Hello all and welcome to the Surfside PPC Newsletter!
Two of last week's changes affect what your ads say and what your reports show, and neither one waits for you to approve it. Google Ads can now pull promotional offers off your website and place them in your ads on its own, and Search Console has started reporting your AI search visibility without telling you whether any of it turned into clicks.
That is the frustrating part about a week like this past one. Nobody emails you when your ad starts promoting a sale that ended in July, and nobody flags that the impressions climbing in your new AI report have no click data attached to them. You find the first one when a customer asks about a discount you are not running, and the second one when you sit down to prove the work was worth paying for.
Here is what changed. There were no hard deadlines last week, so I put the change that can rewrite your ads without asking you first at the top.
Google Ads Will Pull Promotions From Your Website Automatically
Google Ads can now read promotional offers off your site and attach them to eligible Search and Performance Max campaigns. It is automatic rather than opt-in, and the thing that stops it is running your own manual promotions on that campaign. Go clear the expired sale copy off your landing pages before Google turns it into ad copy.
Read the full breakdown
Search Console Now Shows Your AI Search Data Worldwide
You now get impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates for AI responses, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. Clicks are not included, so treat it as visibility data and not performance data. Google also finished rolling out the control that blocks your site from those AI features on August 31, and opting out costs you traffic and impressions both.
Read the full breakdown
Google Will Not Have To Sell AdX After The Antitrust Ruling
Judge Leonie Brinkema kept the finding that Google illegally monopolized the publisher ad tech market but declined to force a sale of the ad exchange, ordering behavioral remedies instead. Nothing in your account changes because of it, and most of the specifics are not public yet. Watch your display and video CPMs over the next couple of quarters rather than reacting now.
Read the full breakdown
ChatGPT Ads Expands Globally And Adds Real Measurement Tools
OpenAI took ChatGPT Ads into select markets across Europe, India, the Middle East, and North Africa, and shipped better audience management, hashed customer data support, and card level product feed reporting. Conversion goal bidding and impression based billing were announced but are not live yet, so you are still managing it by hand. One warning before you build a dashboard: card impressions are counted separately from billable impressions.
Read the full breakdown
Google Says Ranking Recovery Can Take Months After You Fix Things
John Mueller put disavow file effects in a three to six month range and said recovery from bigger algorithmic changes can take many months. He also noted that a drop happening within days is probably not related to a disavow submission at all. Find your exact drop date and check it against a confirmed update before you touch your link profile.
Read the full breakdown
If you only do one thing this week, go audit the promotional copy on your landing pages. Every expired banner, every popup, every hardcoded offer sitting in a template. That is the one change on this list that can put words in your ads without your approval, and it is the one you can fix in an afternoon.
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-Corey Frankosky
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