Google Ads Changed (What's Actually Working Now in 2026)

Here at Grow My Ads, we manage millions in ad spend per month across 100+ clients, and it's pretty equal split between e-commerce and lead gen. So we get to see lots of different industries, lots of different businesses, and we manage a lot of money successfully with all the clients that we do have. Google Ads, the fundamentals are the same. However, things have changed over the last couple of years. And so in this video, I want to give you guys a breakdown of what we're doing and having success with, with e-com and lead gen.. So you're going to get tips on both, on just certain tactics that are working today that we have had success with and we're making lots of money with, with our clients. So hopefully, whether you're e-commerce or lead gen, you can take a golden nugget from this video, apply it to your account, your situation, and make some money in 2026, or at least more money than what you potentially would have if you didn't watch this video. Let's dive in. Okay, number 1 is an e-commerce tactic that we have been using now for the past year called the feeder strategy. If you're new to my channel, then I'm going to explain feeder strategy a little bit. If you're not and you're a return viewer, thank you. You probably have heard me bring up the feeder strategy before. This is something that we have been using successfully with a lot of different e-commerce businesses. It means less money has been going to Performance Max campaigns and more money to shopping. I will break that down quickly as to why, but we have had tremendous success. Some of these we've, we've done case studies on, like Ron, where I did an entire interview session with him on the YouTube channel where he has grown new customers by 60% more in his off-season. Or we had a hardware e-commerce business that we increased their sales by more than half a million year over year at a higher ROAS. And this is a company that, you know, wasn't massive in size. So that half a million additional revenue was huge to them as well as a hobby e-com business where we did $1.3 million more in sales year over year after deploying the feeder strategy. With higher ROAS as well. This has been something that we're testing with most, if not all, the e-commerce clients that we're consulting or working with. This is something, if you're an e-commerce brand and you're plateaued, you absolutely should be testing. Let me go show you a real account where we did this just to give you a quick example of it. Okay, so quick examples of this. So this is the hobby e-commerce business. So they sell products for a specific hobby. That's as much as I can tell you, but you can see year over year, 2025 over 2024, look how much we generated from shopping compared to what we did on Performance Max. So Performance Max was technically reduced by $1.5 million. We did more on, I mean, $2 million more essentially on shopping. So. More cost. If I come into the cost column here, we spent about $250,000 more on shopping. We, we reduced that from Performance Max. So we moved this spend. This was not an intentional— I mean, this is almost an exact $250K more in shopping, $250K less in Performance Max. That wasn't intentional. And so for the year, we did spend 13 or 14% more. Across the account. So that's $63,000 more. But you— I just showed you, it's not like we actually moved more to shopping. It's just like we pushed back on PMax, pushed heavier on shopping, went to the feeder strategy. Most the spend that we spent more of went into the search campaigns. Uh, we, we did some further search expansion stuff for this account too. Okay, all of that said, we did $1.3 million more in sales for them year over year, which is just totally insane. And obviously the biggest increase was coming from our shopping year over year. And then, you know, again, we did some search stuff that did quite well. Again, I said higher ROAS or the higher ROAS was achieved as well in this account. It was, and they get like a stupid insane return. So there's just, evidence of a year-over-year example that I just spit at you in the opener. Let me show you then the other example. I'm going to show you how we actually did this. So this is year-over-year results as well, about $500,000 more in revenue. So that's 75% increase. Now, we did do more spend on this account because this is a smaller account that was primed and ready to start scaling. So we spent 36% more. To achieve 75% more in revenue. I would say that's pretty good. And you'll notice that Performance Max cost-wise year over year was about the same, but we actually spent $40,000 more on shopping. We pushed more into it. So how does this work? I have full videos on this if you want to get into the weeds further. And so I'll have some of those videos in the description below. But basically what we did, and I'm just going to pull back to like the first part of the year through the fall. So October, just to give you an example of this, but you'll notice the trend of revenue really increasing up here. They were stuck around $50K. Uh, we deployed the feeder strategy