Industry News

Google Analytics real time reporting seems to be lagging again this morning. I woke up to a ton of complaints on social about the real time reporting reports in GA4 are simply not working as expected.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google held another Google Creator Summit where they invited 7 creators on a fully paid expense trip to their Washington, D.C. office to spend the first two days in some larger Small Business Summit and then day three with Danny Sullivan, Paul Haahr and I believe HJ Kim from the Google Search team.

Google is testing showing a large "Sponsored results" header in the search results that can lead to more search results and grouping various Google search ads together.

Google has announced a new Google Ads search campaign feature named AI Max. Google says AI Max for Search campaigns is a "new, one-click feature suite" that brings you a "suite of targeting and creative enhancements" of "the best of Google AI to your Search campaigns."

Google is testing moving the about results text, where it shows the count of results, to within the search tools menu. So when you click on "Tools" under the search bar, you may find the "about results" section.

Google is testing showing images within the sitelinks carousel in Google Ads and sponsored results. We've seen images in sitelinks before, numerous times, but here is a version of them in the ads extension.

Google has a "new feature," as it labeled it, within Google Merchant Center, for event promotions. This allows you to promote an event, such as a sale, promotion or occasion, that may help you sell product.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Here is a weird one - doing a site command and Google presenting an AI Overview summary of the results. In this case, the AI Overview was dead wrong - which is not all that uncommon - but why show an AI Overview here?