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
Thomas Eccel has flagged that Google Ads has relocated Lift Studies into the "Experiments" section of the interface, with a refreshed setup flow. Two studies are available: Brand Lift measures the impact of video and audio ads on awareness, consideration, and purchase intent through surveys, returning absolute lift, lifted users, and cost per lifted user.
Google Ads
Vivek has spotted a new step in the Google Ads campaign creation flow titled "Where do you want to run ads?": offering advertisers a choice between all channels or select individual channels before campaign settings are finalised. The control gives upfront visibility over where ads will appear, rather than relying on post-creation opt-outs.
YouTube
Ginny Marvin has published a detailed walkthrough of how to activate YouTube Creator Partnerships directly inside Google Ads, recorded with Melissa Nikolic, Director of Product Management for YouTube Ads, on stage at the YouTube NewFronts in New York. The conversation centres on lowering the barrier to creator marketing: historically reserved for brands with dedicated influencer resources: and bringing it into the same workflow as standard Google Ads campaign management.
Google Ads
Google has begun displaying sponsored product ads directly within the free listing grid on the Google Shopping tab: a placement previously reserved exclusively for organic listings. Brodie Clark first documented the change on 20 April 2026; SERP Alert followed with broader analysis.
Google Ads
From 4 May 2026, Google Ads will allow online gambling advertisements in Alberta, Canada, for entities authorised by the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission (AGLC). The change covers lotteries, sports betting, online casinos and fantasy sports, with brand awareness campaigns only at launch and strict geo-restriction to the province.
Google Ads
New customer acquisition (NCA) goals for Performance Max campaigns are now importable directly from Google Ads into Microsoft Advertising, and the feature was rolled out to all advertisers this week. Google "website visitors" audience segments convert to equivalent rule-based remarketing lists; Google's auto-created "all visitors" and "all converters" lists map to Microsoft equivalents; unsupported lists such as Customer Match can be substituted with "all converters" or omitted at import.
Google Ads
Anthony Higman has identified a new Local Services Ads mobile format that shows a single business listing (one-pack) that expands into a five-pack, then into the full LSA list.
Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft Advertising now supports campaign names up to 400 characters, up from the previous 128-character limit. The increase applies across the UI, API, Editor, imports, and reporting, and brings Microsoft to parity with Meta and Google.
Google Ads
Google has announced that the Google Ads API will require MFA for all new OAuth 2.0 refresh tokens starting April 21, 2026, with enforcement rolling out over the following weeks. Existing OAuth refresh tokens continue to work without interruption.
Microsoft Advertising
Arjun Singh has flagged that Google is consolidating its tagging ecosystem: Google Ads, GA4, and Floodlight: under a single Google Tag using the GT-XXXXXXXX format, retiring the AW-XXXXXXXX format used for Google Ads conversion tags. The unification is intended to reduce tag conflicts, improve cross-platform data consistency, and simplify container management in GTM.
Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft Advertising is rolling out autogenerated assets to Responsive Search Ads that lack the maximum number of user-supplied text assets. The feature uses AI to generate fresh, relevant ad copy for campaigns with insufficient or infrequently updated assets, which Microsoft reports underperform compared to campaigns with full asset volume.
Meta Ads
Ales Sturala has published a clear analysis of the Meta Ads bans associated with AI tool integrations. The trigger is not "AI touched the account": it is the setup pattern: creating a Meta Developer App on a personal Facebook profile, leaving it in the default Development tier, using a personal access token, running an open-source MCP locally, and performing bulk writes.
Meta Ads
Bram Van der Hallen has also flagged the deprecation of Meta's Flexible and Collection ad formats, which are being replaced by a new Format Display Options system. Under the new model, advertisers using Manual upload see only two base options: Single image or video and Carousel.
Meta Ads
Meta has published a substantial update to the Instagram Graph API, available through the Instagram API with Facebook Login. The Content Publishing API now supports the partnership ads label at publish time: third-party scheduling tools can publish organic posts with the "Paid partnership with [Brand]" disclosure label, including brand tagging via the Business Discovery API for brand ID lookup.
