Google Ads Exclusive with Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison

Episode Description

In this exclusive interview hosted by Navah Hopkins, Ginny shares what’s changing in the world of paid search — from Performance Max updates and ad rank mechanics to landing page experience, creative optimization, and the future of AI ads.

You’ll learn:

• The truth about ad rank and CPCs
• New landing page quality rules (and how they affect scores)
• Why most marketers misuse Performance Max
• What to expect from AI ads and visual search
• Google’s evolving stance on keyword targeting
• Must-do audits for better campaign performance

Episode Takeaways

Ginny Marvin, who transitioned to Google after building her reputation as a trusted industry voice at Third Door Media, brings a unique dual perspective to the table. Her background as a marketer combined with her insider knowledge of Google’s systems provides invaluable context for navigating today’s rapidly evolving advertising ecosystem.

What makes this conversation valuable is Marvin’s direct approach to advertiser concerns and her practical advice for adapting to AI-driven ads. Her main message: even with all the tech changes, core marketing principles still matter.

1. The truth about ad rank and CPCs

In the interview, Ginny Marvin addressed some important misconceptions about how Google’s ad rank system affects the cost-per-click (CPC) that advertisers pay.

She clarifies that there’s a balancing act in Google’s auction system:

• In most scenarios, higher ad rank leads to lower CPCs
• In exceptionally competitive situations with similar ad ranks, the system might require higher CPCs to maintain position advantage
• But as a general rule, investing in relevance and quality is still the best long-term strategy for cost efficiency

This explanation helps advertisers understand why they might occasionally see higher costs despite good quality scores, while reinforcing that Google’s system is still fundamentally designed to reward quality with better economics.

“So when you have two ads that are very competitive have similar ad ranks, typically the ad with the higher ad rank will still show but may end up having a higher CPC in order to show ahead of the other ad that is has a similar ad rank.” explains Ginny.

2. New landing page quality rules and how they affect scores

Ginny also explained that the recent Google Ads quality update will significantly impact how landing pages are evaluated. This update specifically targets landing pages with limited or no navigation options.

Marvin explained that Google made this change due to a common user experience issue: many lead gen landing pages are overly minimal, often just a form with no navigation. Google found this “trapped” experience leads to poor user satisfaction.

“And then we did recently also talk about an ads quality update that we made. So essentially that update means that we will likely show ads that have landing pages with limited to no navigation less often because we found it is a poor user experience.” shares Ginny.

She recommends adapting to these changes by:

• Adding simple navigation
• Maintaining page speed
• Keeping relevance as priority

3. Why most marketers misuse performance max

In the discussion, Ginny talks about how AI-driven advertising systems like PMax operate:

• The more data and options available to the system, the better it can optimize toward goals
• Over-restricting ad placements limits AI’s ability to uncover unexpected opportunities

However, she shares that many marketers have a tendency to apply old campaign management approaches to this new AI-driven format. They fail to feed the system their unique business knowledge which results in missed opportunities. Advertisers also often expect PMax expect to function like other campaign types rather than leveraging its cross-channel, conversion-focused nature.

“PMax is designed like specifically designed to reach across all of Google inventory and it is goal-based. Your conversion value is what it is designed to go after.” said Ginny.

Marvin also emphasized throughout the conversation, the importance of proper conversion tracking and feeding back data.

“Please give Google the data it needs to help you and your business succeed. The more you withhold information, the harder time you’ll have seeing success.”

4. What to expect from AI ads and visual search

Marvin explains that creating “tailored experiences” across different channels is a “massive focus” for Google’s teams. It suggests Google is working to extend AI capabilities comprehensively across their entire advertising ecosystem.

“I can definitely say that this is a massive focus for the teams and thinking about the best formats and use cases to give users tailored experiences and across different channels. And that happens to be where your ads are serving” explains Ginny.

She also talks about the importance of brand differentiation, especially as AI takes on a greater role in advertising. This is because your brand’s unique attributes will guide and constrain what AI can generate. It will prevent all ads from looking similar and make sure that your brand connects meaningfully with your target audience.

Apart from this, Ginny also notes that images will become increasingly important as both search inputs and responses. Future search experiences will likely combine text, image, and potentially other modalities. This points to the importance of maintaining consistent visual branding across all touchpoints.

“I think branding is extremely fundamental. Your product differentiation is extremely fundamental and important. I think you want to be ultra focused on what makes your brand your brand and what is going to make your brand resonate with your target customers.”

