Measured

For the last decade, the advice to business owners heading into Black Friday has been the same. Turn on seasonality adjustments. Raise your budgets. Expect huge conversion rate bumps. Ride the wave.

New data from the last three Black Fridays says the old playbook is not just outdated. It is actively costing advertisers money.

Optmyzr, a Google Ads management platform used by thousands of agencies, just published a three-year study analyzing between 4,000 and 6,000 Google Ads accounts across Black Friday 2022, 2023, and 2024. The results challenge three different assumptions that most business owners and most agencies still operate on.

In this episode of Measured, we walk through all three findings, what they mean together, and what you should actually do about them before Black Friday hits in four weeks.

Story one: Seasonality adjustments backfire on Black Friday. Advertisers who followed Google’s recommendation to use seasonality adjustments saw CPC inflation nearly double. In 2022, CPCs rose 36.7 percent with seasonality adjustments versus 17 percent without them. ROAS dropped. The reason is counterintuitive: Google already knows Black Friday is coming, and Smart Bidding adjusts bids on its own. Adding a seasonality adjustment on top tells Google to overshoot.

Story two: Black Friday CPCs are rising faster than most owners realize. CPCs rose 22 percent month over month during the 2025 BFCM window. Pet Supplies CPCs hit $1.87 at peak. Food and Beverage hit $1.30. If you budget for Black Friday based on your Q3 CPCs, your budget buys 18 percent fewer clicks than you planned for. We walk through how to pull your CPC trend from Google Ads and rebudget accordingly.

Story three: The Black Friday conversion rate bump is shrinking. Three years of data show a clear trend. 17.5 percent conversion rate improvement in 2022, down to 11.9 percent in 2023, down to 7.5 percent in 2024. The magic multiplier that advertisers have budgeted around for years is fading because shoppers are spreading purchases across the full month of November and into December.

What all three mean together. Google’s automation has gotten smarter. Advertiser competition has gotten more expensive. Consumer shopping behavior has spread out. All three of those changes have been happening gradually, and most business owners and most agencies have not updated their approach.

The frame to keep in mind. Never trust Google’s default settings and recommendations. Google’s defaults are built for Google’s business, not yours. This episode is three different examples of that same lesson.

In this episode:

Customer question: Should I use a .com or does it even matter anymore?

Featured project: Cornwall, Avery, Bjornstad & Scott

For the past decade, Google has been moving in one direction. More automation. Less advertiser control. Trust the algorithm. Hand over your budget and let the system figure out where to spend it.

This past week, that trend reversed.

Three Google updates landed between October 13 and October 14 that give business owners more granular controls over where their visibility shows up and how it works. Google Ads introduced Channel Prioritization and Budget Allocation for Performance Max. Google published new guidance on how it ranks PDFs in Search and AI Mode. And Google Merchant Center added a new store address attribute for Local Inventory Ads.

In this episode of Measured, we walk through all three changes, what each one means, and what you should actually do about them this week.

Change one: Google Ads adds Channel Prioritization and Budget Allocation. For two years, Performance Max advertisers have been frustrated that they could not see or control which channels their budget actually went to. You handed Google your money, Google decided where to spend it, and you got a combined report at the end. That just changed. Advertisers can now set channel priority and allocate budget across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps instead of letting Google decide the full mix.

Change two: Google explains how it ranks PDFs. If your website has menus, price lists, brochures, downloadable forms, or resource guides as PDFs, this matters. Most business owners have never thought about whether their PDFs show up in search. We cover Google’s new guidance, answer the obvious follow-up question about whether to just use web pages instead, and walk through a three-check audit for every PDF on your site.

Change three: Google Merchant Center adds a new store address attribute. Smaller change, but important for any retailer running Google Shopping with physical store inventory. The system has always required accurate store information, but connecting a specific product’s inventory to a specific store address has been clunky. The new attribute fixes that.

What all three mean together. Google is giving businesses more granular controls over where their visibility shows up. Why Google is giving control back now is not fully clear, and we are honest about that in the episode. What is clear is that the businesses that use these new controls thoughtfully will outperform the ones who still assume Google’s automation will figure it out.

In this episode:

Customer question: How fast does my website need to load?

Featured project: Midwest Land Management

For the past two years, the conversation about AI content has been loud but blurry. Should you use AI to write blog posts? Is it bad for SEO? Will Google penalize you? The answers depended on who you asked and what they were selling.

Last week, Google made the answer official.

On October 1, 2026, Google updated its AI-generated content guidelines for Search. The new guidance states it is critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness. On October 2, Google added a fake author warning to its Helpful Content guidance, calling out fabricated author profiles as a form of deception.

In this episode of Measured, we break down what changed, how to tell if you have been affected, and what you should actually do about it.

