PPC & marketing news, tracked daily.
Paid search, paid social, and feed-driven advertising changes across Google, Microsoft, and the AI ad surfaces.
What changed, as it happens.
Tracked daily from primary sources. The items below are what we're watching for clients right now.
Impression limits are coming to all of Google Ads, and nothing gets disapproved
Google is expanding its Limited Ad Serving policy, previously narrower in scope, to cover all Google Ads. The update was announced on 5 August 2026, and Google says implementation "will begin gradually and will be completed by 2028." The policy limits impressions for advertisers Google does not consider qualified, on searches judged more likely than others to result in negative ads experiences, and Google states that "individual ads will not be disapproved." Seven factors decide qualification: account attributes, user activity and reports, account maturity, ad format usage, history of policy compliance, advertiser industry, and advertiser verification status. Limited accounts receive an in-account notification and can appeal through Google's Limited Ad Serving Appeals Form. Enforcement began in September 2024 and has been applied gradually across YouTube ads; the guidance now names Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and the Play Store.Source: Search Engine Land →
Our take: Nothing gets disapproved, so nothing looks broken. An account under limits reads like an account with a demand problem: impressions fall, volume thins, and the only signal is one more notification in an interface full of them. Most of the seven qualification factors are not settings anybody chooses. Verification status and policy history are the two an advertiser works on directly; industry, account maturity, and what users have reported about you sit outside the account.
Read our full take →Google Ads will report new customers without touching your bids
Google Ads added a "Report on new customers acquired" option inside Customer Acquisition settings, spotted by Thomas Eccel and written up by Search Engine Land on 7 August 2026. Selecting it unlocks the New customers and New customer value columns without applying any bidding adjustment. It replaces a workaround in which advertisers selected "Bid higher for new customers" and assigned a token new-customer value of 0.01, small enough to leave the auction effectively untouched. Google's documentation states that customer acquisition reporting works only with Purchase conversions, and that it depends on a new-customer parameter supplied through the Google tag, Google Tag Manager, Shopify, Firebase, Google Analytics, or offline conversion imports.Source: Search Engine Land →
Our take: The setting is the easy half. New-customer reporting reads Purchase conversions only, and only when your tag is already sending the new-customer flag through the Google tag, Tag Manager, Shopify, Analytics or an offline import. Switch the option on with nothing feeding it and every buyer files as new, which is a worse number than no number. The workaround it retires, a bid bonus of 0.01, at least made it obvious the reporting was a side effect of a bidding setting.
Read our full take →Google will move broad match and auto-created assets into AI Max on September 1
From September 1, 2026, Google Ads begins automatically upgrading eligible Search campaigns that use Automatically Created Assets or campaign-level broad match into AI Max. Campaigns arriving via Automatically Created Assets get search term matching and text customization enabled by default; campaigns arriving via campaign-level broad match get search term matching. Advertisers are being notified by email, and Google frames the change as carrying forward functionality advertisers already rely on.Source: Search Engine Land →
Our take: The upgrade is being described as carrying your settings forward, and it does more than that. Automatically created assets adds headlines Google wrote; text customization lets it rewrite the ones you wrote, which is a different permission and it arrives switched on. Campaigns coming in on campaign-level broad match get off lighter, picking up search term matching alone. Nobody has published whether you can decline, so the step available before September is a list of which campaigns currently run either setting.
Read our full take →ChatGPT Ads switches form-field matching on by default August 17
OpenAI emailed ChatGPT Ads advertisers with nine product changes. Automatic advanced matching becomes the default for existing web pixels on August 17, 2026: the pixel captures identifiers people enter into site forms, hashes them client-side, and transmits them alongside the conversion event, and advertisers who do not want it must disable it under Tools, then Conversions, then Data Source, then Edit pixel. The release also adds a conversion-optimized CPC beta for product feed campaigns with fixed or manual bidding under a positive conversion bid cap, campaign cloning and bulk creation for oCPC, dynamic URL macros for campaign, ad group, ad and account IDs, Triple Whale and Hightouch measurement integrations, fuller pixel diagnostics, and a multi-product carousel format in testing.Source: PPC Land →
Our take: Default-on collection of what people type into your forms is a consent question before it is a measurement one. Hashing in the browser limits what leaves the page; it does not settle whether your privacy policy and cookie banner already describe the practice. Only advertisers with a pixel already installed are in scope, which is still a short list. For everyone else the weight of this release sits in the oCPC beta, which lets product-feed campaigns be ranked on predicted conversions instead of clicks alone.
Read our full take →Performance Max on Microsoft can now be told to leave Audience Ads alone
Microsoft Advertising added a setting that lets advertisers exclude Audience Ads placements from within a Performance Max campaign. Search Engine Roundtable reported the change on 6 August 2026.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: Placement control inside Performance Max has been the standing complaint on both platforms, so the reflex will be to switch Audience Ads off and call it a cleanup. That reflex assumes you already know what those placements were contributing, and a blended Performance Max report is the one place that will not tell you. Inventory is easy to turn off and hard to read afterwards, because the comparison you want is against a version of the campaign you just stopped running.
Read our full take →
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