To paraphrase Bob Dylan, as far as B Corp is concerned, the times they are a’ changin. After 20 years of operation in the US, and 10 years in the UK, B Corp have completely overhauled how they assess organisations and have recently rolled out a new set of standards. 

These new standards move away from a points-based system towards a model centred on mandatory actions that increase over time. There is a clear focus on continuous improvement. 

This makes our annual impact report this year a little unconventional. For the first time, we can’t directly compare how we’re faring compared to the previous year, at least in a numerical sense. 

We’ve been a proud B Corp for three years. For anyone not familiar with the movement, its ethos is to use business for good and in this blog we reflect on the progress we’ve made in the previous key areas and the impact we continue to have.

Sun, sea and Search. This April, the Uprise Up team returned to Brighton for three days of brain-buzzing talks from industry experts. Lots of insights to apply to the charity sector…

Digital media went through a profound change in 2025: AI has fuelled considerable disruption, data requirements have grown substantially, there’s been increased convergence across digital channels, and organic search has undergone another seismic shift.

The charity sector has seen additional change, including a 15% drop in traffic across Google Ad Grants, as well as a complete halt on the Microsoft Ad for Social Impact scheme. Meanwhile, Meta’s data restrictions for health charities look to be avoidable, and new laws for soft opt-in are somewhat of a cause for celebration.

Digital marketers are perpetual pioneers and 2026 is going to require agencies and charities alike to be at our best over these formative months. As Darwin theorised, it’s not the strongest who survive, but those who adapt best.

In 2026, Uprise Up will capitalise on the benefits afforded by new technologies, while providing our clients with closer, more effective partnerships.

We know where we want to get to – now for the plan. These are our resolutions for 2026:

1. Innovate our services through T-shaped expertise.
2. Expand into content and organic social
3. Scale up our data services to meet growing needs
4. Offer clients best-in-sector access to data and knowledge
5. Increase support for clients’ in-house capabilities
6. Champion AI and automation efficiency gains
7. I’m speaking with every client to better tailor our support
8. Provide Satisfaction Guarantees for all client work

It’s been almost a year and a half since Universal Analytics was discontinued, and GA4 has been evolving at speed. In the past 18 months, Google has rolled out more than 45 updates, designed to make the platform more intuitive, insightful and useful for modern marketers.

From new diagnostics that explain data gaps, to expanded audience exports, there’s plenty of untapped value in GA4 right now. In this blog I’ll highlight some of the new features we’ve spotted and tested, and explain how to maximise their value.

Note: The features shared in this blog are based on the Google & Merkle webinar held on 1st July 2025, titled One Year Post-UA: The Ongoing Evolution of Google Analytics.

In this follow-up to the previous blog on the new Meta Pixel restrictions around the Health & Wellness category, we’ll answer some commonly asked questions and demystify Meta’s policies.  These answers are informed by in-depth conversations we’ve had in recent weeks with Meta representatives and charity clients.

Q) If my Pixel/domain has been restricted, what can be done?

A) If your Meta Pixel or domain has been flagged under the Health & Wellness category, or if you’re seeing limitations on conversion tracking or audience building, there are still several actions you can take to mitigate the impact:

1. Review Your Pixel in Events Manager

Firstly, if you believe your Pixel has been incorrectly categorised, you can submit it for review directly in the platform.

Truthfully, we’ve had little success, but we have been having better luck through our contacts at Meta within the Nonprofits Team. If we feel there is a strong case, they can help escalate this internally.

2. Use ‘Clean’ Domains

As restrictions are domain-specific, creating a clean, dedicated domain or subdomain for paid media activity can help circumvent issues – though it’s not foolproof.

Key tips:

• Limit health-related language and references on the clean domain.
• Focus messaging on fundraising, awareness, or general impact rather than condition-specific information.
• You can utilise your existing Pixel, although we’d still recommend creating a new Pixel, to avoid negative associations as much as possible.  

3. Use On-Platform Lead Generation

Consider switching to Meta’s native Lead Ads, which don’t rely on Pixel tracking or your website. These allow you to collect user data (e.g. email, phone, preferences) directly within Facebook and Instagram.

This approach won’t be relevant for every campaign type (e.g. getting people to directly donate) but has the potential benefits:

• Avoids website restrictions entirely.
• Can still be used for building warm audiences and retargeting.
• Integrated easily with most CRMs directly, via automation (e.g. using Zapier) or manual exports.

4. Optimise for Upper-Funnel Actions

If you can’t optimise for conversions, consider running campaigns optimised for link clicks or engagement. While these don’t drive on-site actions nearly as efficiently, they can still support your funnel, especially when paired with warm audience targeting.

