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

Almost everything that changed this week widens the gap between what your account reports and what is actually true. Google starts putting offers into your ads today that you did not write. A calculator went live showing that the campaign you call profitable may be losing money. And the measurement tool that tells you whether your campaigns earned their conversions is finally something you can run yourself.

None of that shows up as a problem. Your dashboard looks the same on Monday as it did on Friday. You find out when a customer calls asking about a coupon you took down last year, or when you finally do the margin math and realize the target you picked out of the air was never going to clear breakeven.

Here is what changed, starting with the one that takes effect today.

Google Ads turns on automated promotions by default starting October 12​
Google now pulls coupons and deals off your website automatically and applies them to Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets. It is opt-out, so doing nothing enrolls you. Campaigns that already carry your own promotion assets are excluded, and the off switch lives in your account-level automated assets settings.
​Read the full breakdown​

Conversion Lift testing opens to Search and Performance Max​
You can now run incrementality studies on Search and PMax without going through a Google rep. A lift study holds back a group of users and measures whether your campaigns created conversions or just collected credit for them. You need 1,000 observed conversions, a $5,000 campaign budget, and a compatible conversion action to qualify.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google Ads can build your Target ROAS from your profit margin​
A beta calculator converts your average margin into the return you need to break even. A 15% margin works out to 667%, which means a campaign running at a 400% target has been losing money the whole time. Use your real margin rather than the built-in estimator, because shipping, returns, and fees are not in that number unless you took them out yourself.
​Read the full breakdown​

The September 2026 spam update finished after two weeks​
It ran from September 24 to October 8, about 14 days, with volatility around September 25, September 30, and October 4 to 7. Recent spam updates wrapped in roughly two days, so this one broke the pattern and made everything you measured mid-rollout useless. Now you have a clean baseline for the first time in three weeks.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google disclosed a UGC Fresh Data program​
Approved forums and social platforms get a pipeline that pushes trending content into Search within minutes. Most sites will not qualify and should not bother applying. The useful part is what Google asked for, including that every item be attributable to a creator with a public profile, which is the same thing Google has been saying all month about authorship.
​Read the full breakdown​

If you only do one thing this week, go look at the promotional copy published on your website. Automated promotions is live today, it reads your site rather than your account, and an expired offer you forgot about is now something Google can put in front of a customer.

If you ever have any questions, please feel free to reply directly to this email. Thanks for subscribing!

-Corey Frankosky

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