Meta Ads
The Meta Pixel AI enrichment feature is explicitly excluded for advertisers in special ad categories: financial products and services, employment, health, and housing. Meta's existing consent frameworks and Business Tools terms continue to govern what data can be shared.
Meta Ads
VIVEK GUPTA has flagged that Meta Ads Manager has introduced a new "Preview Ad Setup" step, and renamed the "Publish" button to "Preview to Publish." The updated flow allows advertisers to review their full ad setup: including creative, targeting, and placements: in a preview window before the ad goes live.
Meta Ads
eMarketer has published a forecast projecting Meta's global net ad revenue at $243.46 billion in 2026, ahead of Google's $239.54 billion: the first time Meta is forecast to lead globally. Meta's year-on-year growth rate is 24.1%, roughly double Google's 11.9%.
Meta Ads
Gil David has flagged that experienced Meta advertisers have continued to see significant performance and delivery issues over the past month, despite creative testing, bid type changes, and setup adjustments failing to resolve them. Issues span budget over- and underspending, AI enhancements activating without operator action, and weekly UI changes contributing to instability.
Google Ads
Google has published guidance for AI-qualified call leads, a new conversion classification system that replaces call duration as the primary signal of lead quality. The system uses Google AI to evaluate call recordings for intent signals: such as a customer inquiring about specific services, scheduling a consultation, or demonstrating readiness to purchase: and counts only qualified calls as conversions.
Google Workspace
OpenAI has launched Workspace Agents in ChatGPT in research preview, available to ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu, and Teachers plans. The feature is positioned as the next step beyond Custom GPTs: shared, long-running agents that can be built once, used together by a team in ChatGPT or Slack, and improved over time.
Anthropic
Linas Beliūnas has flagged that Google is reportedly committing up to $40 billion to Anthropic: Alphabet's largest single AI investment to date. The structure: $10 billion upfront at a $350 billion valuation; another $30 billion tied to performance milestones; and deeper access to Google's TPU-powered infrastructure for Anthropic.
BigQuery
Neil Hoyne has flagged the launch of Deep Research and its larger sibling, Deep Research Max, by Google DeepMind. Both are AI research assistants that work through web sources, user-uploaded files (PDFs, spreadsheets, audio, video), and specialised databases.
Anthropic
Anthropic has launched Routines in Claude Code in research preview across all paid plans. Routines allow a prompt, repository, and connectors to be configured once and run on a schedule, triggered by an API call, or fired by a GitHub webhook.
Display & Video 360
Satya Nadella has announced that Copilot in Microsoft Word now tracks changes and leaves comments directly inside documents, operating as a collaborative in-document coworker rather than a separate assistant pane. The feature is grounded in an enterprise context via Work IQ.
Gemini
Google has published its 2025 Ads Safety Report. Gemini-powered detection tools blocked or removed over 8.3 billion ads and suspended 24.9 million advertiser accounts: including 602 million ads and 4 million accounts associated with scams.
OpenAI
OpenAI has updated its Agents SDK with a more capable harness for building agentic workflows. New capabilities include: configurable memory, sandbox-aware orchestration, filesystem tools, MCP tool use, shell execution, and file editing support.
Google Business Profile
Barry Schwartz has confirmed that the Google Business Profile Posts repeat option: which allows businesses to republish or repeat an existing post: is now officially live.
Anthropic
Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.7, which is generally available across all Claude products, the API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. The model delivers improved performance over Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering: particularly for complex, long-running tasks: with better vision capability (more than three times the resolution) and higher-quality output in professional documents, slides, and interfaces.
Amazon Ads
Ivan Marynych has flagged that Amazon has added Scheduled Actions to Rufus, allowing shoppers to automate recurring shopping tasks, such as monthly product recommendations, alerts for new releases, and reminders for upcoming occasions. Shopper intent is captured once and reused for ongoing recommendations, eliminating the need for new searches.
Amazon Ads
Alexander Swade has flagged a regression in Amazon Ads Bulk Operations: export files previously included the date range in the filename, making it straightforward to identify which timeframe a file covered. The download is now always named "BulkSheetExport" regardless of settings.
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