Week 42: Google Ads lets you rank channels and cap Display spend

Google gave advertisers a way to say which channels get the budget first, and a cap on the ones that come last. It also set a deadline: in February 2027, Search campaigns with the Display Network on lose their current spend split. Most of the rest of the week moved measurement plumbing: how enhanced conversions are switched on in the API, how Tag Manager sends data, and what Safari blocks.

Published this week

• Google Tag Manager now pushes gtag config into the dataLayer: a tag on a .* trigger can fire once more per config call since 8 October.
• LinkedIn counts a view for 90 days. Google, Microsoft and Reddit: 1: view-through windows across six platforms, and why their counts do not add up.
• Three tools say “last click”. Each one means a different click: Google Ads, GA4 and LinkedIn credit three different touches for one sale.
• Two kinds of click ID, and why they never swap: each click ID matches only in the system that made it.
• Attribution is two jobs: your analytics tool’s and your ad platform’s, and why a server-side send does neither.
• The most visited websites in the US, and what AI does to the count: four rankings, four rulers, and what none of them sees.
• Free Twitter analytics tools in 2026: of ten tools on a 2020 list, seven are gone or no longer free.
• Your postback URL returned 200. The conversion can still be lost: 22 test postbacks, 12 lost or changed data.

Releases and changes

Google Ads

14 October. Channel priority and budget caps. Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns can rank channels High or Low priority and cap Low-priority channels at a share of the daily budget, “on a best-effort basis”. The cap is a target, not a limit, so check the spend by channel after it rolls out. In February 2027 the current Display spend split in Search goes away; Google’s instruction to keep it is Low priority with a 50% cap. (Google)

13 October. Demand Gen Drop. A Data Strength Uplift metric, Data Manager for DV360 and Google Analytics, and enhanced conversions “coming soon” to both. Google says Tag Gateway setups see “over 20% conversion uplift” on average. That figure is Google’s own internal analysis of two weeks in June, with no control group described, so read it as a claim, not a benchmark. (Google)

14 October. Google Ads API v26. New Search Lift metrics, and one setting for enhanced conversions: enablement_setting replaces enhanced_conversions_for_leads_enabled, a breaking change. Any script or connector that reads or writes the old field fails when it moves to v26. (Google Ads Developer Blog)

12 October. Two API releases a month. Four major releases a year stay; the rest are minor and non-breaking. v23 sunsets in February 2027, so integrations still on it have four months. (Google Ads Developer Blog)

Google Tag Manager

12 October. Containers send data directly. GTM containers now send to Google measurement products without loading gtag.js. Fewer scripts means less latency, but tags fire through a new path, so compare conversion counts the week before and the week after. (GTM release notes)

Google Shopping

15 October. Universal Cart. A cross-retailer cart in US Search and the Gemini app, with checkout through Google Pay or the merchant. The merchant stays the seller of record. If your store is in it, check that orders paid through Google Pay show up in your analytics, and under which channel. (Google)

Apple Safari

9 October. Apple resolves the adsrvr.org block for the 27.2 beta. A WebKit change committed in February blocks requests to certain domains outright (bug 307853). An engineer at The Trade Desk filed a bug saying Safari 27 bundled its domain, adsrvr.org, in that list, with eight others; Apple marked it fixed on 9 October after a 27.2 beta. Apple has not published the list or announced it in the Safari release notes. The bug is about adsrvr.org only, so for any other ad tech domain, test in Safari 27 rather than assume. (WebKit bug 324771)

13 October. Safari 27.2 beta: CNAME cookies. Safari fixed cookies set by a page’s own response being capped at seven days when the hostname is CNAMEd to a different registrable domain. A site whose own hostname is a CNAME to a hosting or CDN domain lost its cookies after a week on Safari. Once 27.2 ships, returning-visitor counts on such sites may rise with no change in traffic. (Safari 27.2 beta release notes)

Meta

13 October. GEM. Meta’s engineering blog says its generative ads model delivered “18.9% conversion improvement” across its surfaces. No baseline, no method, so it is not a number to plan with. (Engineering at Meta)

Microsoft Bing

13 October. AI Performance gets Topics Portfolio. Bing Webmaster Tools now groups the queries that cite sites in AI answers by topic, and lists the queries where rivals are cited and you are not. Bing calls the numbers “directional signals”, and small sites may not see the tab. For a site that does, it is a list of the answers it is missing, from the engine that writes them. (Bing Webmaster Blog)

Shopify

9 October. Compare-at prices reach AI agents. Agents that read Shopify Catalog now see the compare-at price, behind a merchant toggle. A markdown shown in an AI answer is a price you show, so check the toggle before a sale. (Shopify changelog)

What to do

1. Put February 2027 in the diary for every Search campaign with the Display Network on. Decide now whether Display stays at Low priority with a 50% cap or goes.
2. Find the enhanced_conversions_for_leads_enabled field in any Google Ads API script or connector before it moves to v26, and move anything on v23 before February.
3. Check conversion counts by browser around the GTM and Safari changes. A step change on Safari or after 12 October is the plumbing, not the campaigns.

Google’s 20% uplift is credit the ad platform gives itself. Whether your analytics tool agrees is a different question, because attribution is two jobs.