HighLevel Just Added Google Demand Gen Ads — Here's What Mortgage Pros Should Know

There were a lot of updates this week inside HighLevel. Nothing earth-shattering — but a handful of things that are genuinely useful if you're a loan officer actually using GHL to run your business.

We break these down every week in the Weekly Breakdown. Here's the written version so you can skim, bookmark, and come back to what matters most for where you're at.

1. HighLevel Ad Manager Now Supports Google Demand Gen Ads

This is the biggest update of the week.

The HighLevel Ad Manager has had Google Ads support for a while — but it was limited to search ads. Keywords, negative keywords, the whole thing. Now it also supports Demand Gen campaigns.

If you're not familiar with Demand Gen: these are Google ads that show up in places like YouTube, Gmail, and Google Discover — not search results. Think of them like Google's answer to social media ads. Visual, interest-based, more passive.

Here's why that matters for mortgage pros:

• If you've run Facebook ads before, Demand Gen will feel familiar. Same basic structure — visual creative, interest targeting, conversions as your goal.
• The interest targeting inside Google (things like "mortgage loans," "real estate," "home buying") is honestly solid — arguably better than Facebook's right now.
• Running $5–10/day on Demand Gen is a reasonable test, especially if your Facebook ad costs are creeping up.

Setting up a Demand Gen campaign through the HL Ad Manager is simpler than going directly through Google Ads. You can set up your conversion tracking right inside HighLevel under Settings → Google Ads → Conversions — and if you're using HL forms, your workflows can pass that data back to Google automatically. No developer required.

One thing to note: the ad setup experience inside HL isn't fully guided yet. It doesn't walk you from campaign → ad group → ad the way Google's native platform does. You need to know where to click next. But if you've run any kind of ads before, you'll figure it out fast.

2. Conversation AI Now Has Response Length Settings

If you're running an AI agent (a bot that handles conversations on your behalf), there's a new setting worth knowing about: response length control.

You can now tell your bot to respond with Concise, Balanced, or Detailed responses.

Our take: start with Balanced and see how it feels. Going to either extreme tends to feel off — either too clipped to be helpful, or too long for a text/chat conversation. If you test this, drop your findings in the community. We'd love to hear what's working.

3. Workflow Tag Filters Now Apply to Opportunities (Not Just Contacts)

A few weeks back, HighLevel expanded tag filtering for contact-based workflow triggers — you could say "trigger this workflow when a contact has ANY of these tags" or "trigger only when they have ALL of these tags."

That granularity is now available for opportunity-based triggers too.

If you're tracking deals through pipeline stages and using tags to segment those deals (by loan type, status, team member, whatever), you can now get much more specific about when a workflow fires. Less "this fires for everyone in this stage." More "this fires only for the contacts in this stage who also have this specific tag." That's a meaningful upgrade for anyone doing real workflow automation in GHL.

4. Manus AI Is Now Available as a Workflow Integration

There's a new integration inside HighLevel for a tool called Manus AI.

Honest take: we haven't used Manus ourselves yet. It looks like an AI-powered task system — somewhere between an AI assistant and a lightweight project management platform. Pricing runs from $20–$200/month depending on the tier.

What's new: you can now trigger HighLevel workflows based on Manus activity — things like a new task being created in Manus, or a task stopping. You can also create, update, fetch, and delete Manus tasks directly from inside a GHL workflow.

5. AI Workflow Builder Updates: Voice Input + Smarter Editing

HighLevel's AI builder inside the workflow editor lets you describe a workflow in plain language and have it built automatically. Two new things this week:

Voice input is now available. You can speak your workflow description instead of typing it. It transcribes your voice and generates the workflow from what it hears.

Conversational editing for if/else and wait steps is also improved — so configuring those logic steps should now be less manual.

The honest take: the AI workflow builder still isn't producing great results for anything complex. We tested it recently on something simple — it was faster, but faster at producing something we still had to rework. If your workflow goes beyond a basic follow-up sequence, you'll probably still need to build the logic manually. We'll keep testing, but hold off if you haven't tried this yet and you're expecting magic.

6. WordPress Hosting Gets an AI Page Builder

For anyone hosting a WordPress site inside HighLevel, there's now an AI-powered page builder available. We don't have clients running WordPress through HL right now, so we can't speak from experience. But if HighLevel is using Elementor on the backend — which it looks like they are — this could actually be solid.

If you're running WordPress through HL, drop your experience in the community. We're genuinely curious what the AI builder is producing.

7. Desk Phones: HighLevel Now Supports Desk-to-Desk Calling and IVR Transfers

For teams using desk phones connected to HighLevel's phone system: you can now transfer calls between desk phones — including IVR calls. If a call comes in through your IVR and lands on your desk phone, you can now hand it off to a teammate's desk phone by dialing their extension.

This keeps moving HighLevel closer to a real enterprise phone system. If you're currently paying for a separate platform just to handle internal call transfers, this is worth another look.