Google Ads Will Quietly Steal Your Historical Data (Set a Reminder for June 1)
Google Ads has decided your old reporting data has overstayed its welcome. Starting June 1, granular reporting (hourly, daily, weekly) gets capped at 37 months, while monthly and annual data sticks around for 11 years. So if you've been quietly hoarding 15 years of franchise data for client benchmarking, that warehouse is about to get audited. Translation: export everything that matters now or learn to live with whatever Google decides to keep. Pull your hourly and daily reports for legacy accounts, dump them into BigQuery or a Google Sheet, and call it a Friday well spent. Future-you will be very grateful. Read More // DATA & ANALYTICS
Read the source →Google Tag Manager Just Got Its Biggest Overhaul Ever (And No, It's Not Spying On You)
Google has finally merged Google Tag Manager containers with Google Tags themselves, ending the awkward are these two products or one? relationship that's haunted analytics teams since 2017. Welcome to a unified setup with Destinations, a visual event builder that walks through your site clicks like a CRO tool, and a dual-ID deployment model. Before you panic-DM your tracking specialist: GTM is not suddenly going to start firing tags on its own. The upgrade is opt-in, you can roll back any time, and non-Google tags work exactly as before. But once you've upgraded, tag management gets a whole lot less painful, especially for teams without a dedicated tracking expert on payroll. Read More // SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Read the source →YouTube Brandcast 2026: AI Sponsorships, Buy-Buttons, and a Custom Masthead Shelf
YouTube's Brandcast just dumped a year's worth of ad product launches on stage. The headliners: Custom Sponsorships use AI to surface relevant creator videos for your brand, a Masthead with Custom Content Shelf lets you curate inventory beneath the giant homepage banner, Buy with Google Pay turns connected TV ads into two-click purchases, and Affiliate Partnerships Boost amplifies the branded content creators are already making. The big idea: YouTube wants you spending the same way you spend on Meta, except with creators doing the heavy lifting and CTVs handling the conversion. If you've been running boring TrueView for years, May is the month to actually rethink your YouTube media plan. Read More //
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OpenAI Lets You Run Product Feed Ads in ChatGPT (Catalog Drop, AI Does The Rest)
OpenAI is going full retail-mode. You can now connect a product catalogue, apply filters, and have ChatGPT auto-generate ads using your product names, images, and attributes. No campaigns to build, no creatives to design, no agency notes to file under actually I changed my mind. The platform supports up to one million SKUs per advertiser, with ad tech partners like Criteo and StackAdapt already wired in. For ecommerce brands this is closer to a Google Shopping moment than anything ChatGPT has done before. If you sell products and you're not at least testing a sample feed, your competitors with Criteo on speed-dial absolutely will be. Read More // SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Read the source →Pinterest Is Running Ads to Tell You to Stop Looking at Ads
Pinterest launched a global campaign from May 1 across TV, cinema, OOH, and digital with a single line: The best thing you can find online is a reason to go offline. CEO Bill Ready has been vocal about protecting younger users from social media, and this campaign puts that positioning front and centre. There's a delightful irony in spending serious media budget to tell people to spend less time on media. But the strategy is sharp - Pinterest has always been the odd one out in social, a place where people actually plan trips, bake things, and redo their kitchens rather than doomscroll. Turning that into a differentiator instead of a liability is genuinely smart brand work. Read More // DIGITAL ADVERTISING
Read the source →Google Ads Now Tells You Exactly Where Your Search Partner Money Went
Google Ads has rolled out full placement reporting for the Search Partner Network. You can finally see the site-level domains where your ads ran, with impression counts attached, all sitting inside the Content Suitability Report in your Campaigns menu. API access is there too, in case you'd rather pipe it into a dashboard than click through screens. Translation: that mystery SPN line item you've been quietly tolerating for years now comes with receipts. Pull a 30-day report, find the placements draining budget on no-name domains, and add them to your exclusion list. Your CPA will thank you. Read More // DIGITAL ADVERTISING
Read the source →Google Ads Is Quietly Cranking Up Your Budget Pacing
Round two of Google's June 1 housekeeping. Google is changing how it paces budgets for campaigns that run on ad schedules. Instead of spreading spend across only your active days, it'll now pace toward the full monthly cap (30.4x your daily budget) and cram that whole amount into whatever days you actually run. For a weekday-only campaign, that's the same monthly ceiling squeezed into 22 days, which means daily spend on active days jumps, by up to 38 percent on the exact same settings. The caps themselves don't move: 2x daily, 30.4x monthly, and disabled days still won't serve. But if you run dayparted or weekday-only campaigns, recalculate before the change does it for you. Divide your target monthly spend by 30.4 to find the daily budget that keeps you where you actually want to be. Read More // TECH & INNOVATION
Read the source →GEO vs SEO: Forbes Says Pick The One That Actually Pays The Bills
Forbes wades into the GEO vs SEO debate with a take that's refreshingly grounded: yes, Generative Engine Optimization gets you cited in AI answers, but SEO is still where the actual conversions happen. AI referrals reportedly convert at 4x organic, but they're only 0.1 to 1 percent of e-commerce traffic in Europe. Organic search? Still your bread, butter, and ROI engine. The play isn't either/or, it's stacking them. Use SEO to build the topical authority that gets AI to cite you, then use GEO tactics to optimise that same content for generative answers. If your team is busy pivoting to GEO at the expense of SEO, you're optimising for the wrong end of the funnel. Read More // That's it for May, and what a month of rebuilds it was. Google Tag Manager grew up, OpenAI got into the catalog business, and the Search Partner Network suddenly remembered transparency was a feature. Pull your old G
Read the source →Until next time, may your CTRs be high, your bounce rates be low.