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

Three of this week's changes have already happened to you. If any of your campaigns are capped by budget, your cost per click went up. If you check rankings in a third-party tool, the data you looked at this week is less reliable than it was two weeks ago. And if your site sits behind Cloudflare, your crawler settings may have been switched over for you.

Nobody sent an alert for any of it. Nothing in your account looks different, nothing in your dashboard looks broken, and the reports still load. You find out later, when a month-over-month comparison does not add up and you spend an afternoon hunting for a change that nobody in your account actually made.

Here is what changed, starting with the one that is already costing you money.

Google Ads bid suppression is over, and budget-limited campaigns are paying more​
Google changed target-based bidding for campaigns flagged "Limited by budget" on August 17 and finished the rollout on August 27. September data from Mike Ryan at Smarter Ecommerce shows CPCs rising for those capped campaigns, while a pool of cheap clicks they had been absorbing got released back to everybody else. Google has said it will not adjust your targets or budgets for you.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google is blocking scrapers and your rank tracking data is not reliable right now​
Google appears to have tightened its blocking around September 13. Nozzle reported roughly an 80 percent drop in the data it could pull, and Sistrix confirmed reduced collection on its status page. It landed in the same window as real ranking volatility, so your reports are mixing genuine movement with collection gaps.
​Read the full breakdown​

Cloudflare lets you block AI training without losing Google search​
The new Disallow AI Training setting went live September 15. It publishes robots.txt opt-out rules for Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended while letting Googlebot and Bingbot keep crawling for search. Most customers on the old Block setting were migrated automatically, so it is worth logging in to confirm which setting your site is actually on.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google Ads is now showing you what your competitors spend​
A Spend Benchmarks report is rolling out on the account Overview page with your spend and clicks next to businesses Google considers similar. The comparison group is built on industry and location only, so it knows nothing about your margins or your conversion rates. Read the clicks-per-dollar line and be careful with the rest.
​Read the full breakdown​

Google avoids a breakup but faces six years of court oversight​
Judge Brinkema rejected the DOJ request to break up Google's ad tech business on September 17, calling forced divestiture neither realistic nor needed. Instead there are six years of oversight covering data sharing, discriminatory bidding, and integration with rival publisher ad servers. Nothing changes in your account.
​Read the full breakdown​

If you only do one thing this week, do this. Sort your campaigns by status, pull every one flagged "Limited by budget," and compare July against September while skipping the August 17 to August 27 rollout window. Any campaign that was beating its target while capped is where this change landed. From there you either fund it properly or tighten the target.

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

-Corey Frankosky

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

-Corey Frankosky

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