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
Ruben Runneboom has reported that Shopping image overlays: long prohibited under Google's product image policies: are now being approved and serving without issue across multiple ecommerce accounts. His colleague tested overlays extensively after noticing they no longer triggered disapprovals and observed strong CTR uplifts on images with subtle additional contrast, context, or urgency.
Google Ads
Jason King has flagged that Google Ad Grants campaigns stopped serving ads on Google Maps after February 3, 2026, with no official explanation from Google to date. The issue affects all Ad Grants accounts running map-based placements.
Looker Studio
Google Cloud has confirmed that Looker Studio will revert to its original name, Data Studio, and will feature a new logo with two connected magnifying glasses. Mehdi Oudjida: a long-standing product advocate: published a detailed response noting that the rename appears to reflect a repositioning of the product's scope relative to Looker and expressing concern that it may signal reduced ambition for the tool's evolution.
Google Ads
Google will update its Healthcare and Medicines policy in April 2026 to allow certified online pharmacies to promote prescription drug services in India. Advertisers need LegitScript Healthcare Merchant Certification and must apply directly to Google when the policy takes effect.
Meta Ads
David Pombar Lourido has flagged that the €40 million GDPR fine against Criteo has been confirmed by the French Conseil d'État: the highest administrative court in France: making it final and no longer subject to appeal. The fine reflects data collected and used without a proper legal basis across thousands of marketing stacks where Criteo is deeply embedded.
Google Ads
Austin Lau, a performance marketing PM at Anthropic, has published a detailed account of building a custom Claude Cowork plugin to manage Google Ads via local MCP: encoding his personal search-term review methodology as a reusable skill that connects to the Google Ads API. The plugin outputs a bulk-upload-ready CSV for Google Ads Editor with a reasoning column for each negative keyword recommendation.
Industry
Jawad Ahmed has highlighted the Export Session feature in Google Tag Manager's Preview mode, which downloads a full debugging session as a JSON file containing Data Layer events, tag firing status, variables, and consent state: enabling reproducible debugging sessions to be shared without requiring live account access.
Meta Ads
Google has launched a unified hub at developers.google.com/ads that consolidates documentation, community resources, and developer tools across the full Google advertising and measurement product stack: including the Google Ads API, Analytics APIs, AdMob, Ad Manager, and tagging products. The hub introduces a products directory browsable by category, a streamlined Discord and support connect page, and a media and podcast section hosting the Ads DevCast playlist.
YouTube
Arpan Banerjee has spotted Google product rating annotations surfacing directly on YouTube Shorts placements. The star rating overlay brings Shopping-style social proof to the Shorts format, providing products with an additional trust signal when a viewer engages with a short-form video ad.
Meta Ads
Emirhan Bayutmuş has identified that when creating a Lead campaign in Meta Ads Manager, Meta AI can now read an existing website lead form and automatically generate a corresponding Meta instant form that mirrors its fields and structure.
Meta Ads
Benjamin W. has flagged that the Google Marketing Solutions team has published AdSpace Agent as an open-source agentic marketing assistant on GitHub. The agent connects to Google Ads (via GAQL), DV360, Campaign Manager 360, YouTube, Merchant Centre, BigQuery, and Search Ads 360, with proper OAuth flows and a modular toolset architecture.
Anthropic
Anthropic has launched Claude Managed Agents in public beta, providing a suite of composable APIs for building and deploying production agents at scale. The announcement addresses the infrastructure overhead that has historically slowed agent deployment: state management, permissioning, and agent loop reworking with each model upgrade are handled by Anthropic's infrastructure, with the stated goal of reducing time from prototype to production to days rather than months.
Anthropic
Anthropic has launched Claude for Word in beta for Team and Enterprise plans, integrating Claude directly into the Word sidebar. Edits appear as tracked changes for human review rather than overwriting content directly.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity has released a Conversion tab in its heatmaps tool, showing the percentage of sessions that converted after interacting with a specific element or section on a page. Previously, heatmaps showed attention and click data but provided no direct link to conversion outcome: making it impossible to determine whether a specific component was contributing to or suppressing sales.
