Liam Walsh
Liam is a Co-Director at Intelligency and heads up the agency's Digital Intelligence & Paid Social activity. Over the last decade, he has worked with brands from the world of sports such as Premier League clubs to entertainment such as Channel 4 and Disney.
Google has rolled out a series of AI-powered updates across both Google Ads and Google Analytics, making it easier for advertisers to understand how their campaigns are performing and where the opportunities for improvement lie. While the changes are incremental rather than transformational, they represent a clear direction of travel: Google wants its platforms to surface the right information at the right time, without you having to go looking for it. For businesses managing ad spend across multiple campaigns, that shift in how data is presented can make a meaningful practical difference.
A Smarter Starting Point in Google Analytics
The most immediately visible change is the addition of AI Overviews at the top of the Google Analytics homepage. Rather than landing in a dashboard full of raw data and having to work out what matters, you now see an instant AI-generated summary of the most important recent developments, covering traffic changes, sales activity and other key events. From there, you can ask follow-up questions in plain language to explore any of those highlights in more depth. It is a significant quality-of-life improvement for anyone who spends time in Analytics regularly, and particularly useful for business owners or marketing managers who need a quick read on performance without deep-diving into the data themselves.
Personalised Insights Built Into Google Ads
Google has also refreshed the Google Ads homepage to display AI-powered insight cards tailored to each individual account. Rather than a generic overview, you now see information relevant to your specific campaigns, along with a prompt box that allows you to generate custom insights based on what you actually want to know. Whether you are trying to understand how a competitor is affecting your impression share or identify trends that could improve campaign performance, the intent is to give you the context to make faster, more confident decisions. Google is also developing new dashboard visualisations that convert raw data into clear charts and summaries using simple text prompts, powered by its Gemini AI models.
Benchmarking Against the Competition
Perhaps the most strategically useful addition is a new benchmarking tool within Google Analytics, which will show how your performance compares to competitors in your category. For brands that have lacked a reliable way to contextualise their numbers, this fills a genuine gap. Knowing that your conversion rate is above or below the industry average is far more actionable than seeing the figure in isolation. Taken together, these updates reflect Google’s broader push to make its advertising platforms more accessible and more useful, reducing the gap between the data available and the decisions that data should be driving.
