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.
Industry
Amazon is expanding Alexa shopping so customers can describe design ideas in natural language and generate custom products through Amazon Merch on Demand. Amazon fulfils items and keeps the whole flow inside its ecosystem.
Google Merchant Center
Google will consolidate its Shopping ads and free listings policies into one unified set on September 2, standardising requirements across paid and unpaid product surfaces.
Google Ads
Google has introduced video campaign groups, which manage reach and frequency across multiple video campaigns while individual campaign settings stay in place. PPC News Feed reports the option is now available globally.
Google Ads
Google has published three policy changes affecting regulated categories. For you, this means new eligibility and certification requirements between late July and mid-September, so check each policy against your verticals now.
Google Ads
Google Ads has expanded the availability of Brand Lift studies and added an Enhanced option, as Thomas Eccel flagged. The Enhanced study carries a lower reported lift threshold but requires a larger budget than the Standard version.
Google Ads
Google has published an FAQ for AI Max for Search campaigns, describing it as an evolution of DSA and Performance Max rather than a separate campaign type. It sets out how AI Max differs from each, how assets are generated, and what changes when a campaign turns it on.
Google Ads
Google is testing Channel Diagnostics for Performance Max, found under Channel performance in Insights and reports. It shows diagnostic data across all channels and per channel, including which assets are missing or were not accepted, with fixes available from the same view.
YouTube
Manuel Lodi has flagged that after Google auto-linked Google Ads and YouTube accounts, it created a "YouTube subsequent views" conversion and set it as Primary. Because each organic view counts as a conversion, some Performance Max campaigns shifted most budget to the Video channel.
Snapchat Ads
Meta is testing the ability to combine the Highest Volume bid strategy with a minimum ROAS goal, currently in beta. Min ROAS was previously available only with Highest Value.
Snapchat Ads
Meta's latest ad creation flow lets you show carousel media as a single media ad, with Collage, single image or video, and video slideshow options. The controls sit under Format display options at the ad level and reuse the media from your original carousel.
Snapchat Ads
Snapchat has announced a measurement partnership with DICK'S Media that combines Snapchat ad exposure with DICK'S sales data in LiveRamp's data clean room. The stated aim is to show how Snapchat campaigns drive verified online and in-store sales.
TikTok Ads
Lucy Guest has flagged that TikTok now offers users an ad-free For You feed for a monthly fee, following YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Users who pay opt out of the ad inventory.
Google Ads
Google has published an AI-labelling update, effective July 2026, that lets advertisers add text or visual labels to AI-generated or modified image and video creative, with optional automatic labelling for Google AI assets. The labels do not breach overlay or watermark rules and roll out across Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Campaign Manager 360, Merchant Centre, and Ads Editor, in line with EU, India, and New York disclosure requirements.
Meta Ads
Meta has rolled out five changes across the Business Agent, reporting, and creative. For you, this means more automation and AI in the ad-creation flow, so review each before it touches live campaigns.
Google Ads
AI-written performance summaries are appearing above the Google Ads campaign table to highlight changes and suggest follow-up questions.
Google Ads
A Leads section is appearing under Conversions for Google-hosted submissions, with options to mark leads as qualified or converted.
Google Tag
Vivek Gupta has flagged a new Guided Setup card in Google Tag Manager that auto-creates the tags, triggers, and variables for Google Ads purchase-conversion tracking, currently in beta. It aims to cut the manual steps behind a common setup.
Industry
The European Commission has adopted two DMA specification decisions covering Google. The first sets out how Android must open functionality to third-party AI assistants under Article 6(7), noting that alternatives currently cannot compete equally with Google's own AI services, and the second, which anonymises click and query data Google must share, with whom, and at what price under Article 6(11).
Google Merchant Center
Merchant Centre Promotions now lets you choose placements across Shopping ads, free listings, Chrome, and, newly, Google Wallet in the Physical Stores. Businesses with physical stores can also run promotions through Local Inventory Ads, free local listings, and Wallet.
Google Merchant Center
Select Merchant Centre accounts now show an AI performance report inside Analytics, surfacing AI Mode and AI Overviews data for your products. Metrics include query groups users type into AI search, share of voice for those terms, term popularity, and popular product attributes, following help documentation first spotted by Hana Kobzová and interface digging by Brodie Clark.
OpenAI
OpenAI's Partner Network is now officially live, with applications open, a Partner Locator for finding partners by expertise, and training and enablement on a Partner Hub with badges and tiers, formalising the ecosystem announced last month.
Industry
Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model with a one-million-token context window and native visual understanding. Moonshot says it trails Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on overall performance but consistently beats Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on coding, visual understanding, and long-horizon tasks, and it led Arena's front-end programming leaderboard within a day of launch.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity has launched Topic Insights, a topic-level view in its AI Visibility dashboard that shows how your content shapes AI answers, covering visibility, influence, competition, and opportunities. Announced on 9 July, it runs on prompts you define per topic, with a weekly report cap per project.
ChatGPT Ads
ChatGPT Ads has added audience targeting with advanced bid adjustments, plus custom audiences that let you upload lists of 25,000 or more users to target or exclude, with ad-group-level bid multipliers. OpenAI also added an Overview dashboard, suggested ad drafts built from your site's metadata, a smaller ad-card format, and availability in Japan and South Korea.
Industry
The European Parliament has passed a version of the "Chat Control" regulation that allows platforms to scan private messages, images, and files, with the regime set to run until at least April 2028. End-to-end encrypted services such as WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram are exempt from the scanning.
Google Merchant Center
Google has begun serving ads in AI Mode, with five formats now appearing: standard text ads, Shopping ads placed inline with organic results, and a product grid format. The rollout follows the formats Google previewed at Google Marketing Live.
Industry
Google is expanding Search campaigns for Travel to an open beta covering the things-to-do and events verticals. The beta adds AI Max features such as search-term matching and item groups, central buying across feed formats and text ads, and unified search-term reporting.
Industry
Google will stop serving third-party rates in Hotel Ads from 30 September 2026, after which affected campaigns will no longer run. Performance Max for Travel Goals continues to serve on Search, Display, and YouTube.
Walmart Connect
Walmart has released new content guidelines that take effect now, and sellers report titles over 90 characters being rejected ahead of a formal mandate. Walmart's standardisation of Sparky, its AI shopping agent, whose weekly active users are up over 100% quarter-on-quarter.
Google Ads
Eligible Shopping campaigns are moving towards Local Inventory Ads enabled by default, with an inventory filter replacing the previous local-products control.
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