What's up everyone and welcome to the Surfside PPC Newsletter!

Somewhere on your YouTube channel there is a video you have forgotten about. A webinar recording, a culture clip, something a former employee uploaded in 2023. Google Ads can now pull that into your Performance Max campaigns and run it as an ad, and on new campaigns it is already doing it.

Nobody announced that. It turned up as a toggle somebody noticed in the asset optimization section, and the only confirmation anywhere is one line in a help document saying it is on by default. That is most of this week. Changes already live in your account, found by people poking around rather than told to you.

Here is what to check.

Google Ads Is Adding Videos To Your Performance Max Campaigns By Default​
Up to 10 of them, pulled from your landing page, your social accounts, and your linked YouTube channel. It may have been switched on for some existing campaigns too, during a platform update nobody flagged. Go open your asset groups and look at what is sitting in there. I would turn it off anywhere the creative was built deliberately, and test it on campaigns that are genuinely short on video.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google AI Overview Citation Cards Are Writing Their Own Summaries Of Your Page​
A citation used to be a quote. You wrote the sentence, Google showed the sentence, and you could work on the sentence. Now it looks like Google may be writing its own description of your page instead, generated fresh for each query. It is unconfirmed and it is not showing on every search, so do not rebuild anything around it. Do run your ten best terms and read what the card says about you, because if it is wrong you want to be the one who found out.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google Will Require Financial Services Advertisers To Verify In The US And Canada​
Expected early 2027, no fixed date, credentials checked against financial regulators. The thing that catches people here is not the deadline, it is the paperwork. Confirm your registration is active and that the legal entity on it matches the one on your Google Ads account, because a mismatch there takes weeks to sort out and nobody ever finds it early.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google Ads Expanded Smart Bidding Exploration To Performance Max And Shopping​
It lets bidding chase eligible searches your Target ROAS setup would normally skip. Three requirements will rule most accounts straight out: Target ROAS only, portfolio strategies on Search only, and your campaign should not be limited by budget. Google shipped it with no performance numbers at all, which I will take as a point in their favor.
​Read the full breakdown​

Search Is Now 12 Percent Of Page Views At North American Publishers​
Down from 21 percent a year ago, according to Chartbeat. Before you forward that to anybody: share is not volume, every search engine is counted in one bucket, and no sample size was published. Chartbeat blamed AI for this last year and named no cause at all this year. Go pull your own numbers.
​Read the full breakdown​

Start with the video toggle. It is the only one on this list already spending your money.

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-Corey Frankosky

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