Black Friday 2025 was a bit of a head-scratcher. Year on year, spend rose, impressions fell, but clicks and engagement stayed strong. The data (so far): Source: Optmyzr-connected Google Ads accounts (5,000+ ecommerce, 16,000 lead gen advertisers active both years). Conversion value and ROAS are still coming in — we’ll update when the full picture […]

ChatGPT is currently down for many users of the popular OpenAI service. When you try to ask ChatGPT a question, you likely won’t get a response. OpenAI confirmed the issue on its status page saying, “We’re currently experiencing issues.” OpenAI added, “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We […]

Google is expanding its customer lifecycle tools in Google Analytics with new audience templates and dynamic remarketing features that help you target and re-engage high-value customers more easily. Driving the news. Google rolled out two suggested audience templates in Google Analytics that let you instantly build lifecycle segments: High-Value Purchasers: Built on purchase count or […]

You can now use Circle to Search and Google Lens to detect scammy messages you receive on your phone.

Google rolled out a long-awaited Performance Max (PMax) reporting upgrade, giving advertisers their first clear look at how Search Partners affect campaign results. Driving the news. The update is now live in Google Ads and adds Search Partners to the PMax channel performance tables. Advertisers can now see: How Search Partners contribute to PMax results. […]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued an all-hands “code red” to improve ChatGPT – a move that could delay the company’s advertising plans – according to an internal memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal. Driving the news. Altman told employees the company must urgently improve ChatGPT’s personalization, speed, reliability, and ability to handle a wider […]

Google will shut down three long-running Google Groups forums for advertising developers early next year as it moves all technical support into official channels. Driving the news. Google will stop responding to new posts on Jan. 28. The forums will stay online as read-only archives until later in 2026, when Google plans to disable posting […]

If you entered PPC 20 years ago, testing was scientific, comforting, and one of the biggest reasons to run paid search campaigns. We proudly talked about all the data we collected. You had Ad X and Ad Y. You waited. You declared a winner. You paused the loser. It was a binary world of “Yes” […]

Major SEO platforms, such as Ahrefs and Semrush, along with agencies like Seer Interactive and other leading companies, have released substantial studies that appear to offer definitive answers.  But a closer look reveals something else entirely: nearly every possible narrative about AI search impact has a “study” to support it.  The more I examined the […]

Now that anyone can use AI to generate keywords and spin up a paid search campaign in minutes, it’s easy to assume the hard work is done.  But creating structured, scalable performance still requires a genuine understanding of how search works.  Techniques like n-grams, Levenshtein distance, and Jaccard similarity give search marketers the ability to […]