The Click Brief- June 2026

Jeremy Packee and Emily Anderson break down June’s biggest paid media updates, including Google’s AI Max delay, new Smart Bidding controls, OpenAI’s expanding advertising platform, and Meta’s latest AI creative tools. They also discuss Reddit’s growing role in product discovery, new Google Analytics reporting features, and what these changes mean for advertisers navigating an increasingly AI-driven landscape. As always, the conversation focuses on separating platform hype from practical strategies marketers can apply today.

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Top Takeaways

Biggest Relief
Google’s Smart Bidding updates will begin optimizing more aggressively toward target CPA and target ROAS goals for budget-limited campaigns, making it even more important to set realistic bidding targets and monitor performance closely.

Platform to Watch
OpenAI continues expanding its advertising platform with product feed campaigns, signaling that ChatGPT is becoming a legitimate channel for e-commerce advertisers looking to reach users earlier in the buying journey.

Creative Reality Check
Meta continues investing heavily in AI-generated creative, introducing brand memory, improved creative workflows, and collaboration tools. While these features are becoming more capable, advertisers should still review AI-generated assets carefully before publishing.

Reporting Win
Google Analytics introduced cleaner source grouping and expanded reporting integrations, making it easier to organize traffic sources and gain a more complete picture of campaign performance.

Other Platform Updates

• AI Max remains the default setting for new Google Search campaigns
• Google introduced Promotion Mode and expanded Smart Bidding Exploration
• Google added attributed brand searches and Shorts engagement metrics for YouTube campaigns
• Reddit launched Community Intelligence, shopping ads, and AI-assisted ad creation tools
• Microsoft introduced Product Explorer inside Merchant Center
• Google is testing a “Strongest Match” label on select search ads
• Google Analytics now integrates directly with Google Business Profiles
• Amazon introduced Sponsored Brands Gallery for richer branded shopping experiences
• Triple Whale added AI visibility reporting for e-commerce brands

Final Take

June’s updates reinforce a trend that’s becoming impossible to ignore: AI is no longer an emerging feature—it’s quickly becoming the default across every major advertising platform. The opportunity isn’t to automate everything. It’s to understand where these new tools improve efficiency, where they still need human oversight, and how to continue making decisions based on business outcomes instead of platform recommendations.

Episode Transcript

Jeremy: Hello, and welcome to the ClickBrief Podcast.

Emily:     Your monthly download of what’s new and what matters in digital advertising and paid media.

Jeremy: I’m Jeremy Packey here with Emily Anderson.

Emily:     June kept a really similar paid media theme that we’ve been talking about a lot, especially over the last few months here, where platforms are continuously leaning more into AI and automation and more modeled measurement than before, but our goal stays the same to work to validate what’s actually driving business outcomes. Google gave advertisers some breathing room by delaying DSA auto migration to AI Max, but AI Max is still becoming the default path for new search campaigns. At the same time, Google expanded bidding and promotion controls. OpenAI moved further into e-commerce with product feed ads. Meta and TikTok continued building AI creative workflows and Reddit leaned harder into community-driven product discovery. A lot of these updates are genuinely useful, but none of them are said it and forget it. That’s been a common theme that Jeremy and I have continued to talk about. So we’ll keep going through it, update you, and then give our two cents on how we would approach the update and recommendations on how you can continue to move forward.

But some exciting things going on here in June, so let’s get in here.

Jeremy: Me and Emily are talking through a wall, which is super funny. I don’t think this will make a podcast, but it really makes me laugh.

Emily:  It might make the podcast. Yeah, it could. People should know context. If we seem off, it’s because we’re segregated by a wall.

Jeremy: Every time I look at Emily, I look at a big image that basically says every day I’m hustling. And then it’s Emily and I talking through a wall, a glass wall, but it is a wall. So it’s kind of fun. I feel like I’m already used to it and it’s kind of funny.

Emily:  It’s giving prison interrogation to me. I’m in a foam room. Emily’s going to absolutely lose it if she has to talk more AI. We got to put her in a foam room. But the

Jeremy: Audio qualities allegedly, according to Chris on our team, is top-notch doing it this way. So you guys will have to let us know.

Emily: Anyway. So

Jeremy: We’re going to start off with some of the high impact updates. So Emily already talked about this briefly, but Google delayed the DSA auto migration. They pushed it back instead of turning your DSA, your dynamic search edge into AI Max. It was supposed to happen in September of 2026, but it looks like now it’s going to happen in February 2027. So I think this was probably just due to some of the pushback because a lot of people didn’t want to turn off those DSA campaigns. That was kind of the original AI Max with a ton of control.

So I think this is a good thing. They didn’t say they weren’t going to do it, but at least you have a little bit more time. You don’t have to worry about doing it during the holiday. I feel like the time would be now if you’re going to make the decision before holiday, because I can’t imagine how scary that would be to do it closer to Black Friday because you don’t have the visibility into some of this stuff. I know, Emily, in the notes, you like that I said Google needs to provide you with more reporting on this. We have no idea besides some of the guidelines that we’re putting into these AI Max campaigns, what’s really showing up because allegedly it’s different depending on the user.