5. Google’s evolving stance on keyword targeting

Marvin’s detailed explanation on the future of keyword targeting gives a nuanced picture of how it is evolving. Earlier, we had the single query, single keyword matching model, which is the rigid, literal matching between a user’s search and an advertiser’s keyword.

“ I think you know one of the things early on keyword was it was single query single keyword matching and with automation advancements and AI advancements we’re now able to infer a lot more about what that the query intent is. I

’ll just give one example of AI based keyword prioritization. It applies to both phrase match and broad match when you have multiple keywords that could match to a query.

So what it does is it uses natural language processing to have a better understanding of the user’s query and the ad and what the relevancy is.” explains Ginny.

However, these days AI and automation now infer much more about query intent beyond literal keyword matching. AI is improving how keyword setups work—making broad match more accurate, rather than replacing keywords altogether.

Clearly, keywords are still the core of Google Ads, but AI is making how they work, match, and are organized more advanced.

6. Must-do audits for better campaign performance

According to Ginny, it is essential to maintain fundamental audit practices if you want to run successful campaigns. This includes:

• Setting up proper measurement strategies to identify the quality signals needed for optimization
• Using first-party data rather than relying only on Google’s audience signals
• Choosing the right conversion actions that align with business objectives and setting appropriate conversion values
• Regularly assessing your campaign structure so you can simplify and automate wherever it fits best

“I will say that the fundamentals are still so important. That checking if you have your measurement foundation set up? Is your tagging set up? Are you using enhanced conversions? Are you using customer match? I would really make sure that you’re buttoned up on the measurement side” Ginny shared.

Lastly, she also suggest a three-tiered audit approach:

• Foundational: Is measurement, tagging, and conversion tracking set up correctly?
• Data Integration: Is first-party data being used and fed back into Google effectively?
• Strategic Alignment: Do campaign structures and settings support business goals and align with Google’s AI evolution?

Episode Transcript

Navah Hopkins: Hey everybody, Navah Hopkins from Optmyzr here and I am joined by the amazing, the brilliant Ginny Marvin. She is the liaison over at Google Ads and that means that she listens, takes in our feedback, she shares, and she is usually at the cutting edge, the spearhead of new announcements and helping us to understand them. She was gracious enough to sit with us for an interview of your questions. Ginny, thank you so much for being with us.

Ginny Marvin: Thanks for having me, Navah. I’m really happy to be here.

Navah: One of the things that’s really nice about Ginny and her amazing perspective is that she comes from us. Ginny Marvin started as one of the best forces for good at Third Door Media. She has lifted and empowered marketers of all shapes and sizes, all backgrounds, and now she is the liaison at Google Ads to be our voice with the product as well as helping us understand some of the changes that are happening. With that said, I can’t think of a better first question to kick us off. What are you excited about? There are a ton of really interesting creative enhancements. There are a ton of really interesting enhancements to Performance Max which we may or may not be allowed to know yet. Would love to hear your perspective on some of those new and exciting changes.

Ginny: I think PPC is one of the reasons I’ve loved this. I started on the agency side in 2005 and have been in-house and consulted and done ecommerce and lead gen and worked across all kinds of verticals. One of the things that drew me and I think draws a lot of people to PPC is the pace of change. There’s always something new happening and on the horizon, and this is a time of exponential change.

I’ve said this many times and I’m not the only one to say this, but the transition to mobile was obviously a massive amount of transition for customers and for marketers, and this new wave and advancements in AI is bigger than that. I think one of the things though that I see with a parallel with mobile and AI is oftentimes the consumers are leading and marketers are slow to catch up.

So I think we’re now in that period of responding to changes in consumer behavior and the way they’re searching, the way they’re hopping across devices using any number of platforms and channels. So that I think is where there’s this really enormous opportunity to meet consumers where they are, which sounds trite, but really is so important for making marketing work in today’s age. So I think that’s what I’m really excited about.

Navah: One of the things that I’m really interested in in what you were just saying is mobile versus AI and kind of that change of pace. One of the main mechanics of the mobile search result page is just how we have maybe two headlines instead of three usually or there’s much more of a focus on visual and video content because it’s much easier for us to consume that content in that way and to engage with a video or quick bit of audio versus reading a big long website. Do you see the different spots in the search result page carrying different inventory prices or even different mechanics going into this AI first world or do you see a lot of those spots on the search result page still behaving essentially the same? It’s just that there’s net new ones that are AI focused.

