Paid Ads

Google Ads, Meta, TikTok and programmatic breakdowns for practitioners. What is breaking, what is working, what CMOs are spending on now.

Pop art illustration of a single toggle switch absorbing multiple conversion data streams with a cracked magnifying glass

Google Simplified Enhanced Conversions by Removing the Parts You Could Audit

Google announced this week that it's merging "enhanced conversions for web" and "enhanced conversions for leads" into a single unified feature. One toggle. On or off. Starting June 2026, the method selection screen disappears from your Google Ads account entirely. The framing from Google

Split-screen pop art showing green Google Ads conversion dashboard beside a flatlined Stripe revenue chart with trial signup forms scattered between them

Google Ads Counts Every Trial Signup as a Win (Even the 75% That Never Pay)

A thread on r/PPC this week described a problem I suspect is way more common than the conversation suggests. A SaaS advertiser was staring at two dashboards: Google Ads showing healthy trial conversion numbers, steady CPA, everything green. Stripe showing revenue that barely moved. The campaigns looked like they

Adobe Lifted Firefly Citations 5x in a Week. Nobody Knows If It Sold Anything.

Adobe ran its own LLM Optimizer on its own pages last quarter and watched Firefly citations climb fivefold in seven days. Acrobat's LLM visibility jumped 200%. Adobe.com saw a 41% lift in LLM-referred traffic. These are real numbers from Adobe's own blog post, not vendor

Meta and YouTube Lost the Legal Theory That Made Their Ad Business Possible

A Los Angeles jury just spent two weeks doing something no other court has fully managed since Section 230 was written into law. They decided that infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic recommendations are not speech. They are product features. And product features can be defective. That verdict, against Meta and

IAS and Reuters Just Put a Number on Keyword Blocking (It's 54% of Safe News)

If you run programmatic and haven't audited your brand safety keyword list since 2020, there's a decent chance you've been quietly walking away from half of your safe news inventory. Reuters just made the receipt public. On April 6, Integral Ad Science and Reuters

Pop art illustration of a Google AI Mode product panel showing a sponsored stores ad label above organic retailer listings with Gap chinos at $29

Sponsored Stores Hit Google AI Mode (and Organic Links Landed on Top)

Search analyst Glenn Gabe flagged it on X last Wednesday afternoon: a "Sponsored Stores" unit sitting inside a Google AI Mode product detail panel, right above the organic "All stores" block. A day later, Search Engine Roundtable wrote it up. Google, as of this morning, has