Tactics to make this work:

• Use warm audiences from first-party data (e.g. lead/email lists or CRM exports)
• Run video view campaigns, then build custom audiences from engaged viewers.
• Avoid using completely broad targeting, as it will optimise for low quality, ‘cheap’ traffic, unlikely to convert down the line.

Also, don’t forget to:

• Set up UTM parameters to better track website performance in GA4 with more detail.
• Also use CRM data to assess performance outside Meta’s platform – or create dashboards or reports combining GA4 + CRM.

5. Diversify Your Media Mix

If Meta restrictions are limiting your performance, it’s a good time to explore alternative platforms where restrictions may be less severe.

Recommended options:

• TikTok: Often more flexible for health and charity messaging, especially with strong creative. Not exclusive to a young audience either.
• Programmatic Display: Allows audience targeting with more control, and is not only used for raising awareness, but we’ve found to drive lower funnel actions too. Also possible to reach video, audio and CTV channels though platforms such as DV360.
• Google Performance Max (PMax): Covers Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail, and is intended for driving conversions. The campaign type offers much less rich insights, but the results are becoming more encouraging.

The key is to reduce over-reliance on Meta and build a multi-channel strategy that can weather platform-specific changes.

Q) If our Pixel has been categorised as Health & Wellness, can we just create a new Pixel?

A)  If your domain and content remain the same, the new Pixel will likely be flagged again.

It may also take 1-2 weeks to actually see the H&W categorisation appear in Events Manager for the new Pixel, and in the meantime, the Pixel will either not activate or just not send any events like pageviews.

Q) Is H&W categorisation enforced per Pixel, domain, or Business Manager?

A) Categorisation applies per domain. Hence why if you create a new Pixel, it will also likely be flagged. There may be some situations where this is not the case though, due to inconsistencies in how Meta’s systems carry out checks.

NOTE: A subdomain is technically a separate domain, and therefore is deemed as a new domain in this instance.

Q) So if I just create a new domain or subdomain, and place my Pixel on this site, will this avoid being categorised as Health & Wellness?

A) Using a separate domain might delay enforcement but if your content or events still relate to health conditions, Meta will likely flag it again.

Seek to make a ‘clean’ domain, that limits health-related language and references where possible.

Q) Where can we see our Pixel’s status?

A) Go to Events Manager: https://business.facebook.com/events_manager2

Then either within the Overview section you will see a notification such as the below:

Or go into the Pixel itself within settings, and under ‘Manage data source categorises’, click ‘manage’:

• You will then be able to see more details about what specific domain are restricted with more details and the ability to appeal the decision.

Q) When requesting a review of the categorisation, what actually happens? Is it checked by a human?

A) The flagged domain is then reviewed manually by a human. This is a dedicated team at Meta, although details about the team and their processes are strictly guarded.

What is known is that any information across the data source that may provide sensitive health information is subject to review against their policy. The homepage is likely where they will start though. They will not be able to review unpublished pages.

Q) What is Core Setup, and why does it matter?

A) Core Setup is a restricted configuration applied to your Meta Pixel or other business tools when Meta detects that your website may involve sensitive topics, including health

Sometimes, a Pixel won’t be restricted outright but individual components within your setup (like a conversion named Cancer Support Sign Up) might be flagged. This puts you into a kind of probation zone, where the Pixel works but Meta is watching.

When your Pixel is in Core Setup, Meta limits the data it collects, especially custom parameters and parts of URLs after the main domain. You may lose access to some functionality, like:

• Custom audiences based on specific URL paths.
• Certain custom conversion tracking.
• Advanced matching.
• Catalog integrations.

This configuration can still impact campaign performance, however, you can still use standard event (e.g. purchases) for reporting and optimisation, which is the key part lost if full restrictions are applied.

Q) Why are Meta enforcing so many news restrictions?

A) Meta isn’t targeting charities or being overly strict for no reason but essentially responding to legal requirements, user expectations, and internal risk controls around the sharing of sensitive data.

Our feeling is that a key trigger was the Digital Markets Act which became enforceable in mid to late 2023. The DSA established criteria to qualify a large online platform (i.e. Meta) as a ‘gatekeeper’ and put the onus on them to get clear consent from users before tracking their data. This includes tracking for personalised advertising, user demographics, and remarketing. Google developed Consent Mode V2, but Meta lagged behind without an alternative solution for ensuring consent had been provided. Our theory is they likely reached a deadline, so had to completely stop the sharing of any sensitive data.

Unfortunately, this means that well-intentioned organisations (like charities) often get caught up in the same systems built to protect users from misuse, misinformation, or unethical advertising practices.