Ginny: The auction dynamics haven’t changed. I think you’re alluding to recently updated our help center page to make it more clear about how different locations on the page function in separate auctions. That has actually been happening for many years, well before I joined Google four years ago. So essentially the top ads have an auction, bottom ads have an auction, but obviously shopping ads and local ads they have a separate auction as well. So with that help center update it really is just more of a clarification versus nothing has changed in the way that the auction is working.

Navah: It does. Can you give a little bit of transparency into how we should think about ad rank’s impact on the auction price for those different parts of the search result page? One of the bits that I know stood out to me and to a lot of folks is that there might actually be a more expensive cost per click depending on how close the ad rank is if it’s very competitive. I know we’ve historically thought about, well if I can get a really good quality score I can get cheaper clicks. So would love clarification there. Is this just depending on the search result page, you might pay a little bit more, pay a little bit less, or is this something else?

Ginny: So I’ll back up a little bit. Ad rank first determines if you’re eligible for the auction and then where your ad will show relative to other advertisers on the page. So when you have a competitive auction and you’ve got two ads that have similar ad rank, the ad rank really is aimed at showing the most relevant ad and the most relevant ad tends to have a lower cost per click than lower quality ads.

So when you have two ads that are very competitive and have similar ad ranks, they will typically - the ad with the higher ad rank will still show but may end up paying a higher CPC in order to show ahead of the other ad that has a similar ad rank if that makes sense.

Navah: So just so I’m clear, if you have a good ad rank, you shouldn’t be paying more per click. That’s a misconception in people reading the documentation.

Ginny: So in the cases where you have two ads with very similar ad ranks, the one with the slightly higher ad rank may end up paying more to show higher on the page than the other one, that in those very competitive scenarios when you’ve got those two ads with very similar ad rank. But for the most part, ads with the higher ad rank will typically pay a lower CPC than lower quality ads.

Navah: So, there’s a couple of places we can go here. I’ll give you a choice of which we address first. Would love your perspective on impression share, especially when an ad from the same advertiser can serve on multiple spots in the search result page and how we read that. But I’d also love your perspective on quality score and the role of quality score in today’s auction. So, do you have a preference on where we start?

Ginny: I can start with the first one because I don’t have much to share. There’s an experiment going on now. So I don’t have anything really to share on that other than as a result of that experiment, you may see some changes in top impression rate and/or absolute top impression rate and overall clickthrough rate. You may see a change there. But you should not see other top ad metric changes.

Navah: So then going to some of the studies or people who have shared that they have seen their absolute top impression share drop. Is it fair to say then that that impression share went to AI overviews? Is it fair to say that it went to another ad type? Or is it just that you just had a everyone had a relative drop or a lot of people had a relative drop in impression share?

Ginny: I can double check, but there was a short-term bug that impacted impression share reporting that has been fixed.

Navah: Amazing. So that’s super useful to know that it’s not that people actually had problems. It was just a reporting issue.

So going to the quality score question, we at Optmyzr are clearly very much a fan of quality score and using it as a guide to know where to focus. There have been some who have said that quality score is dead. I’d love to get your perspective of how does quality score impact today’s world, especially thinking about landing pages and the evolution of the web page and how ads might start serving in AI overviews and AI mode. Would love your perspective on quality score.

Ginny: I wouldn’t say there’s been any change to really how to think about quality score. And certainly landing pages continue to be really important and you want your landing page to be as relevant as possible to the ad, right? The whole goal is to serve an ad and a landing page that is highly relevant to the user, what their need is, what their problem is that they’re searching for.

So this is an example where fundamentals are still fundamental and they really haven’t changed very much, and everyone’s work on conversion rate optimization on their landing pages - that work is still extremely valuable. You want your landing pages to be fast, particularly on mobile. If you’ve got a call to action or promotion, you want that highly visible on the landing page so the user sees the ad, sees that connection right there on the landing page.

And then we did recently also talk about an ads quality update that we made. So I know there have been some questions about that as well. Essentially that update means that we will likely show ads that have landing pages with limited to no navigation less often because we found it is a poor user experience. I know a lot of especially lead gen folks use PPC only stripped down no navigation form-based landing pages. Again I would say we’ve found that it leads to poor user experience when advertisers can’t navigate outside of that page. So think about adding some simple navigation and make those pages fast and make them really relevant.

Navah: I love that. There was a question specifically around how to improve the average score for lead gen sites for that metric. I’m assuming you just gave the checklist there. One follow-up question. So cumulative layout shift or CLS, I believe the quality score check for that is 8 seconds on render. If I’m off we can correct this or is it five or is it 8 seconds?

