PPC In the Trenches: Google Ads Bidding, Meta Instant Forms, and ChatGPT Ads | 26 April 2026

On this episode of PPC in the Trenches, Jeremy Yang, founder of Digital Goliath, and co-host Frances Suarez run through the latest in Google and Meta Ads. 

They cover Google’s upcoming bidding algorithm change ahead of the August 17 deadline, Smart Bidding Exploration in beta, Meta’s calendar integration in instant forms, the new customer labeling feature for Meta audiences, Digital Goliath’s early run at ChatGPT Ads, and a LinkedIn hot take on brand vs non-brand separation that got both hosts fired up.

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Intro

Jeremy: All right guys, welcome back to another episode of PPC in the Trenches. I’m with Frances Suarez again. Today is the 26th of June, 2026. How are you, Frances?

Frances: I’m good. It’s nice to be here again, over and over. It’s always a pleasure doing this with you, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Same. We’re getting more organised too. In the next couple of weeks, we might even have an app built for the podcast. Right now we’re using Claude, we built a bot and an agent and we’re pulling all the R&D from across the agency. We’ve got four people contributing. 

Jeremy: We pull from newsletters we follow, LinkedIn people we follow, and we’re going to drop it all into an HTML file, upload it into the bot, and allow comments alongside it. So whoever’s testing a particular piece of R&D can leave notes. Then when I come on here with you, I’ll decide what to talk about based on what results we got. I’ll be scrolling through it live as we talk.

Frances: That’s amazing. I actually had an experience with Claude just yesterday that left me in awe. One of the team helped me connect Claude to our project management tool  Hive and I needed to put together a 90-day plan covering June through September. 

Jeremy: I just brainstormed with Claude, went back and forth a bit, and then asked it to post everything into Hive. It just plotted it all out, tasks with date ranges, all the details. I was blown away.

Jeremy: Really? That’s great. We could probably do something similar with ClickUp. I use ClickUp, you can connect a lot of apps to it. We’ll test that. We’re building something in the next two weeks. It could bomb, but we’ll see.

Frances: Where did the app idea come from?

Jeremy: The R&D process felt clunky. Multiple people are contributing but I feel like I’m not doing their work justice because everything’s scattered. I’ve got emails, LinkedIn, things I want to talk about, things I don’t. 

Jeremy: Like the European consent thing, I hate it, I can’t remove it from my feed, and I don’t advertise there anyway. And enhanced conversions, everyone has a lot to say about it but I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

Frances: There’s no genuine proof that turning it on has massively affected conversions. Last time we checked, it was just a slight bump, like 1 or 2 percent. Not really massive.

Jeremy: Exactly. Anyway, for those who don’t know, Frances is the only PPC manager in the world that I trust with my own money and my own agency. That’s why she’s my co-host. All right, what do you have for us this week?

Google Ads: Bidding Algorithm Update (August 17 Deadline)

Frances: Mostly algorithm updates and some beta features Google is rolling out. The first one is a bidding algorithm update. It’s not entirely clear what’s changing, but Google is saying we should take action before August 17th. According to them, they’re changing how they handle campaigns that are running out of budget. 

Frances:Right now, if your campaign is hitting the daily budget limit, the algorithm behaves a certain way. After August 17th, that changes. If we don’t tidy up our targets, like if you’re using Target CPA or Target ROAS, it could affect performance. The campaigns most likely to be affected are those using portfolio bid strategies.

Jeremy: I don’t use portfolio bid strategies, and neither do you. But I can add some context. I heard about this from a Google rep in Sydney. 

Jeremy: He explained it like this: if your budget runs out and your CPA target is set unrealistically low, say your natural CPA is $30 but you’ve set it to $17 just to squeeze in cheap conversions, Google will stop entering you into auctions. Whoever’s bidding at the realistic $30 target will still compete, but if Google decides it can’t hit your $17, it just stops.

Frances: And similarly, I got related information from a Sydney Google rep. Say you have a campaign with a target ROAS of 700% but you’re actually hitting 1,000%. Google is going to try to meet that 700% target by spending more aggressively, increasing bids, showing your ads more.

Jeremy: Which is not what you want. If I’m sitting at 1,000% ROAS and my target is 700%, I don’t want Google artificially bringing me down. That’s pretty frustrating.

Frances: Right. And the flip side, if you’re sitting below your target, it might try to spend more to pull the average back up. So if your target CPA is $100 but you’re getting $70, it could increase exposure to drag the average toward $100.

Jeremy: It feels like the move is to keep targets tight and realistic. Not try to game it low, because the risk is your ads stop showing entirely if you go too far below what Google thinks is achievable.

Frances: Exactly. That’s always been the case to some extent, but this sounds like it’s being enforced more explicitly after August.

Smart Bidding Exploration (SBE) Beta

Frances: The next one is Smart Bidding Exploration, or SBE. I hadn’t heard of it before. It’s an opt-in AI feature that allows campaigns to show on high-performing search queries outside the usual targeting parameters. It’s in beta and you’d need to reach out to a Google Ads specialist to get access.

Jeremy: Isn’t that just what AI Max does?

Frances: That’s what I thought. The description sounds similar, expanding search terms beyond your normal match types.

Jeremy: We’ll monitor it. If it turns out to be something distinct from AI Max, we’ll come back to it.

