Exact Match Is Now Exact-Ish
Mike Ryan at smec ran 383 million EMEA ecommerce impressions through the numbers and confirmed what your gut has been muttering since spring. By July, about 29% of the impressions charged to your exact match keywords weren't exact at all. AI Max had been broadening them on the quiet. What matched nearly 100% of the time in early 2025 now sits around 71%, and Ryan's verdict is blunt, it's basically broad match wearing a badge that says exact. The economics don't flatter it either. Independent testing puts AI Max at roughly 35% lower ROAS, against the shiny 15% uplift Google promised from the stage. It's already crept into Standard Shopping, and from 1 September any Search campaign running automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match gets the upgrade whether it asked or not. You can still opt out, if you know the door is there. Go check those settings now, because every autum
Read the source →Display Campaigns Are Off To Demand Gen, Whether They Want To Or Not
Google is winding down standalone Display and moving the whole roster into Demand Gen. The migration tool has been rolling out in waves since June, and the help doc drops the pretence near the end. Soon you won't be able to spin up a Display campaign at all, and anything you leave behind gets moved automatically, no signature required. The fine print bites us marketers on the behind. Only 42 days of history makes the trip, your campaigns come back with a #2 stitched on the back, the originals get stamped "Removed", and the Google Display Network turns up already opted in with the checkbox greyed out. Handle the move yourself and you at least pick the date and read the terms. It's August, peak transfer-window season across Europe, except this is the one deal that closes whether we've opted in or not. Read More // TECH & INNOVATION
Read the source →ChatGPT Started Running Ads In Europe
Six months after the US pilot, OpenAI switched ChatGPT Ads on across 31 European markets on 24 August, Switzerland firmly on the list, which takes the worldwide total to 35 countries. The ads only surface for Free and Go users, so the roughly 7 euro Go tier is the one carrying advertising while Plus and Pro stay spotless. The creative sits walled off from the actual answer, and advertisers get precisely nothing out of anyone's conversations. The privacy setup is, refreshingly, dull. Interestingly, a brand-new inventory pool with no settled CPC floor is the rarest thing in this business, and it stays cheap for maybe a quarter before the crowd arrives and prices it like everything else. Every platform gets exactly one cheap year and never a second. Want to catch the cheap year? comtogether will get you live before the rest of the market finds the door. Read More //
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The EU's AI Labelling Rules Are Live, And One Google Field Is Forever
There is a field in the Google Ads API you can only answer once. Google's new AI labels are already live in Asset Studio across Google Ads, DV360, CM360 and Merchant Center, and the field behind them is syntheticContentAttestationStatus . Every asset begins unlabeled. Tag it AI or not-AI once and that clean slate is gone for good, no takesies backsies. After that you're only ever swapping one label for another. Run a bulk script on your entire library at your own risk. The reason any of this exists: Article 50 of the EU AI Act went live on 2 August, roughly when the continent was at its most horizontal. Chatbots now have to own up to being chatbots, deepfakes need labelling, and AI-generated creative needs machine-readable markings. Advertising counts as commercial speech, so don't expect the artistic-and-satirical exemption to bail out your synthetic spokesperson. Get it wrong and the f
Read the source →Google Is Scrapping Language Targeting And Switzerland Will Feel It
From late September, campaign-level language targeting disappears from Search and stops applying to the Search Network part of Performance Max, though PMax keeps it for YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail. Google's argument is that the control had become redundant, since the system already reads your creative, your landing page, the search term and the user's own language settings. It's got this, apparently. Comforting in a one-language country, rather less so in ours. Switzerland runs four national languages in a place you can drive across before lunch, Belgium has its own carefully balanced arrangement, and plenty of you have quietly relied on this setting to keep the German ad away from the French landing page. From now on the match rides entirely on your creative and your landing page, so those are the only levers you've got left. Audit which language every asset group actually serv
Read the source →Your Meta Dashboard Went Quiet On 6 August And Left You Hanging
Three Meta reporting breakdowns now demand an explicit opt-in, one account at a time. Device, hourly, and frequency. Any account that hadn't opted in by 6 August started getting empty rows back, while the API keeps cheerfully returning HTTP 200 and the dashboard keeps rendering as if all is well. No error, no warning, no email. Your reporting didn't break so much as develop a very polite habit of telling you nothing. You opt in per account under Breakdown, then Additional Breakdowns in Ads Manager, or you POST to the feature-settings endpoint. There's no bulk switch, no business-manager shortcut, and nothing backfills, so every day of device, hourly and frequency data between 6 August and the moment you spot it is simply gone. If clicking through forty accounts one by one sounds like a lost afternoon, that's exactly the kind of unglamorous rescue comtogether turns up for. Reach out. Read
Read the source →Until next time, may your CTRs be high, your bounce rates be low.