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We have been tracking the paid media conversation for the past couple of weeks and it has moved up a gear. It is not just niche PPC blogs talking about click through rates any more. It is big platform announcements, AI agents sitting inside ad accounts, and uncomfortable stories about how much money Meta is making from scam ads.
We already spend too much of our time reading Google Ads and Facebook Ads news, so we pulled out the pieces that matter if you are running campaigns for real clients with real budgets.
For context, we care a lot less about shiny features and a lot more about whether they change performance, measurement or risk. That is the filter we are applying here.
Here is what caught our attention this month.
Google’s AI advisors and agentic tools move from slideware to reality
Google is now openly talking about AI advisors and agentic tools that sit on top of Ads and Analytics, generate campaign ideas, suggest budgets and even help stitch together reporting. Between Google’s own announcements and coverage in the trade press, the direction of travel is clear. They want AI sitting between you and the platform, not just inside bidding algorithms.
This matters for agencies because it changes what your value looks like. If a client can click a button and have an “advisor” propose campaigns and assets, the days of charging just to build basic account structure are numbered. The value moves to strategy, constraints, governance and interpreting what the AI is doing to your budget.
We are paying particular attention to how transparent these systems are. If an AI agent can recommend changes but cannot show you the trade offs it made, you are not optimising, you are blindly accepting a black box suggestion with your logo on the invoice.
New Google Ads conversion metrics and what they really change
Search Engine Land and the PPC blogs have been covering Google’s quiet rollout of new conversion metrics, including “original conversion value”. On the surface this looks like another incremental measurement tweak. Underneath, it is a signal that Google wants more nuance in how value is attributed, especially in journeys that bounce between channels and devices.
The important bit is not the label on the metric. It is whether your organisation has the discipline to decide which conversion number is the source of truth and lock reporting to that choice instead of picking the one that looks best this month.
For agencies, this is a reporting and education challenge. If you do not get ahead of this, you will end up with dashboards and exports all using different definitions of value, and arguments about why performance “looks down” when nothing in the real world changed. The mature move is to pick a primary metric, document the logic, and teach clients why you are sticking to it even when another column looks more flattering.
→ Read more at Search Engine Land
Brand controls in Shopping campaigns quietly evolve
Google has been adding brand inclusions and related controls to standard Shopping and rolling similar ideas into newer campaign types. Roundtable and Search Engine Land have both picked up on it. For retailers, this looks like welcome news. More ways to tell the system which brands matter and where you want to show.
In practice, this is one more example of Google bundling sophistication into levers that most accounts will never properly configure. The advertisers who will benefit are the ones with clean product data, clear brand hierarchies and someone who can sit down and map actual merchandising logic into campaign settings. Everyone else will tick a few boxes and hope for the best.
If you are an agency with retail clients, this is an opportunity to step in as the grown up in the room. Run structured tests, document impact on brand and non brand visibility, and treat these controls as part of merchandising, not just media set up.
→ Read more at Search Engine Land
Journey aware bidding is the next frontier for Smart Bidding
Search Engine Roundtable and others have spotted “journey aware bidding” on the Google Ads roadmap for 2026. The basic idea is simple enough. Instead of looking at single auctions in isolation, Google wants bidding models that consider where a user is in their decision journey and how likely they are to convert over time, not just right now.
For lead gen and high consideration purchases, this is potentially huge. It finally acknowledges that not every click is meant to convert immediately, and that there is a difference between an early research visit and a bottom of funnel comparison query. The question is whether advertisers will have any meaningful say in how “journey stages” get defined.
If you are an agency, the homework here is to get your own intent mapping sorted before this arrives. If you cannot clearly describe what an awareness, consideration and decision query looks like for your clients, you are not going to be in a good position to challenge or shape whatever the black box decides.
→ Read more at Search Engine Roundtable
Account suspensions, policy enforcement and the risk surface
Google has been talking up big improvements in the accuracy and speed of advertiser account suspensions and reversals. Both The Keyword and Search Engine Land covered the story. On paper it is good news. Fewer false positives, faster reinstatement, better protection against bad actors.
From an agency perspective, this is about risk management as much as performance. If you run multiple accounts across regions and verticals, the odds that one of them will get flagged at some point are no longer theoretical. Your job is to make sure there is a playbook for what happens when it does. Who talks to the client, what evidence you pull, how quickly you can escalate through the right channels.
The deeper point is that policy enforcement is now a permanent constraint in media planning, not an occasional annoyance. If your strategy cannot survive a stricter review of ad content, landing pages and user data handling, it is not a strategy. It is a temporary exploit.
