If you don't upgrade your Google Ads strategy now, AI visual search will leave you behind
In April 2025, Debbie Weinstein, president of Google Europe, the Middle East and Africa, publicly revealed a key trend: in the era of AI-driven visual search, 1 in 5 Google Lens searches have commercial intent. This data not only indicates a profound change in consumer behavior, but also highlights that Google Ads is facing the dual challenges of the withdrawal of third-party cookies and tightening privacy regulations. When consumers begin to use lenses instead of keyboards to make shopping decisions, how can small and medium-sized enterprises accurately capture these visual business opportunities without touching the red line of privacy? This article will dismantle the innovative strategy of Google Ads in the privacy-first era through the actual cases of companies such as Victorian Plumbing, Bayer and Nestlé.
1. Core Challenges of Google Ads Strategy for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises
1.1 Precision Delivery Requirements Under Budget Constraints
For Victorian Plumbing, which has an annual turnover of 285 million pounds, Google Ads is the core engine that drives growth, but the high unit price and low purchase frequency of bathroom products make the cost of each click must be carefully calculated. As third-party cookies gradually phase out, traditional remarketing strategies face serious challenges. The company found that when users choose to disable marketing cookies, conversion data gaps may cause advertising optimization to lose direction. This dilemma is more obvious in small and medium-sized enterprises, and limited budgets cannot afford any waste of ineffective delivery. Victorian Plumbing's solution is to adopt Google's "Enhanced Conversion" technology, which uses hashed first-party data to accurately attribute conversions to specific advertising campaigns even when cookies are blocked, so that every pound of advertising spend can generate verifiable returns.
1.2 Data Gap Problem of Third-Party Cookie Withdrawal
As Safari and Firefox have fully blocked third-party cookies, and Chrome will also be phased out by the end of 2024, marketers are facing the biggest data gap in nearly a decade. Victorian Plumbing's case shows that traditional conversion tracking methods may lose up to 40% of real conversion data. This data black hole not only affects the evaluation of advertising effectiveness, but also distorts the decision-making basis of automated bidding systems. The company successfully recovered 12% of the lost conversion data through the AI modeling technology of "Consent Mode" and correctly attributed millions of dollars in revenue within 10 months. The key to this technology is to use differential privacy and aggregated data to reconstruct a complete view of the user journey without touching personal identifying information.
2. Low-Cost and High-Performance Advertising Solutions
2.1 Adopting Google's Privacy-First Tool Combination
The successful practice of Victorian Plumbing reveals a key trend: privacy compliance tools are becoming performance drivers rather than cost centers. The "privacy-first tool combination" adopted by the company includes three core components: the consent management model (CMP) ensures the compliance collection of user consent; enhanced conversion technology fills the attribution gap through SHA256 encrypted first-party data; and AI-based conversion modeling fills the data gap caused by privacy choices. This combination not only solves compliance issues, but also brings a 12% increase in conversion rate within 10 months after implementation. For small and medium-sized enterprises with limited resources, this "three-in-one" solution is particularly valuable for reference - it does not require huge IT investment, but only requires configuration optimization on the existing Google Ads architecture.
2.2 Practical Application of Enhanced Conversion Technology
The core value of enhanced conversion lies in its "degenerate adaptation" ability - it can maintain basic tracking functions even under the most stringent privacy settings. When users reject cookies, traditional tracking is completely ineffective; however, enhanced conversion can still establish an anonymous link through hashed first-party data such as emails or phone numbers. Victorian Plumbing's technical team particularly emphasized the key details of correct implementation: data must be hashed immediately on the user side and cannot be reversed to original information; hash values are only used to match ad interactions and conversions, not to build user portraits. This "good enough" data granularity just meets the marketing needs under the new normal of privacy - neither excessive collection nor loss of optimization capabilities due to excessive restrictions.
