GoSocial, 84 Cathedral Road, Cardiff (2026)

25/09/2026

Are Your Ads Working Harder For Your Agency Than They Are For You?

You're running Google or Meta ads, money's going out every month, and if someone asked what's actually driving your results, could you give them a straight answer? Most business owners can't, and it's not because they're not paying attention. It's because their reporting was never built to be understood.

That gap costs more than it looks like on the surface. Some of it's wasted spend sitting in campaigns that nobody's properly checked in on for a while. Some of it's the leads and sales slipping through because the account isn't quite doing what it could. And most of the time, you're locked into a long contract the whole time, making it hard to even push for something better.

That's exactly why we built Go Social the way we did.

One simple monthly fee, no long contracts keeping you stuck if it's not the right fit. Reporting that's actually written for you to understand, not just sent and moved on from. We've managed millions in ad spend across Google and Meta, so we know the difference between a genuine problem and a campaign that just needs a bit more time.

If your ad budget deserves more clarity than it's currently getting, this is worth a conversation.

Book a free call with one of our PPC specialists. gosocialgb.com/qualification/

23/09/2026

Your Campaigns Were Just Auto-Upgraded To AI Max. Here's How To Check What Actually Changed.

If you manage any Search campaigns using campaign-level Broad Match or Automatically Created Assets, Google has been migrating them to AI Max throughout September. Most of it happened without anyone actively checking what came through.
Here's how to audit it properly.

1. Go to Campaigns, then filter by bid strategy or campaign type to identify which campaigns now show AI Max settings that didn't have them before September 1st.

2. Open each migrated campaign and check Brand Controls under campaign settings. Google says inclusions and exclusions carry over automatically. Confirm that yourself rather than assuming it matched what you had, since this is the setting most likely to slip.

3. Check the Search Terms report for each migrated campaign over the last two weeks. AI Max matches more broadly than standard Broad Match did, so look for irrelevant queries that wouldn't have triggered your ads before the migration.

4. Review any location or audience exclusions you had in place pre-migration. Confirm they're still active under the new settings, not just carried over in name.

5. Compare cost per conversion for the two weeks before migration against the two weeks after. A meaningful shift, either way, indicates whether the new matching behaviour is helping or hurting that specific campaign.

6. If a campaign is underperforming post-migration and you want tighter control back, you can manually adjust AI Max settings rather than reverting, since the legacy structure it came from is no longer available to recreate.

Don't wait for a dip in performance to notice this happened. Check it this week if you haven't already.

Want us to run this audit across your accounts? gosocialgb.com/qualification/

22/09/2026

Google Just Started Routing Searchers Away From Websites, Including Yours

Google is testing something worth knowing about if any of your traffic still comes from organic search or AI Overviews influencing buyer research.

Links within AI Overviews now direct users to AI Mode, Google's conversational search experience, rather than to actual web pages. These links sit at the bottom of the Overview, styled to look like normal follow-up links, but they keep the user within Google rather than sending them elsewhere.

This matters for PPC too, not just organic. If AI Overviews increasingly keep users within Google's ecosystem before they ever reach a search results page with ads, the research phase of the buyer journey is shifting to a place paid search can't currently reach.

Worth watching over the next few months:

Check whether your organic click-through rate has started dipping on queries that trigger AI Overviews, separate from any ranking changes.

If a meaningful share of your traffic previously came from informational queries, expect more of that research to happen entirely inside Google before a user ever searches again with commercial intent.

This reinforces why bottom-of-funnel, high-intent keywords matter more than ever. The awareness stage is increasingly happening somewhere your ads and your website aren't present.

Nothing to action urgently here. Everything to keep an eye on.

Want a read on how your account's keyword mix holds up if this trend continues? gosocialgb.com/qualification/

18/09/2026

Those Cheap Clicks Your Budget-Limited Campaigns Used To Get? Google Just Quietly Ended Them

Remember the August 17 update to target-based bidding? We covered the headline change back then. New analysis is now surfacing what actually happened underneath it, and it's bigger than "campaigns perform closer to target."

