywords that capture what you sell. The AI will ingest your website content and ad assets as a foundation for its optimizations (like text customization or final URL choices). Errors or poor-quality elements would otherwise mislead it.

Use AI features together

Google’s various AI features can work best in tandem, so mix and match them. A good example is using broad match keywords with Smart Bidding. Broad match goes wide to find relevant searches you might not have thought of, and Smart Bidding ensures you’re only paying big bids on queries that are likely to convert. An online pet supply store could try broad match to discover new trending search terms (like a surge in “organic dog food”) and let Smart Bidding raise or lower bids in real time for those queries.

Use your knowledge to set AI guardrails

Automation doesn’t mean you relinquish all control; your ideal outcomes will likely require you to guide Google’s AI. Take advantage of the controls available. For example, use brand exclusions or inclusions in Search campaigns to control which branded searches you appear in, or generate negative keyword lists that block clearly irrelevant traffic. A bakery for custom buttercream cakes might exclude terms like “grocery store cake” or “how to frost a cake,” so its Google Ads won’t appear for people looking for DIY recipes or cheap cakes. By filtering out traffic unlikely to convert, you prevent frivolous ad spend and help Google Ads laser-focus on shoppers who are actually likely to buy.