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Automating the creation, management, and optimization of Google Ads is key to staying competitive in the 2025 digital advertising landscape. Today’s automation tools are robust enough to help you scale smarter, work faster, and achieve better results.
Whether you want to automate data for Google Ads or refine your approach to audience targeting, this article highlights three automation use cases to help you create more efficient, impactful Google Ads campaigns. By integrating AI, first-party data, and automation into your strategies, you can position your agency as a Google Ads powerhouse.
This article will help you:
- Understand AI’s evolving role within Google Ads, including how to safely (and effectively) make the most of AI’s capabilities.
- Learn how to optimize Performance Max campaigns for enhanced control and scalability.
- Unlock strategies that ensure privacy-focused advertising within Google Ads while utilizing first-party data.
1. How to safely and effectively navigate AI’s increasing role in Google Ads
Over the last few years, Google has increasingly incorporated AI into its ad ecosystem. The company is continuing this trend with the introduction of Google’s robust Gemini AI into the platform. The addition of Gemini in Google Ads via a conversational chat-bot experience enables advertisers to “create optimized Search campaigns by generating relevant ad content, including creatives and keywords.”
It’s no secret that AI excels at helping with creative generation: when you have to write headlines and copy for hundreds of different ad sets, AI generates a ton of variety, quickly. Since Gemini operates exclusively within the Google Ads platform, you can seamlessly move AI-generated copy directly to your description or headline variations and save a lot of time.
It’s important to remember that AI can (and does!) make mistakes. Your agency needs safeguards to ensure brand or regulatory compliance before pushing AI-generated content live. This is where automation can step in and make your workflows more efficient.
Use case: automation ensures compliant AI-generated content
Automation enhances the value of AI's speed and versatility by guaranteeing that everything AI generates is safe and ready for deployment. How? Automation tools can flag any AI-generated materials that aren’t brand-ready by putting boundaries on what goes out the door.
For example, let’s say you use AI to generate images for an automotive customer’s winter truck promotion. Eight of those 10 images might be fine. But maybe one image shows a car instead of a truck and another one shows someone doing donuts in a snowy parking lot.
Automation rules can ensure the two non-compliant ads are flagged for human review before turning them live. This gives your team ultimate control over what AI-generated content goes out the door without having to manually babysit every piece of content. You can utilize AI’s rapid content generation capabilities while guaranteeing compliance and not slowing down launch times.
Unfortunately, these types of automation tools don’t yet exist within the Google Ads platform. The only AI oversight currently in place within Google Ads is that of your human teams: they must manually check each image or read each copy set generated by Gemini before sending it out the door.
Using a third-party system that brings AI and automation together ensures you get the speed and variety of AI and the safeguards bolstered by automation.
You can also use third-party automation tools to flag customer-provided images or copy your team writes in-house. Let’s say a multifamily real estate customer gave you full access to their property images. However, they don’t want any pictures of bathrooms in their ads. Automation and AI can work together to ensure that no images containing toilets are included in ad sets.
Using automation in conjunction with AI enables you to speed up the creative process, whether it’s keywords, ad copy, or images—but in a responsible way.
2. Performance Max (PMax) campaign changes give you greater control and autonomy
Another indication of Google Ads’ commitment to AI is the company’s continued investment in Performance Max (aka PMax) campaigns.
Performance Max utilizes Google's machine learning capabilities to deliver ads across all its platforms, including Search, Display, YouTube, Discovery, and Gmail. By integrating different ad platforms under a single campaign, PMax helps you to understand overall ad performance and easily identify trends to make data-driven decisions.
When PMax first launched, advertising experts were disappointed that there was such limited visibility into how these campaigns improved overall ad performance, though. For instance, it wasn’t clear exactly how PMax optimized delivery for improved conversions.
In 2024, Google Ads indicated that they heard these concerns: they granted greater visibility into impression-level data. This was a welcomed relief for agencies that wanted more control over their PMax campaigns.
Another improvement that PMax launched in 2024 was the addition of negative keyword exclusions. Campaign-level negative keywords in Performance Max give you greater control and precision in ad targeting, making it easier to align ads with audiences and optimize performance across platforms.
“[Google Ads] knows a lot about the consumer signals,” said Eric Mayhew, President and CPO at Fluency. “We're at this evolutionary place where if you can provide them headlines, text phrases, descriptions, some imagery—they know exactly how to engage the user and run it everywhere.”
These changes indicate that Google Ads may give advertisers greater campaign management control and security in 2025. Even so, the bigger question is, does your agency have the bandwidth to maximize PMax campaign performance?
Use case: automate and scale asset creation for optimal PMax performance
The key to making PMax work for you is that you need a lot of different assets that the AI can use to experiment with and figure out what’s effective.
“You've got to think a little bit differently when you're working with Performance Max,” said Mayhew. “You need more variations of the same thing. It's a little bit more upfront investment than with paid search.”
For example, maybe you’re managing advertising for a quick-service restaurant franchise with 3,000+ locations. Building up a library of images, copy, and headlines for PMax to use for that many locations will take a lot of time, even with AI lending a hand.
