Picture this: someone's watching a YouTube video on a Sunday evening, spots one of your products and thinks "ooh, that looks good". Then they get distracted, close the app and forget all about you. Sound familiar? That gap between "that's nice" and "add to basket" costs online shops a lot of money, and this week Google made another push to close it.
Alongside that, Microsoft has given advertisers more control, Google is cleaning up its search results again, and there are two useful reminders about getting your words right. Here's what matters for your business.
YouTube's September Demand Gen drop is all about turning interest into sales
If you haven't come across Demand Gen yet, it's Google Ads' campaign type for reaching people before they search. It shows your ads on YouTube, Discover and Gmail, where people are browsing rather than actively shopping.
Google has now released its September "Demand Gen Drop", a round-up of new features. The theme is clear: turning discovery into action. The update focuses on smoother experiences and more integrations, so there are fewer steps between someone seeing your product in a video and actually buying it.
Why does this matter to you? Demand Gen has always had an awkward reputation. It's good at getting you seen but harder to link to sales. Every step Google removes between watching and buying makes the campaign type easier to justify, especially if you sell products that look good on screen, like fashion, homeware or gifts.
What this means going forward: if you've written off Demand Gen as a "brand awareness" spend you can't measure, it's worth another look. Just go in with sensible expectations. It works alongside your Shopping and search campaigns rather than replacing them.
Microsoft Ads hands advertisers more control over Performance Max
Over on Microsoft Advertising (the platform behind ads on Bing), the API now offers deeper search reporting and more Performance Max controls. The API is the behind-the-scenes connection that tools and specialists use to manage accounts.
That sounds technical, so here's the plain version. Performance Max is the "let the AI handle it" campaign type, and its biggest weakness has always been how little it shows you. You hand over your budget and product feed, and the machine decides where the money goes. More reporting on which searches trigger your ads, plus more ways to steer the campaign, means less guesswork and less wasted spend.
I'm paying attention to this one. Microsoft often gives advertisers the visibility they've been asking Google for. Bing's audience is smaller, but it can be cheaper, and it tends to skew towards older buyers with money to spend.
What this means going forward: if you're only advertising on Google, Microsoft is worth considering, and it's getting easier to manage properly rather than on autopilot.
Google's spam clean-up and new image data in Search Console
Three things in one here. Google's September spam update is rolling out and may take up to two weeks to finish. Search Console, Google's free tool for tracking how your site performs in search, now includes image-based search data. And new reports are looking at how much traffic actually comes from Search compared with AI Mode.
This isn't paid advertising, but it affects your ad spend. If your organic rankings drop during a spam update, you often end up relying more on paid clicks to make up the difference. If you see your organic traffic move over the next fortnight, don't panic and don't make hasty changes to your campaigns. Wait until the update has settled.
The image data is good news for product-led businesses. People really do shop by picture, and now you can see more of how that behaviour leads to your site.
What this means going forward: check your Search Console once the update finishes, and look at how people find you through images. Your product photography matters more than you might think.
Your customers are already writing your best ad copy
WordStream has published a good reminder this week: use the words your customers use, not the words you use internally.
It sounds obvious, but most businesses get it wrong. You might call something a "modular storage solution", but your customers search for "stackable shelves". Reviews, customer service emails, returns notes and search term reports are full of the exact phrases people type into Google.
The article makes a point I agree with. Customer language doesn't just help conversions. It also helps with SEO and visibility in AI tools. AI search tools answer questions the way people ask them, so if your product pages and ads talk the same way, you're much more likely to be the answer.
What this means going forward: spend an hour reading your reviews and pulling out recurring phrases. Then use them in your product titles, ad headlines and descriptions. It's one of the cheapest improvements you can make.
Using AI agents to check your content before it goes live
The Marketing AI Institute has looked at using AI agents as fact-checkers and copy editors, so they review content rather than just write it.
I like this, because it flips the usual worry about AI. Most concerns are about AI inventing things. Here, it's used to catch mistakes: wrong prices, outdated claims, inconsistent product details or clumsy wording before anything is published.
For an online shop, that's genuinely useful. A product description claiming "free delivery" after you've changed your policy, or an ad promoting a sale that ended last week, can lose you sales and cause problems with Google's ad approvals. An AI checker working through your content is a sensible safety net.
What this means going forward: treat AI as a second pair of eyes, not a replacement for your own judgement. Someone who knows your business should still sign off on anything customers will see.
What I'm watching
This week's thread is fairly clear. The platforms keep shortening the journey from seeing something to buying it, while giving us slightly better visibility into what's actually happening. That's a welcome change after years of "just trust the algorithm".
Over the next few weeks, I'll be watching how the spam update settles and whether Google's Demand Gen changes turn into real sales rather than just nicer-looking features. With the busy fourth quarter approaching, now is the time to get your copy sharpened, your product images sorted and your campaigns ready, not the week before Black Friday.
As always, if you want to talk through what any of this means for your shop, get in touch. I'm happy to help.