Meta Ads
Luiza Jarovsky has reported that Greece has announced it will ban social media access for users under 15, effective January 2027, following Australia's under-16 ban. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis cited rising anxiety, sleep disruption, and addictive platform design as the primary drivers, and explicitly stated Greece intends to push the EU to adopt a similar framework across member states.
Google Ads
Google has announced that enhanced conversions for web and enhanced conversions for leads will be combined into a single feature with a unified on/off toggle, effective June 2026. From April 2026, Google Ads will simultaneously accept user-provided data from website tags, the Data Manager, and API connections: removing the requirement to choose a single implementation method.
OpenAI
OpenAI has partnered with Smartly to launch conversational advertising units within ChatGPT. Criteo has separately reported that users referred by LLMs convert at 1.5× the rate of other channels.
Amazon Ads
Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands Prompts have moved into the standard CPC bidding and billing framework as the feature becomes generally available across all accounts. During the beta phase, prompts operated as an experimental engagement layer.
Google Merchant Center
Google has extended its loyalty programme features in Merchant Centre to 14 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has released updated participation rules for Prime Day 2026. The most significant change is a 60-day pricing rule: any promotional price for a Prime Day deal must be the lowest price offered in the previous 60 days, including all prior discounts and coupons, and must represent at least a 5% discount from the lowest price of the last 30 days.
OpenAI
OpenAI has introduced Codex-only seats on ChatGPT Business and Enterprise plans with usage-based pricing billed on token consumption: removing the requirement for a fixed monthly seat cost to access Codex. To encourage adoption, OpenAI is offering $100 in credits for every Codex-only seat added, capped at $500 per workspace for eligible Business accounts.
Microsoft Advertising
Anthony Higman has spotted Google testing two new multi-location Google Business Profile asset formats in Google Ads: one variant shows GBP review figures alongside additional information for each location, and the other shows locations in a swipeable carousel. Higman noted the carousel version appeared partially glitched in his observations, suggesting the feature is still in development.
Google Ads
Google has announced that Shopping Ads are expanding into 15 new European markets across two waves. The first phase, timed for Back to School, covers Cyprus, Luxembourg, Moldova, North Macedonia, Malta, and Liechtenstein.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has announced two structural changes to how reference prices are validated on listings, effective in late April and May, respectively. From April 23, List Price: the crossed-out price shown next to a sale price: will only be displayed if the product has verifiably sold at that price on Amazon or is currently selling at that price at another retailer.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has announced a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge applied to FBA fulfilment fees, effective April 17, 2026, with MCF and Buy with Prime following on May 2. The surcharge is calculated on the fulfilment fee, not the product price, averaging approximately $0.17 per unit for standard US FBA.
Meta Ads
Meta has updated the Single Image ad format to support 2–3 images per ad unit. The format is not a carousel: Meta automatically rotates the images and progressively allocates delivery to whichever image performs best.
Meta Ads
Bram Van der Hallen has reported two significant Meta Ads updates announced at the Meta Marketing Summit 2026.
Google Ads
Thomas Eccel has highlighted that Google Chrome DevTools now includes built-in Gemini AI features accessible via Settings → AI Innovations. The tooling includes an "Understand this error" button that breaks down console errors in plain language, AI-generated explanations for failed requests and warnings, code suggestions inside the Sources panel, and AI assistance for CSS styles, network requests, and performance issues.
Google Ads
Google has updated Help Centre articles for nine advertising policy areas: Cryptocurrencies, Editorial, Financial products and services, Healthcare and medicines, Limited ad serving, Other restricted businesses, Sexual content, Sexual health and wellness, and related policies: for improved organisation and readability. Google has confirmed that the updates do not change policy enforcement; they are content and structure improvements only.
Anthropic
Charly Wargnier has flagged that Claude Code now supports Computer Use directly from the terminal, enabling Claude to compile and launch macOS apps (SwiftUI or Electron), click through the UI to verify fixes, and complete tasks that previously required leaving the terminal. The feature is enabled via the /mcp command and requires macOS with a Pro or Max plan.
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