→ Read more at Search Engine Land
Meta’s scam ads problem is now an advertising story, not just a tech story
Investigations from TBIJ, Which and others have used leaked Meta documents to estimate that a significant chunk of revenue in 2024 came from scam ads. We have also seen coverage of influencers making hundreds of thousands off the back of hateful content that gets monetised through Facebook’s ad systems.
If you are buying media on a platform that knows a meaningful share of its revenue is coming from fraud and carries on anyway, you have a brand safety problem whether you want one or not.
For agencies, this is not just an ethical question, it is a commercial one. Clients will increasingly ask where their ads are running, what proportion of inventory is high risk, and what you are doing to avoid funding bad actors. “We trust Meta’s systems” is no longer a sufficient answer.
This is the moment to get proactive. Build brand safety positions, document exclusion lists, and be ready to talk honestly about the trade off between reach, efficiency and risk. The agencies that can do this without sounding defensive will have an advantage when the next wave of negative Meta headlines lands.
→ Read more at World Trademark Review and Which via Google News
Facebook analytics tools for 2026 raise the bar on reporting
Sprout Social rounded up fourteen Facebook analytics tools to measure marketing success in 2026. Most of them will be familiar to performance teams, but the list itself is a reminder of how high the bar has moved. Basic page insights and in platform reporting are no longer enough if you want to properly understand cross channel impact.
For agencies, this is both an opportunity and a trap. The opportunity is to differentiate by building serious analytics stacks for clients, not just exporting Meta’s default reports. The trap is to drown everyone in dashboards without any clear narrative about what is working and what should change.
The teams that win here will be the ones who can take messy, multi source analytics and turn it into simple answers to simple questions. Which audiences are worth the money. Which creative actually moves the needle. Which channels genuinely contribute to pipeline instead of just intercepting conversions that were going to happen anyway.
Meta Business Suite and the tooling arms race
Metricool and others have been publishing updated tutorials on Meta Business Suite for 2025. On one level this is just product education. On another, it reflects how central Meta wants this hub to be for small and mid sized advertisers who do not live inside Ads Manager every day.
If your clients are self managing parts of their presence, they are probably already inside Business Suite without you realising. That means the line between what you touch and what they touch is getting blurred. Posts, boosts, inbox, basic paid campaigns, commerce tools. It is all in one place from their perspective.
Agencies that ignore this and insist on doing everything through their own logins will feel increasingly out of step. The smarter move is to learn the suite deeply, set it up properly, and define who owns what so clients feel supported rather than locked out of their own assets.
Messenger based campaigns and value optimisation in the wild
One of Meta’s own case studies highlighted how a brand increased sales and improved return on ad spend by using click to Messenger campaigns with value optimisation switched on. Case studies like this are obviously curated, but they are still useful as pattern spotting exercises for agencies.
The pattern here is straightforward. When you treat Messenger as a genuine sales or lead channel rather than just a support inbox, it can pick up high intent users who do not want to fill in a form yet. Combine that with value based optimisation and you have a set up where the system is actively looking for people likely to generate higher value conversations, not just any conversation at all.
Most accounts still treat these formats as experiments rather than core acquisition channels. The opportunity is to build proper funnels around them, with clear scripts, follow up processes and measurement of conversation to sale, not just click to chat.
→ Read more at Meta via Facebook Business
Facebook analytics, tutorials and tool lists are not a strategy
Between “best Facebook marketing tools” lists, beginner tutorials, and round ups of business credit cards that earn extra points on ad spend, one theme is obvious. The ecosystem around Facebook and Instagram advertising is still growing fast. There is always one more tool, one more course, one more optimisation checklist.
For agencies, the temptation is to keep bolting new tools into the stack and hoping that one of them creates an edge. In reality, the edge comes from how you think, not what you subscribe to. A simple set up with clear goals, disciplined testing and honest reporting will outperform a cluttered stack that no one fully understands.
The question to ask before adopting anything new is boring and brutal. Does this make us better at finding the right people, with the right message, at the right cost, and proving it. If the answer is not a clear yes, it is probably a distraction.
What we are watching next
Across both Google and Meta, the same pattern keeps repeating. More AI inside the platforms. More automation on the surface. More policy and trust stories in the background. The gap between advertisers who simply accept default settings and those who build real strategy on top of the tools is getting wider.
The organisations that are going to be in a strong position by 2026 are not the ones who adopted every new feature first. They are the ones who decided what they care about, built measurement to match, and treated Google Ads and Meta Ads as infrastructure for growth, not just quick win channels.
We will keep following the signal and leaving the noise behind.
If you would like to dive deeper into how these Google Ads and Meta Ads changes will affect your 2026 lead flow and paid media strategy, our team are happy to chat. Feel free to email us or reach our Paid Media Strategy team on 01276 402 381 to set up an initial discovery call. We are happy to share how we are thinking about future proofing your campaigns while the platforms keep shifting.
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Carl Gale
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