Ginny: We’ll have to check.

Navah: I’m pretty confident it’s 8 seconds, but I could be totally wrong. One of the reasons I bring up CLS is I don’t know that enough people pay attention to it. Is there any potential plan that CLS could enter into our dashboard on the Google ad side that we could actually see what the CLS is for our landing pages because then we could know this page really needs help improving.

Ginny: Not that I know of. I know that there are in the help center when you look for landing page optimization it’ll help walk you through ways to test your speed and look at your landing page report. But not that I know of in terms of an integration.

Navah: So in the meantime you just plug your site in and check. But that is definitely I think an underutilized tool in the quest for a better quality score specifically on the landing page experience.

Ginny: And I think you’re right that a lot of people sort of forget about the speed piece of it. It was such a focus several years ago and we sort of just forgot about it or take it for granted. So I think that’s a really good point to keep that top of mind.

Navah: One of the things I’m really curious about is the future of AI ads. We’ll bring the Microsoft into the equation. They’ve launched a whole bunch of AI specific ads. And I’m really curious what the future of Google ads is going to look like. Are there going to be some comparable AI specific ads? Is it going to be more just you rank appropriately for AI overviews or AI mode once it comes about? Would love any insights you can share. And I totally understand if this is “I can’t tell you the specifics but I can tell you generally where we’re heading.”

Ginny: I don’t have specifics but can definitely say that this is a massive focus for the teams and thinking about the best formats and use cases to give users tailored experiences across different channels and wherever that happens to be where your ads are serving that is a huge focus for the teams.

Navah: And then going back to our previous discussion and then we’ll move on to other things. Do you see the landing page still mattering in the AI ad world or do you see it shifting to more of agents or that we just talk with Gemini in that chat or that we’re on the search result page? Should we care about even people coming to a landing page?

Ginny: I think if we’re thinking now like what we can do now are whatever you can control in terms of your creative assets. I think already though I would say things like your landing pages and your creative assets are what are helping to inform your generated assets and automatic assets. And so I think branding is extremely fundamental. Your product differentiation is extremely fundamental and important.

And so whatever the mechanism it is that you’re know your user experience is I think you still want to be ultra focused on what makes your brand your brand and what is going to make your brand resonate with your target customers and think about it from that perspective.

Navah: And I’ll plug Google’s amazing resource for brand guidelines that you can apply for Performance Max Creative. They are fantastic. Would love to eventually learn whether that’s at Google Marketing Live or future events of additional fonts being made available because I know sometimes we have to kind of fidget with those. But it is a great resource to ensure that when Google is helping us with our ads that it is in fact in line with our brand.

One question and I totally understand if this is still technically under NDA even though the whole of the internet found out about it. So PMAX search terms and channel distribution are coming but maybe not but maybe we don’t know when they’re coming. Would love any insights you can share about that.

Ginny: I don’t have any insights to share on that. I will say I think what you’ve seen over the last year or so is a real focus on bringing more insights, new controls, really continuing to evolve PMAX and I think we’ll continue to focus in those areas.

Navah: So then less of a technical and more of a how we think about PMAX. I really struggle with how many people call PMAX the lazy man’s campaign as well as the blackbox campaign. I think the campaign’s been out what now three years. And everyone predicted that it was going to kill search or it was going to just assimilate every single campaign type. What would you say to the skeptics who are still out there who believe that PMAX is going to absorb everything and we’re just going to be in a big blob of PMAX?

Ginny: I would say PMAX is there to use if you want to have a way to reach your potential customers across all of Google. We also have search campaigns and display campaigns and standard shopping campaigns. And I think you’ve also seen investments in those and certainly in search there’s a whole lot of work happening there. But standard shopping campaigns and display innovations as well and/or features coming to PMAX as well as other campaign types - demand gen, app campaigns as well.

So that’s what I would say and I would say that they can be complimentary. We’ve also see people who are PMAX focused and we have advertisers who are heavy in search and use PMAX to augment that. So I think it’s really your choice.

Navah: Another group did a comparable study, but when we looked at our own customer base, we found I think it was either 52 or 56% of advertisers didn’t use exclusions with performance max. And what I found really fascinating is that the ones that didn’t use exclusions actually had better performance. Can you speak to how much we may be getting in our own way with negatives and with exclusions versus the very real need to protect our brands from whatever concepts or if there’s a strategic need for a campaign to only serve to these sorts of folks? Because I think a lot of people would really benefit from hearing not only Ginny with the Google hat on but then also Ginny the marketer’s take on that.

