The Click Brief- August 2026

Follow The Click Brief for fast, no-fluff performance marketing updates every month.

Top Takeaways

Biggest Change to Watch
Google completed its budget-limited bidding rollout for campaigns using Target CPA and Target ROAS. Advertisers may see changes in auction activity, CPCs, and overall efficiency, making these campaigns especially important to monitor and adjust if performance shifts.

AI Max Update
Google expanded AI Max experiments with multi-campaign testing and additional brand and location controls, giving advertisers more flexibility to test automation under conditions that better reflect how campaigns actually run. Microsoft is also making AI Max generally available and turning it on by default for new Search campaigns, making campaign settings increasingly important to review before launch.

Measurement Win
GA4 added custom conversion windows and a campaign data import validation report. Advertisers can now customize click-through and engaged-view conversion windows while more easily identifying missing cost, click, or impression data from non-Google campaigns.

Platform to Watch
ChatGPT Ads expanded self-service access internationally and introduced additional campaign controls, including automated bidding. As the platform continues to mature, advertisers have more options for testing ChatGPT as part of their paid media mix.

AI Reporting Watch
Google continues adding AI-powered analysis across Ads and Analytics, including personalized insight cards, prompt-built dashboards, automated summaries, and benchmarking through Ask Advisor. These tools can make first-pass analysis faster, but still require human context and review.

Other Platform & AI Updates

• Google added multi-campaign testing and expanded controls for AI Max experiments
• Performance Planner can now apply selected budget and bid target recommendations directly to live campaigns
• Microsoft is making AI Max generally available and the default for new Search campaigns
• ChatGPT Ads expanded internationally and added new campaign controls and automated bidding options
• Google’s Search language targeting phaseout is moving into implementation
• Google Tags are becoming full Tag Manager containers to simplify deployment
• Demand Gen is expanding view-through conversion bidding, with video view-through conversions playing a larger role in optimization
• Google Ads added AI-powered homepage insights and prompt-generated dashboards
• GA4 added AI overviews highlighting notable performance changes
• Ask Advisor can now compare campaign performance against anonymized benchmarks from similar businesses
• Google continued expanding generative video and multimodal tools for Demand Gen
• Microsoft and Snap opened read-only advertising connections for AI assistants

Final Take

August’s updates continue a familiar trend: AI and automation are becoming built-in parts of everyday campaign management. From AI Max and automated bidding to view-through conversions and AI-generated reporting, advertisers have more tools to test and optimize—but also more defaults and automated decisions to scrutinize. The priority remains understanding what the platforms are optimizing toward, testing intentionally, and validating performance against actual business outcomes.

Episode Transcript

 Jeremy: Hello, and welcome to the Click Brief Podcast, your monthly download of what’s new and what matters in digital advertising and paid media. I’m Jeremy Packee. My usual co-host, Emily Anderson, is still out on her well-deserved and needed maternity leave, so I’ll be flying solo this month and I can’t wait to have her back soon. August brought several meaningful updates across paid media, measurement, and AI. Google completed its budget limited bidding rollout, expanded AI Max testing and performance planner controls, and gave GA4 users more flexibility with custom conversion windows and a new campaign data import validation report. We also saw Microsoft make AI Max generally available and turn it on by default in new search campaigns. ChatGPT ads expanded internationally with new campaign controls, and Google announced new demand gen messaging tests and generative video tools. In our AI watch section, OpenAI and Anthropic detailed the safeguards they’ll put in place after separate agent security incidents while Microsoft and Snap opened read-only advertising connections for AI assistance. 

Starting off with the high impact updates. So we covered this in June when Google originally announced it, but budget limited campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS can now be optimized more consistently, what Google is saying, toward their configured target rather than recent performance when the target is less efficient. So this was their big limited by budget update that was in the US. It was implemented on August 17th, and this applied across search, shopping, PMAX, demand gen and travel. And Google began showing account notices for it a while ago, but now we’re starting to see obviously the changes in campaigns. And our take is just please watch these campaigns. We’re watching them closely. You might see some big changes in your auction insights. So from competitors, you might start seeing some keywords or search terms rather in there that you maybe didnt see there before. And I’ve seen a couple instances of really high CPCs where previously they should be thinking the $5 range. I’ve seen maybe a $20 CPC. So just watch it carefully and make sure your campaigns are still being efficient and obviously adjust your automated targets like your TROAS or TCPA if it’s not working up to your expectations.

