This one is for product businesses. If you sell services, the rest of this cluster is more use to you. Here is the shift. When someone asks an AI assistant to find them a product, it does not browse your website. It does not read your carefully written product page, it does not see your […]

For twenty years, measuring advertising worked one way. A tag sat on your website; it watched what visitors did, and it reported back. That method is being dismantled. Not all at once, and not by any single decision, but steadily. Cookie consent removed a share of it. Browser restrictions removed more. Ad blockers take another

Two things are true about your Google Ads account right now, and you were not asked about either. Your ads can already appear inside AI Overviews, the AI-written summary sitting at the top of the results page. You did not switch this on, and there is no setting to switch it off. And you cannot

Open your Google Ads account and look at the conversions column. Some of those conversions did not happen the way you think they did. They are estimates. Google could not observe them, so it estimated how many probably occurred and added them in. They sit in the same column as the real ones, with the

On 1 September 2026, Google starts moving Search campaigns into AI Max on its own. You do not have to agree. There is no opt-out once it begins. If your campaigns use Automatically Created Assets, or the campaign-level Broad Match setting, they are on the list. Google emailed affected advertisers on 5 August 2026. Plenty

The dashboard says forty conversions. Best month on record. Your diary says twelve genuine enquiries, of which maybe six were worth quoting for, and two of those were people who wanted something you do not sell. Nobody has done anything wrong. The account is doing exactly what it was told. This is the single most

Somewhere in your account there may be an advert running right now containing a line that nobody in your business ever typed. Not a headline you forgot to write. A sentence assembled from your landing page copy and your existing assets, generated to match a particular search. That’s not a glitch, and it isn’t Google

Most of Google Ads is an auction you influence but do not control. You choose keywords, and Google decides which searches match them. You set bids, and an algorithm adjusts them. You write ads and a system assembles them. Then somebody clicks, and for the next few seconds everything is yours. Your page, your words,

Here’s a test worth running before you read any further. Open your Google Ads account and note how many conversions it recorded last month. Then open your diary, your inbox or your CRM and count the enquiries you actually received. If those two numbers are close, you’re in a minority, and the rest of this

Most small businesses don’t meet their optimisation score in the interface. They meet it on the phone. Someone from Google rings, friendly and genuinely helpful in tone, offering a free review of the account. Your score comes up early. It’s sitting at 68 per cent, and there’s a set of recommendations that would take it

Ask most business owners about Performance Max, and you’ll get some version of the same answer. It’s a black box. Google spends your money and won’t tell you where. You have to trust it. That was a fair description once. It isn’t any more, and the gap between the reputation and the reality is now

There’s a report in your Google Ads account that lists every website and app your Display ads appeared on, and what each one cost you. Most advertisers have never opened it. The ones who do tend to go quiet for a minute. You’ll find a flashlight app. A mobile game aimed at seven-year-olds. Three sites

Here’s the pattern I see most often with YouTube. A business runs ads for a month. The video gets watched. The dashboard shows two conversions, maybe three. The cost looks embarrassing next to Search. They switch it off and conclude YouTube doesn’t work for their industry. Then something odd happens about eight weeks later. Branded

Someone typed your competitor’s name into Google this week. They read a couple of reviews, opened two websites, and closed both tabs. They haven’t decided yet. You could chase them in Search. Bid on the competitor’s brand name, pay a high cost per click, and accept a poor quality score. Plenty of businesses do it,

There’s a version of Google Ads failure that confuses people more than any other. The ads work. The clicks arrive. The traffic graph goes up and to the right. And the phone doesn’t ring. Almost every time we investigate that, the answer is the same. The account is buying the wrong intent. Now, plenty has

Google lets you put 20 keywords in an ad group. Most people read that as a recommendation. It’s a technical limit, in the same way a lift has a maximum weight rather than a target weight. The recommended number is between 3 and 10, sharing a single search intent. We regularly take over accounts with