Is it only charities that have been impacted by these restrictions? Are there other categories?

A) The restrictions aren’t limited to Health and Wellness content only. We have focussed on this categorisation as this is the most commonly applied one for charities, and our area of specialism. But it also extends to categories such as Financial Services, Politics, Religion, Sexuality. see full list here:  Meta Business Help – Data Source Categorisation.

Back in January 2025, Meta introduced new restrictions for Pixels associated with health and wellness content, and many charities suddenly found their tracking capabilities disrupted.

From September 2nd, further policies are being rolled out. They bring the threat that even charities not formally categorised as Health and Wellness could face restrictions on certain custom audiences and conversions.

In this blog, we’ll explain:

• What the original restrictions were.
• How the Health & Wellness category is determined.
• What impact the changes in September could have.
• The answers to common questions and misunderstandings that have been raised (having extensively spoken directly with Meta).

What happened in January 2025?

Meta began enforcing a policy that limits what data the Pixel can collect if it’s associated with medical conditions or health statuses.

If your Pixel was flagged as being in the Health & Wellness category, you may have noticed:

• You couldn’t utilise custom audiences based on Pixel events, e.g. remarketing to website visitors.
  
• Custom or standard events couldn’t be used for both conversion optimisation and reporting of ad campaigns.
  

It’s important to note, however, that restrictions are applied per domain/subdomain. So, while a single Pixel might be applied across multiple sites, if Meta only deems one (e.g. charity.org.uk) to be associated with medical conditions, you might still have full Pixel functionality for another, e.g. donation.charity.org.uk.

You can identify which domains have been restricted through Events Manager: https://business.facebook.com/events_manager2

What was the impact?

In some cases, the impact was substantial – not only affecting campaign performance but also creating stress, confusion and anxiety about the future within the charity community.

When a website was flagged, charities lost the ability to let Meta optimise towards key on-site actions like sign-ups and donations; forcing ads to use less effective strategies like ‘click optimisation’.

The difference in performance can be stark.

Charities have seen costs per acquisition (CPA) increase by 2-3x when forced to optimise for clicks. This is even higher for colder audiences.

There are some other potential solutions available, discussed later.

What counts as Health & Wellness?

According to Meta, this category applies to products, services, or content related to medical conditions or sensitive health topics, such as:

• Cancer, dementia, arthritis.
• Anxiety or depression.
• Substance use disorders.
• Self-harm or suicide.

How is Meta determining categorisation?

Meta uses AI to scan a page’s content as well as considers the URL naming, using key phrases as context clues. Naturally, these automated checks can often lead to inconsistencies. The exact criteria for how Meta are determining these categorises is not known, and unlikely to ever be made available.

This can lead to some ambiguity as to what actually constitutes Health & Wellness content.

While a page offering advice on breast cancer symptoms and treatments is a more obvious case, pages specific to donation activity might still include health-related terms, but are not promoting health related information per se.

As noted though, restrictions are domain-specific. For this reason, many advertisers have opted to place a new Pixel on a ‘clean’ domain that has more limited content, e.g. a donation-specific page. Whilst this can be successful, this is not always the case and has been a point of frustration.

Why are some similar sites categorised differently to others?

In recent months, we’ve seen a new category emerge, Health & Wellness – Other. A Meta contact within the nonprofits team confirmed this came into effect some time between March and June 2025.

Importantly, this category does not come with full Pixel restrictions, but rather a lighter set referred to as ‘Core Set-up’.

This new category is not actually discussed in any of Meta’s help articles, but a definition can be found within Events Manager, if you happen to be categorised this way:

The last point is particularly pertinent. This specifies that domains for health-related charities that are fundraising should be categorised as Other and thus not face such severe restrictions.

This subtle distinction could mean your Pixel has been incorrectly categorised. While you can send your Pixel for a manual review, we’ve found that often the decision isn’t overturned – with no further explanation and no option for another review for 30 days.

This is a source of continued frustration, but one we’ve been working closely with Meta on recently. If you feel you have been incorrectly categorised and unfairly restricted, please contact us.

So, what’s changing on September 2nd?

Meta will begin flagging individual custom audiences and conversions that “suggest specific health conditions,” even if your Pixel wasn’t already restricted.

This means:

• Custom audiences built from sensitive health-related content may be rejected.
  • This will also prevent lookalikes audiences built from custom audiences from working.
    
• Custom conversions could be denied or removed from campaigns.
  
• You could be flagged before your Pixel is fully restricted.
  

