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 buried under the bigger strategic narratives, and I think that is a mistake. In my experience, the tactical specifics are exactly where performance is won or lost, and these particular ones are too useful to leave sitting in a transcript.

Some of them live inside platforms you are already paying for. A couple of them are new enough that the industry has barely had time to react. All of them are worth your attention.

Your Creative Has to Sell Without a Safety Net

There is a specific test worth running on every ad asset you have. Pull up your creative library and ask one question about each piece: could this sell your brand if it had to stand completely alone, with no surrounding copy, no page context, no brand cues anywhere else on the screen?

Not "is this good creative?" Not "has this performed well?" But specifically, if a single headline and a single image were the only things between your brand and a stranger, would they add up to anything?

This matters now in a way it did not two years ago because AI systems are assembling ad combinations based on context signals, not on how you built your campaign. A responsive search ad might serve only your weakest headline paired with your most generic image to exactly the right customer at exactly the right moment. If those assets cannot hold up on their own, that opportunity is wasted.

The practical audit:

• Look for any asset in your account that you would describe as a "nice to have" or a supporting element for something else.

• Those are the ones that belong unpinned or replaced.

• The assets you keep pinned should be ones that could theoretically run alone and still make someone want to act.

This is not an argument against testing. It is an argument against treating creative breadth as a substitute for creative strength.

Asset Low Volume Is Not a Penalty. It Is a Signal.

A related misconception worth addressing:

• When an asset gets low impression volume, most advertisers interpret that as the asset underperforming or the platform deprioritizing it. Often that is wrong.

Ad platforms are designed to assemble the best combination for the context at hand, not to rotate through your asset library for fairness. An asset that shows up infrequently but converts well when it does show up is not failing. It is finding a specific subset of your audience that other assets cannot reach.

The right response to low-volume, high-performing assets is not to pause them. It is to look at what audience or context they are serving and consider whether that segment warrants its own campaign.

You may have found a niche your broader targeting was missing.

Swap out assets that have been live for a couple of weeks with minimal impressions and no conversions. But do not confuse low volume with low value. Those are different things.

The Lead Gen Conversion Goals Most Advertisers Skip

Google has specific conversion action categories built for lead generation that most advertisers never select. Qualified lead, converted lead, book appointment, and request a quote are all available as distinct goal types. They are not cosmetic labels.

Selecting these specific conversion actions triggers invalid traffic protections that are built specifically for lead generation environments. This is not the same as general click fraud protection. It is purpose-built filtering for the patterns that show up in lead gen campaigns, where bot activity and low-intent clicks tend to concentrate differently than in ecommerce.

If you are running lead generation campaigns and you have not audited which conversion action categories you are using, this is worth fifteen minutes. You may be paying for leads that Google's own systems would have filtered if you had selected the right goal type.

Impression-Based Remarketing on Microsoft: The Quiet Workaround

Most remarketing strategies are built on clicks. Someone visits your site, gets cookied, and enters a retargeting audience. That model has two problems heading into 2026:

• consent requirements are tightening

• plenty of your best prospects are seeing your ads and not clicking, even when the ad is working exactly as intended.

Microsoft Advertising has a remarketing format built specifically around impressions rather than clicks. Any campaign can contribute to building these audiences, and any campaign can target them. Search can speak to search. Performance Max can feed into audience lists used by CTV. The audiences are privacy-compliant by design because they are based on ad exposure rather than site behavior.

This opens up targeting and exclusion strategies that are not possible with click-based remarketing alone.

• You can bid up against audiences who have seen your ads across multiple touchpoints.

• You can exclude people who have already received heavy brand exposure to avoid frequency waste.

• You can build audience segments from campaigns that do not drive much direct traffic but do reach the right people.

It also works as a traffic quality tool. If you are seeing impression volume that does not convert and cannot explain why, building exclusion lists from your low-quality impression sources is a legitimate way to tighten targeting without cutting reach.

Microsoft Clarity Is Now a Publisher Requirement. Here Is What That Actually Means.

As of November 2025, Microsoft requires all third-party syndication partner publishers to have Microsoft Clarity installed for ad clicks and impressions to be billable. Any traffic coming from pages without Clarity installed is filtered out and marked non-billable.

The intended effect is better traffic quality for advertisers. Publishers who do not meet the standard see their clicks excluded from billing, which means advertisers are not charged for traffic from pages that have not been verified against Microsoft's editorial and safety standards.

For advertisers running Microsoft Advertising campaigns, this is relevant in two ways.