Promotion Mode Beta

Frances: Next is Promotion Mode Beta. It’s designed to give campaigns a temporary boost during peak periods, like end of financial year, Black Friday, that kind of thing. It’s the opposite of the existing feature where you ask Google to ignore a certain period. This one tells it to treat a specific period as higher priority.

Jeremy: We already have processes for peak periods. I’m not sure where this fits yet. I’d probably only use it for larger clients who can justify the extra setup.

Frances: Same. It’s a lot of work to implement for every single client.

Google’s “Strongest Match” Label in Search Results

Jeremy: Google is also testing a “Strongest Match” label in search results. Alongside the usual ad rankings, they’re flagging the result that most closely matches the search query with a label. It’s quite controversial and I’m not sure how it plays out for advertisers yet, we’ll watch it.

Meta: Calendar Integration in Instant Forms

Jeremy: On to Meta. They’re investing heavily in instant forms, specifically, they’re integrating a calendar booking directly into the form. No need to leave the platform to book. They’re working with Calendly now, and HubSpot is coming later this year. So by end of year, the form handles the full booking flow.

Frances: That’s powerful. In my experience with Meta Ads, instant forms already drive a decent volume of leads. The problem has always been no-shows and drop-off after the form, people submit, get what they wanted from the confirmation, and then don’t follow through on booking. This removes the step where they’d have to go to a website to book separately.

Jeremy: Exactly. It removes the double data entry. They’ve already filled in their details in the form, now they don’t have to do it again on a booking page.

Meta: Customer Labeling for Audiences

Jeremy: The other Meta update I found useful is customer labeling. Right now, when you build audiences, watch 15 seconds, add to cart, purchase 180 days, signed up for a webinar, they all sit there with whatever naming convention you used. 

Jeremy: If another agency comes in, they’re guessing what’s what. Now Meta is letting you label your audiences with set categories: customers, new people, leads, and so on.

Frances: So it’s not just an organisational thing, it’s also feeding the algorithm information about who your best people are?

Jeremy: Right. Before, the only way to do that was to upload a list and create a lookalike. Now just labeling an audience signals to Meta: find more of these people. It’s a step in the right direction.

Digital Goliath Launches ChatGPT Ads

Jeremy: Some news from our end, Digital Goliath has officially launched ChatGPT Ads for ourselves. It’s clunky as anything right now. There’s no conversion campaign available for our account yet, so it’s essentially a traffic campaign. 

Jeremy:Minimum spend is $25 a day, $5 a click. We sent an email asking who wanted to try it and got five to seven clients who said they were in. We’re setting up their accounts now. Full disclosure, the platform is rough. But we’re trying it.

AI Recommendation Poisoning and the SEO Landscape

Jeremy: Last thing on my list. Search Engine Journal ran an article on AI recommendation poisoning. Someone tested injecting false information into a website and it got picked up by AI search results quickly, no verification, no intelligence behind it. It’s a real problem for the SEO world.

Frances: SEO agencies are doing a lot right now because of the AI shift. The hard part is that results take months to show up. You can’t just make changes and see improvement next week.

Jeremy: Yeah. And the agency game for SEO isn’t what it was. I’ve been watching Studio Hawk, one of the most reputable SEO agencies in Australia, and they’ve shifted into courses and speaking engagements. That’s not something they were doing before. People need to adapt. I’m not being doom and gloom about it, but you have to keep moving.

Hot Take Pushback: Brand vs Non-Brand Separation

Jeremy: I want to talk about a post I saw. Jeremy Krentz put out a take saying that anyone still blending brand and non-brand in performance media campaigns in 2026 shouldn’t be allowed to log into ad platforms. I completely disagree.

Jeremy: I handle small budgets. I don’t have $200,000 where I can separate everything. If someone has $3,000, I’m putting one campaign. Whoever comes in, they come in.

Frances: I felt attacked reading that too. Not all of my campaigns are segmented that way, especially the smaller ones. And with e-commerce, there are clients who specifically want to show for their brand in shopping, which makes the brand separation more complicated anyway.

Jeremy: Exactly. It also makes me think we should bring someone onto the show who actually disagrees with us. We agree too much, it could come across as an echo chamber, which isn’t the intention.

Outro

Jeremy: If you’d like to work with Frances, find her on LinkedIn, search PPC Ces or PPC Frances and she’ll come up. And if Frances can’t help, give me a call and I might take a look at your account too. Thanks guys, another episode of PPC in the Trenches, 26th of June 2026. See you next time.

Key Takeaways

• Google’s August 17 bidding change targets unrealistic targets. The algorithm update affects campaigns running out of budget. Setting your tCPA or tROAS too far below what Google considers achievable may cause your ads to stop showing. Setting it too far above your actual performance could trigger more aggressive spending to drag results back toward the target.
• Meta’s instant forms are getting closer to a complete lead funnel. Calendar integration with Calendly and HubSpot (coming end of 2026) means a prospect can go from seeing an ad to booking an appointment without leaving Facebook or Instagram. The drop-off between form submission and booking should shrink significantly.
• Meta’s customer labeling is more than organisation. Tagging audiences as “customers,” “leads,” or “new people” now signals directly to Meta’s algorithm what kind of audience to find more of, without needing to go through the lookalike creation process separately.
• Budget context matters for campaign structure. The brand vs non-brand separation debate isn’t black and white. For accounts with large budgets, the separation makes sense. For SME accounts on constrained budgets, forcing that structure can do more harm than good.