Google Ads news
Independent analysis of every meaningful Google Ads release, deadline and policy change — written by the people who run the accounts, not by a press-release summariser.
44 articles
AdsPulse · Operating playbook
The operating playbook for AdsPulse, Konvtrack’s MCP for Google Ads: sixteen ready-to-use use cases, each with the prompt to copy, what to expect back and what to watch out for. One overview, four chapters, and the announcement for the background.
Read the playbook adspulse.dev
AdsPulse is a Konvtrack product, in beta access.
Chapters and reading
What you do every day, in ten lines of chat. · 7 min read
Understanding what is wrong before touching anything. · 7 min read
From the decision to the change, with the preview in between. · 7 min read
The numbers you need before you spend. · 7 min read
What a Google Ads MCP is and why we built one. · 8 min read
AdsPulse · · 9 min read
Sixteen ready-to-use use cases in four families. For each one, the prompt to copy, what to expect in reply and what to watch out for. This is the page to start from: how AdsPulse works, the map of the use cases, the typical week and the habits that decide the quality of the answers.
AdsPulse · · 7 min read
The repetitive work that today drags you into the interface account by account. Here it becomes a single request, the same for every client: the morning report, the search terms wasting budget, the month’s spending pace and the question nobody knows how to ask Google Ads, “what changed since Monday?”.
AdsPulse · · 7 min read
Four read-only analyses. They do not change the account, so you can run them on a client that arrived this morning: a complete picture with an action plan, a check that the conversions you read are the real ones, the landing pages Google actually serves, and where the Performance Max budget really goes.
AdsPulse · · 7 min read
Here AdsPulse writes to the account. Every change reaches you first as a preview: you read it, you approve it, and only then does it go. Ads written from the real content of the landing page, a new ad group with keywords and RSA in a single preview, Google’s simulations before touching a budget, and a verdict on every recommendation.
AdsPulse · · 7 min read
Demand, competition and opportunity: what you need to plan a campaign or to present to a prospect. Keywords with volumes and cost forecasts, the rivals that matter and why they outrank you, three quantified findings already written for the deck, and the GAQL query that answers when the standard reports do not.
AI Search · · 11 min read
In January OpenAI announced a US test. Eight months later ChatGPT ads are live across Europe, with a self-serve Ads Manager and no minimum spend. Here is where things stand in October 2026, separating what is confirmed from what is merely reported, and what we are advising our clients.
Measurement · · 10 min read
In 2024 GA4 stopped calling its most important events "conversions". It was not a cosmetic relabel: it separated what you analyse from what you bid on. Plenty of accounts never noticed — and Smart Bidding is still optimising towards a mix of double-counted purchases and page scrolls.
Bidding & budget · · 10 min read
When leads arrive with made-up names and numbers that do not exist, the temptation is to blame "click fraud" and buy a tool to block it. The problem is often something else, and the biggest cost is almost never the click you paid for: it is the algorithm learning to find more leads like those.
Bidding & budget · · 10 min read
A 500% ROAS can hide a loss-making campaign, and a low cost per lead can be a symptom rather than a success. These are the numbers we look at when we have to tell a client whether Google Ads is making the business money, and the ones that only matter to whoever runs the account.
Formats & assets · · 10 min read
YouTube is no longer "the brand campaign": conversions now run through Demand Gen, views are cheap and creative matters more than targeting. The real risk is measuring it badly. Here is how to pick the right campaign, read the numbers without fooling yourself and set up a first test that actually tells you something.
Ecommerce · · 10 min read
Since 2024 Performance Max no longer beats Standard Shopping by default, and both campaign types have changed a great deal in the meantime. The right question is no longer "which one" but "which campaign for which products". Here is how we approach it.
Privacy & compliance · · 10 min read
Third-party cookies in Chrome have not gone away, yet your customer data matters more than before: it is the most reliable signal you can give automated campaigns. In Europe, though, a list uploaded without consent or left to go stale simply does not work.
Search & AI Max · · 10 min read
For a business with one location and a catchment area of a few kilometres, Google Ads works differently from the way ecommerce guides describe it. What matters is the Business Profile, opening hours, reviews and the phone. And the conversions you choose to count: a directions request is not a customer.
Search & AI Max · · 10 min read
You choose “Manchester” as your location and assume you are only talking to people in Manchester. With the default setting, you are not: Google also shows your ads to people elsewhere who have shown interest in Manchester. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. Often it is not.
Account management · · 10 min read
When a business changes agency it often discovers it never really had its own account: no admin access, invoices in someone else’s name, tags and Analytics held by the supplier. We are an agency ourselves, so here is what you should demand — including from us.
Measurement · · 11 min read
An audit is not a hundred boxes to tick: it is a sequence. If conversions are wrong, everything that comes after — bids, budgets, structure — is built on false data. This is the order in which we audit an account, and why.
Search & AI Max · · 9 min read
Microsoft Ads is not a second Google: it is a smaller channel with a different audience and a couple of advantages Google does not offer. Importing your campaigns takes ten minutes. Importing them properly, without a scheduled import overwriting your work every night, takes a few more decisions.
Bidding & budget · · 10 min read
Tell Google that every submitted form is worth the same, and Google will bring you the cheapest forms it can find. That is not a flaw in the algorithm: it is exactly what you asked for. Value-based bidding is how you ask for something else.
Bidding & budget · · 10 min read
Two advanced Smart Bidding tools, constantly confused and usually misused. One tells the system the future will differ from the past; the other tells it that part of the past never happened. Late September is the right moment to work out which one you need before Black Friday.
Automation & AI · · 9 min read
A 100% score does not mean an account that performs: it means an account in which every Google recommendation has been either applied or dismissed. Understanding the difference is the first step to using recommendations as a tool rather than a to-do list.