Ginny: First of all, there’s constant suitability exclusions and use those for your brand needs. I do think when we think about AI systems like flexibility matters. It does. And so again I kind of come back to like what’s the fundamental? The fundamental is how does this AI system best work and what inputs can I give it that I know about my business Google doesn’t know about my business.

I would also sort of quick tangent just say that the idea that Google wants to just take your campaign and run with it. There’s so much that the marketer knows and only the marketer knows about their business and their customers and it’s so important to give that information into the system to help it optimize and find more of your great customers.

So I think from an exclusion standpoint the tools are there because we know there’s requirements here and there but again I would just think about is this exclusion serving the best purpose of my business and AI works best when it has flexibility and so that’s where your goals, who are your best audiences, how are you feeding that information back into Google, setting your targets appropriately and giving those signals are really important.

Navah: On that note, demand gen was blessed with channel specific settings that we can say that we want to lean into or away from any of the various channels that demand gen has. PMAX currently still doesn’t let us do that. And I’m curious if that’s because Google is seeing that all of the channels are playing a role. Is it because we’re not leaning into certain channel types but even though they’re helpful? What went into the decision to make it available for demand gen but not for PMAX?

Ginny: So PMAX is designed specifically designed to reach across all of Google inventory and it is goal-based and really your conversion value based. That is what it is designed to go after - that’s essentially the mission of PMAX - finding those conversions.

Demand gen is a different campaign type. It has different marketing objectives. It certainly can be conversion focused but also has max clicks and branding awareness. Discovery is part of that as well. It is a different campaign type when you’re thinking about sort of that middle of the customer journey. That might be a great place for demand gen to fit in and have those really engaging visual, video and image creatives together.

Navah: The last I’ll ask about within performance max although I fully agree with you that performance max is ultimately a conversion-oriented campaign type, not everyone is going to hit the 50 conversions, 60 conversions. If we go by Google’s language 15 to 30 conversions needed in a month, does that mean that not every customer should use performance max or does that mean that we need to get better at micro conversions? How do we help businesses leverage these tools and know when to use these tools if they’re not going to necessarily be hitting those conversion thresholds?

Ginny: I think the data that you have that you’re able to feed in the system is obviously going to be so key to your success with that tool. There may be cases where search is going to be the place for you to really invest and start and build out with PMAX.

Really like any of the campaign types though I would say as far down to the end conversion that you can get with enough data that is still a good signal for you to understand quality. Thinking about lead generation - what is how low can you go in that funnel where you still have enough data and it’s still a good signal of quality and then what from your CRM can you feed back in based on that signal to can you track qualified leads can you track those and feed that back in.

Navah: So, this is just a really good reminder for everyone. Please give Google the data it needs to help you and your business succeed. The more you withhold information, the harder time you’ll have seeing success. Share the offline conversions - actually let Google know when it delivered success.

There was a question that was asked tongue in cheek, but I think there’s a deeper question here. The actual question is when is Google planning to deprecate keyword targeting Google ads. I don’t think you’re going to say that Google is planning to deprecate keywords in ads. But there is something to be said for the way we target and think as marketers has historically been very search term focused of targeting what people are saying when they’re searching for products and services that we look for as opposed to what are the driving needs that influence that. So, how would you advise the marketer going into 2025 and beyond to think about targeting and how much should keywords be the spearhead? How much should keywords be a supporting role? How would you advise marketers to think about that?

Ginny: There are no plans to deprecate keywords. I get the question. It’s been a question for what, like a decade. I think I got asked at SMX literally a decade ago about this. That’s not to dismiss the question at all.

I think one of the things early on, keyword was single query single keyword matching and with automation advancements AI advancements we’re now able to infer a lot more about what that query intent is. I’ll just give one example like AI based keyword prioritization. We shared a lot about that last year. It applies to both phrase match and broad match when you have multiple keywords that could match to a query.

So what it does is it uses our advancements in natural language processing understandings in part to have a better understanding of the user’s query and the ad and what the relevancy is. And then it can say okay this is the most relevant keyword and ad combination to match this user’s query and we’re going to choose this most relevant combination for the auction.