Emily: Totally. Yeah, I think they got pushback on this because if you’re running a DSA campaign, I feel like you’re more of a OG paid search advertiser. You’re not necessarily an amateur who’s just kind of running ads. And DSA used to be

Jeremy: Scary back in the day.

Emily: Totally. And that’s what I mean. You know what DSA is, you know how powerful it can be. So to lose that for AI Max, I can see why. The pushback they got is probably because the people who are aware of DSA know a lot about paid ads. Yeah, my biggest thing is obviously glad to have a little bit more time. Like you mentioned, I still think it’s probably something worth testing and starting to look at because it’s going to happen.

Jeremy: 100%.

Emily: I can’t see it not at this point.

Jeremy: There’s no point in waiting unless you want to wait till after the holiday. I get that.

Emily:  Exactly. Yeah, totally. Or yeah, depending on your seasonality. The thing about this update was obviously search defaulting to AI Max on. I

Jeremy: Forgot to mention that. Yeah,

Emily: That

Jeremy: Still is. Did I not put that in here?

Emily: No, you did put that in there because I laughed. I’m like, okay, now when I start a new campaign, okay, search partners off, AI Max off, especially if you’re starting from… Some accounts do warrant testing AI max. I’m not here anti-AI Max, but to have it as a default is sneaky. I’m just picturing in my mind now how many accounts I’m going to audit where it’s just tanking and just totally out of control. And it’s like, oh, AI Max is on for this account that’s not meant to run AIMax.

Jeremy: Especially with the looser, basically you have no keywords then and it’s going to expand and you don’t really know exactly what your ad copy is. That’s kind of scary.One example, I might’ve even brought this up in a previous podcast, but for a company that we do ads for, one of our goals is to not push ads for people to buy at retailers, but to buy online. And we noticed that AI Max, and this was through a third-party tool, literally made one of our headlines find a retailer. And that was the exact opposite of what we wanted to do. We caught it right away and it’s fine and there are ways of doing that. But yeah, in regards to it being in the new campaigns, that is pretty sneaky. But I will say I’m not an AI Max hater. If you have the budget, I really like it.

Emily: Budget and data, I would say. And

Jeremy: There’s different ways of turning

Emily: It on. Conversion and measurement tracking is set up. I just know there’s so many people out there who don’t have that. Oh yeah. And they’re just running Google campaigns because their boss told them to run Google campaigns and Google is just going to rake it in.

Jeremy: And you know what I found out? I was in an account today and I was like, “Oh, that’s weird. My branded search keywords are becoming more expensive.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s weird. All these competitors are now bidding on my brand.”

Emily: And

Jeremy: I was like, “When did this happen? Oh, April when they started pushing AI Max super hard.

Emily: Yeah, that’s actually a really good nugget. If you’re seeing increased CPCs, especially on brand, it’s probably because a lot of AI max we’ve seen is a lot.

Jeremy: We went up like 30 to 40% in cost. I mean, granted, we’re talking pennies in grand scheme of things, but that adds up where it’s like if your average brand CPC, which I still love, by the way, running manual brand, if your brand CPC is five cents, which if that sounds low to you, it is, but it should be pretty low depending on the brand. That’s on the very low side. But we went from five cents to nine cents and 10 cents, and that’s a hundred percent increase in some instances. So it happened right around that time. So very interesting. But yeah, Google, we want more reporting in this. We do like it.

Emily: At Google. A little bit more. The other search terms box. Or the previews. I haven’t been seeing that in regular search campaigns now. A lot less visibility into search terms and more impressions and clicks and even conversions going into the other search terms box, which is unknown.

Jeremy: Next update. So smart bidding exploration is expanding with availability now for Performance Max campaigns without a product feed. And it’s now in beta for shopping campaigns and PMAX campaigns with a product feed. So Google also announced promotion mode and beta for search and performance max campaigns. Promotion mode lets advertisers schedule temporary changes to ROAS tolerance and add extra daily budget during peak sales periods like flash sales or product launches. Google also shared a backend bidding target optimization update, which by the way, this is catching fire this week. We were early to seeing some of this,

Emily: But

Jeremy: This is kind of a big deal. Emily and I discussed this in Slack for a long time and the implications of it. But essentially this change applies to search, shopping PMAX, demand gen, anything using target-based bidding strategies, including TCPA, target ROAS, max conversions, max conversion value. Yeah, it’s

Emily: Almost every –

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. But essentially the goal that Google is saying is to more consistently optimize towards the stated CPA or ROAS target when a campaign becomes limited by budget. So think of it, I mean, this is going to affect the target CPA and target ROAS campaigns. So that’s really interesting. Essentially what it’s doing is, let’s just say you have a target ROAS of a 200% and your campaign’s limited by budget and you’re actually getting an 800%. For some reason, Google is now going to try to go after the 200%. I’m sure there’s more. I mean, maybe there’s a more logical explanation, but maybe their logical explanation is we’re just going to give you what you ask for. Where before you would just say, I’m just going to put 200% to be aggressive and I’m probably going to get something much higher.