Measurement · · 10 min read
The conversions report tells you who Google gives the credit to. It does not tell you how many of those sales would have happened anyway. For that you need a controlled test: here is how to design a clean one, how long it should run and how to read the numbers.
Search & AI Max · · 10 min read
The brand campaign has the best ROAS in the account and often proves the least. Not because it is useless, but because it counts clicks that would largely have arrived anyway. The right question is not "is it worth it?" but "how much of this is incremental?".
Measurement · · 10 min read
Server-side tagging gets sold as the fix for every measurement problem. It is not. It is a server of your own, on your own domain, sitting between your site and your ad vendors: useful, sometimes decisive, but with costs, limits and obligations worth knowing up front.
Search & AI Max · · 10 min read
For years the "right" structure was the most granular one: a campaign per match type, per region, per service. Under Smart Bidding that granularity became a cost. But consolidating everything is the opposite mistake, and it has precise symptoms.
Formats & assets · · 10 min read
Fifteen headlines are not fifteen ideas: usually they are one sentence rewritten fifteen times. A responsive search ad performs in proportion to the real variety you give it, and the Ad Strength meter will not tell you whether you managed it.
AdsPulse · · 8 min read
We built the tool we were missing: an MCP server that connects an AI assistant to a real Google Ads account with the depth of the interface, plus one constraint the interface does not have — nothing is written until a person has seen and approved it.
Landing page & CRO · · 9 min read
Half the problems that look like campaign problems live after the click. Moving conversion rate from 3% to 4% cuts cost per lead by 25% without spending another penny: no bid optimisation delivers that reliably.
Search & AI Max · · 9 min read
Negative keywords have gone from housekeeping to strategic control. In an account where the system decides which queries to appear on, they are one of the few levers that still say "no" — and they need designing, not improvising.
Measurement · · 9 min read
Every month somebody opens GA4, opens Google Ads, sees two different numbers for the same month and concludes that tracking is broken. It almost never is. They are two systems answering two different questions — and knowing which question you are asking is half the work.
Search & AI Max · · 8 min read
Quality Score is the most quoted and worst used number in Google Ads. It does not enter the auction, it is not a target and it should not be optimised: it is a diagnosis. Here is how to read it in an account where keywords matter less every quarter.
Bidding & budget · · 9 min read
The question "how much should we spend on Google Ads?" has no price-list answer, but it does have a calculation. It starts from the number of customers you need and works back to monthly spend through three numbers almost nobody writes down before launching.
Demand Gen · · 10 min read
Demand Gen is where Google put everything that is not search: YouTube, Shorts, Discover, Gmail. It is also the last modern campaign type where creative and audience are still your levers. Here is when it is worth opening, and what kills it in the first thirty days.
Bidding & budget · · 9 min read
On 15 June 2026 Google announced three changes to its bidding and budgeting infrastructure. Two are opportunities you opt into. The third switched itself on for everyone on 17 August and moved the delivery curve of every budget-limited campaign. Here is what actually changed in the accounts.
Performance Max · · 10 min read
The standing criticism of Performance Max was that it was a black box. In 2026 the box opened considerably: channel reporting, search terms, campaign-level negatives, audience exclusions. The problem now is a different one — knowing which decisions that data actually licenses.
Measurement · · 11 min read
There is a technical deadline that will pass unnoticed in a lot of accounts until something quietly stops working: offline conversion uploads have moved to the Data Manager API. It is the right moment to fix the thing that matters more in lead generation than any bidding tweak.
Ecommerce · · 10 min read
If an agent can complete a purchase on the user’s behalf, the storefront stops being where the decision happens. UCP and Universal Cart are the infrastructure Google is using to make that scenario ordinary. Here is what it means for people who sell.
Search & AI Max · · 11 min read
AI Max is not a new campaign type. It is a switch that changes three things at once in your Search campaigns — how you get matched to queries, how your ad text is written, and which page the click lands on. Here is what you still control, what you no longer control, and how to measure it without fooling yourself.
Search & AI Max · · 9 min read
The automatic Dynamic Search Ads migration slipped from September 2026 to February 2027, so accounts are not forced through a structural change in the middle of Q4. It is a reprieve, not a cancellation — and two September deadlines have not moved.
AI Search · · 10 min read
For twenty years a search ad was a block of text placed next to the results. In the formats shown at Google Marketing Live 2026 the ad lives inside the generated answer, and Gemini composes the copy from your assets. Here is what that means for the people running campaigns.
Ecommerce · · 10 min read
Merchant Center changes never make headlines the way product launches do — but they are the only ones that can pull half your catalogue out of circulation. Here are the 2026-2027 deadlines and the order of work to meet them without surprises.
Privacy & compliance · · 11 min read
Consent Mode is not a banner: it is how your site tells Google what it may do with each visitor’s data. Misconfigured, it silently switches off remarketing and conversions. Configured properly, it recovers a meaningful share of what consent refusal takes away.
AI Search · · 10 min read
The figure everyone quotes is blunt: with an AI Overview on the page, ad CTR drops from 19.70% to 6.34%. It is true, and it is incomplete. During 2026 the curve stabilised and in some segments started climbing back. Here is how to read it without making the wrong call.
Formats & assets · · 8 min read
For plumbers, clinics, garages and emergency services, the call is the conversion. Google is retiring the format built for exactly that, in two steps: creation blocked from February 2026, serving stopped from February 2027.
Market & regulation · · 9 min read
It is easy to file antitrust proceedings under "matters for lawyers". But a court found that Google charged supracompetitive prices for general search text ads: that is a statement about what you paid, not an abstract principle.
We audit Google Ads accounts for free: structure, tracking, wasted spend and the migrations you have not started yet. You get the findings whether or not you work with us.