Automation makes it possible to generate on-brand assets at scale by pulling in approved brand language, logos, or personalization tags like <location> or <promotional special>. Tools like Fluency’s Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS) can automate and augment the ad asset creation process. This minimizes the manual effort and costs that go into generating the necessary assets for Performance Max campaigns.
Watch now: Getting the most out of Performance Max (PMax) campaigns with automation
3. Ensure privacy-focused advertising with first-party data
The relationship between advertisers and consumers is built on trust. In 2025, that trust hinges on how well your agency (and therefore, your customers) respect user privacy. Data privacy regulations and increasing consumer awareness about personal data usage can put your agency in a tough spot without the right privacy practices in place.
Google Ads has made major strides in reinforcing consumer privacy. Following the requirements of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, Google Ads rolled out Consent Mode v2 in early 2024. This updated version of Google Ads’ Consent Mode requires visitors to your website to consent to specific advertising actions, like retargeting, after visiting your site. This information is sent back to Google Ads so the platform knows whether or not a user agrees to the cookies required for any following advertising efforts.
Essentially, Consent Mode v2 validates that you have permission from the user to deliver them ads. Implementing this amped-up version of Consent Mode is a must to retarget or reach key audiences accurately. Without using Consent Mode v2, you can’t capture user audience data for your ad targeting efforts. This means you risk either using inaccurate data or spending money targeting suboptimal audiences.
Fortunately, Google Ads has made it easier to utilize their first-party data, ensuring that you can stay compliant with privacy laws while still effectively reaching target audiences. For instance, Google Ads offers CRM integration for popular CRM systems like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM so you can serve customized ads to precise audience segments.
Syncing your customers’ CRMs with Google Ads is the best of both worlds in terms of using primary data in your advertising strategies. You can seamlessly retarget users already in the funnel without jeopardizing user privacy.
Use Case: automate customized retargeting efforts via first-party data sources and bi-directional APIs
But what if your customer’s first-party data isn’t stored in a typical CRM system? Maybe your customer has a legacy database with valuable customer information. Maybe they have a spreadsheet exported from their homegrown app or website.
Even with user permission, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to sync atypical data sources into Google Ads. Or, even if you can import data into Google Ads, you likely won’t be able to track user changes or make updates without subsequent manual uploads.
A bi-directional API bridges the gap between Google Ads and first-party data sources by enabling real-time updates, notifications, and communication between these two connected systems. Bi-directional APIs can be used across multiple advertising operational workflows to improve targeting efforts, generate ads at scale, and reduce AdOps workloads—all while respecting strict privacy measures.
For example, suppose a new user signs up for a newsletter on your customer’s website and consents to have their data used in advertising efforts. They spend some time browsing for ski gear on your customer’s site but they don’t make a purchase.
This is where real-time bi-directional API functionality and ad automation tools can accelerate your Google Ads retargeting efforts. Details of the user’s browsing experience—products they viewed, where they’re located, etc.—sync automatically between Google Ads and the first-party data set accessed by your Digital Advertising Operating System.
Automation tools can use these data points to instantly create multiple Google Ads ad types. These tools can pull in product images from the browsed pages and generate hyper-relevant copy: “Looking for <product name> in <city name>? Check out our selection!”
Because these ad sets and campaigns are populated by dynamic user data moving between Google Ads and your app CRM data, the ads can automatically adjust in real time without manual updates. This enables your agency to generate highly customized retargeting ads at scale while respecting a user’s privacy.
These automation tools and bi-directional APIs help your team unlock the full potential of first-party data assets for every customer in your portfolio. You can generate and launch personalized campaigns at scale in a way that reinforces user privacy and maximizes ROI. With the right Google Ads automation tools and your agency’s tried-and-true strategies, you can confidently balance personalization, compliance, and trust.
Integrate Google Ads into your broader multi-channel strategy with automation
Google Ads may play a vital role in your agency’s offerings. However, to unlock its true potential, your Google Ads strategies must work cohesively with campaigns on other channels like Meta, Connected TV (CTV), and programmatic advertising.
The most successful advertising strategies in 2025 don’t live in silos. A cohesive advertising strategy ensures that every channel complements the other to deliver a unified brand message that resonates with audiences, no matter where they are.
Automation plays a pivotal role in bringing all of your channels together. Solutions like a DAOS work by centralizing your data sets and uncovering what’s working best, regardless of channel. For instance, you can collectively bring together audience insights from Google, campaign performance metrics from Meta, and engagement stats from CTV into one system, then disperse your findings across your wider strategy.
As you build out your Google Ads strategy for 2025, consider the wider impact that automation can have on your agency’s internal operations and execution capabilities. With automation, you can dynamically respond to consumer behavior, adjust ad copy in real time across platforms, and automatically reallocate budgets to the most impactful campaigns regardless of channel. In short, automation makes it possible to both streamline campaign execution and make strategic decisions that improve performance results across publishers.
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