You might have received an email notification from Meta about specific audiences or conversions that will be restricted, but you can also view this in your account within Events Manager:

You may also see a small yellow triangle with an exclamation point within Meta Ads Manager, if your campaigns are utilising either the flagged audiences or conversions.

Meta will not pause your existing campaigns after restrictions begin on September 2nd, 2025. However, unless resolved, any existing campaigns using flagged audiences or conversions will see reduced delivery and performance over time, as those conversions and audiences stop collecting data and thus become unable to guide optimisation.

You can also request a review if you think audiences or conversions have been unfairly flagged. Before doing this, we recommended reviewing both the naming of conversions or audiences (and the URLs used in building audiences or conversions) and removing words or phrases related to health conditions.

What does this mean for charities?

We’ve seen some confusion around what these restrictions will actually mean. Two questions keep cropping up, which we’ve clarified with Meta:

Q: If we’re already categorised as Health & Wellness, with full restrictions, will these new changes affect us further?

A: No, these changes won’t affect you. All custom audiences and conversions will already be limited.

It’s worth noting, if certain custom audiences or conversions do get subsequently flagged, these changes might give a clearer indication of what’s causing the categorisation in the first place.

Q: If a custom audience or conversion gets flagged as ‘suggesting specific health conditions’, will the Pixel be subsequently categorised as Health & Wellness and be susceptible to full restrictions?

A: Not necessarily. If some conversion or audiences get flagged, it will just mean the Pixel is placed under ‘Core Set-up’, which does not carry full restrictions.

However, it could still trigger further flags from Meta’s AI and result in the category changing in the future. Unfortunately, it’s not clear how often or under what criteria domains are checked.

Further changes coming for EU advertisers in October 2025: Politics & Social‑Issues ad ban.

Meta announced that, starting October 2025, it will no longer allow political, electoral, or social‑issue ads in the EU, due to complications from the EU’s Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation.

Key takeaways:

• Meta says TTPA introduces “significant operational challenges and legal uncertainties,” making alternative compliance solutions untenable.
• The decision affects ads that advocate or inform about public policy, elections, or societal issues, which can include charity causes such as homelessness, environment/sustainability, and animal welfare. See more details about Social Issue ads here.
• Meta maintains that these policies only apply within the EU; other regions are not affected by this ban, including the UK.
• EU users and organisations can still post organically, but paid advertising is what’s banned.

But there’s still plenty of questions outstanding. Keep your eyes peeled for a part 2 to this blog in the coming days, where we’ll answer all the FAQs that clients have been asking around these updates…

If you’ve run any Meta Ads campaigns, you’ll probably be familiar with Advantage+, Meta’s offering in using automation to simplify campaign setup, improve performance, and reduce manual workload. And while it undeniably has some great uses, we’ve also seen it causing persistent problems for charities, when not managed properly.

Left unchecked, ad campaigns equipped with Advantage+ can lead to unexpected ad spend, poor targeting, and ultimately, inefficient campaigns. It’s also alarming that so often, Advantage+ features are enabled by default, so many advertisers might not even be aware.

Let’s break down what Advantage+ can do, how to use it effectively, and where you need to tread carefully.

What is Meta Advantage+?

Meta Advantage+ is a campaign tool designed to streamline your advertising by handing more control over to Meta’s algorithm. It uses automation to manage campaign delivery and determine creative combinations, placements, and importantly, audiences. 

For advertisers, this can sound like a win: less hands-on setup, more ‘intelligent’ targeting. But as with many automated systems, what’s easy isn’t always effective, especially when your campaign has specific goals or audience nuances.

To give more specifics of what Advantage+ can do:

Advantage+ Campaign Budget:

Allows you to set one central campaign budget (daily or lifetime) that continuously distributes in real time to ad sets with the best opportunities, throughout the course of your campaign. As opposed to setting budgets per ad set/audience.

Advantage+ Placements:

Automatically optimises ad placements across all available platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Meta’s Audience Network. As opposed to manually selecting specific placements e.g. News Feed.

Advantage+ Detailed Targeting:

Allows Meta to reach a broader group of people than defined in your detailed targeting selections. This option will show your ad to additional people who Meta believe are likely to get you more or cheaper results, or both, informed by your optimisation goals.

Advantage+ Creative:

Uses generative AI to apply ‘creative enhancements‘ to your original ad creative, including: adjusting brightness, image cropping, image animation, image background variations, text overlays, and adding music.

While we do often make use of and encourage the budget and placement features of Advantage+, we have more concerns over the targeting and creative options…

The lack of control over audience targeting can cause problems.

