The changes that matter to advertisers, with the sources behind them and a practical next step. Pick a topic and catch up at your own pace.
Google Ads
Google Ads has rolled out full placement reporting for the Search Partner Network, which is surfaced via the PPC News Feed. Advertisers can now see specific placement-level performance data across the Search Partner Network: closing the long-standing gap where Search Partners delivered traffic with effectively no placement visibility.
Google Ads
Ahead of Google Marketing Live on 21 May, Ginny Marvin has previewed three AI Max updates.
Google Ads
Google Ads will enforce the 37-month data retention policy from 1 June 2026, with VIVEK GUPTA flagging the deadline ahead of enforcement. The policy was officially confirmed in the Google Ads Developer Blog (covered in Week 19) and applies to the Google Ads API, Google Ads scripts, the Google Analytics Data API, and the BigQuery Data Transfer Service.
Google Merchant Center
Barry Schwartz has flagged that Google is testing Merchant Advisor: a Merchant Centre equivalent to Google Ads Advisor, originally spotted by Tamara Hellgren on Momentic and surfaced by Hana Kobzová in her weekly digest. The product mirrors Ads Advisor's design pattern: in-context AI assistance for diagnosing feed issues, troubleshooting disapprovals, surfacing optimisation opportunities, and answering platform questions through natural-language interaction with the Gemini-powered Advisor.
Google Ads
Thomas Eccel and Tamás Geiger have both flagged a wave of phishing emails targeting Google Ads advertisers, using a "synchronisation error in your Google Ads account" pretext to trick recipients into clicking a malicious link that purports to fix the synchronisation issue. The emails are sophisticated enough to bypass standard spam filters and reach advertisers' primary inboxes.
Google Ads
Dario Zannoni has flagged a quiet but consequential update to Google's Help pages: primary conversion actions not used for bidding optimisation may be treated differently than expected. The clarification updates the public documentation to explicitly state how primary conversions feed (or don't feed) into Smart Bidding optimisation when they're not selected as the optimisation goal.
Meta Ads
Meta has launched incognito chat with Meta AI inside WhatsApp: letting users interact with Meta AI in a private mode that doesn't surface in chat history, doesn't influence Meta AI's memory of the user's preferences, and doesn't feed back into Meta's training data. The launch aligns with WhatsApp's broader privacy positioning and addresses user concerns about Meta AI's data handling on the messaging surface.
Meta Ads
Matias Axel Ramayo has flagged a quiet but consequential Meta Ads behavioural change: when an ad within an ad set reaches its spending limit (delivery, frequency, or budget cap), Meta now redistributes the remaining budget to the higher-performing ads in the same ad set rather than splitting it equally. The change is part of Meta's broader auction-mechanic refinement and isn't formally announced.
Meta Ads
Meta has renamed the Detailed Targeting option to Advantage+ Detailed Targeting, aligning the audience-targeting feature with Meta's broader Advantage+ branding. VIVEK GUPTA has flagged the rename with its strategic framing: this aligns with Meta's broader Advantage+ direction, where the system suggests interests, behaviours, and demographics aligned with campaign goals: but advertisers retain control over the configuration.
Meta Ads
Meta has added a dedicated Lead Nurturing section to Ads Manager, surfaced by Bram Van der Hallen. The section consolidates lead-nurture workflows: follow-up sequences, retargeting setups, and lead-quality scoring: into a single Ads Manager surface, rather than scattering them across audience setup, campaign settings, and external integrations.
Meta Ads
Meta has launched the Meta AI Developer Assistant for Business Messaging: a new developer-facing AI assistant that helps developers build, debug, and optimise code for WhatsApp Business and Messenger integration. The assistant runs within the Meta for Developers environment and surfaces contextual help, code suggestions, and troubleshooting guidance for the Business Messaging APIs.
Google Ads
Thomas Eccel has spotted an AI video generator CTA appearing in Demand Gen campaigns as a beta feature: a "Create video" button in the campaign creation flow that lets advertisers generate AI-powered video assets directly in Demand Gen without going through external production tooling. The feature is in beta and not yet broadly available.
YouTube
YouTube has run its annual Brandcast 2026 advertiser event, with Google publishing the full set of advertiser-facing announcements alongside the consumer-facing Brandcast highlights. The announcements span three structural pillars.
Google Ads
Google has released Google Ads API v24.1 on 13 May, with five practitioner-relevant additions. Mobile Device Platform segmentation lets queries segment campaign and customer reports by iOS or Android: a feature previously requiring workarounds for bid adjustments and OS-level performance analysis.
Meta Ads
Meta's free, one-click Conversions API setup (first flagged in Week 18) is now appearing in materially more Meta Ads Manager accounts, surfaced by Ulusal Çağdaş Çalım with the practical visibility note: advertisers without an existing advanced CAPI configuration are now seeing the one-click setup option directly in Ads Manager. The launch has progressed from limited availability to broader rollout in the past month.
