Soku AIBlog
Insights, tutorials, and updates from the Soku AI team.
Feed-Driven Creative: When Your Catalog Is the Ad
Feed-driven creative assembles the ad at serve time from your product feed — which means the creative brief is a data quality problem, and it is usually owned by a team that has never been told the feed is now advertising copy.
11 min read · August 12, 2026
Generative AI Display Advertising Is Now the Default
Google is retiring standalone Display campaigns into Demand Gen — no new Display campaigns from January 2027. Five of the eight generative AI creative features in Demand Gen are on by default, which means the question is no longer whether to use AI for display, but which defaults to turn off.
12 min read · August 12, 2026
Google Ads Match Types in 2026: Phrase, Exact and Broad
Google Ads match types explained from Google's own documentation: what broad, phrase and exact actually mean now that all three match on meaning, the close-variant rule you cannot opt out of, how Google picks which keyword serves when several are eligible, and why the old three-tier account structure is now actively harmful. Verified 2026-08-12.
15 min read · August 12, 2026
Marketing Mix Modeling for Paid Media Teams
Marketing mix modeling explained for people who buy media: what MMM can and cannot answer, the data volume it genuinely needs, adstock and saturation in plain arithmetic, why it disagrees with your ad platforms by design, and the four failure modes that produce confident wrong answers.
16 min read · August 12, 2026
Meta Audience Network: Should You Keep It On?
Meta Audience Network is on by default inside Advantage+ placements, and excluding it is the most common reflex in paid social. What Audience Network actually is in Meta's own documentation, why the exclusion usually costs more than it saves, the two cases where turning it off is correct, and the account-level control that works even with Advantage+ on. Verified 2026-08-12.
14 min read · August 12, 2026
Server-Side Tracking Is Now an AI Bidding Input
Server-side tracking stopped being a measurement project when the platforms started weighting server-confirmed conversions more heavily in bid-model training. Meta's Advantage+ models now prefer CAPI-confirmed events over pixel-only ones — which makes signal quality a bidding lever, not a reporting one.
11 min read · August 12, 2026
Best Ad Spy Tools in 2026: 10 Platforms Compared
Four of the ten best ad spy tools are free, official, and run by the ad platforms themselves — which changes what the paid six are actually selling. Real 2026 pricing where vendors publish it, an honest note where they don't, and the coverage wall that limits every tool on this list. Verified 2026-08-11.
15 min read · August 11, 2026
ChatGPT Ads Now Prohibits Individual Housing and Job Listing Ads (Policy v1.4)
OpenAI's ad policies moved to v1.4 on 10 August 2026, adding a Housing and Jobs section that prohibits ads for individual job listings and housing rentals or sales — with a carve-out for platforms. A second, unannounced change added an ad preview endpoint to the Ads API. Neither appeared in an advertiser email. Verified 2026-08-11.
12 min read · August 11, 2026
Free Media Plan Template for Paid Advertising
A free media plan template that actually calculates something — budget split, forecast impressions, clicks, conversions, CAC and ROAS from your own assumptions, plus a reconciliation block that catches the two errors most media plans ship with. Download the CSV, or build it yourself from the column spec.
12 min read · August 11, 2026
Performance Max Explained: When PMax Wins and When It Doesn't
Performance Max is not a campaign type you either believe in or don't. It has a specific shape, documented controls most advertisers never turn on, and three situations where it structurally cannot work. Here is what Google's own documentation says PMax does, what it now reports, and the honest decision guide. Verified 2026-08-11.
14 min read · August 11, 2026
ChatGPT Ads Delta Feeds API: Update Product Availability Without Reuploading Your Catalog
OpenAI has quietly shipped a Delta Feeds API for ChatGPT Ads — PATCH /feeds/{feed_id}/products lets you flip availability and titles on individual variants instead of re-uploading the whole catalog over SFTP. What it does, what it refuses to do, and why the help centre still says the opposite. Verified 2026-08-10.
9 min read · August 10, 2026
Google Ads Management Software: The 2026 Buyer's Guide
We fetched every vendor's pricing page on the same day and half of them would not give us a number. A 2026 buyer's guide to Google Ads management software — what each category actually does, the real prices where they exist, and the spend-based pricing model that quietly punishes growth. Verified 2026-08-10.
15 min read · August 10, 2026