Next update. So Google expanded AI max experiments and they let performance planner update live campaigns. So this was a follow-up to AI Max testing and control updates we’ve covered in many previous click briefs. On October 20th, Google announced three separate changes, not necessarily campaign changes, but overall changes here. So there’s multi-campaign testing. So Google plans to roll out new AB testing during September that will let advertisers test different budgets and ROI targets across multiple search campaigns at once. There are brand and location controls. So Google says advertisers can now run AI max experiments while keeping specific brand and location settings enabled. Brand inclusions and exclusions added during setup apply to both the control and treatment arms. Google’s current experiment documentation does not explain how location controls are configured within the test. And the last one is performance planner implementation. Advertisers cannot review suggested budget or bid target changes, remove individual campaigns from the change set, and apply the remaining adjustments directly to live campaigns. Changes take effect immediately and can be monitored or undone through bulk actions. So AI experiment defaults to require attention. The treatment arm automatically enables search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion. Advertisers can adjust supported campaign level settings during setup, but some ad group level controls must be changed after the experiment is created. So our take is a lot of these features should have really been there in the beginning. So the fact that you can set up experiments under the conditions that you would actually want the campaign to run makes sense. But again, whenever you’re doing this, just review the treatment arm instead of just accepting the default combination of the expanded matching, the generated text and landing page selection. I do love the multi-campaign testing. I think that’s awesome to be able to test multiple campaigns. And I do like that Performance Planner has the one click application as a shortcut. I don’t know how often we’ll be using all of these, but it’s definitely nice to have.

The next high impact update that I found really interesting is GA4 adds custom conversion windows and a campaign data import validation report. So our July click brief cover GA4 is new currency requirement for campaign data, but on August 10th, they launched a validation report that helps identify non-Google campaigns missing useful cost click or impression data, and it allows teams to review previously imported campaign data. On August 11th, they added a custom integer lookback window from one to 90 days for click through conversions and from one to 30 days for engaged view conversions. Engaged view conversions were previously fixed at three days while click through windows were limited to six preset options. So our take is I think it’s nice to be able to change how channels look in reporting without making actual changes to attribution. So it’s really another way to look at your data within GA4. And I love the fact that GA4 is making some updates to where it serves almost like a diet triple whale to be able to see non-Google campaign performance. I think that’s huge. And the fact that you can import the data and then validate it is also huge. So you might see that cost isn’t coming in correctly or maybe you’re missing an important part of it. So I am here for anything in GA4 that makes it more usable and how it should operate in 2026 because there was a while there where GA4 just didn’t feel that great for paid besides everything in the Google ecosystem. 

So if you can start grading Meta and you can start grading TikTok or Pinterest right out of GA4, that’s absolutely huge. And the fact that you can change your view attribution is amazing because some of those platforms are very heavy in views or engaged views. So I’m definitely here for these changes. The next change, and we’re kind of seeing this in the industry a lot when Google makes an update, Microsoft does it shortly after, but Microsoft is now making AI Max generally available and it’s going to be the default for new search campaigns. I haven’t made a new Microsoft search campaign since this came out, so I can’t 100% confirm that it’s going to be in every account, but it is going to be available soon in every account. So just be ready for it. Just know that whenever you’re launching a search campaign or really any campaign across Meta, Google, Microsoft, there’s going to be a ton of settings that you want to toggle off, especially a lot of the AI ones. 

I will say that AI Max does work in certain situations. So I’m not an AI Max hater by any means. I’m usually pretty early to trying these features, but just be aware of what you’re doing. If you have a really limited budget and you really know what keywords you want to target, you’re probably not going to want all these features on because it could waste your budget. But with that being said, in some of these platforms like we just talked about, you’re getting some actual features to test AI Max. So test it. I don’t know if Microsoft has all those testing features, probably not, but just don’t just launch a campaign without looking through every setting. That’s kind of a go-to on the granular team is when you’re launching something, literally look at everything because when you’re launching something today, it is not going to be the same as when you launched it a week ago, certainly not the same as two months ago because everything’s changing. 