Google Analytics
Arpan Banerjee has surfaced a substantial GA4 expansion: Google, Meta, and LinkedIn budgets are now optimisable from inside Google Analytics 4: moving cross-channel budget management from a manual cross-platform exercise into a unified GA4 surface. The update includes Projection plans (channel-by-channel expected pace), Budget allocation across channels, and Cross-channel optimisation recommendations based on GA4's attribution data.
Google Analytics
Google has opened alpha access to cross-channel conversion reporting in the Google Analytics Data API. Arpan Banerjee has surfaced the alpha along with the technical details; ADworld Experience has flagged the same release.
Google Ads
This week features three major industry events over three consecutive days, with some overlapping schedules.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has announced that Merchant Centre for Agencies is now generally available globally as of 11 May 2026. The product was previously generally available in the US and Canada with a pilot in other markets through March 2026; the May rollout extends full GA worldwide.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has documented a new agency account conversion request workflow, giving agencies a structured path to convert legacy Merchant Centre accounts into the unified agency account model. The workflow lets agencies submit conversion requests for client accounts they manage, and Google reviews and processes each request to align the account with the current agency account architecture.
Display & Video 360
DG Media Network has announced a new collaboration with Google Display & Video 360 and YouTube, expanding how brands programmatically access premium YouTube inventory through the DV360 buying surface. The partnership extends programmatic targeting and bidding controls into YouTube inventory that has historically been less accessible through DV360, particularly for advertisers running cross-channel programmatic strategies.
ChatGPT Ads
Juozas Kaziukėnas has flagged the next major feature on the ChatGPT Ads roadmap: custom audiences. The feature will let advertisers upload raw or hashed email addresses and phone numbers to ChatGPT Ads, matching them against ChatGPT user accounts to enable targeting existing customers, retargeting website visitors with known contact details, and excluding current customers from prospecting campaigns.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity has rolled out its AI Citation report to all users, surfacing which Microsoft Copilot and partner AI surfaces are citing the website inside their AI-generated responses. Navah Hopkins has flagged the launch with strategic framing; Josh Silverbauer has provided the practitioner detail: the report uses Microsoft Copilot and partner data (not just Bing) to map AI citations against the website's content, giving operators visibility into AI-referral traffic that has historically been invisible inside web analytics.
Display & Video 360
Google Marketing Platform has confirmed that Costco Retail Media is officially joining Google's Commerce Media Suite, letting brands connect with Costco Wholesale's first-party audience data through Google's commerce media stack. The partnership extends Google's retail media network: which already includes major partners across grocery, big-box, and pharmacy: into Costco's distinctive membership-based audience.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has confirmed that vehicle ads in the United States are expanding to support All-Terrain Vehicles (ATVs), Utility Task Vehicles (UTVs), Recreational Vehicles (RVs), and non-motorised trailers such as travel trailers and campers, starting May 2026. The expansion extends Google's lower-funnel, omnichannel vehicle ad format beyond traditional automobiles into the broader powersports and recreational-vehicle category.
Amazon Ads
Lee Woodman has flagged that Shopify has rolled out llms.txt files across its entire 7-million-store portfolio. The llms.txt standard: analogous to robots.txt for traditional crawlers: gives AI crawlers (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) a structured signal about which content can be used for AI training and citation purposes.
Amazon Ads
Publicis Groupe has entered into an agreement to acquire LiveRamp, the global data collaboration platform: the largest agency-side acquisition of a data infrastructure provider in recent memory. The deal accelerates Publicis's data collaboration strategy and brings LiveRamp's identity-resolution, data-clean-room, and audience-collaboration infrastructure under Publicis Groupe's ownership.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has walked back a portion of the FBA fee increases announced last year, with Jason Mclellan flagging the change as "a big win for everyone in the Amazon community." Last year, Amazon announced plans for material FBA fee increases that would have meaningfully tightened seller margins through 2026; the walk-back reverses or softens specific fee categories in response to community feedback and seller pushback.
Google Workspace
OpenAI for Business is hosting a webinar on building and running workspace agents in ChatGPT Enterprise on Monday, 19 May at 11 am PT: the same day as Microsoft Advertising Activate and one day ahead of Google Marketing Live's I/O kickoff. The webinar covers how to build agents that operate inside ChatGPT Enterprise to automate workflows across team document review, research, and process tasks.
LinkedIn Ads
noyb (the European Centre for Digital Rights) has filed a GDPR complaint against LinkedIn for its handling of profile visit data. The complaint: LinkedIn tracks profile visits but locks the visit information behind the paid subscription tier: users can see who visited their profile only by paying for LinkedIn Premium. noyb argues that this violates the GDPR's right of access provisions, which require data controllers to provide users with access to their personal data on request, regardless of subscription status.
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