Here's the mechanism nobody talked about at the time. Before August 17, budget-limited campaigns using target-based bidding benefited from something called bid suppression. Google was quietly holding bids down to help these campaigns secure cheaper clicks and outperform their stated ROAS or CPA targets. That's a big part of why some accounts looked exceptionally efficient.

New data suggests that suppression has effectively ended. Budget-limited campaigns are now bidding closer to what their target actually calls for, which means CPCs are rising and impression share is shifting, exactly the behaviour Google said it wanted.

The uncomfortable part: some of your strongest-looking campaigns may have owed part of their performance to a quirk in how Smart Bidding handled budget constraints, rather than purely to your targeting or creative.

What to check this week:

Pull CPC and impression share trends for any budget-limited, target-based campaign, comparing before and after August 17.

If CPCs have climbed and ROAS has drifted toward your stated target rather than beating it, that's this change working as intended, not a sign something broke.

Reassess whether your current targets still reflect real margins, now that the artificial cushion some campaigns had is gone.

If a campaign looked unusually efficient all year, this is worth checking before you assume the strategy stopped working.

Want us to review your accounts against this? gosocialgb.com/qualification/

15/09/2026

If Your Meta Campaigns Reach Teenagers, Your Available Inventory Is About To Shrink

Meta has settled with a coalition of US state attorneys general in a deal worth roughly £13 billion over ten years. Buried in the settlement are teen usage defaults that directly matter to advertisers.

From late February 2027, teens under 18 face a default two-hour daily cap across Facebook and Instagram combined, not per app. Add a midnight-to-6am access block, muted notifications during school hours, and hidden like counts on teen posts.

Here's the part that affects your account, not just teen wellbeing. Less time spent on the apps means less available inventory in that age bracket. Campaigns skewing toward the 13-17 audience should expect delivery to tighten as these defaults roll out, simply because there's less scroll time for ads to appear in.

This isn't optional for Meta, and individual advertisers can't opt out. It's a legal settlement, not a policy that Meta later chose to reverse.

What to check now, well ahead of February:

Review which of your campaigns currently have meaningful delivery to the 13-17 age bracket.

If teen reach is a real part of your strategy, start planning for tighter available inventory rather than assuming current delivery patterns hold.

Watch CPMs in this age bracket over the coming months. Reduced inventory against steady demand usually means costs climb before anyone officially flags it.

Six months feels distant until the delivery numbers start moving. Worth having this on your radar now.

Want us to review how this affects your audience mix? gosocialgb.com/qualification/

31/07/2026

Your Reports Have Been Lying To You Since March

If your Meta ads reporting has looked shaky since the spring and you couldn't quite explain why, here's the answer.

Back in March, Meta reclassified how certain conversions get attributed. Conversions that used to count as click-through are now being counted as engage-through instead. Same customer, same purchase, different column in your reporting.

This isn't a small technical footnote. Click-through and engage-through conversions tell you different stories about how someone actually found you. Blend them together silently, and your cost-per-click efficiency looks worse than it is, while your true engagement-driven wins get buried in a metric that doesn't separate them out.

Most advertisers haven't caught this because the dashboard still looks normal. Numbers moved, but nothing flagged the move.

If your CPA has crept up since March with no obvious cause, check how your conversions are being classified before you touch targeting, budgets, or creative. You might not have a performance problem. You might have a reporting problem wearing a performance problem's clothes.

Want a proper audit of what's actually happening in your account? gosocialgb.com/qualification/

29/07/2026

145 Qualified Leads At 93p Each: How One Of Many Fixed A Broken Funnel In 30 Days

One of Many had what most businesses would call a good problem. A strong brand. A proven coaching programme. Genuine demand from women looking to grow and lead.

What they didn't have was a system.

No lead qualification process. No consistent monthly lead flow. No automated follow-up once someone showed interest. Ad spend was going out, but nobody could say with confidence who was coming in, or whether they were the right fit.