3. In-Depth Analysis of Actual Combat Cases
3.1 Victorian Plumbing's 12% Conversion Boost Secret
The case of Victorian Plumbing proves that privacy compliance tools themselves can be performance accelerators. The company not only filled the data gap through the combined application of "consent mode" and "enhanced conversion", but also found that the conversion path estimated by the model is more comprehensive than traditional tracking - because the AI model can identify implicit associations across devices and browsers. A key detail is that the company did not rely entirely on model data, but established a "three-layer verification" mechanism (model data, server logs, CRM records) to find the most reliable data intersection area. This rigorous attitude makes the 12% performance improvement highly credible and also provides a replicable methodology for small and medium-sized enterprises.
3.2 Bayer's "Smile Effect" Strategy to Reach Young People
Bayer's "Smile Effect" campaign showcases the innovative application of Google Ads in social issue marketing. The campaign uses AI smile detection technology developed with the TensorFlow open source framework to embed interactive elements in YouTube ads - users can unlock mental health content by smiling at the camera. Bayer's marketing team worked with Google to adopt a "reach-view" two-stage strategy: using video reach ads (VRC) to maximize exposure in the early stage, and turning to video view ads (VVC) to deepen interaction in the later stage. Data shows that this AI-driven full-funnel strategy has increased the use of the Laif brand among young people by 60%, proving that functional products can also win the market through emotional communication.
3.3 Cost Control Model of Nestlé Content Studio
Nestlé's 41 content studios constitute the core productivity of its Google Ads creativity. These studios adopt the "centralized creation, localized adaptation" model - the headquarters provides high-quality core materials, and local market teams adjust details according to cultural differences. For example, the same coffee advertisement emphasizes morning efficiency in Germany and social moments in Italy. This model reduces Nestlé's content production costs by 50%, and increases the speed of localization adaptation by 3 times. The revelation to small and medium-sized enterprises is that even small teams can establish a standardized content template system to quickly produce localized variants while maintaining brand consistency.
4. Topkee's Google Ads Solution
Topkee provides a one-stop online advertising service based on Google Ads, aiming to help companies increase potential customers and improve sales performance. Regardless of the size of the customer, Topkee can provide customized solutions based on different needs, covering the complete advertising delivery process from pre-evaluation to post-optimization.
In the early stage of service, Topkee will conduct a comprehensive website evaluation and analysis, use the latest scoring tools to detect the website SEO structure, and produce detailed problem reports and optimization suggestions. This stage not only includes technical SEO checks, but also in-depth detection of page content to ensure that the content meets search engine specifications and is valuable to the target audience. Through these basic optimization measures, the website's ranking in search results can be effectively improved, laying a good foundation for subsequent advertising activities.
In terms of technical tool application, the TTO system developed by Topkee can centrally manage multiple advertising accounts and realize the automation process of account application, budget allocation and permission setting. The system supports multi-tag ID association, can accurately track data from various channels, and automatically synchronize settings to the advertising background according to conversion goals. Compared with traditional UTM parameters, the TM tracking tool used by Topkee is more flexible. It can customize tracking rules based on dimensions such as advertising source, media type, and event name, and generate exclusive links with TMID, so that customers can monitor the marketing effects of various channels in real time.
Overall, Topkee's Google Ads solution transforms advertising into a quantifiable and optimizable scientific process through a systematic tool chain and data analysis capabilities, helping customers maximize marketing benefits in the highly competitive digital advertising environment.
Conclusion
From Victorian Plumbing's privacy technology practices to Bayer's AI-driven interactive advertising, these cases together depict the future of Google Ads - under the dual transformation of privacy compliance and AI innovation, advertising is no longer just chasing users, but creating opportunities for value exchange. The "visual search revolution" mentioned by Debbie Weinstein has just begun. When consumers' curiosity shifts from text to camera, corporate advertising strategies must also evolve simultaneously. We recommend that all marketers immediately review their Google Ads architecture to ensure that it has a privacy-safe data foundation and AI adaptability. If you need professional assistance, please contact our digital advertising consultant team to jointly create a compliant and efficient new generation of advertising strategies.