What Google actually changed. Google is not saying AI content is banned. Google is saying AI content is fine if it is helpful AND you have fact-checked it. That is a measurable standard, and the responsibility now sits squarely with the publisher. If you publish AI content that contains errors or fabricated details, you cannot blame the AI.

The fake author warning covers AI-generated author photos depicting people who do not exist, invented bios with fake credentials, and author attributions that misrepresent who actually wrote the content. Google has now explicitly called all three practices deception.

How to tell if your content has been affected. Google does not send you a notification saying your content was demoted. Detection is indirect. We walk through specific Search Console checks, the exact-phrase technique for spot-checking individual pages, and how to watch for patterns rather than single pages.

In this episode:

Customer question: When should I start sending emails for Black Friday?

Featured project: Prairie View Campus

October is a week away. Q4 is here. And Google Ads is quietly changing in three specific ways right now that affect how much you spend, how you show up, and how you plan for the biggest advertising quarter of the year.

In this episode of Measured, we break down what is changing, what to do about it, and what the rest of your Q4 prep should look like this week.

Change one: Local Services Ads are transitioning into Performance Max. US accounts started migrating in August. Historical LSA reports will not transfer to the new format. If you want to keep your historical performance data, you need to export it before the migration completes.

Change two: Campaign-level language setting is being removed. Starting late September, Google is removing the campaign-level language setting from Search and AI Max campaigns. Google will now decide which ad to show based on the language the ad copy is written in and what Google knows about the searcher.

Change three: Performance Max added a new destination option. You can now choose between sending traffic to your website or sending traffic to your Google Business Profile. For local businesses focused on calls or store visits, that is a meaningful new option worth testing.

We also cover the Q4 cost climb. Meta ad costs typically jump 30% to 80% during Q4, doubling or tripling during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Google Search costs rose 12% year over year in 2026 with another 8% to 10% projected through Q4. The businesses that do best in Q4 do not spend more in November. They spend earlier, warm audiences at lower cost, and use November to convert.

In this episode:

Customer question: How long does SEO actually take to work?

Featured project: State Bank & Insurance

Three things landed in the past two weeks. Two are updates from Google that give small businesses new ways to see how they show up online. The third is a real case study of what happens when a business loses visibility fast and cannot get it back.

In this episode of Measured, we break down what happened and what to actually do about it.

Two quick updates from Google. On September 10, Google brought back Business Profile post view counts for the first time in three and a half years. View counts now appear on individual posts and go back 18 months. Separately, Google is testing a new AI Contribution feature in Search Console with limited publishers, which would eventually show businesses what percentage of their traffic came from AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The main story. On September 8, 2026, Search Engine Journal reported that a UK news publisher lost 98% of visibility for trending Google News queries after moving from a .co.uk domain to a .com domain. According to NewzDash, the site's visibility dropped from 1% to 2% down to 0.02% within two weeks. Four months later, the site still shows only isolated appearances. Standard SEO tools tracking evergreen keywords showed a 60% to 70% drop over the same period.

Google associates your domain with years of authority, backlinks, and trust signals. Changing domains means Google has to figure out that the new site is you, and that transfer is not automatic. It relies on 301 redirects, sitemap updates, and preserving the trust signals Google uses to evaluate whether a site is authoritative.

In this episode:

Customer question: Should I have a chatbot on my website?

Featured project: Le Mars Area Family YMCA

Not every change to how customers find your business shows up in your inbox or on the news. Some of the biggest shifts happen quietly, without a press release, without a Google update banner, without anyone asking you to pay attention.

Three of those quiet shifts have been building over the past few months. In this episode of Measured, we break down what changed and what to actually do about it.

Story one: TikTok Local Feed has become a real local discovery channel. On February 11, 2026, TikTok launched a dedicated Local Feed in the United States that surfaces content from nearby businesses based on the viewer's real-time location. Follower count does not matter. According to TikTok, 73% of users say they have discovered a local business through the app.

Story two: Google finished its August 2026 spam update on August 21. The update targeted sites publishing hundreds of low-value pages to game rankings. According to SE Ranking, URLs in Google's top 10 were 82% more likely to drop beyond position 100 during the update. Legitimate sites publishing human-written content mostly rode it out.

Story three: YouTube's Ask YouTube feature is changing how people research. More than 140 million users interacted with Ask YouTube during June 2026 alone. Viewers can ask conversational questions right on video watch pages and get synthesized answers pulled from the video and related content. The feature is now moving into wider YouTube search.

In this episode:

Customer question: Do I really need an About page on my website?

Featured project: Dew Drop Drill

Three things landed this month that affect how your business shows up online, how you measure it, and what you are legally responsible for. None of them dominated headlines. All three matter for how you run a small business.

In this episode of Measured, we break down what happened and what to actually do about it.

