🏕️ Opening Bite
Everyone's still building keyword lists in two-word chunks.
Meanwhile, the real problem is your buyers stopped searching in two words.
Same keywords. Same match types. Same search terms report.
Google's AI Mode ads now follow people into their follow-up questions, which is where the buying decision gets made.
🪵 We got this wrong: Nothing reported from Monday's issue. If you caught something, reply with the number and it goes here Friday, with your name.
Stories Told Around The Camp
🚨 The Big Marketing Story: Google Launches Multiturn Ads in AI Mode
At the end of October, Google expanded ads in AI Mode to 10 more countries, including Australia, Canada and India, and rolled out Multiturn Ads broadly in the US. 1
Multiturn means the sponsored placement adapts as the person keeps asking. The ad isn't tied to the opening query. It moves with the follow-ups. 1
Google's own numbers explain why this matters: AI Mode queries run about three times longer than traditional searches, and one in six includes a voice or image input. 1
Two weeks earlier, Google also launched Universal Cart across Search and Gemini in the US, so more of the shopping trip can now happen without leaving Google. 1
The kicker? By the third follow-up, the searcher isn't asking what something is. They're asking which one to buy. That's a product-aware question, and most landing pages were written for the first one.
Survival Skills
🧠 Why This Matters
Your landing page is now part of the targeting. When the query is 25 words long, Google is matching intent, not a phrase. Pages that answer the specific follow-up (price, fit, comparison) earn the click. Pages that restate the headline lose it.
Your search terms report is about to get weird. Expect sentence-length queries. Negative keyword lists built for short queries will miss most of them, so judge waste by landing-page conversion rate, not by how odd the query looks.
The feed is the ad. With Universal Cart in Search and Gemini, product titles, prices and availability do more selling than ad copy. A stale feed is a 3x-longer query landing on the wrong product. 1
Translation: stop adding keywords and start answering the third question.
📸 See It In Action
An illustrative example for a cash-pay physical therapy clinic:
Classic search | AI Mode, follow-up three | |
|---|---|---|
What they type | physical therapy st pete | which of these takes cash pay and can see me this week for a running knee injury |
Awareness stage | Solution-aware | Product-aware, ready to book |
What wins | Bid and keyword match | A page that answers price, availability and fit in the first screen |
🔍 What Operators Are Doing
Smart operators aren't adding 500 long-tail keywords. They're rewriting the first screen of their landing pages to answer the questions people ask after the first search: how much, how soon, and why this one.
🧪 Try This This Week (10 minutes)
Step 1 (5 min): Export the last 30 days of search terms. In a sheet, add a word count column and sort by it. Pull the 10 longest queries that converted or got clicks.
Step 2 (5 min): Open your landing page next to that list. For each query, ask: does the first screen answer it? Mark yes or no.
Expected outcome: a list of the 3 to 5 questions your page skips, ready to become headline and FAQ rewrites before Black Friday traffic hits.
🔦 Around The Fire: first seat still open
This slot carries one reader's real account every issue: spend, what you shipped in the last 30 days, what the numbers did. The first operator to take it gets a line in Friday's issue and the swipe file on the house.
The bar is low on purpose. A landing page you rewrote on a Tuesday night. A creative test you ran with three ads instead of thirty. If it moved a number, it belongs here.
⚡ 3 Quick Signals
1. Google Ads: you can now tell it which campaigns eat first. Channel prioritization lets you mark Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen as High or Low priority. High gets fully funded within your tCPA or tROAS before Low gets a dollar, and you can cap Low with a daily percentage. Set it before BFCM. 1
2. YouTube: your engagement rate is about to drop 30% to 50%. Google raised the video engagement threshold from 5 seconds to 10 seconds on Oct 10 for in-stream, in-feed, masthead and Shorts. Nothing about your ads changed. Update automated rules and benchmarks that key off engagement. 1
3. Google Ads: it's adding your website's coupons to your ads. Since Oct 12, automated promotions pull offers from your site into Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets and no promotion assets. It's opt-out. Check that last month's expired code isn't running. 2
🤖 Tool Watch
Google's Customer Retention Goals. Now broadly available across Performance Max, Search and Shopping, with three modes: Re-engagement for lapsed customers, Loyalty for program members, and Retention Only for dedicated retention campaigns. Percentage bid multipliers (1.1x to 5x) also moved to general availability. If half your BFCM revenue comes from past buyers, this is how you stop paying new-customer prices to reach them. 1
🔥 Campfire Close
If your Google conversion rate slips while impressions climb...
it's probably not your bids.
It's that your ads are now showing three questions deep, to people your landing page never answers.
Campy's War Story: "In 2014 an ad was one picture and a line of text. I was a cracker on a paper plate. Now Google's ads hold whole conversations. I've never held one longer than a scroll. Write the page for question three."
See you around the campfire.
🤝 The Campfire Promise
Six things you can hold us to. Same six, every issue.
No platform money. Meta, Google, TikTok and the ad-tool companies can't buy a slot, an affiliate link or a "partner" post here. When anyone else sponsors an issue, it's labeled, and Jake has used what they sell.
No courses. We will never sell you a $997 anything. The playbooks are free and they stay free.
Every issue ends in a 10-minute action. If you can't do something with it before lunch, we didn't finish writing it.
A reader in every issue. Real accounts, real numbers, credited. Operators publishing operators.
Corrections go at the top. When we miss, you read it above the first story, not in a footnote.
Jake answers every reply. Hit reply. A person who runs ads reads it and writes back.
Caught us breaking one? Reply with the number. That goes at the top of the next issue too.
🍫 Know someone who runs ads?
Forward this to them, or send them your link. One signup gets you the S'mores Sticker Pack. Three gets you the Campfire Wallpaper Pack. Ten gets you the swipe file I write client ads from.
🎧 Have You Listened To The Podcast?
Same campfire, longer conversations. Listen on Apple Podcasts or listen on Spotify.
References
1. Common Thread Collective, "Every Google Ads Change in 2026 (Updated Weekly)," commonthreadco.com (entries Oct 10 to Oct 30, 2026)
2. PPC Land, "Google Ads will auto-apply website coupons to some campaigns from October 12," ppc.land (Oct 6, 2026); Search Engine Roundtable, seroundtable.com (Oct 5, 2026)
