Google is adding Scenario Planner to its Meridian marketing measurement toolbox, giving marketers and developers tools to improve campaign measurement. Many marketers struggle to link Marketing Mix Model outputs to business decisions. Scenario Planner offers a user-friendly interface for experimenting with budgets and seeing real-time ROI without coding, making measurement insights more accessible and actionable.
Microsoft Clarity introduces AI Citations (beta), offering end-to-end visibility of how content is cited in AI-generated answers and drives AI-referred traffic. It unifies signals from Bing Webmaster Tools and Clarity, showing citation activity, query volume, and page citations. This helps brands understand their influence in AI answers, optimize content, and monitor AI visibility trends. Access is by invitation.
Upload all Meta ad types in bulk directly from Google Sheets, single image, video, carousel, and flexible ads. Control placements, multiple headlines, primary texts, descriptions, and creatives from one spreadsheet. Built for agencies and teams managing dozens of ads across multiple accounts, helping you launch faster, stay consistent, and avoid costly manual errors.
Google Tag Manager now automatically sends more Google Ads website events, reducing manual setup and improving data consistency. This allows advertisers to measure and gain insights more effectively with less effort. As more events are collected and sent, advertisers might see increased network requests to Google domains in the background.
Microsoft Clarity introduces a beta feature called AI Bot Activity, revealing how AI assistants, search crawlers, and automated agents interact with your site. It shows which bots access your content, how often they crawl, and which pages get the most automated visits. This feature aims to provide visibility into automated web activity, helping teams make informed decisions. Available now in Dashboards → AI Visibility → Bot Activity.
Looker Studio updates include cross data source filtering, allowing controls to filter charts from different data sources by overriding default field IDs. Users can now show or hide individual charts and components for all or select viewers. A new histogram chart feature helps visualize data distribution, revealing insights about data shape, center, and spread not easily seen in pie or bar charts.
GA4 introduces beta features like multi-channel budgeting with projections for budget distribution, conversion management allowing choice of count type and attribution window to reduce discrepancies, and new conversion attribution reports with touchpoint metrics to understand channel roles and justify investments in non-converting campaigns. These updates target advertising but support integration of other channels.
Google Tag Gateway is launching a Google Cloud Platform integration in beta, allowing one-click deployment using an External Application Load Balancer and backend service routing. This setup hosts Google's tagging tech on a first-party domain, improving resistance to tracking prevention and ad blockers. Previously, Cloudflare was the only automated option. More details and documentation are expected as the feature rolls out.
"Manage data transmission" in Google Tag controls data flow by blocking ads, analytics, or diagnostic requests if consent isn't given, even with Advanced Consent Mode. It allows limited data for ads without consent and automatically refires tags when consent is granted, queuing events until then. This applies only to Google's tags now, with possible future enhancements.
Google Tag Manager now includes three new Built-in Variables: Analytics Client ID, Analytics Session ID, and Analytics Session Number. These variables retrieve values from Google Analytics cookies safely and faster than the gtag() GET API. Additionally, a new variable type called Analytics Storage allows customization of Measurement ID and cookie prefix for creating personalized versions of these variables.