Emily: Or build in flexibility. Yes. Yeah, like Jeremy said, Jeremy and I have been talking about this for a little bit now because what was interesting is this was released very shortly after Google Marketing Live. It was not talked about at Google Marketing Live. It was almost introduced as a –

Jeremy: Oh, they were

Emily: Doing this. A side note. And we were immediately like, “Huh, that’s a pretty big change.” And then we just kind of read it. Well, we were trying to connect the dots. And we were like, “Huh.”

Jeremy: Flexible bidding,

Emily: Flexible matching. And then we’re like, “Well, huh.” So we’ve been watching this pretty closely here and the turnaround time is quick, mid-August for this to come through. So yeah, basically the takeaway from this is if you’re running one of these bid strategies and your campaign is limited by budget and you’re overachieving whatever goal you set, just be prepared to start seeing performance almost get worse.

Jeremy: And we were trying to connect it and we got really deep in the conspiracies and Google, we love you. Yeah, we put it into a hat on. Okay, so the bidding strategies are becoming more loose. The match types are more loose. AI max is happening. AI mode is happening. There’s all this extra inventory and now you’re going to be going after if you’re achieving a better ROAS or you’re going after a lower ROAS. Well, Google’s going to probably expand what it goes after and it might be filling – It has to. Yeah, it might be filling that other inventory. And then we also have, like I said, AI Max coming into play where it’ll be writing the ad copy and there’s the new list ads and the new, I forget all the names of them, like the Gemini powered shopping ads. There’s just a lot of things sort of happening and it seems like a convenient way to fill maybe some of that inventory.

But these are campaigns that are limited by budget, which what campaign isn’t limited by budget with all the kind of expansion now?

Emily: Well, that’s the thing. Yeah. You could almost say any campaign. So definitely something I’m going to be keeping an eye on. Absolutely, you

Jeremy: Should.

Emily: I think this is huge news. Because I love, love, love, love a target ROAS or a target CPA campaign. And I intentionally bid in some ways to allow flexibility and then almost to not hit that goal in a sense if that sounds… So yeah, I –

Jeremy: And just be clear, I think we maybe didn’t say this very clearly. I know they’ve been changing the names of this stuff, but this is target ROAS, target CPA, or they previously, I forget what it’s called even now, but it’s like, or maximize conversions with the target or maximize conversion or value with the target. So there has to be a target.

Emily: With a target. With target. It’s just like max conversions. Correct. Because you don’t have anything. Maybe I wasn’t clear on that. Yeah, no, that’s a good clarifying. So yeah, really the ones with a target.

Jeremy: The other stuff I think is cool. I mean, the smart bidding exploration, that’s just interesting. That’s an interesting thing if you want to test that out because that was only on certain campaigns. I think it was only on search for a while where you could have a tolerance, which is kind of weird. You could say you want to target ROAS of 400, but I think I forget what the max or minimum is, but you could say maybe with a tolerance down to 300 or whatever, which is just another kind of sneaky way to expand, I don’t know, expand spend maybe or impressions and clicks. But I also like the promotion mode I think is really cool. Typically you would do something like that with rules, but I love the idea of just being able to loosen the tolerance or increase the spend right in the campaign versus maybe setting up the rules, which are probably intimidating.

At least with Google, you can test them and you can see, oh, this rule is actually going to work and notify me.

Emily: Well, now the system or algorithm is seeing that you have that intent too versus just one day changing it. And so maybe it makes it a little smarter because it knows that you’re about to ramp up or ramp down depending. So you kind of give it a schedul heads-up versus a rule. I don’t think it was working or communicating with the algorithm that way. It was just simply making the change.

Jeremy: And previously, I feel like I haven’t done this as much, but I’m talking, I don’t know, 2020 through 2022, there was that adjustment where you could say, I think I’m going to get a better conversion rate during

Emily: Black

Jeremy: Friday. That’s still available, but I feel like these campaigns, to your point, are now smart enough where they know it’s Black Friday, they know it’s Cyber Monday. They know to spend more in those days. So I don’t know, I think this is cool because it provides some control.

Emily: That’s a big update all around.That’s a loaded update.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: There are a couple of components.

Jeremy: Yeah, I kind of combined a bunch of updates into this one.

Emily:I mean, that’s fine. I mean, it’s all around the general theme of what’s going on with bid strategy.

Jeremy: Absolutely. And I feel like we’ll move on to the next one. Emily, you’ll probably be better at talking about this one than me, but OpenAI added product feed campaigns to its ads manager and beta. Retail advertisers can upload a product feed, connect catalog data to campaigns and create ads from feed-based product information instead of building ads item by item. So OpenAI says product feeds can keep product titles, descriptions, prices, availability, images and destination draws up to date. A product set can filter which products are eligible to serve. Any product ad template can fill the ad title description and price from whatever eligible product is selected. You’re running OpenAI ads right now? Correct, for Granular. We launched our first ones. I’m not running these yet. I know it’s available. We’re working on getting some clients up to date, but I think this is good. I still love using ChatGPT.