around March or April, I believe. I forget. I, I don't know, somewhere within the springtime, early summer, and then boom, we blasted off. We actually doubled their sales. And in fact, we tripled it towards the end of the year on a monthly basis of what they were averaging. Again, this company was like stuck at $50K. Like if I pull back even further, you know, $50K, $50K, $50K, around $50K to $60K is where they were. They were plateaued here, right? This had nothing to do with like if I go to probably October of 2024. Yeah, they're at $60K. So with $170K or $169K in October 2025 compared to $62K, huge, huge difference. And yes, we did spend more, but not massive. Like they are spending up to $15K a month now, but last year is like $9K. So. Not, not huge for the results that they're getting. And their return on ad spend is, is there as well, even though none of these accounts we work off of ROAS. I'm going to share that later. So what did we do? The feeder strategy, basically in short, and again, if you want more details on this in the weeds, I have the videos that you can go check out in the description below. But you push more aggressively on shopping, you get more first-time click visitors from shopping, and you run Performance Max more as a back-channel filler. Kind of think of it as a remarketing campaign. It's a bit hacky, but you run that at a higher return on ad spend than you would your standard shopping. You run standard shopping super aggressive. What we found is a lot of e-commerce businesses that adopted Performance Max campaigns early on, right? You got that first, you know, sort of competitive advantage of using it. But then years have gone by and now a lot of companies have plateaued and it's like, well, if I spend more on it, my, my return dips, I get the, you know, inefficiency efficiencies of it after I start spending more. And then my only other option is basically to lower the ROAS for it to try to scale further. So a lot of— I'm talking big, big spenders to small spenders— were having this plateau issue with Performance Max as well as us. And we were seeing cases where Google Ads looked fine and year-over-year results looked fine, but backend data was showing less new customer acquisition. That was a problem. We also found Performance Max does like to cherry-pick a lot of repeat customers too. That's a problem too when you're just trying to— when you're also trying to scale new customers. I don't think it's a problem overall. It's fine if someone's a repeat customer and they're not specifically searching for your brand, whatever, bring them back in. Right. But if you think all of this revenue from PMax is all new, it's not. There's going to be a chunk of repeat in there too. So a lot of these companies poured all this money into it. They, they reduced what they were doing on the shopping side and then they decreased actually new customer acquisition over time. With the feeder strategy, you kind of flip it. You go back to standard shopping, you go super aggressive there because you're just pushing into shopping ads only where PMax is, you know, everything. And then you use PMax at a higher ROAS goal to go let it rabbit hole warm traffic that did not convert on the website. A lot of that generated by the shopping campaign. That's the whole basis of it. Again, if that's like too confusing, you're like, what the heck? How does this all work? Go watch my other videos after you watch this video. I go more in detail on setting up the feeder strategies in those videos. Okay. This is all made possible by utilizing your backend data. So this is another tactic, tactic number 2, at least with e-commerce that works really, really well. Right, right now, this should work for everyone no matter what the year is, but that is focusing on your backend data, less in-app metrics. Now, I do believe there's a role in guiding optimizations in accounts while looking at in-app metrics. So in-app means the actual Google Ads metrics that you are seeing inside of the Google Ads account. So that's going to be your CPAs and ROAS. However, a lot of companies have just been like brainwashed to only think about ROAS and just what Google's reporting to them. What we do with a lot of our e-commerce clients, especially when we're running these like crazy strategies like feeder strategy, is we're like, hey, let's just focus on how many new customers are we bringing in at what NCAC. So that's new customer acquisition cost, right? So if we're going to do scaling testing, that means, hey, let's push heavier on the feeder strategy with an additional, you know, $20K in ad spend this month. Then I better see my new customer column start increasing at the new customer acquisition cost that I'm willing to pay depending on the unit economics of my business. So tactic number 2 that works really, really well for us with e-com businesses is less in-app metrics, more backend metrics to help steer the strategy. If you're not doing that, go do that. Don't just look at Google Ads metrics only. Again, there's a role there. There's a play there. I'm not saying ignore Google Ads metrics