So I think on the back end there’s a lot of advancement happening. On the front end from how marketers should think about their keywords, I think there’s certainly a tendency to get still very specific and I understand that but I think again it kind of goes back to giving the system the flexibility it needs and understanding things like natural language processing understanding and how those systems are being used to better serve those relevant ads to your users, thinking about your keyword theming and creating your ads around those keyword themes, resonating with users from that kind of little bit broader perspective, and giving again giving the system more freedom, understanding that the way users are searching is constantly evolving. We’re seeing longer queries, we’re seeing visual queries, we’re seeing multimodal queries.

Navah: We’ll be talking - flip the script, you’ll be asking me the questions on structure. My question for you, someone has an older account where they have had all that historical performance, they can make gradual changes versus someone today starting a net new account. Would you give the same advice of go broad or give AI the room to both? Would it be slightly changed for the older account? Would it be leaning into more visual content for the newer account? Would love your take on older versus newer account choices and recommendations.

Ginny: Older accounts, especially if things are going well. Is there room to do better? And starting small. What’s the low-hanging fruit for thinking about consolidating your account structure, simplifying your account structure and consolidating data, right? And again, it goes back to the whole idea is serving the most relevant ad and landing page combination to your users. And so that is the north star to convert or drive whatever outcome you’re looking for.

So I think there’s probably lots of room in old accounts to evolve. I think again start small and then in new accounts like your world - lean in.

Navah: There’s a really - I forget who originally told it to me. I know it was picked up from someone else, but that there’s the burden of knowledge that we have biases that we’ve picked up from being used to running things a certain way. And I think one of the reasons marketers struggle as much in this world is that it is truly a new world and the things that will serve us well now are not what served us well 10-15 years ago.

On that note, video - it has been mind-boggling to me that it’s more than a decade of video being the new frontier because people are still struggling to get on video. And I know Performance Max does enable it quite a bit. But there’s no denying that when you do targeted video, or targeted display, they’ll have a higher chance of performing well than just having it lumped into Performance Max because you actually created the creative for it - you did that targeted campaign. How would you advise marketers today, especially if they’re feeling like search is not giving them the full return and they’re looking for new ways to expand or they’re looking for ways to do better to get into video or to get into demand gen or what would your advice be?

Ginny: Video has huge potential. I also would say that video is also very complimentary to search. There’s all kinds of ways to take advantage of video. That’s long form, short form. So, demand gen, I think, is you’ve got all kinds of opportunities and you can say I just want to serve shorts. I want to serve in feed. I want to serve YouTube across the board. I want to serve in display. So, I think there’s a lot of flexibility there.

And then the other thing I would point out in terms of the creative tools and where AI is helping maximize visibility and reach is things like video enhancements and I know that’s the kind of tool that makes people a little bit apprehensive again. So video enhancements is pretty cool. It will take your existing videos and either transfer if you’ve got horizontal oriented video. It can transfer it to vertical to again reach the short surfaces and mobile surfaces. And it will also automatically shorten your longer videos. I think it’s over 15 second videos. And it does that again using AI to isolate identify sort of the most resonant pieces of your video and then formats those to like frontload the most impactful piece within the first 5 seconds so you really catch the user’s attention.

It can sound a little bit nerve-wracking, like I’m losing control, but it’s one of those ways that AI is making huge differences in your ability to reach across multiple services in multiple formats quickly, easily, and impactfully.

Navah: And I’ll just throw out there, a lot of the enhancements that Google is doing on video are things that we would pay for a third party to do anyway. And so if you can save money by letting Google make those edits for us, it’s not like you’re giving Google Cart Blanche to make whole net new content. It’s just fixing or reformatting the existing creative.

Ginny: And can I just do a quick plug for that. With all of these new things, dig in, look at the help center, understand how they work and what the reporting looks like and all of that. So you can really get comfortable with everything that’s new and coming online and understand how they work so that when you’re talking to your stakeholders, your clients that you’re feeling confident.

Navah: I recognize again this wasn’t an officially pre-checked question, but it came up - the help documentation. There have been a number of instances where the documentation didn’t match the functionality and it turns into a whole bit of drama and then we fix it and then life is fine. What is the best way for marketers to stay informed on the current rules of engagement? And what is the best way for us to give feedback? And what should we bring when we’re giving feedback on help center or anything, but documentation first just because I feel like that’s one of those areas where trust was eroded because the documentation was a little bit odd and it wasn’t necessarily deserved for eroded trust.

Ginny: I think taking off my Googler hat, I’ll just say that help center updates - it’s been a struggle. I know there is a lot of work that goes into trying to be as comprehensive as possible. So when we get notified that things are not as they should be there’s fast action to make updates. And so as far as surfacing those issues, you certainly can come to me and the best way - you can message me or you can report to support that kind of thing.