I think it’s a great product. I use it every day. I mean, I use Cloud stuff too, but I still like

Emily: OpenAI. I like OpenAI. It’s kind of the first one I went with. I still like it. But yeah, we decided to launch it for Granular. It’s a $20 a day, or it’s 25, I can’t remember, 20 or $25 a day minimum. We are running a ClickBid based campaign and we’re not running product feed. So it’s been an interesting experience. It’s actually kind of funny how limited reporting is on it so far. I was actually laughing. I sent it to Jordan and Steve here for their monthly report, how hilariously simple the graph is they made. But we also have a coworker, Justin, who is launching the product feed campaign for a client. Oh, you were actually off, Jeremy, when he talked about this on Tuesday. But he mentioned how he just straight up uploaded the feed into ChatGPT and he couldn’t get to serve, and he figured it was a formatting issue.

He had not asked ChatGPT yet how they wanted format. Oh, that’d be the first thing. Yeah. But they didn’t provide any documentation that he could find. Oh, wow. I still think there are some kinks working through the system, but I definitely think if you’re an e-comm and willing to test this, I think it’s definitely worth it. We have a free guide now on the granular website. Oh, perfect. I think I

Jeremy: Just saw

Emily: That. For getting your feed AI shopping feed ready. Yeah. It’s a blog

Jeremy: Post on the site.

Emily:It’s not a blog post, it’s actually a guide you can download. It’s our first lead generation offer on the page. Love it. But it talks about basically how to make your feed strong. And at the core, it’s what you would do for Merchant Center and anything else and more to come there. But yeah, it’s an exciting update. I’m still not seeing conversions as an options. We talked about that a few months back how that campaign type was coming. Check today, not available, but product feed is just still very limited on how to set it up. You have to be okay with it being a test budget. Right. It’s

Jeremy: Funny that the most advanced –

Emily:Right. But for Granular, this is our first month running it and we are using some impression-based tagging as well. And we can see the pathway of that someone did view us on ChatGPT and then go to our website for a certain amount of time. It’s been interesting. So I think if you have the money to test it, give it a go.

Jeremy: And I feel like I know there’s a bunch of competitors and there’s some data that these LLMs are growing, but maybe ChatGPT is losing some ground, but the market’s growing, so it’s technically still getting bigger. But I live, maybe I shouldn’t say where I live in the podcast, but I live a little bit outside of Milwaukee and ChatGPT is what everybody knows. Nobody knows Gemini. Nobody knows Claude. My friends who work in GT. Smaller town vibes. It’s like I use ChatGPT for everything. I use it for this, I use it for this. And that’s interesting

Emily: To me. 100%. My friends who don’t work in marketing, one, they couldn’t tell you. Some of them don’t even know what ChatGPT is, but for the most part, if they know anything or if they use anything, it’s ChatGPT for sure. You

Jeremy: Can always tell when somebody first finds it out by the structure of their text or their message or

Emily: Something. Oh my gosh, I know. My husband just figured out how to use the image generation on ChatGPT. I’m like, Jack, you got to quit. It looks like you’re wearing makeup now. And he’ll try to make a small tweak to an image like, remove this background. I can’t even remember, but it was like – That’s so good. Why does it look like you’re literally about to sing for green days? Awesome. It’s an eyeliner on.

Jeremy: You got to check that prompt.

Emily: That

Jeremy: Might be on purpose.

Emily: Yeah. Oh my gosh, that’s funny. But yeah, so I think ChatGPT is still extremely relevant. Being able to go in at 20, $25 a day I think is pretty affordable. So I would give it a go. And I mean for us at Granular, we obviously like to test things before we recommend them to clients. So we wanted to be one of the first ones in there and get a feel for what’s going on. So we’re learning there and then we’re going to just continue to roll that out to our clients who especially express interest in running ads.

Jeremy: It’s going to be a player for sure. And it’s exciting whenever there’s a new one that seems like it might work. I feel like before this, TikTok was the big one where it’s like, “Oh, this actually works.” For me, Pinterest a little bit right now is better than expected. But yeah, this is definitely one to consider.

Emily: And people are excited about this. CEOs hearing, “Oh, we’re showing up on LLMs.”

Jeremy: So next one, next update here. So at, how do I say this? How do you say this festival? Is it Cannes Lions?

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy: Is he sure? Am I going to get roasted?

Emily: I don’t know.

Jeremy: All right,

Emily: Don’t roast for this. You can see obviously we don’t work for a huge, huge agency. Yeah, because we’re not at

Jeremy: This place.

Emily: Conglomerate because we don’t go to this.

Jeremy: I feel we’re better than them though.

Emily: Yeah. Well, we’re more authentic. Judding. So

Jeremy: At the Cannes –

Emily: We don’t want to go there.