Story one: Google confirmed a search data bug that ran for a week. Starting around August 15, site owners saw significant drops in their Google Search Console data. On August 21, Google confirmed the numbers were wrong. Not an algorithm change. A reporting bug on Google's end. If you made decisions based on August traffic numbers, those decisions were made on bad data.

Story two: How to actually protect your Google Business Profile. Google Business Profile suspensions have been a running story through 2026. Recent guidance from Search Engine Land lays out what small businesses can actually do to reduce the risk, from keeping verification documents ready to maintaining consistent business information across every platform.

Story three: The EU just made AI disclosure a legal requirement. On August 2, 2026, the EU AI Act's Article 50 took effect. Chatbots must disclose they are AI. AI-generated content must be labeled. Deepfakes must be identified as artificial. Fines reach up to €15 million or 3% of global annual turnover. The law applies to any business whose AI outputs meaningfully reach European users, not just European businesses. We also cover how watermarking actually works, since AI companies including Anthropic have already started watermarking every output to comply.

In this episode:

Customer question: Do I need customer testimonials on my homepage?

Featured project: Kossuth County

Your business now shows up in more places than ever, and less of it is under your control. Three specific changes to the platforms your business relies on landed this month. None of them are dominating headlines. All three affect how your business gets seen, measured, and recommended.

In this episode of Measured, we break down what changed and what to actually do about it.

Story one: Yelp is now feeding your reviews into ChatGPT. On July 23, 2026, Axios reported the details of a data licensing deal between Yelp and OpenAI. ChatGPT now has access to 330 million Yelp reviews and 8 million business listings. When someone asks ChatGPT for a local recommendation, Yelp's data is part of what the AI pulls from.

Story two: Google Search Console is quietly getting more powerful. Google has been adding new property types this year that let you track how your content on external platforms performs in Google Search. If you post on YouTube, Instagram, or other social platforms, you now have more visibility into whether that content actually shows up when people search.

Story three: Google Smart Bidding just changed on August 17. Google updated how Smart Bidding handles budget-limited campaigns. Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns should now behave more predictably when they hit daily budgets mid-day. If you or your agency runs Google Ads with Smart Bidding, this change matters for the next two weeks.

In this episode:

Customer question: Is it worth still printing business cards for my business?

Featured project: Pearson Lakes Art Center

If you run a small business, the holiday season already started. Consumers are shopping earlier than ever. Ad costs are climbing. And Q4 is coming faster than most businesses realize.

In this episode of Measured, we break down what the data actually shows, why ad costs spike so hard in Q4, when to actually run sales, what to have ready by September, and what most businesses get wrong.

More than half of consumers (50.7%) plan to start shopping even earlier than last year. 68% of consumers shop early to avoid delays. The National Retail Federation forecast puts US retail sales at $5.6 trillion in 2026, growing 4.4%. Black Friday falls on November 27. Cyber Monday is December 1. By the time those dates arrive, a significant portion of your potential customers will have already decided where they are shopping.

Ad costs spike hard through Q4. Meta CPMs typically jump 30% to 80%, with Black Friday CPMs often doubling or tripling. Google Ads is more stable but still climbing. The 2026 average Search CPC rose 12% year over year. The businesses that do best in Q4 do not spend more in November. They spend earlier, warm up their audiences at lower cost, and use November to convert customers who already know them.

Sale timing matters more than most businesses realize. September and October are not for discounting. They are for showing up. Share what is new for fall. Re-engage customers with content that reminds them why they bought from you. Then run promotions strategically through November, whether as one continuous push or two distinct windows.

In this episode:

Customer question: Is it okay to have a video playing in the background of my homepage?

Featured project: Greater Des Moines Orthodontics

If you run Google Ads, this fall is going to be different from any fall in the last decade. Google is rebuilding the platforms you have been using for years and giving you fixed deadlines to catch up.

In this episode of Measured, we break down the three changes moving through the system right now, what they mean for your business, and what to actually do about it.

Story one: Local Service Ads are moving into Google Ads. LSAs are the "Google Guaranteed" ads that home service businesses run. Plumbers, electricians, contractors, HVAC companies, and dozens of other service categories use them. Google announced this month that LSAs are moving into the main Google Ads interface. The migration begins in August 2026 and rolls out through 2027.

Story two: Dynamic Search Ads are migrating to AI Max. Google pushed the deadline from September 2026 to February 2027. Every DSA campaign still ends up on AI Max. Advertisers just have more runway.

Story three: New Search campaigns are already defaulting to AI Max. Alongside the DSA extension, Google made AI Max the default when creating new Search campaigns. Every business starting Google Ads for the first time is being handed a campaign with broad match, Smart Bidding, and Final URL Expansion turned on out of the gate.

Together these three changes point in one direction. Google is consolidating and automating your ad platforms. Whether you signed up for it or not, more of your ad spending is being controlled by Google's algorithms than a year ago.

In this episode:

Customer question: Can we just use stock photos for the website?

Featured project: EZ Living