Navah: I’ll just share for context. One of the easiest ways to get things fixed is to bring a CI in the specific instances where the thing went arry so that Google has the chance to dig in and uncover what is happening.

I will say Ginny has been a champion every single time because we were able to provide a specific CD, specific instances, time frame, all of that. And we were able to figure out if it was a bug or if there was an issue or if it was just a misunderstanding. When you don’t bring the CD, it feels like it’s asking you to respond to a wall of noise as opposed to here’s a problem, please help us fix it.

Ginny: Yes. I will say and this goes for going to support as well. When you see an issue or think there’s an issue, the best way for us to troubleshoot that is by starting at the account level, sometimes the campaign level, whatever ID, as far down as the ID level that you can give us. And the other thing I would say is start with support. I try to help as much as I can, but I’m not actually in support. I don’t have a whole lot of resources and bandwidth. So, start with support. And if you’re still having issues, then hopefully I can help.

Navah: And it is worth noting that Google is effectively a software provider. And we should treat Google like a software provider going through support, filing tickets, so on and so forth. And when those things aren’t addressed, then yeah, we can bubble it up. But going through those dedicated channels does make it easier to actually solve the problem.

Moving on to your outlook into 2025. We are currently as we previously discussed in a sea of change. There’s a whirlwind of change. There’s a whole bunch of change. And it can feel really difficult to ground oneself. If you had to give everyone one go do, what would that one go do be generically and then if you want to give a go do for e-commerce and a go do for lead gen that would be awesome.

Ginny: That’s a really great question. I would highly recommend checking out the letter to the industry that we published last week and also teases that GML is happening on May 21st. That gives a really great overview of kind of where we’ve been and where teams are focused in this coming year to take advantage of all the advancements in AI and then really looking at your account and thinking is it best equipped to reach the audiences and resonate with the audiences that our business wants to reach. Are we giving the inputs that Google needs to really understand what’s important to our business?

I will also say the fundamentals still exist and I keep saying this but the fundamentals are still so important and that means your measurement - do you have your measurement foundation set up? Is your tagging set up? Are you using enhanced conversions? Are you using customer match? And so those pillars I would really make sure that you’re buttoned up on the measurement side as well.

Navah: So what would your go-to be for lead gen and what would your go-to be for e-commerce?

Ginny: Lead gen I would say that again I think this is where your measurement foundation is so important feeding that CRM data back in and really giving Google the understanding of what a good lead is for your business. And the other thing I’ll say is that when you are sending those qualified leads back in and using those specific lead gen focused value based rules, conversion actions, those also kick in lead quality tools on our back end as well. I think also there’s new reporting for lead gen like the lead funnel reporting again when you’re pulling in those qualified leads goals back into Google that are really helpful.

Navah: I don’t think enough people realize how important the conversion action piece actually is. Can we spend a little bit of time talking about why choosing the right conversion action within the Google system is so important?

Ginny: It helps the system literally optimize for what’s important to you. That’s what you’re saying. And with lead gen like I mentioned it also helps bring in the tools and technologies that we have to help ensure quality leads as well. And then for ecom, same thing. It’s saying, you know, what is the conversion that matters to you?

Navah: One thing I’ll throw out there, and this is a shameless plug for Optmyzr, we have tools that let you not only score your segments, but then also have that data upload protection layer so that you can flow in all those different pieces to then give Google that additional information or you can put that in directly within Google’s data center. There is no reason not to share that information. You can just decide how you want to do so. Do you have a go do on e-commerce or did you have something you want to say off of?

Ginny: You just reminded me of Google ads data manager and so that is specifically designed to help make it easier to bring your own first party data in and plug in those connections and feed that data into your campaigns.

Navah: And I’ll shamelessly plug on the Google side, I don’t think enough people use the exclusion tool so that when you’re configuring your conversion actions, and this might seem super in the weeds, but if you’re in the process of doing that holistic audit, you really want to make sure that that exclusion information is used if you need to course correct for Google. Because if you’re say taking over an ad account and someone had a whole other scheme of how they’re doing conversions and how they’re running the account and you’re taking it over and changing that, you just want to make sure that you’re letting Google know that things are shifting. E-commerce. What’s your go do on e-commerce?

Ginny: I think this is another opportunity to talk about quick things you can do with AI. So I would point to product studio and being able to edit your product images. And the other thing you can do there is export those images that you alter for use in other media.