Jeremy: At the Cannes Lions 2026, Meta announced several AI advertising updates designed to move more of the creative workflow inside Meta’s system. This includes brand memory, enhanced text generation, translation tools, campaign collaboration features, and a broader push towards AI-assisted creative generation testing and deployment. Meta also continued expanding its creator tooling and included a more consolidated creator marketing hub designed to help brands and creators work together more easily. So I just think I put in here, this is kind of where paid social is heading. Meta doesn’t want to just optimize the media by it, wants to help create the ad, translate it, test it, personalize it and decide which version each user should see. So that was a lot of Andromeda. And this is every other platform right now. Creative diversity is super important. But I found a really funny, I mean, not funny for the company, but kind of a funny example.

Did you see the REI bike that was made? So obviously this was made with AI. So what I think probably happened is some – Wait,

Emily: I‘m sorry, this is an ad REI ran? You’re using this tool? Okay. No, I didn’t hear about

Jeremy: That. It just is related to this tool, so I put it in here.

So REI basically created a gravel bike photo and it was a Meta ad, and essentially the ad had, it was clearly AI made. Yu couldn’t really read whatever the logo or whatever it was on the bike, the paint text on the actual bike. But what was even more crazy is it put handlebars on the seat. So it’d almost be like if you could ride it this way and then you could turn around and then ride it with the seat. So it was clearly AI made and they got absolutely obliterated on social because you got to think their target market, it’s not like –

Emily: Oh, it’s like save the water.

Jeremy: Well, it’s not somebody getting their first bike.

Emily: Well, I’m thinking to the environmentalists who support REI. I didn’t even think

Jeremy: Of that angle. I was thinking of the bikers that are like,

Emily: “This is

Jeremy: Offensive to us because you think we’re going to buy a bike with this image.”

Emily: Oh, I immediately go to REI is supposed to be for the environment. And obviously LLMs take a bad hit for these data centers and the water they’re using. So making that portion

Jeremy: Of the population. That’s a whole nother layer to it. But I think it’s funny how easy it would be to make this mistake. It’d be so easy because I’m not kidding. Anytime you go on Meta and you make any sort of update, I swear it’s like adding an AI product feed or it’s adding a bunch of related images for a promotion that was successful but ran two months ago. Totally. So this is such an easy mistake to make if you’re not looking at every single setting in the ad platform. And also, maybe they did make it and they thought it looked good and they just didn’t notice it. This just goes to show that you got to audit all of this stuff coming out of it

Emily: Because

Jeremy: I’ve had some crazy stuff. I’ve showed you this image before, but I had Meta put a gun in one of its AI created photos.

Emily: Which is crazy. That’s crazy for a lot of reasons.

Jeremy: Right. I will say it’s gotten better than ever. The AI images and Meta for some brands I honestly think could be usable, but it will for sure do wrong variations. It’ll look very wild. You’ll have a car still with a really weird paint job or maybe half of a person on it or something. That’s becoming more rare. But these features, in my opinion, you just cannot turn them on and let it rip. You can’t. I do a lot of – Unless you have a brand that’s like, “We don’t care and this is our shtick,” or something.

Emily: Which I really want to just get my hands on running something. But I work with a lot of B2B clients and it’s not a good fit right now. It’s a very stock photo-y type of deal. You

Jeremy: Know what I say does work really well and I don’t know if you’ve used it, but the little mini animation it can make. For instance, we have a car client and what it’ll do is it’ll just almost do a little pan of the car. It

Emily: Actually

Jeremy: Can figure it out. And the other one which I really like is we

Emily: Often – A moving image.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s just a really slow moving image.

Emily: That’s what was working well on Google too. If they just did moving image, that was actually pretty good because it kept the core of your actual image and just added subtle movement.

Jeremy: And the other one I really like, and I forget what it’s called, is if you have basic text on a pretty basic image, Meta can very easily pull the text off and just add it in as a video,

Emily: Kind

Jeremy: Of like an animation.

Emily: Oh, yep. That’s what Google nana banana when I was testing.That worked well too. Yeah,

Jeremy: And it looks good.

Emily: It’s just when it was trying to come up with stuff from scratch or in this case, that’s –

Jeremy: So I hope I’m not coming off as like, don’t use these tools. I think there’s ones

Emily: You can use. You have to test it. If anything, you’re coming off with cut the REI, social manager a break.

Jeremy: I think you should because

Emily: I bet it – Very complex. I bet it was on

Jeremy: Accident.

Emily: Yeah. Well, there’s no way he, she, they looked at that and they were like, “That’s good.”

Jeremy: Yeah. But they got absolutely roasted online. It was a big thing.

Emily: Oh, I’m sure.

Jeremy: Yeah. And the bike is, when you look at it, you might not notice it immediately, but when you notice it, you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s

Emily: Pretty bad.” How many people are like, “Wow, what a cool bike.”

