paid-ads

Pop-art illustration of a credit card cut in half with April 1 2026 calendar and floating Meta invoice receipts in bold red and yellow comic panels

Meta Killed 45-Day Float on April 1 and Agencies Forgot to Reprice

Meta required higher-spending advertisers to switch from credit cards to monthly invoicing or direct debit on April 1, 2026, eliminating the 45 to 60 day card float that agencies had quietly built into their working capital. Most retainer contracts haven't repriced. The agencies absorbing the timing gap on

Pop-art illustration of a ChatGPT speech bubble pulling cash from a display banner while a search box sits untouched, $3 to $5 CPC tag overlay, Lichtenstein halftone dots.

OpenAI Told Agencies to Pull ChatGPT Ad Money From Display, Not Search

OpenAI's ads lead Asad Awan told Digiday on May 6 that ChatGPT is "a different kind of a place," and that advertisers should not pull ChatGPT test budget from search. Agency contacts confirmed OpenAI is steering clients to fund tests from upper-funnel programmatic display instead. With

Pop-art split panel showing a Meta Advantage+ campaign builder beside a manual ad set, with an incrementality ROAS chart between them favoring manual campaigns.

Advantage+ Shopping Won 42% of 640 Tests. Manual Won the Other 58%.

Haus measured 640 Meta incrementality experiments across advertisers spending an average of $14M a year and found that Advantage+ Shopping beat manual campaigns in only 42% of accounts. On average, Advantage+ delivered 12% lower incremental ROAS than manual, even though it spent 18% less per day. Meta's marketing

Pop-art illustration of a Google Ads dashboard with a rising CPC line, a September calendar marker, and a DSA campaign tag being upgraded to an AI Max badge.

AI Max Holdouts Kept CPCs Flat. Their DSAs Auto-Upgrade in September.

Six agencies tracked Google's AI Max for Search through its first year and reported CPC increases of 10 to 25 percent depending on adoption depth, alongside year-over-year search spend up 7 to 15 percent. Holdouts who stayed on Dynamic Search Ads kept their search CPCs roughly flat. That

Pop-art illustration of a US map split into treatment and control regions, with three dashboards labeled GeoX, Meridian Studio, and Data Manager piping into a Google Cloud node.

Google Open-Sourced Meridian GeoX. The Holdout Now Lives in Google's Stack.

Google announced three measurement tools at Google Marketing Live on May 5, 2026: Meridian GeoX (open-source geographic incrementality), Meridian Studio (a Google Cloud MMM platform), and a Data Manager map view that visualizes data flow across BigQuery, HubSpot, Shopify, and Drive. GeoX testing begins later this year. Studio runs on

Meta's Ads CLI Just Made the Agency Hour the Wrong Billing Unit

Meta released the Ads CLI on April 29, 2026, a Python command-line tool that wraps the entire Marketing API into 29 tools across campaign management, catalog, and insights. Agents and shell scripts can now create, edit, and analyze Meta ad campaigns without a Developer App or App Review, cutting setup