🔍 Explainer: Google tests new ad formats in Search.

🛍️ Two-thirds of consumers go to TikTok Shop to discover new products and brands.

🚌 The Ordinary’s latest stunt? Filling a transportation gap in Brooklyn.

🍅 Heinz brings back the glass bottle to celebrate 157 years.

🐦 Self-care app Finch gets weird in its first brand campaign.

According to WordStream’s Google Ads Benchmarks report, 2026 marks the first year in five years where average cost per lead declined across industries.

Advertisers are becoming more effective at using Google’s AI-powered campaign tools, audience targeting, and conversion-focused strategies to improve efficiency over simply driving more clicks.

Google’s Performance Max and automated bidding appear to reward advertisers with stronger relevance and better-qualified traffic.

Brands that invest in first-party data, creative testing, and landing-page optimization are seeing stronger returns despite higher media costs.

Some insights to know:

• Average click-through rate (CTR): 6.64%.
• Average cost per click (CPC): $5.42.
• Average cost per lead (CPL): $66.69.
• Average conversion rate increased in 87% of industries.
• CPLs declined year-over-year for the first time since 2020.
• Legal industry had the highest CPL: $131.63.
• Arts & Entertainment had the lowest CPL: $26.84.
• CPCs have increased more than 100% since 2015.
• AI-powered campaigns are outperforming many manual strategies.
• Landing-page quality is becoming more important than keyword volume.
• Automation is reducing wasted ad spend.
• Competitive industries continue to see aggressive bidding pressure.
• First-party data strategies are becoming critical for targeting and attribution.
• Performance Max adoption continues to rise across industries.
• Advertisers focused on efficiency are outperforming those focused only on scale.

Dig into the data at WordStream.

Google’s new Ask Advisor tool is an AI-powered marketing collaborator across Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Merchant Center.

It connects data from each platform to provide recommendations, insights, and workflow automation.

The system can automatically pull product information, suggest campaign structures, and help launch ads faster.

It can also interpret performance trends, explain what influenced results, and recommend next steps.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, “The Future of Google Search,” to learn more about Google’s plans to replace the search box with 24/7 AI-powered information agents and interactive “Generative UI” that builds mini-apps and custom widgets directly on your results page.

What does that mean for advertising, for SEO, for the Internet as we know it?

Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• GLP-1s are Disrupting Every Sector (9:56)
• Spirit Airlines 2.0: Will it Fly? (11:08)
• Major Platform Updates (8:17)
• Nike Runs into Controversy (12:19)
• Transgressive OOH (18:45)
• Your Brain on AI (12:33)
• Meta, McDonald’s Mukbang, and The OpenAI Mess (14:41)
• Ethics in the AI Era (18:33)

🎙️ Now streaming on Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

“The Daily Carnage was the newsletter that brought us the most meaningful demo clicks and new trials.” — Digital Summit

“Open rate was nearly 50% and CTR was relatively high, especially considering this newsletter’s audience was likely being exposed to our event for the first time.” — Adweek

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Book a $99 Classified ad instantly, or ask us about our custom sponsorship packages tailored to your campaign objectives.

What’s better than time capsules and letters to your future self? Booking a reservation for 2046, maybe.

StreetEasy’s “Reserve Your Future” campaign was created with Mother New York for StreetEasy’s 20th anniversary.

It invites New Yorkers to make symbolic reservations at iconic NYC restaurants, bookstores, and cultural venues for twenty years from now.

Interestingly, it doesn’t showcase real estate listings or mortgage rates, instead centering the identity of place and belonging.

Picturing your life two decades ahead is little spooky, a lotta hopeful, and ultimately a super strong emotional campaign.

Weigh in on The Daily Carnage Subreddit:

• The Daily Carnage Show Ep 2.9 Discussion: “If AI agents become the primary interface to knowledge, what happens to the humans and businesses that knowledge originally came from? What does it mean for the internet to quietly transition from an open ecosystem of destinations into a closed ecosystem of gate-kept answers? Are we speeding toward a future where people stop visiting the web directly? If that behavior ends, we ever be able to rebuild it?”

Hi-C, 1963