Paid Search Advertising

The Performance Features Most Advertisers Haven't Gotten Around To Yet

I write a lot about PPC. Brand and performance convergence, AI measurement gaps, Performance Max controls, first-party data strategy and if you have been reading this blog for a while, you have seen me cover that ground in depth. I am not going to repeat any of it here. What I have not written about yet are the specific tactical moves that came out of a recent deep-dive conversation between the ads liaisons at both Google and Microsoft. These are the details that tend to get

Heidi Schwende

Feb 238 min read

Performance Max Finally Gets Guardrails

Why That Matters So Much for Your Budget For two years, Performance Max has been Google's favorite way to eat advertising budgets while keeping advertisers in the dark about where their money actually went. The pitch was simple; hand over your creative assets, set a budget, and let Google's AI do the rest. The reality was messier. Advertisers lost control of where ads ran, which search queries triggered them, and whether the system was cannibalizing existing high-performing c

Heidi Schwende

Feb 910 min read

Google Ads Isn't Broken. Your Landing Pages Are.

When click volume tanks, most advertisers start poking around in Google Ads looking for what broke. They tweak bids, fiddle with keywords, maybe pause a few underperformers. That's backwards. A click drop is a symptom. The actual problem usually lives on your website. Google Is Grading Your Website. Most Businesses Are Failing. Quality Score isn't some arbitrary number Google invented to annoy you. It's their way of telling you whether your landing page is doing its job. Thre

Heidi Schwende

Jan 309 min read

Microsoft's Latest Ad Platform Updates

They Matter More Than the Usual Feature Dump Every January, ad platforms announce updates. Most are incremental. Some are marketing spin dressed up as innovation. But Microsoft's recent changes to their automated campaigns address something I've been pushing clients to think about for some time now. It's the tension between letting algorithms optimize and actually growing your business. The Real Problem With Automated Campaigns Here's what drives me crazy about most automati

Heidi Schwende

Jan 174 min read

Winners in 2026 Don’t Ask About SEO vs. PPC — They Orchestrate Both

We're heading into Q1, which means budget conversations are happening right now. Before you finalize spend on campaigns, content programs, or that shiny new martech platform, get the foundation right first. Your website excellence, your SEO, and your PPC form the base of your entire online presence. Everything else—social, email, ABM, events—builds on top of that foundation. If the base is shaky, nothing you stack on it will perform the way it should. And 2026 needs to be the

Heidi Schwende

Jan 25 min read

The Ad Model Catches Up to AI Search

What It Actually Means for Your Marketing Budget Advertising has arrived in AI search. Google expanded ads in AI Overviews to 12 countries in December 2025. OpenAI is building ad prototypes for ChatGPT. Perplexity launched ads a year ago, then pumped the brakes when they couldn't prove ROI. If you're running paid search campaigns or relying on organic traffic for revenue, this isn't theoretical anymore. It's reshaping how your prospects find you—and what it costs to reach the

Heidi Schwende

Dec 28, 20256 min read

CMOs: Performance Max Is Exposing Who Actually Knows What They're Doing

Why Your Google Ads Person Needs to Stop Acting Like It's 2015 Here's something I keep seeing with mid-market companies: you're paying someone to manage your Google Ads, but they're still using tactics from a decade ago. And when they try to run Performance Max campaigns? It's a disaster. Not because Performance Max doesn't work. It does, when handled correctly. But because they're bringing the wrong mindset to the table. Let me be clear upfront: Performance Max isn't always

Heidi Schwende

Nov 24, 20256 min read