Soku AIBlog
Insights, tutorials, and updates from the Soku AI team.
Free Google Ads Reporting Template (2026)
A free Google Ads reporting template you can copy in one click — no signup, no connector, no trial. Search, Shopping and Performance Max tabs, the exact metric definitions each one needs, and the reporting mistakes that make good accounts look bad. Verified 2026-08-13.
14 min read · August 13, 2026
Instagram Post Size Guide 2026: Every Format and Safe Zone
Instagram post size in 2026: 1080×1350 for feed, but the profile grid previews at 3:4 — so the two crops disagree and most cheat sheets never mention it. Every organic format, the exact overlap zone, and where text actually survives. Verified 2026-08-13.
12 min read · August 13, 2026
Instagram Stories Ads Examples: 25 Worth Copying
25 Instagram Stories ad patterns that survive a full-screen, sound-off, thumb-ready placement — grouped by the job each one does, with the safe-zone maths that decides whether any of them render. Verified 2026-08-13.
14 min read · August 13, 2026
LinkedIn Ad Examples: 20 B2B Ads That Worked
20 LinkedIn ad examples by format — with the specs each one needs, why it works, and how to pull up the real thing in LinkedIn's Ad Library yourself. Honest about which results are published and which are pattern-level. Verified 2026-08-13.
15 min read · August 13, 2026
ChatGPT Ads Added View-Through Conversions as a Separate Metric (August 2026) — Superseded by the September Attribution-Window Update
Dated record of the 2026-08-12 ChatGPT Ads update, when OpenAI's developer documentation gained view-through attribution across the Measurement Pixel, the Conversions API and the insights endpoints — reported separately at campaign level and explicitly excluded from Conversions, CPA, bidding and billing. SUPERSEDED: on 2026-09-16 the help centre introduced selectable attribution windows and now counts eligible view-through conversions inside the Conversions total when the view-through window is 1 Day. See the linked follow-up for the current state and the remaining conflict between OpenAI's two documentation surfaces.
13 min read · August 12, 2026
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 — Google says new Display campaigns will "only be created within Demand Gen" ("coming later"), with the transition expected to complete by 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