Jeremy: There were some funny comments. They’re like, “Oh, that’d be cool if they made something, you could ride it both ways or something. It’d be two different bikes. I will say that the brand memory is pretty cool. So Meta has the AI built into it. It was Manis. I never released this as an update, but that Manis integration got shut down by China, I believe. Meta no longer is able to buy it, so they’re actually separating the company again. And Manis is not going to be part of Meta. Hopefully I’m not wrong on that, but I’m pretty up-to-date

Emily: On that situation. That is what I am under the understanding. Obviously, this stuff changes daily and then depending on the source you see, but that is my understanding of it. And that is also why I think they made this announcement and shift. Because

Jeremy: They still need to do that. Yeah,

Emily: They need to do that. Because Google AskAdvisor’s getting

Jeremy: Better.

Emily: Exactly. But if Manis was still a part of the picture, this would’ve been more released under I feel like that umbrella.

Jeremy: Absolutely.

Emily: So the fact that it wasn’t and what we’ve heard.

Jeremy: But brand memory is huge. The fact that you can actually teach –

Emily: Yeah, that’s cool.

Jeremy: I guess the LLM in your Meta account. I just think of so many instances where this is helpful because I do a lot of event-based ads. And for instance, if we do the same event every July, but this year it was July 15th and last year was July 5th, that can skew data huge. And if Manus, or not Manis, I got to stop thinking Manus with Meta. But if Meta knows that, then it can actually give me some insight and it knows the context and it’s like, oh, actually your conversions aren’t down. This event is on a different day. And the fact that I don’t have to go in and be like, here’s the entire history of everything is huge.

Let’s think of some other updates we want to talk about here. So this one’s kind of neat. Reddit expanded its community intelligence ad strategy. So community intelligence, that’s something I kind of had to look up, but essentially the way they’re branding it is Reddit Community Intelligence, this is right off the Reddit site, is an interpretation layer of insight derived from the raw data and signals of Reddit communities and conversations. It combines Reddit’s first-party signals with machine learning and AI to extract meaning and make the signal usable. So my understanding of this community intelligence is instead of just relying only on AI, it’s using the human conversations on Reddit and helping you target ads and interests based on that. And I will say, I don’t know if you guys have ever used, I believe it’s called Reddit Answers. You should check out Reddit Answers. Sometimes this is on a tangent right now, but Reddit Answers is little AI ask thing and it bases it off of the Reddit conversation.

So if you ever want to try to understand what do people think about your brand on Reddit, you should just look at it because you might be shocked because it’s pretty unfiltered. I’ve seen some pretty rowdy answers in there. If people hate your brand, Reddit will say stuff like unfiltered, I’ll just say. It’ll pick up unfiltered results. And Reddit is often used as a source in LLM, so it might be a good place to

Emily: Figure out – Reddit’s having a moment here in 2026. That’s a really good tidbit. I did not know about this Reddit answers, and I just looked it up here and it is interesting. It basically looks like an LLM and you ask it a question. It’s

Jeremy: Pretty cool.

Emily: That is fun. Sometimes if I can’t sleep at night or if I – Oh, do same thing. I already know where you’re going. I read Google Reviews. If you want to go down a funny rabbit hole, you just go to Alcatraz’s. And people just leave the funniest – And the fake ones are

Jeremy: Funny and

Emily: There’s layers to it. Oh my gosh. There’s some so funny things you can look up on Google reviews.

Jeremy: And there’s sometimes jokes about jokes like you had to have watched this show or done this. Yeah, it’s an inside

Emily: Joke. There’s so many layers to memes

Jeremy: Right now.

Emily: Oh my gosh. Yes. Yeah. So now you’ve opened my eyes to a whole new rabbit Hole.

Jeremy: Look up your brand. Look up the brands you manage. You might be surprised. No, this is important. I will say I love Reddit. A lot of people complain in Reddit too. So So don’t think that that’s 100% what your brand is, but also be aware of if people are talking about your brand like that in Reddit and people are using tools that use Reddit as a source or even just Reddit in general, you should, I don’t know, look into ways of getting – It might be a good

Emily: Place to get organic content ideas too, or even running paid blog media posts. When I used to work in – house, usually the best type of content for your website are answers to questions people are asking. So that’s a fun little tidbit.

Jeremy: But basically Reddit is doing shopping list ads, which it’s servicing products alongside relevant conversations where users are already comparing options. It says there’s a freeform ad generator that uses a brand’s website and related Reddit conversations to create more Reddit native ad variations and Reddit or highlights, which lets brands showcase positive user posts or summaries about their company or products inside ads. So I mean, it reminds me of some of the stuff Google’s doing with Gemini, but this is kind of in a human-led sort of almost social-like platform. Cool. Just some of the other updates, these are more like the medium and lower impact. We’re just kind of going to blaze through some of these. Emily really liked this one. Google Analytics added a new source group field that consolidates messy traffic sources into cleaner reporting categories. I love so much. It’s pretty cool.

