Exclusive: Inside Google Ads with Ginny Marvin – What’s next for Advertisers

If you’ve worked in digital marketing for any length of time, chances are Ginny Marvin has influenced your thinking. With nearly 20 years in the industry, she’s worn every hat – agency leader, in-house strategist, independent consultant, and notably, editor-in-chief at Search Engine Land, where she earned a reputation for cutting through the noise and breaking down complex trends.

Today, Ginny serves as the Ads Product Liaison at Google, a role that bridges product teams and the advertising community. She explains new products and policies to advertisers while ensuring their voices are heard by the people building the tools. 

Here are the biggest takeaways every marketer should know from Ginny’s session.

One of the first things Ginny highlighted was a trend many of us are seeing, people aren’t typing short, simple keywords anymore. Queries are getting longer, often five words or more, and more conversational.

Today’s searchers are asking contextual questions often influenced by voice search, AI tools, or visual discovery. This evolution is forcing marketers to rethink how they build campaigns, especially when it comes to:

• Embracing broad match to capture long-tail queries
• Moving away from rigid keyword lists
• Focusing more on intent than exact match

Google Lens now handles over 12 billion searches each month, signaling that visual search has transitioned from a niche trend to a widely adopted behavior, largely fueled by Gen Z users.

Google’s introduction of Circle to Search on Android and increasing use of image + text combinations mean that advertisers need to think beyond text-based search. Ginny confirmed that Google is gradually rolling out ads in Lens and AI Overview results, creating new opportunities for placement and relevance.

AI Overviews are probably the biggest change to the Google search results page in years. These AI-generated summaries now appear above organic and paid results in some cases, and Ginny made it clear: AI in Search is just getting started.

While reporting on AI overview engagement isn’t available yet, Ginny emphasized that Google is testing carefully and early signals show higher engagement, particularly among younger users like Gen Z.

What’s interesting is how Google plans to match ads not just to the search query, but to the content within these AI overviews. That’s a major shift in how ad relevance might be calculated moving forward.

With Adthena’s Search Intelligence our data is able to pin-point AI Overviews appearance on the SERP and our Enterprise customers are already adapting bidding strategies to take advantage via our custom dashboards.

Originally pitched as a low-maintenance campaign type, Performance Max is becoming more flexible. Ginny acknowledged the feedback from advertisers who felt the platform has its pain points, including a lack of visibility, and confirmed Google’s working on a number of improvements.

Some of the latest updates:

• Channel-level brand exclusions in retail campaigns with product feeds
• Campaign-level negative keywords now rolling out (limit raised to 10,000)
• Device and demographic exclusions now in beta
• High-value mode for new customer acquisition goals
• “URL contains” rules for campaigns with product feeds
• Search themes with usefulness indicators and source column in reporting
• Downloadable asset group reporting with performance segmentation

PMax also now competes on Ad Rank with Standard Shopping, instead of overriding it, which should help with campaign cannibalization concerns.

Ginny highlighted a shift in Google’s ad systems: landing page navigation is playing a bigger role in ad delivery and performance.

Traditionally, many advertisers used minimalist landing pages with no nav to reduce distractions. But according to Ginny, Google is seeing high bounce rates from users who land on these types of pages and can’t easily find what they’re looking for. As a result, those pages may be shown less frequently in search ads.

Yes, search term visibility is still limited due to privacy thresholds, but Ginny said teams are working on new ways to surface meaningful insights while respecting user privacy.

As more users enter long-tail, low-volume queries (especially with voice and AI), this kind of visibility will be increasingly important.

Adthena continues to fill the gaps on reporting for advertisers, particularly in light of double ad serving visibility – which is fast becoming one of the most requested reports of our enterprise advertisers. Here is a snapshot of the report:

The dashboard provides a daily overview of double serving activity within a category, with flexible filters and detailed views that let advertisers explore its impact on specific search terms and competitors.

The pace of change in Google Ads is undeniable. For advertisers, staying ahead means not just reacting to change, but proactively reshaping strategy around it.

What stood out in Ginny’s session is just how quickly user behavior and ad delivery mechanics are shifting. And with so many variables from hidden search queries to AI-powered SERPs, it’s easy to feel like you’re flying blind.

Adthena can help bring much-needed clarity to this complexity. With powerful search intelligence, enhanced visibility into search terms, and market trend monitoring, Adthena helps marketers uncover what’s driving performance and where opportunities are being missed.

Want to see how your search strategy stacks up in this evolving landscape? 

Book a personalized demo and start transforming your PPC strategy for 2025.