completely. However, cross-reference with what your true backend data is showing compared to the actual testing that you're doing. This also goes to lead gen clients as well. With lead gen clients, we always want access to the true backend leads that are coming and the true phone call conversions, usually with phone call recordings using third-party tools like CallRail or Call Tracking Metrics. You have to know the true backend data, though, to actually steer the strategy on the front end with advertising. And so companies that when, you know, we ask them some of these numbers, which I feel like should be fairly simple and they just don't quite know, that's an issue. Go understand these numbers. I mean, lead gen, you absolutely should know it because that's what you're literally buying is a lead. So you should know leads to lead quality and how much you're paying for, you know, an MQL to an SQL to a closed deal. But e-com, there's just a lot of e-com businesses usually under about $10 million in revenue that seem to just only focus on what Meta and Google shows them. And they, they're ignoring all the great data that they have on the back end, especially if they're on Shopify. So set up something as simple as like this performance dashboard. Really look at what new customer acquisition looks like for you. Your ad dollars right now, especially if you're sub-$10 million, should be pushing for more new customers to help you scale. Know the data of the backend that will help actually steer the strategy on the front end with the ads. Okay. Tactic 3. This is e-com based too, but this has been a great tactic and actually really fun to test. We've been using a lot of Google AI Studio. This is backed by Gemini and utilizing Nano Banana 2, which is an incredible image generator. What this has allowed us to do for certain companies, I'm going to give you an example here. We're able to target and easily then create images that would make sense for different themes. So what I am showing you is a sectional sofa for a sectional sofa company called Home Reserve, but there are different sets of keyword themes that we could target, and sometimes it's really hard to do all of that within one product SKU. So we do— and this is legal, by the way, as long as you have different images and titles and descriptions and everything's very unique, different item IDs too. But we have been able to create different themes with actual product imagery that makes sense then to go after a different set of keywords, which has actually increased our exposure on those keyword themes. For example, here is a sectional sofa, and I'm gonna show you it's literally the same sectional all 3 times, but we're going after 3 different themes. So one is dog-friendly sectional sofa. Here there's a dog on the sofa that was generated by utilizing Google's AI Studio and Nano Banana 2. Same here, cat friendly. We've got a nice little cat on there instead of a dog. And then here's the same one, but now we're going after apartment-sized and small space specific terms. And we've got like a city background because this is A also perfect fit for someone who lives in a high-rise building and can't lug up a giant sectional sofa through the elevator of their 50-story building in New York City. So this, with Home Reserve, you're allowed to get these boxes individually shipped. It's super easy and it's perfect for someone who lives in a high-rise or an apartment-sized building. And so we were able to target different images here and resonate with someone who would be in an apartment or resonate with like, you know, a high-rise image of a city background. This has allowed us to actually then increase our exposure on search terms for like apartment-size stuff, cat-friendly and dog-friendly. So this has been something only made possible really today by AI and the image generation that you can do. So don't just think, oh, I can only run like this one product and try to stuff a huge title in there with everything I'm trying to target. No, we have found like, hey, can we create different themes and actually have different images that make sense for those themes for those SKUs? Again, this is the same ultimate section of sofa you would be buying, but we've been able to split it out into different themes within our feed and target correctly with images and the titles to increase our exposure and resonate at a higher level with someone who's searching specifically for some of these keyword themes. Okay. The other thing we've had success with and we're testing a lot more this year than what we have in the past is advertorial pages. Now, this can be used for both e-commerce and lead generation. It's, it's pretty big on e-com though. This allows us— and here's the thing, we still— I still prefer Meta for this type of traffic and advertorials work really well. For Meta ads as well. But with Google, you know, you predominantly focus so much on the bottom of the funnel, but we want to still go middle, top. Now, again, I think Meta is a better play in most cases for that middle of funnel, top of funnel traffic. However, we have been testing more