Google Ads AI Essentials: Creative Performance Best Practices

About creative performance

Creative assets are more important to performance than ever before. According to NCS, your creative is responsible for 49% of the total sales impact of advertising.¹ And at every touch point, consumers expect highly relevant, personalized experiences from the brands they engage with.

AI-powered solutions can help deliver creative variations at the speed, quality, and quantity required to resonate with your customers today.

Follow these best practices below to maximize your creative.  

Provide quality and quantity

Give Google a variety of inputs in order to find out what works. From a strong website, to image assets or your business logo, ensure you share a range of on-brand creative elements.

• Build a website with diverse, relevant landing pages that act as the source of truth for your brand. Search and Performance Max are able to pull information, such as your business logo and name,² as well as visuals to build new creative assets. It’s important the input from your website is accurate, specific, and recent, because outdated information can undermine your campaign.
• Aim for quality and quantity: Include a range of headlines and descriptions so Google AI can test different combinations and find what works best. This will help ensure each ad group in your Search campaign has at least one responsive search ad with 'Good' or 'Excellent' Ad Strength.³
• Add image assets ⁴ to your Search ads to visually showcase your offerings, or enable dynamic image assets to let Google AI automatically select the most relevant images from your landing pages and append them to your ads.

Generate at scale

Google AI helps you build out better assets, faster, and at scale. Accelerate the creative process by partnering with Google AI-powered solutions.

Generate new:

• Enable automatically created assets in both Search and Performance Max campaigns to deliver more relevant ads. Automatically created assets will continually generate new headlines and descriptions that are better tailored to customers’ unique context and intent, while staying true to your business and offerings.
• Use the new asset generation and generative AI capabilities in Performance Max. You can generate new headlines, descriptions, and lifestyle images that are relevant and unique to your business—all right in the Google Ads UI.
• Create a Search campaign—with AI-generated suggestions for keywords, headlines, images, and more—through chat, with the conversational experience in Google Ads.

Augment existing assets:

• Use the video creation tool to create a video in all orientations: at least one vertical, one horizontal, and one square.⁵ Google AI intelligently flips your original video format and creates videos in new aspect ratios, and Trim video can create Bumpers from longer clips.
• Enhance your existing product imagery with Product Studio, in Merchant Center Next. It’s an easy way for you to update your product images, making them relevant for a variety of customers, product offers, and a variety of ad formats.

Evaluate and optimize 

Understand your performance, iterate, and double down on what works. With the right insights, you can build a full understanding of which creative resonates with your audience.

• Share top performing content and asset audience insights with creative teams to start strong. Both your creative teams, and Google AI, will use these to create new assets for testing.
• Combine your first-party data with Google AI to develop more powerful creative insights and improve the quality of your assets, which can lead to better performance. For example: your creative might perform better if they’re tailored to the stage of the purchase funnel your buyer is at, or even the region they see your ad in.
• Keep an eye on Ad Strength. Ad Strength provides you with forward-looking feedback that helps you understand how well an ad follows best practices for optimal performance and which action items to take to improve them.⁶
• Use the Insights page to understand new trends in performance and run experiments on new ideas. This will help your brand put its best foot forward at all times across both evergreen and seasonal creative.

Video Resources

Digital marketing, generated by AI | Google Ads

We’ll continue to evolve these steps as new features come out. In the meantime, check out our in-depth Search and Performance Max best practices guides to learn more about how you can set up your creatives for success. And read the Ads Power Pair best practices guide for additional tips to maximize campaign performance.

1. According to NCS, your creative contributes 49% of the total sales impact of advertising. Source: NCS Solutions, 5 Keys to Advertising Effectiveness, 2023.
2. Advertisers that show a business logo and name with their Search ads see an average of 8% more conversions at a similar cost per conversion. Source: Google internal data, Global, 3/9/2023 - 3/22/2023.
3. Advertisers who improve ad strength for their responsive search ads from 'Poor' to 'Excellent' see an average of 12% more clicks and conversions. Source: Google internal data. Impact will vary by advertiser, and Google cannot guarantee this or any other uplift. 
4. Advertisers can see a 6% increase in click-through rate on average when image assets show with their Search ads. Source: Google internal data, Global, 4/2/2023 – 4/29/2023. Impact will vary by advertiser, and Google cannot guarantee this or any other uplift.
5. Advertisers that included at least 1 video of each orientation (horizontal, vertical, and square) to their Performance Max Campaigns delivered 20% more conversions in YouTube compared to horizontal videos alone. Source: Google data, Global, November 2022.
6. Advertisers who improve Ad Strength for their responsive search ads from "Poor" to "Excellent" see 12% more conversions on average. Source: Google Internal Data. Date range: Feb 28, 2023 to Mar 1, 2023.