In June 2025, four of our Found Search Marketing team members traveled to Boston, MA, for the first in-person SMX conference in 5 years. We’ve compiled many of our thoughts and takeaways for those that missed it.
Since Found Search Marketing specializes in performance paid media, it’s only natural we’d gravitate to this session about how to leverage advanced Google Ads strategies for successful lead generation. The session focused on strategies for optimizing Google Ads campaigns to drive meaningful lead generation, including topics like campaign structure, audience segmentation, and conversion tracking. Here’s what we learned:
“Lead gen is wicked hard.” Why is this? First, we face longer sales cycles, tougher keyword intent, high spam volume, and higher CPCs—all while losing data visibility.
A standout insight relates to the importance of quality over quantity when it comes to leads. With e-commerce, success is instantly trackable: someone clicks, makes a purchase, and is done. But in lead gen, the handoff from click to actual customer passes through multiple steps, often offline.
This delay makes it difficult to truly measure ROI, and advertisers may fall into the trap of solely optimizing for form submissions alone, which are not your most qualified leads. That is why it’s so crucial to optimize lower in the conversion funnel. Christine Zirnheld, Director of Lead Gen at Cypress North, recommends importing any and all lifecycle stages in Google Ads and identifying the optimal conversion action that…
Emily Williams-Hempstead, FoundSM Client Delivery Strategist’s main takeaway? “As important as achieving higher quality leads is, it is equally important to understand how to scale effectively,” she notes. “The challenge is not choosing between, but building a system that brings in more leads—all while filtering for top quality conversions. To determine the ideal balance for your client, it’s important to leverage first-party data, feed CRM data back into Google Ads, and use values-based bidding in combination with testing.”
With the launch of AI overviews, clicks from organic traffic are at an all-time low for many sites. Click-loss is happening with the introduction and rise of AI Overviews. We are in this midst of a paradigm shift, and marketers need to adapt and break away from our traditional ways of thinking. Even Wikipedia is feeling it:
Clicks are down, but that doesn’t mean revenue and conversions are down. In fact, although many sites are experiencing less organic traffic, qualified leads and conversions are on the rise. At SMX, SEMRush shared a recent study that revealed the average LLM Visitor is worth 4.4 times the average traditional organic search visitor. Here’s how we can prepare and make the most of this:
While FoundSM specializes in performance paid media, we also recognize the importance of the PESO model in informing integrated marketing strategies and know many of our clients leverage all aspects of paid, earned, shared and owned.
The rise in AI Overview use makes it more important than ever to diversify your channel and distribution strategy. LLMs are learning, and they will continue to learn. FoundSM attends conferences like SMX Advanced to stay up-to-date and current on the latest trends that are impacting our industry, our clients and their customers.
While this may be the end of “SEO as we know it,” it’s not the end of search entirely. You can’t kill search. It’s a function. Not a platform.
The shift to AI-first marketing requires agencies and brands to rethink workflows, partnerships, and strategies. But we aren’t there yet. 2026 will be the year of Copilot agentic experiences. Every brand will have agents just like they have websites.
Today Copilot will give unbiased answers from the web, but if a brand wants to join the conversation, they can run showroom ads. This is the first ad type in conversational ads in Copilot, with the first five advertisers to be announced next week in Cannes.
A major shift continues to be underway, with traditional keyword strategies being rethought in the age of AI, which will become even more conversational. As brands place ads, it will be very interesting to see how they handle agent-to-agent handoffs and to understand the overall change in user behavior.
Think of “agent-to-agent” hand-offs like this: You have an issue with a recent purchase, and call customer service at [X Company]. They answer. You explain your issue. The agent responds with “One moment. I’ll transfer you to [Y Department].” Once you’re transferred, you have to repeat yourself and your problem all over again. That first agent did not provide any context to the next agent. Today, that is how it works with AI, where AI is Agent #1 and the destination you’ve been trying to reach (e.g., the brand’s website) is Agent #2.
Consider this example scenario, in which a customer is looking for running shoes on the Adidas website, where they decide to engage with the site’s AI agent/Copilot. On its website, Adidas (as an example), runs a showroom ad next to the Copilot conversation, with the goal of helping the consumer decide on the right type of shoe to buy. The customer asks questions, shares their needs & preferences within this conversation.
Once the user leaves the conversation and goes to adidas.com, however, there is no real handoff and adidas.com doesn’t know anything about the previous conversation. In the future, the Copilot agent will be able to hand off seamlessly to the Adidas agent, making it easy for the consumer to continue the conversation and, ultimately, make the right purchase decision.
If you think AI is going away, it is not. It’s here to stay. At SMX, Fractl presented the latest research about consumers’ feelings and confidence relative to AI, indicating that only one-third of consumers consider AI to be “overhyped”:
Sources & Credits: https://agents.frac.tl/; http://mfour.com/
A recent survey from ppcsurvey.com confirmed that in 2024, people thought it was harder than ever to effectively manage PPC campaigns despite the modern technologies available to them, including automation.
Tyler Maine, Campaign Manager at Found Search Marketing, attended a session to learn more about leaning into AI and navigating automations effectively while still managing PPC performance. The session heavily explored best practices for different PPC scenarios.
For many brands, it makes sense to set multiple primary goals with accurately-assigned conversion values. That way, Google can get a fuller picture of the conversion journey (as opposed to an instance with a single, primary conversion action).
While this is a paradigm shift, Tyler came away with some insights that will help us to navigate it effectively. This session introduced some incredibly useful, in-the-weeds insights and recommended best practices:
Ultimately, “it’s like driving a car in unfamiliar territory,” as Frederick Vallaeys, Founder of Optmyzer, puts it. “If you go drive a car in a foreign country, you didn’t forget how to drive. You’re just driving on a different side in unfamiliar territory. You need time to adapt. Same thing with Smart Bidding. It takes time to recognize patterns. It will experiment with bid levels, which can lead to temporary inefficiencies. The lower the data volume, the longer the learning phase.”
At the end of the day, marketing principles still matter. Audiences still matter. The business side of marketing is still so incredibly important.
We’re not moving away from the basics of knowing about our brand, customers, UVP’s or margins. Recognizing that data is king, the fundamentals are still vitally important (brand and product offerings and campaign/keyword structures, for example). We have to guide AI in the right direction to get our desired outcomes.
Also, considering how people simply have different opinions on what best practices actually are, you either have to use data to inform your decisions where possible or use your own intuition (your own PPC knowledge, as well as your own knowledge of the client’s brand and offerings).
We will have to continually stay up to date with Google’s updates in order to understand the impacts that they’re going to have and to be able to make quicker improvements to campaigns where Google continues to give us more visibility.
As Ginny Marvin, Ads Product Liaison at Google aptly puts it:
“Performance and branding are connected. Performance marketers connecting the brand essence of their businesses into driving performance is so important. A bold, smart marketer is still critical. What you know about your customers is going to inform your creative prompts [when using AI]. You’ll get better creative, better results, etc., the more that you know.”