with Google traffic on that middle and top of funnel traffic to advertorial style pages, right? Usually someone who's typing in like like, you know, best protein powder, they're researching. Okay. They're still in that phase of trying to figure out what the heck they actually want. They know they want protein powder, but they want to go research. They want to go evaluate and understand what actually is, you know, the best protein powder for me. If you're just trying to send them directly to a product page in that case, a lot of times that converts terribly. And usually your then in-cash costs there, new customer acquisition, new customer acquisition cost is not going to work with the unit economics of your business. But when running to an advertorial style page, we have found that it actually does work, can convert. And so we are testing this more with actual Google Ads traffic as well. And that's a mixture of, you know, search, Performance Max, those types of campaign structures. But Meta, in my opinion, is still the best place to spend your money on this. We're just trying to tap further into utilizing avatorials for even like YouTube Shorts search traffic. And, uh, so think of the top of funnel search terms that just don't do well for you in your account because it is very much a research search. Someone who's just evaluating what's out there in the market. They're not quite ready to buy today. Like, what is the best protein powder?, then see if you can craft an advertorial type page that would work for you. I'm on a swipepages.com. I've just pulled up random ones. They have like examples on here just to give you an idea. Here's like this AI certificate one and here, you know, the best AI certification programs and boom, here's one right here, MIT. This is an advertorial setup. This type of page works really well. So, you know, take out AI certification programs, input protein powders, and you can— you get the idea. I'm sure you've been on these pages. You as a marketer might think, who falls for that? Or do people actually believe that? The reality is they work really, really well. And so, yes, people do convert on these types of pages and they work well and you can run them on your website as well. You don't need to go build some separate website for this to work. You can just run straight an advertorial straight to like a subdomain on your domain and, you know, lay out why you're number one in regards to the best protein powder or whatever product you sell. So this is something we're investing more in. And the page creation process, which will lead me to my next tactic that we're doing a lot of this year, is very easy today with AI tools. So that's the next tactic that we're investing further in. I want to give you a glimpse of a page that we were able to create within 1 hour utilizing AI tools today. Okay, so here's a page that we did for a landscape design company that we work with. This is a page that we were able to actually build, which would have taken, you know, a couple of years ago, this page would have taken, you know, probably a week, 2-week process. And we were able to actually create this within 1 hour. With our team. So, I mean, we do have, you know, multiple people probably working on this page together. It's not just a one-person effort. It could be a one-person effort, but this page was done with AI. Now it's built with our entire landing page framework, which is part of our school community called PPC Copilot. So in that group, we give you an entire landing page framework plus an LLM prompt that you can use. Now we go above and beyond, like this is using Claude Code and other nerdy tools to actually have the full developed page. And you can even say this isn't even on their website right now. So I'm actually showing you what has gone through our team's process. But because of the advancement of AI tools and especially like utilizing tools like Claude Code, our team over the last couple of years has been trying to refine the process of certain tasks, one of those being landing page builds, where we're able to do that internally at a fast rate built on our frameworks. And we now have this dialed in. I don't want to speak too soon. I haven't done a full training on how to, like, go replicate this yet. I will. I promised our school community I will have a training on that when I'm 100% confident there's no bugs or errors people will run into. If any of you have used any of these AI tools like Claude Code and you've built things like pages, you do understand the complexities and headaches when you do have issues and you need to revise and revise and revise. And now you're in this infinite rabbit hole of continued issues. But we've kind of worked through a lot of that over the last couple of years as AI has continued to advance. And we are now getting to a process where we can pump out pages quicker. For offer testing and landing page test with especially with lead gen clients. Okay. With the advancement of being able to build pages quicker now, offer testing is huge. Always has been, right? And it's one thing that we teach on a lot. So this is