I think also outside of your feed creative tools for editing your image assets. This can apply to lead gen as well. But I think for e-commerce folks to think also beyond just their product feed. And you can use image editing to add, remove, alter your image assets. You can tailor them for seasonal campaigns, for example, and just add a new level of resonance for consumers during a particular season or promotion, things like that. I mean there’s certainly a whole lot to do on other optimization levers there, but I think kind of taking a fresh look at your creative is a great opportunity for ecom.

Navah: I don’t know if this is a reasonable question. How should advertisers think about image quality score? Whether that’s in video or images in shopping feeds. I know there’s not really a conventional quality score. But it feels like there’s a backend quality score and I’d love your perspective on how we can think about that.

Ginny: I think you can think about it as are your images serving. That is fair. And are they serving? And the only other thing I will caveat with serving is I’m just thinking about the performance rating in responsive search ads. And I just want to quickly note that you may see assets that have a high performance rating, a good performance rating, but they have low impressions or no impressions. And that’s typically because they are resonating with a subset of users, a smaller set of users. It’s certainly indicating that this is a valuable asset. There just aren’t a whole lot of users searching that fit this profile that this is resonating with. Just because your asset, whether that’s text asset or image asset, isn’t serving a lot doesn’t mean it’s not having a great impact with certain segments.

Navah: We’re now going to go into a bit of a rapid fire round. And then we’ll finish up. What’s the question you get the most that makes you face palm?

Ginny: I can’t share that.

Navah: Fair enough. What’s the question you get the most that makes you elated because it’s an intelligent question or the comment and theme that “Oh, that’s such a good question.”

Ginny: I can’t point to one. There are a lot.

Navah: Or groupings like what are maybe top three groupings.

Ginny: Well, I guess I’ll say questions that are forward-looking if that makes sense - questions that are aimed at how do I evolve and adapt to what user behavior is doing, what how systems are evolving. Those are exciting and at the same time I fully empathize with questions about why is this changing? Why can’t we go back to the way things were? I have all the empathy in the world for those kinds of questions.

And I’ll just kind of go back to why I took this role in the first place. So I joined in 2021. And my two kind of mission pillars, not unique to me, but were thinking about helping marketers adapt and understand this new world that we called automation at that time. And also understanding the impacts of privacy and regulation changes and how to adapt and also at the same time bring in to our teams internally like this is not resonating, this is not working, this is the feedback how can we gain trust and gain adoption.

Navah: Yes. I mean ultimately yes my raison d’etre is to help build trust. There’s a whole lot that goes into that obviously and certainly not going to be a one person show.

Ginny: I don’t know - you do a lot to be the one woman behind the trust of Google. I think we all rally behind you and how much you are a voice for a lot of our concerns but also how much you listen.

Navah: And I will say I do really want people to know that when I am talking to individuals and teams internally like the response is positive. It is never we don’t want to hear that. It may be like there’s certain explanations for things obviously but I wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t see real customer response and love.

Ginny: Absolutely.

Navah: So a final question. If you could give the upcoming generation of marketers one piece of advice, what would that advice be? And how is it different than the advice that you were given when you were starting?

Ginny: I’ll be honest - still be the same.

Navah: That is useful for everybody to know that the core is still the same. We’re all still useful. We’re all still valid. So what’s that advice?

Ginny: Be curious and know your business and know your market. The tools are tools. They are not a strategy and staying curious, being willing to evolve and learn and grow and have fun and meet the challenges.

Navah: Ginny, this was such an honor to not only hear your amazing perspective and to learn from you, but to sit down and have a genuine honest conversation about the state of Google, your thoughts on Google, and for folks to hear how much you believe in the path that Google is taking and that you’re elevating the questions when needed, but then also amplifying the triumphs where they occur. If folks want to get a hold of you or to follow you, we all know Twitter/X @AdsLiaison is the official title. Where are all the places where folks can find you?

Ginny: Yes, I am at @AdsLiaison on Twitter/X and on Bluesky and Threads. Bluesky I have a fledgling presence there. So please engage with me on those channels. And then I’m Ginny Marvin on LinkedIn and you can reach me across all those channels.

Navah: Thank you everyone so much for investing the time. Hopefully you found this helpful. If you’d like us to do more of this sort of content, please let us know. And everyone definitely send a lot of love and thank you to the amazing Ginny for investing the time with us.

Ginny: Thank you. Thanks to the amazing marketers because that’s what makes the world go around in our world.