I’ve been digging through Google’s 2025 Year in Review this week, and honestly, it’s less about celebrating what happened last year and more about reading the tea leaves for where Google Ads is heading. If you’re running an e-commerce business and relying on Google Ads to drive sales, there are some clear signals here about what Google expects from advertisers going forward.
Let me walk you through what caught my attention and what it actually means for your business.
Google’s 2025 Priorities: Reading Between the Lines
Here’s the thing about Google’s annual reviews – they’re not just a retrospective. They’re a roadmap. When Google highlights certain features or trends in their year-end summary, they’re essentially telling you: “This is what we’re doubling down on, and you should probably pay attention.”
According to Search Engine Journal’s analysis, this year’s review makes it crystal clear that automation and AI aren’t just nice-to-have features anymore – they’re becoming the foundation of how Google Ads works.
What does this mean for you? Plain and simple: if you’ve been holding back on automated bidding strategies or avoiding AI-powered features because you prefer manual control, that approach is going to get harder to maintain. Google is building their platform around advertisers who embrace automation, which means the manual controls are likely to become less effective over time.
The Shift Towards AI-Driven Campaign Management
I’ve been watching this shift happen gradually over the past few years, but Google’s year in review makes it explicit: they’re moving towards a model where the platform does more of the heavy lifting. Performance Max campaigns, broad match keywords with Smart Bidding, and AI-generated assets are all getting prominent placement in their highlights.
Now, I know what some of you might be thinking – “But I like having control over my campaigns.” I get it. There’s something reassuring about knowing exactly which keywords you’re bidding on and what your ads say. But here’s what this actually means for your business going forward: the advertisers who figure out how to work with these AI tools rather than against them are going to have a significant advantage.
Think of it this way: you’re not giving up control entirely. You’re shifting what you control. Instead of managing individual keyword bids, you’re providing the AI with better inputs – your product data, your conversion goals, your creative assets. The quality of what you feed the system becomes more important than your ability to manually optimise every detail.
What You Should Be Doing Now
If you haven’t already, start testing automated bidding strategies on at least some of your campaigns. You don’t need to flip everything over at once, but you do need to start building experience with these tools. The learning curve is real, and the sooner you start, the better positioned you’ll be.
International Campaigns: More Complex Than You Think
The second piece that caught my attention this week was a detailed breakdown of 13 critical settings for international Google Ads campaigns. If you’re selling to customers outside the UK – or thinking about expanding internationally – this is worth your time.
Here’s what many e-commerce businesses get wrong: they assume running ads in Germany or France is basically the same as running ads in the UK, just with translated text. It’s not. There are currency settings, location targeting nuances, language targeting options, and compliance requirements that can completely derail your campaigns if you get them wrong.
The Settings That Actually Matter
Let me highlight a few that I see businesses overlook most frequently:
- Location targeting vs. location of interest: Google lets you target people physically in a location or people interested in that location. Get this wrong, and you might be showing ads to tourists planning a trip rather than actual local customers.
- Language targeting independence: Your language settings don’t automatically align with your location targeting. You need to set both correctly, or you’ll end up showing English ads to French speakers (or vice versa).
- Currency considerations: If your prices are in GBP but you’re targeting customers in the EU, you need to think about how currency conversion affects your pricing psychology. A product that looks reasonably priced at £49 might seem expensive at €59, even if the actual value is similar.
- Local payment methods: Different countries have different preferred payment methods. If you’re not supporting the payment options that local customers expect, your conversion rate will suffer no matter how good your ads are.
What does this mean for your business in the real world? If international expansion is on your radar, you can’t just duplicate your UK campaigns and change the language. You need to approach each market as its own entity with its own settings, preferences, and quirks.
The Bigger Picture: Where Google Ads Is Heading
Taking a step back and looking at both of these developments together, there’s a clear pattern emerging. Google is simultaneously making their platform more automated and more complex. That might sound contradictory, but it’s not.
The automation handles the tactical execution – the bid adjustments, the audience targeting, the ad serving decisions. But the strategy – knowing which markets to enter, how to structure your account, what goals to optimise towards, what data to feed the system – that’s becoming more sophisticated.
This is actually good news for e-commerce businesses who take their advertising seriously. The barrier to entry for just “running some Google Ads” is lower than ever thanks to automation. But the opportunity for businesses who invest in proper strategy and setup is growing, because the gap between a well-configured account and a poorly configured one is getting wider.
What This Means Going Forward
If I had to distil this week’s developments into actionable guidance, here’s what I’d focus on:
First, accept that automation is the direction Google is moving, and start building your expertise with these tools now. You don’t need to abandon all manual control overnight, but you do need to start the transition.
Second, if international expansion is part of your growth strategy, treat it with the complexity it deserves. Don’t just translate and duplicate – properly configure your campaigns for each market from the ground up.
Third, recognise that as the platform becomes more automated, the strategic decisions you make at the account level become more important, not less. What you’re optimising towards, how you structure your product data, which markets you target – these foundational decisions have outsized impact in an AI-driven world.
The world of paid advertising keeps evolving, and this week’s developments make it clear that the next phase is about learning to work effectively with AI tools while maintaining strategic oversight. That’s the balance we’ll all need to strike going forward.