in our group called PPC Copilot. I would love for you to join if you want to upscale your knowledge on Google Ads. There will be a link in the description below to go learn more about the group. I do Q&As in there. There's ongoing trainings. My courses are in there. So lots and lots of value. If you want more beyond just this YouTube channel, go check that out. But Meez, Mizell here, Meez has joined our Q&A calls and he's taken our advice and he has actually increased. He went from 5 leads a month at $100 CPA to doing over 30, well, 29 leads at a $30 CPA. This was done and he spells it out here through following the programs and everything that we teach in the group, as well as what we have instructed him and trained him to do on the Q&A calls where you're able to like share your screen and ask questions on your actual account. With this specific account, I was like, the offer's just bad. You guys need to rework the offer for this account. We brainstormed a little bit on the call and then we went through sort of offer creation processes there. He then created this new offer and this has worked tremendously well and he's starting to really scale this campaign. This was back in January, so it's been several months and I know he was on a Q&A call recently and they're having tremendous success. So this is something that we're able to now do faster due to the advancement of AI and being able to do pages quicker as well.. And this is huge because offer testing, if you have a bad offer, doesn't matter how great your campaigns are set up, but now being able to test different offers quicker is something that we will continue to be able to invest in further this year. And that can sometimes have the biggest impact like Mies did inside of our school group. I will— again, the school group is something I do Q&As in. I have my courses, further ongoing trainings. I would love for you to join if you were looking to upskill your Google Ads knowledge or want more access to me. So a link to that group will be in the description below. I would love to see you inside. If not, YouTube channel's got a lot of value too, hopefully. Okay. A few other things that we're noticing or tactics that we're doing. Small accounts, we still use predominantly phrase and exact match keywords. Larger accounts, we're heavy on broad match today. So large accounts, you know, it, it depends on the industry, but lots of conversion volume. Volume, right? We're talking in many cases they're getting thousands per month. In some cases it's just in the hundreds, but a lot, a lot of them that are real heavy on broad is within the— is like in the thousands of conversions per month. Now we still utilize exact match quite a bit in those accounts too, but you— most high volume accounts were phrase. You see very little of— so it's a, it's a heavy on broad and then a mix of exact match. Smaller accounts though, we still— you're going to still see a lot of exact match and phrase playing a bigger role in those accounts. We, and we still test broad, but we just, we have seen there is a difference between large volume accounts with conversion volume versus small, low volume accounts. And it doesn't mean small could still be a big spender. They just have high CPCs in their industry. So conversion volume's naturally low. You know, I'm talking to you, you personal injury lawyers or those type of industries. So I'm not talking, just spin numbers, but think of it more as like a volume of conversion in the account within a 30-day period. So we are— that's, that's how we're seeing accounts still today. And that's how we are operating differently with high volume for sort of lower volume. Then the next thing is on the high volume accounts, negative keywords, what we're testing more of today is actually removing negative keywords.. And so we have some campaigns, high volume, where we've completely removed negative keywords. In that, the reason being is there's so much volume for the bidding algorithms to learn off of that Google actually is able to show what you would feel is an irrelevant term, and it would've been bad early on in the stage of your account. But now that there's so much conversion data, Google knows like this person actually shows the intent to convert. On your product or whatever you're trying to sell. So bigger high-volume accounts, we're actually removing negatives and testing the impact there. And in some cases we're seeing an uptick in conversion volume. For example, a lot of accounts, especially if you're newer, I always recommend negating competitor terms. Usually someone searching for competitors, not just going to convert to you because they were actively searching and looking for that competitor. However, on high volume accounts, we will remove those competitor negatives and actually convert on competitor names today. Now, it's weird because it's driven by a lot of broad match. If you go and try to like exactly target competitor terms, you probably will fail. But if you let it live with inside of a broad match and remove those competitors as negatives, this is just an example. You can actually do quite