Google changes Target CPA and ROAS bidding for budget-limited campaigns from August 2026.

AI, privacy and governance are converging to shape marketing performance and measurement.

Google’s Product Value Adjustments helps Smart Bidding optimise for profit.

Google’s AI Brief gives advertisers greater influence without restoring complete control fully.

Forrester says fragmented measurement and limited automation are holding many retail media networks back, with commerce media emerging as a more scalable alternative powered by first-party data.

Commerce media platform Criteo is reportedly the target of a private equity takeover bid, highlighting renewed investor confidence in ad tech and retail media infrastructure.

The Federal Government has proposed tougher gambling advertising restrictions, including a ban on influencer promotions and new limits across television, radio and online platforms.

AI martech platform Tec-Do has been announced as a technology partner supporting ChatGPT Ads, signalling continued expansion of the emerging AI advertising ecosystem.

DuckDuckGo has introduced default YouTube ad blocking in its browser, highlighting the growing tension between privacy-focused browsing and ad-supported digital platforms.

Australia’s competition regulator has launched legal action against Amazon, alleging it unfairly changed Prime’s advertising terms, highlighting the growing regulatory scrutiny of digital advertising platforms and consumer transparency.

Cloudflare has introduced new controls that let website owners decide how AI bots can access, search and use their content, signalling a major shift in AI governance across the web.

More than 160,000 tech jobs have been cut so far this year as companies including Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and Salesforce restructure to accelerate AI investment and automation.

Europe’s highest court has upheld a record antitrust penalty against Google, marking another significant chapter in global regulation of major technology platforms.

New Australian privacy obligations covering AI, children’s privacy, cross-border data transfers and automated decision-making mean organisations should start preparing now for significant compliance changes.

From July 2026, advertisers can add labels to AI-generated or modified image and video creatives to comply with global transparency regulations. These labels won’t violate policies against text overlays and help inform consumers about synthetic content in your campaigns.

The stricter certification requirements first launched in March are now expanding to cover all advertising categories directly governed under the Google Ads Gambling and Games policy (such as sports betting, online casinos, social casino aggregators, and physical gambling spots).

Starting August 17, 2026, Google will be making changes to its bidding systems, making it easier for you to get more consistent and predictable performance based on the targets you set, even when you make budget adjustments. Note: The Bid Target Adjustment Tool is now available in Google Ads as of July 6, 2026.

The mandatory, platform-wide auto-upgrade of DSAs to AI Max or broad-match smart structures has been pushed back from September 2026 to February 2027. Marketers now have a voluntary testing buffer through January 2027.

Google Analytics now automatically flags and isolates referral traffic from the world’s top AI platforms (like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity) right inside your default reports.

You can now use pre-trained TimesFM models in BigQuery ML directly from Connected Sheets. These models let you create forecasts and detect anomalies in your data by using the AI.FORECAST and AI.DETECT_ANOMALIES functions.

The Data Agent Kit extension is an extension for agent coding tools, such as VS Code, Antigravity, and Cursor, that lets you interact with BigQuery resources directly in your agent environment. You can use this extension to browse datasets, manage pipelines, run queries, and prompt your agent to perform other BigQuery tasks directly in your preferred IDE.

Google has updated Tag Manager’s behaviour regarding containers deployed via unsupported installation paths (such as /gtag/js or /gtag/destination). Moving forward, restrictions will be determined strictly by the container ID rather than the loading path.

Retail accounts managing fewer than 100,000 SKUs gained access to a unified, searchable dashboard to diagnose metadata gaps, track eligibility, and check product-level performance.

The OAIC’s latest determinations reinforce that accountability for customer data cannot be outsourced.

The ad tech industry is rebuilding itself for an increasingly agentic future.