We built a two-funnel system across Meta and Google. A quiz-based scorecard funnel that qualified people before a single call was booked. A monthly webinar funnel, run at £5 per registration, giving cold and warm audiences a reason to engage properly with the programme. Behind both, an automated SMS and email nurture sequence that kept leads warm without anyone manually chasing them.

The result: 145 leads generated at £0.93 per lead, webinar registrations at £5 each, and a 27% attendance rate once people signed up.

The team at One of Many noted the work went beyond the ads themselves, touching their landing page and follow-up sequences too, and that cost per lead has continued to drop as a result.

The lesson isn't "run more ads." It's that cost drops and quality improves once the entry point, the qualification, and the follow-up are all built to work together.

Want a system like this for your business? gosocialgb.com/qualification/

27/07/2026

Stop Paying An Agency To Guess What's Working In Your Ads Account

Most agencies hide behind jargon because clarity is uncomfortable when the results aren't there.

We built Go Social the opposite way.

One simple monthly fee. No long contracts locking you in past the point it's working for you. No surprise add-ons landing on an invoice three months in.

We've managed millions in ad spend across Google and Meta. That means we know the difference between a campaign that's genuinely stalled and one that just needs another two weeks of data. We know what scales and where the ceiling actually is, not where an algorithm says it should be.

Every client gets clear reporting. Not a wall of metrics designed to look impressive. A straight answer to two questions: what's working, and what happens next.

If you're planning your next campaign and want traffic that's actually ready to buy or enquire, that's the conversation worth having.

Book a free call with one of our PPC specialists. gosocialgb.com/qualification/

24/07/2026

Google Just Admitted Your Lead Gen Campaigns Have Been Optimising For The Wrong Thing

If you run lead generation campaigns on Target CPA, Google has quietly acknowledged a problem you've probably felt for years.

Your bidding has been optimising for the form fill. Not the sale. Not the qualified lead. Just the moment someone submitted a form, regardless of what happened after.

Google's new feature, Journey-Aware Bidding, is now in beta for Search campaigns using Target CPA. It learns from your full set of conversion goals, not just the one you're bidding to. For anyone running a complex sales cycle- quote requests, consultations, multi-step qualification- this closes a real gap. Your bidding strategy can finally learn from what actually turns into revenue, not just what fills a form.

Here's the catch. This only works if your account already tracks the full journey. Offline conversions, CRM data, deal stages fed back into Google Ads. Without that data, the beta has nothing to learn from and won't improve your results.

If you've been meaning to set up offline conversion tracking and kept putting it off, this is the reason to stop.

Want help getting your account ready for this? gosocialgb.com/qualification/

23/07/2026

Your Ad Schedule Is Lying To You About How Much You're Spending

If you run ads Monday to Friday only, you've probably assumed your schedule controls how much you spend each day. That assumption changed on June 1st, and most advertisers haven't noticed yet.

Here's what used to happen. Google paced your budget based on your active days. Five-day schedule, budget spread across those five days, roughly 21.7 times your daily budget as a monthly ceiling.

Here's what happens now. Google paces toward your full monthly limit, 30.4 times your daily budget, whether your ads run five days or seven. The system is trying to hit a number built for a full month, even though your schedule only gives it five days to spend it in.

The result is budget arriving faster and heavier on the days you are live, because Google is compressing a month's worth of intended spend into fewer active days.

If you manage a limited-schedule account and haven't checked your daily spend against your budget in the last few weeks, do it today. Compare actual daily spend to what you'd expect under the old pacing model. If it's running high, your monthly budget cap may need adjusting downward to compensate.

Small technical change. Real effect on your numbers if you're not watching for it.

Want a second pair of eyes on your account? gosocialgb.com/qualification/

GoSocial

25/09/2026

23/09/2026

22/09/2026

18/09/2026

15/09/2026

31/07/2026

29/07/2026

27/07/2026

24/07/2026

23/07/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Listing takedown request