The Paid Search Association recently held their 2025 digital conference featuring a full day of sessions from the industry’s top speakers from around the world. The event covered a wide range of topics ranging from display, video, search, artificial intelligence, & more. We wanted to share our top takeaways from the conference and how advertisers can make the most of the insights shared.
A big theme of the day was without a doubt AI. Multiple sessions including those from Fred Vallaeys & Mike Rhodes covered ways to integrate AI into paid marketing. For example, Mike discussed how to use AI to help create intricate scripts to help gain valuable insights into paid ad accounts. Fred shared a number of advanced ways to utilize AI like using search terms to then suggest blog ideas and creating different personas to provide feedback from various points of view. However, the session that stayed with me was the one that kicked the event off by Ameet Khabra. Her topic surrounded AI in PPC and where AI shined vs where humans shined. The cases Ameet shared included one where they put AI up against a copywriter to see who could produce the top performing ad copy, spoiler the human won. She also shared how AI is able to help scale the ad creation process for businesses. Ultimately Ameet’s presentation wasn’t about one being better than the other, but that together marketers can play off AI’s strengths while injecting our own knowledge of our client’s businesses and best practices to drive the best results.
If you’d like to dive deeper into AI and how to rank in AI results be sure to read this article on Generative Engine Optimization.
Another topic I found interesting is Navah Hopkins’s presentation on challenging PPC biases with data. A key value we share at Revel is strategic impact, which means we are constantly looking at the data to identify actionable insights we can use to achieve our goals, which aligns perfectly with Navah’s topic. She started the discussion defining biases and why people might have them when it comes to their PPC advertising, examples such as, information delivered from a supposed “expert” or a norm in the industry that people are comfortable without questioning. Navah then went on to dispel multiple common beliefs in the PPC industry, backed by data from Optmyzr.
One example of a bias in PPC is search ad capitalization. In every agency I have worked at, the best practice has always been to write all search ads in title case, capitalizing the first letter in every word of an ad. With Navah’s data she shared, it showed that sentence casing, capitalizing the first letter of every sentence in an ad, overall performed better than title casing! This and the other data she shared has been a great conversation starter for our teams internally identifying other biases we would like to test against the data we have for our clients.
The day closed out with a presentation from Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ad Liaison, on Google Ads in 2025. In PPC everything is constantly evolving and Ginny was able to share a recap of some of the recent changes to Performance Max & Demand Gen campaign types. While she wasn’t able to share any brand new updates with us, she did say that with AI overviews playing a more critical role in the SERP, Google is testing new ways to deliver the best value for users and advertisers. Also, to keep an eye out for new ways to reach users in the near future.
With that, the PSA Conference 2025 came to a close. We greatly appreciated hearing from such a fantastic group of speakers and look forward to next year’s event! To watch the full 2025 conference be sure to visit the Paid Search Association’s YouTube channel and for other digital marketing news stay tuned to the Revel Interactive blog.
Photo: © ChristianChan from Getty Images