Emily: Mainly because I am like, I don’t like to admit this, but I am very type B. I push to be type A and organized at work. I have to stretch that muscle. But I think at my core, I’m more type B, but I have gotten more type A over time and I try to be more type A at work, try to be very organized. One thing I’m notoriously bad at is UTM naming conventions. And it’s not like anything super off, but I’ll label it Facebook somewhere, FB somewhere, or IG Meta. So the fact that these exist now, especially even for accounts we take over and maybe – Oh, for sure. They have a different naming. So the fact that you can make these groups now, I just think yay.

Jeremy: I still think you’re

Emily: Type A, but

Jeremy: I hear what you’re saying.

Emily: I know. And I think maybe I am over time, but when I was in high school, I was definitely type B. I did not have folders, Jeremy. I was the kid who just like –

Jeremy: We’re getting heavy insights into early Emily.

Emily: Yeah, here’s the background. Wait, you said

Jeremy: You didn’t have folders?

Emily:     No, I would just take papers and put it in my backpack. And you’re not in jail right now? I’m just kidding. No, for real. There’s probably people that are like, wow, she’s on this podcast. But no, for real, I didn’t have folders. I don’t know.

Jeremy: No folders is wild.

Emily: No folders is wild. Loose

Jeremy: Paper in a backpack is wild.

Emily: Yeah, just craziness. And

Jeremy: Now by the way, she’s so organized, so this is why

Emily: I’m laughing. I’ve done a 180 in my life and I don’t know. I also have dyslexia, so I think I had to learn what works for me. And my biggest thing is another tidbit is I don’t really like using Basecamp either. Interesting. I use it to assign other people tasks, but if I get a task, I write it in my notebook.

Jeremy: Oh, yeah. I still kind of am

Emily: Hybrid, but

Jeremy: I try to use

Emily: The digital

Jeremy: Versions way more.

Emily: Yeah. But I’ve come a long way since no folder, Emily, in high school. But I just want to shout out Google Analytics for this update. Yeah, it’s a great one. Because that makes no folder Emily happy because that feels like progress. So I compare my journey to theirs.

Jeremy: Love it. So other updates, Google announced two new measurement updates for YouTube brand campaigns. Short actions are now included in budget optimization and reporting columns for video view campaigns. Opted into shorts. Google also made attributed brand searches available globally as Google ads… Wow. Google also made attributed brand searches available globally as a Google Ads reporting metric. So that’s for reach and view campaigns and I think demand gen as well. Probably. Yeah, you have to reach out to your rep to get it. Yeah, just reach out to a rapper, us, and we’ll reach out to the rep. And we’re also trying to get this in all of our accounts. I think it’s cool. I like the attributed brand searches because –

Emily: I think more to come here. And this is just kind of setting up for a bigger update we’ll probably talk about.

Jeremy: Yeah. But one thing I like about it is you’ll get some insight into if your video campaigns are resulting in – Brand searches. Brand searches. Yeah. So yeah, I like

Emily: It. Which is good because it is sometimes hard to prove YouTube value because you don’t necessarily see a lot of direct conversions come through those campaigns or historically it’s been more challenging. I know now with how people are measuring attribution is more and more different. But I remember even five years ago it was really hard to prove the value of a YouTube campaign.

Jeremy: Absolutely.

Emily: So this is a good step in the right direction.

Jeremy: And then I’m going to cherry-pick some of the other ones that I

Emily: Find

Jeremy: The most interesting. There are a lot of other updates we’re not going to cover on here,

Emily: But – Some of them are kind of boring.

Jeremy: Yeah, just mak sure to check the blogs. Yeah, they might be important to you, but one of the ones that I like is Microsoft Advertising Launch Product Explorer and Merchant Center. So this tool gives advertisers a searchable view of their product catalog, including which products are active, serving, and performing. This is something we’ve basically had in Google forever. I cannot believe it took this long to get to Microsoft, but I love whenever Microsoft Merchant Center gets any sort of update because it is like 2018 up in there right now in general. And right now it feels like we’re maybe in 2019. What

Emily: Do you think the Microsoft conference room is like? Do you think they just have a board of here’s the stuff that Google has that we don’t? What’s our initiative this quarter? Let’s just pick one. We don’t have to come up with fresh ideas. We literally just have to just do the script. Which

Jeremy: Google ideas is best? Don’t sleep on Microsoft totally though. There’s definitely still some conversions to be had there. But yeah, I’m just happy this happened because it was kind of wild that you couldn’t even get a picture of the product. You had to know what SKU aligned and look at the product title. Just seeing a picture of the product in Merchant Center is amazing for Microsoft. Another update. So I saw this, I believe this is from Jenny Mac. Is it Jenny Marvin? Sorry, this is from Jenny Marvin on LinkedIn I saw she was talking about this.

So Google is testing or they were testing a strongest match or strong match label on some of the search ads. So the label is intended to help users identify ads that Google believes are especially relevant to their query based on existing ad quality and relevant signals. So it’s kind of interesting. I don’t know if it’s going to actually happen or if they just tried this test, but it’s going to influence what you click on or the average person if it’s like, this is the best match to your ad. Totally. That would make position number one really the most important because there obviously were strategies I think of personal injury attorneys and stuff where it’s like we want to be at the top, but we know if we’re in the top two to three, we’re fine and then we don’t have to pay for one. You’re just kind of in that mix.