Next, I’ll look at some of the medium impact updates that I find pretty relevant. I’ll probably just read through some of these headlines. So ChatGPT expands self-service access and campaign controls. So basically it just expanded the ads to a bunch of other countries, which is great. And then it’s added some updated bidding strategies. So I saw that there is a maximize results as an automated bidding strategy, so that’s great. I do like the automated bidding strategies, especially when data is sort of limited, you at least have some sort of control to reign in your campaign. So anytime we get something like this, it’s always worth trying, but just be careful out there.

The next one, so Google’s search language targeting phase out moves into implementation. So we covered this way back in August 2025, so pretty wild that we’re giving you an update on this, but essentially from what we’ve read in September 2026, search ads will be matched based on the language of the ads plus signals about the languages a user understands. So in Performance Max, campaign language settings will stop applying to search inventory, but they will remain for YouTube, display, discover and Gmail. Shopping ads also seem unaffected. My take is, I don’t really have a strong take on this yet. I’m usually a fan of having manual control overrides, but I guess if Google thinks they know what language a person is able to understand and see the ads, then that makes sense. So Google’s been getting better at this type of stuff, and as long as the language matches the user in the end, I don’t have a problem with this. Another update. Let’s see if there’s anything else that I really thought was interesting. So Google, they turned Google tags into full tag manager containers. You can read more about that in the blog, but they’re trying to simplify deployment. But just whenever you’re making changes, just be careful about what you’re actually doing. 

I’m usually a fan of a professional team setting things like this up. Google also announced demand gen, V2C messaging, travel, and multimodal video updates. So V2C is just view through conversion. So we covered this when Google introduced in April, and per Google advertiser communication that was shared publicly in August, it says that the view through conversion bidding will become limited to video assets and will expand to the Google display network, which is interesting. Video only refers to an eligible ad format while display refers to those video ads. Wait, while display refers to where those video ads can run, image view through conversions will no longer influence bidding. This is the actual more important part. It said that in this communication that view through conversions optimization will become the new default for demand gen. So that’s super interesting. We’ve just started really testing the view through conversions on demand gen campaigns. 

So that’s a big shift. If you’re going to be including those, you just have to know that that’s what you’re looking at when you’re looking at conversion performance. You can still break this out and segment the data and see your all conversions and see it broken out. So from that regard, it’s fine. But obviously Google knows that people are viewing ads and especially videos and they’re not always clicking on them and they want to show value there. And honestly, they should. It’s not how we are used to seeing Google operate, but it’s something that we’ll have to get used to. The last one I want to talk about is Google edit AI homepage insights, prompt built dashboards and GA4 benchmarking. So on August 10th, Google announced additional AI analysis and reporting features across Google Ads and Google Analytics. So Google Analytics added AI overviews that summarize notable changes since a user’s last visit. 

The Google Ads homepage added personal AI powered insight cards and a prompt box for generating custom insights. Google Ads also added dashboards that turn text prompts into visual reports and automatically generate real-time summaries. Google says dashboards are coming soon to Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, AskAdvisor can now compare campaign performance against anonymized averages from similar businesses. AskAdvisor, again, the Google Ads Insight cards and Google Ads dashboards are currently in beta for English language accounts. So our take on this, and this is probably the last big update I will cover, is these tools are absolutely fantastic for first pass analysis and to help you uncover things that would normally take a lot of digging. I love using these tools to just see what they’ll come up with to be like, “Hey, how has performance changed over the last week? Or have there been new competitors that have entered the auction?” And sometimes I get pretty good results and sometimes they’re just not good or it says it doesn’t have access to that data or it doesn’t know all the context. 

But the tools are getting better. The peer benchmarks, I haven’t tried this, but very neat, kind of scary that everybody’s worried about data in some of these LLMs, but Google has all your data anyways, so you’re going to be able to benchmark your business against comparison groups. So that’s very interesting. And those are the bigger updates I wanted to cover. I do find the AI watch section of the click brief to be more and more informative and interesting because these things are changing really every day, every week. It’s just a lot. So take a look at the blog, let us know if you have any questions. We live and breathe this stuff every day and AI has become a part of it, whether we like it or not. So yeah, that’s it. Thanks. Bye.