Google Marketing Live 2025: Recap for Ecommerce Businesses

By: Jyll Saskin Gales, Google Ads Coach

For anyone involved in Google Ads, from casual users to daily managers, keeping an eye on Google Marketing Live (GML) is always beneficial. This annual event offers a crucial glimpse into the future direction of Google Ads. While GML is distinctly aimed at larger advertisers, there's always a significant emphasis on ecommerce objectives. I was fortunate enough to attend #GML2025 at Google's Mountain View headquarters this year, and I'm excited to share these updates with you. 

Google has recently begun articulating its strategy through a new framework known as "the 4 S's": streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping. The inclusion of "Shopping" as one of these core pillars underscores the pivotal role ecommerce advertisers play in Google's ad ecosystem. This prominence highlights why retail solutions are a major focus for Google Ads product development.

Here are the top three Google Ads product announcements from GML that ecommerce advertisers should pay close attention to for 2025:

1. Expanded Shoppable Video Ad Formats

The convergence of "streaming" and "shopping" is creating new opportunities for ecommerce advertisers. While the capability to link your Google Merchant Center product feed to video campaigns isn't new, Google is now introducing more avenues to display your products directly alongside your video ads.

Shoppable CTV (Connected TV)

One notable launch is Shoppable CTV, first announced at YouTube Brandcast 2025. This newly unveiled format for ads on Connected TV allows you to present your products on the right side of the television screen during your ad. This turns the ad experience into a sort of digital storefront, where viewers can intuitively browse and select items using their TV remote. The user experience here is somewhat novel, so it will be interesting to observe how quickly viewer behaviour adapts to this new functionality.

Shoppable Masthead

To grasp the concept of a Shoppable Masthead, it's helpful to first understand what the YouTube Masthead entails. The YouTube Masthead is a prominent advertising unit situated at the very top of the YouTube Homepage, visible across all device types. Its primary purpose is to deliver broad brand exposure and can be acquired on either a Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions (CPM) or a Cost-Per-Hour (CPH) basis.

Now, the Shoppable Masthead introduces the ability to integrate your products directly into this prime YouTube homepage placement. Naturally, though, such prominent exposure comes with a premium cost.

Integrating your product feed with Google Ads video campaigns, whether through established methods or these newly announced formats, presents significant opportunities to bridge the gap between video content and direct ecommerce product engagement.

2. Attributed Brand Searches

This GML announcement delivers another valuable update for video campaigns, specifically enhancing measurement capabilities. Google Ads is introducing a new metric called Attributed Brand Searches designed to provide clearer insights into how many branded searches on Google Search and YouTube Search are directly influenced by users having viewed one of your video ads. This offers a tangible way to assess whether your video content is effectively cultivating brand recognition and prompting search behaviour.

This is pretty cool, because search lift studies are typically only accessible to advertisers with very large budgets. Attributed Brand Searches, however, are structured to be more widely available to advertisers of all sizes. Furthermore, this new feature is designed to be "always-on," contrasting with traditional search lift studies that run for specific campaign time frames. This means you can continuously gain a better understanding of the value your video campaigns provide, regardless of your budget, by seeing if your video ads are truly inspiring people to actively look for your brand.

3. Increased Transparency in Performance Max

Ever since they launched in 2022, Performance Max campaigns have been perceived as something of a "black box" due to their limited data visibility. That situation is now changing.

Performance Max Search Terms Report

Until now, if we wanted to know what queries our PMax campaigns were advertising on, we were restricted to viewing "search term categories," which offered only a generalized overview of query types. Google is now rolling out a full search term report within Performance Max, consistent with what we have in standard Search and Shopping campaigns.

This expanded level of detail will allow us to gain a clear understanding of what our target audience is searching for when ads appear, enabling more accurate and effective campaign optimizations thanks to...

Self-Serve Negative Keywords in PMax

Complementing the improved search term reporting, Google is also providing advertisers with the capability to manage negative keywords in Performance Max. Previously, adding negative keywords to these campaigns was often a cumbersome process, requiring direct assistance from a Google representative and limited to just a few additions.

Now, we get full feature parity with the functionality we're accustomed to in Search and Shopping campaigns: up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign. This allows for proactive exclusion of irrelevant or low-converting searches, contributing to more efficient ad spend and overall campaign effectiveness.

Performance Max Channel Performance Reporting

Performance Max campaigns have operated with very limited insight into channel-specific spend. We typically couldn't determine the exact distribution of their budget across channels like Search, Display, Maps, or Shopping. While some developed custom scripts to approximate this data, which was immensely helpful and insightful, even this solution lacked true precision.

Now, PMax Channel Reporting is here. This feature is currently in open beta and is rolling out globally starting in May 2025. It provides data on how your impressions, clicks, and conversions are distributed across Google's various channels.

It's important to note, however, that while Google Ads now offers reporting on these channels within Performance Max, direct channel controls are not provided. This means you cannot deselect or exclude specific channels, even if their individual performance isn't meeting your expectations.

More GML Announcements for Ecommerce Advertisers

While the updates above form my top three most impactful announcements for ecommerce advertisers, you might encounter other discussions in the industry, particularly concerning AI Max for Search campaigns. This feature was actually announced a few weeks prior to GML and is slated for global rollout to Google Ads accounts starting in May 2025.

Think of AI Max as a Search-only version of Performance Max, designed to bring keyword-less search term matching, text asset customization, and final URL expansion into your existing Search campaigns.

It's important to note that AI Max is not a new campaign type; instead, it's an optional setting that can be activated within your current Search campaigns and will operate alongside your existing keywords, dynamic ad targets, and ad creative.

More updates from Google Marketing Live 2025

Google Marketing Live 2025: Recap for Small Business Owners
Google Marketing Live 2025: Recap for Lead Gen Advertisers
Google Marketing Live 2025: Recap for Ecommerce Businesses

AI Max for Search Campaigns: What you need to know about "Search Max"
Smart Bidding Exploration in Google Ads: Everything you need to know

Performance Max Channel Reporting: Transparency, But No Control
Performance Max Search Terms Report & Negative Keywords - Finally!

All About Shoppable YouTube Ads: Shoppable Masthead, Shoppable CTV
What are Attributed Brand Searches in Google Ads?