But if it starts showing stuff where it’s like, this is the strongest match, what a win for position one.

Emily: Yeah. I think this is a smart move off Google’s part. I think people are going to –

Jeremy: You

Emily:Really want to be a number one. You want to be number one. Because

Jeremy: If it’s

Emily: Like – Yeah, and I’m assuming I wrote a note here, I’m assuming quality score is going to be a large part of that as well in how really making sure your keywords are reflected in your keywords or non-keywords. Or what

Jeremy: Are you opted into? Yeah, what are

Emily: You opting into? How are you going to be the strongest

Jeremy: Match if you don’t have the ad text creation on

Emily: From Google?

Jeremy: It’s kind of like –

Emily: In a strong website. These

Jeremy: Companies are very good at pushing you without saying you have to do

Emily: Something. Yeah. But I just think the way humans are starting to… We want the answer now. We don’t want to look through a bunch of websites. I want the go to LLM. I want it to tell me this. Okay, now if I’m on Google and it’s telling me this is the best website for me to go to, okay, done. I’m going there.

Jeremy: I would click on that.

Emily: Me too. If I was

Jeremy: Like, I want to take a family vacation, this is the best place to take a family. I’m like,

Emily: Okay – Sign me up then. I’ll click

Jeremy: On it.

Emily: And then all of a sudden you have bedbugs and you’re like, that was that.

Jeremy: Oh, they must have bid high for this.

Emily: Yeah. That’s so funny. Yeah. I’ll be curious if you see one in the wild or if anybody does, send it to me because I have not seen it.

Jeremy: I haven’t seen it in the wild either. I haven’t even seen a lot of the stuff that was announced at Google Marketing Live in AI mode. Those AI mode ads are just like, they’re not in the streets yet. I’m not seeing them. Yeah,

Emily: I’m not seeing

Jeremy: hem either. I know it’s coming, but maybe they’re waiting for more advertisers to get on before they really push them because they’re like, “Well, we don’t want this one ad to win everything.” But I would just have expected by now to see all of the conversational discovery ads and the different answer ads and the Gemini powered shopping ads. I’m just not seeing a ton of that yet.

Emily: Yeah, me either.

Jeremy: Other little one that I think is kind of neat, Google Analytics added a new Google business profile integration. So think the old Google My Business, businesses can now link GA4 properties with Google Business Profiles directly in the admin panel and import local engagement metrics in the GA4. This includes interactions, phone calls, bookings, direction requests, website clicks, messages and menus. That’s just cool. If you have local business, I would just set that up. I think that’s neat.

Emily: Yeah. I saw something too, and I meant to screenshot, and this is probably for a July update, but also being able to add, maybe it wasn’t to GA4, maybe it was the search console, but your social presence as well and that’s going to be able to pull that in. So they’re definitely working on connecting the pieces of the –

Jeremy: GA4 is a big hub. If you’re e-comm, that is your AI hub, but most of your information’s going to be pulled from there. And then obviously your website landing pages and stuff. Totally.

Emily: And Google’s making it available. You pull in MetaSpend and all that. Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, we are doing that

Jeremy: As well. I think we announced that a long time ago, but

Emily: We- We were doing it for, I was testing it out with Granular too. It does pull by the UTMs. So we were having a little bit of an issue because we do some –

Jeremy: Got

Emily: It. Well, Emily with the folders is making the UTMs. No, that wasn’t it. There’s

Jeremy: Direct integrations too if you work

With reps where you can actually get kind of triple whale style reporting where it’s partial attribution. If you look at the details, it does still heavily favor Google in some instances, but it’s still pretty cool. Pretty cool. Anything else we want to talk about here? This one’s interesting. So Amazon Ads Sponsored Brands Gallery. So essentially there’s this new ad type. It’s only available with the pre-buying the reserving share of voice campaigns, but essentially lets advertisers create a more brand forward top of search experience for branded keywords. So instead of the typical sponsored brand ad, this can include lifestyle imagery, custom text, custom headlines, and a brand store call to action in a carousel of three to five brand store categories or collections. So that’s really the difference where before and sponsored these brand ads, you would add your images, but this is actually more of, it’s almost like a brand store ad.

We’re looking into doing this. It’s not like set your daily budget. You do have to pre-buy this inventory, but to protect your brand in Amazon is kind of an important strategy because there are ads everywhere you look in Amazon, even when you don’t think through ads. So I just like that this is an option.

Emily: Yeah, very cool.

Jeremy: And I think that might be the last one. Triville added some AI visibility, which is kind of neat for e-commerce brands. So that’s kind of interesting. They put together a framework of how to audit it. I think that’s kind of neat. Look at the blog to find out more about that. And that’s the ClickBrief podcast for June 2026. This episode was edited by AJa Blue and produced by Emily Anderson and me, Jeremy Baby.