• First, it should gradually improve the quality of the traffic you are getting from the syndication network, as non-compliant publishers are filtered out.

• Second, if you install Microsoft Clarity on your own landing pages, you get session replay and behavioral data that tells you exactly what happens after someone clicks your ad.

Heatmaps, scroll depth, rage clicks, and navigation paths are all visible. That data is useful for diagnosing landing page problems before you attribute underperformance to the campaign.

Clarity is free and the installation is straightforward. The behavioral data it provides on landing pages is the kind of information that most advertisers are paying for elsewhere or going without entirely.

The Metric That Lives in SEO But Belongs in PPC

Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much a page moves around while it is loading.

When content shifts position after rendering, users miss clicks, lose their place, or bounce before the page settles. It is a Core Web Vitals metric, which means it factors into Google's Quality Score calculation for paid campaigns.

Most PPC teams have never looked at their Cumulative Layout Shift scores. Most SEO teams track it but do not connect it to paid campaign performance. The result is that advertisers are paying higher CPCs on campaigns pointing to landing pages that are quietly dragging down Quality Scores through a technical problem neither team owns.

Google recommends a CLS score of 0.1 or lower for at least 75 percent of real user sessions. Pages that score above 0.25 are considered poor.

You can check your scores in PageSpeed Insights or Google Search Console under Core Web Vitals. If your landing pages are failing on CLS, fixing it reduces the technical penalty you are paying on every click.

The broader argument here is that PPC and SEO teams sharing performance data is not a nice-to-have. It is a performance lever that most organizations are leaving unused because the two disciplines report into different people and rarely compare notes.

Gaming and CTV: The Inventory Worth Watching

This one is further out on the horizon but worth paying attention to now. Gaming inventory is evolving beyond static placements into interactive formats where brand presence is baked into the environment rather than interrupting it. Connected television advertising already has significant traction. CTV ad revenue was projected to reach $21.5 billion in 2025 in the United States, driven by streaming adoption.

Neither of these is a direct response channel in the traditional sense. But the brands investing in them now are building the kind of exposure that makes their performance campaigns work harder. Someone who has seen your brand multiple times in non-interruptive environments comes to a search query with different intent than someone who has never encountered you before.

Performance marketers have historically treated anything that does not convert directly as someone else's budget problem. That thinking is increasingly costly as the channels where buyers form preferences multiply and the traditional search click faces more competition for attention.

Conversational Reporting: The Tool Both Platforms Have That Most Advertisers Ignore

Both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising have conversational reporting built into their interfaces. You can ask questions about your campaign performance in natural language and get answers without building custom reports or exporting data to a spreadsheet.

It is not transformative on its own. But it is significantly faster than the traditional reporting workflow, particularly for account managers who need quick answers during client calls or who are trying to diagnose a performance drop without a dedicated analyst.

The reason it goes unused is mostly inertia. People have reporting habits built around dashboards and exports, and they default to those even when faster alternatives are available.

If you have not tried conversational reporting in either platform, it is worth spending twenty minutes with it. It will not replace structured reporting for monthly analysis, but it is useful for the kind of quick diagnostic questions that otherwise eat up time.

The PPC landscape rewards the people who pay attention to the specifics. The broad strategic arguments:

1. AI is changing things

2. measurement is harder

3. visual creative matters

Those conversations are useful but they do not win campaigns. The details above are where the practical edge is right now.

Most of the teams I talk to are closer to getting this right than they think. Sometimes it just takes a fresh set of eyes on the account. If you want to have that conversation, I am easy to find.

Sources

SMX Next Keynote: Future of PPC — Navigating Data, Creative, and AI in a Changing Landscape. Search Engine Land, November 2025.

Microsoft Advertising requires Clarity for third-party publishers. Search Engine Land, November 2025.

Microsoft Clarity mandatory for syndication partner publishers. Search Engine Roundtable, November 2025.

Microsoft makes Clarity mandatory for publishers. AdPilot, November 2025.

Microsoft Advertising requires Clarity for third-party publishers. PPC.Land, November 2025.

Microsoft to publishers: Miss standards, forfeit impressions. MediaPost, November 2025.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Web.dev / Google Developers.

Cumulative Layout Shift and Ads. Advanced Ads.

Core Web Vitals: CLS as a ranking factor. Google Search Central.

CTV ad revenue projections 2025. NinjaPromo PPC Statistics, December 2025.

Global paid search spend 2025. Digital Silk PPC Statistics.

PPC Statistics Every Marketer Should Know. Coupler.io, May 2025.

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