well. So that's something we are testing. It doesn't perfectly work on every account. So I'm not saying this is like you must do this if you're high volume, but if you're a high volume account and you're like, actually, we do have like 40,000 negatives in there, including all of our competitors, I'm telling you, go test removing some of those and seeing what happens within the data. Give it some time. But if you're running broad match specifically as well,, it can work really well and actually start driving some incremental conversion volume for you. Okay. The other thing is, you know, AI Max is kind of a big topic in 2026. We are continuing to test it. I've done full videos on AI Max, so I'll have those videos in the description below if you want to go further down the AI Max rabbit hole. My thoughts on AI Max still today is it probably will work really well in the future. It hasn't had too big of an impact act today on our accounts, but we continue to test, test, test, and eventually when it gets really good, hopefully then we'll be on top of it right away. But we still will utilize dynamic search ads. So here is an actual account. So it just says all, this is an actual DSA ad group targeting all pages, basically next to an AI Max ad group. So inside of an AI Max ad group, you won't see any keywords, right? Because you're just running the AI Max. AI Max targeting there. You'll notice that most of the revenue is still pretty much driven by dynamic search ads. In this case, this was like an actual just test that we wanted to set up inside of a specific DSA campaign is what we labeled it. We are seeing that DSA actually still works better than AI Max right now in most of our tests. Again, it's not saying we don't test AI Max, but it's just not a big needle mover for us right now. Now, I believe, and I had this in my projection video at the end of 2025 where I said they probably will, Google will probably get rid of Dynamic Search Ads completely and just force you into basically utilizing AI Max. It's very similar technology. I think that actually, I'm pretty sure I read an article recently where that might be true. And by the time you're watching this video, maybe it is true. I don't know. But. I will say we're not just scrapping DSA and moving fully into AI Max. We right now, yes, I think that the tech overlaps a decent amount, but we are testing both. And what we have found still is DSA works wonderfully still and we have better impact from it than we do AI Max currently. By the way, this is not how we always test AI Max. It's not just like this simple of a DSA ad group versus an AI Max ad group. We just did that for fun in this case. Where we did spend several thousand dollars. You'll notice though, most of that money is being generated from DSA versus AI Max. In other cases, we're just running AI Max through the broad match reach, utilizing broad match keywords and flicking on the AI Max tech and then reviewing, you know, what AI Max is bringing in through the AI Max search term report that you get. Again, I don't have any accounts that have really blown up yet from AI Max. So despite what Google will tell you, we're not seeing it. And this has been I mean, we've spent lots of money testing across our entire client portfolio. So by the end of this year, maybe that changes. But for now, in 2026, I do not think AI Max still is a big needle mover within accounts yet. So keep utilizing dynamic search ads if you have them in your account. Don't just try to like pause those and replace it with AI Max. There you go. That is what we're doing here at Grow My Ads or seeing that is working in 2026. I hope you were able to take at least one of these tactics or get a little golden nugget that will make you more money this year than you would have made if you haven't watched this video. I've got two things for you before you go. One is if you want to go get an audit, if you qualify, my team does free account audits. So we'll get in, we'll actually review your account, compare it to like what your goal is and give you a roadmap in regards to here's how we believe you should improve and optimize your account, make more money, spend less on wasted ad spend, and hit your goals. It's a practical audit. Again, if you qualify, it takes 2 seconds to go check. Go hit the link in the description below to go get that free audit. See if you qualify for it. Again, takes 2 seconds to go through the questions that it's going to ask for you to be able to go get that free audit. Maybe you don't care about an audit. Maybe like, I just want to upskill more on Google Ads. And go check out our group called PPC Copilot. We do ongoing training in there, has my courses in there. We do Q&As. You can even get your account looked at through like a Loom video review feedback system that we have weekly. Go check that group out if you want to upskill. It's super affordable for all the value you get, and you get more access to me as well within that group. The link to that group will be in the description below. And if you don't care about any of that, that's cool too. I will see you on the next video.