Advantage+’s detailed targeting promises improved performance, largely by handing over the reigns to Meta. The Meta interface does indicate that you can still “set limits to control who can and can’t see your ads,” which is done by providing suggestions about what the ideal audience is (e.g. demographics, interests, and website actions). 

Functionally, the setup is similar to normal campaigns, where you would carefully define age ranges, genders, interests, and custom audiences. However, we have found Advantage+ often ignores these input parameters entirely.

This can become especially problematic for charities running campaigns designed to speak to specific motivations and/or life stages, such as legacy giving or challenge events. When testing Advantage+ in these situations, we’ve often seen the net cast much wider than intended, placing most of the budget on the wrong demographic.

One example of this for a Skydiving fundraising campaign, where the target demographic clearly wasn’t 65+…

Another campaign we ran, targeting expectant mothers, saw the exact same trend. In theory, Meta’s AI should be analysing the content of the ad creative, ad copy and landing pages, and use them to help steer the ad delivery. But this obviously doesn’t seem to be the case.

The fact it repeatedly puts so much weight into older demographics, is most likely because that is a key audience for most charity campaigns. This missed nuance leads to misaligned messaging and audience, and ultimately wasted spend.

While Advantage+ audience targeting may perform well for some campaigns, our advice for now is to always opt for manual targeting whenever you need to be more certain of reaching a specific audience. While new campaigns will default to using Advantage+, you can revert settings at the bottom of the ad set targeting menu by clicking ‘further limit the reach of your ads’.

How to view the data using segmentation.

As in the above examples, you can segment performance data in Ads Manager, to see exactly how far Meta is deviating from the intended audience. 

If you customise the columns by clicking the ‘Breakdown’ button, you can then split your data by demographics like age, gender, and placement. This allows you to review cost and reach allocations for each demographic segment, as well as their comparative performance.

Even if you don’t use Advantage+ audience targeting, we would encourage advertisers to be using this function anyway. These insights are essential for understanding campaign performance and making informed optimisation decisions. You can break down results by platform, device, time of day, and even creative variations like headlines or images, helping you identify what’s working, where, and with whom.

Time to face(book) the music.

Another frequently problematic feature of Advantage+ is its creative automation.

While we encourage using some of the basic creative enhancements, such as auto-adjusting brightness and highlighting the ‘most relevant’ ad comments, we have concerns about those that compromise how the brand is represented. This includes generating entirely new copy, altering image backgrounds in ways that don’t align with brand colours, and adding music that wasn’t part of the original creative direction.

Adding some background music might not seem like a major issue, but it can raise legitimate brand safety concerns, particularly for charities with sensitive messaging. The AI should match the content of the ads to a relevant piece of generic music, but in practice can completely misalign.

A particularly frustrating aspect of the music is that this option regularly turns itself back on. Make any edit to a campaign (unrelated to creative asset customisation) and upload your changes, and boom, music is re-enabled. It doesn’t even log this in the account/campaign change history, so it can feel like Meta is gaslighting you.

Our advice is to proceed with caution when using the Advantage+ asset customisation options without having a good understanding of what changes they can make. Always check your campaign settings before publishing any changes. And check again after publishing. And maybe one more time for luck.

Fluctuating ad spend.

Another automated feature, which isn’t necessarily new or specific to Advantage+ budgets but is worth flagging, is Meta’s ability to spend up to 75% over your daily budget. This will even out across the week though, so you won’t exceed 7x your daily budget over a 7-day period.

The point of this is to maximise potential opportunities to improve results by allowing for flexibility. Google has a similar level of flexibility with their budgeting, too. 

Generally, we find this feature to be a helpful use of automation, but it can be alarming to see if you’re operating under strict budgets and not expecting your daily budget to be exceeded.

Issues can also arise if this causes the limit on your card to be reached at the same time of being invoiced, which can lead to ads being temporarily paused.

What’s the future of Advantage+?

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid using Advantage+ features. As Meta continues to push automation, along with a continually changing interface, with disguised options pre-set, opting out is getting harder.

Also, as with Google, we expect control to eventually become completely relinquished, being impossible not to use automated campaign set-ups in the future.

This is part of a much longer trajectory Paid Media platforms have been on, with options becoming more and more limited. Note, for example, Meta’s removal of interest targeting options around ‘sensitive causes’, which impacted charities in early 2022.

That said, we expect Advantage+ to improve over time. As machine learning advances, there’s potential for smarter targeting, better creative combinations, and more efficient spend. Even since writing this blog, Meta has announced further features being rolled out around generative AI tools for branding creatives and automated video creation.

But we’re not quite there yet.

Our recommendation, therefore, is to use Advantage+ with caution. Don’t assume Meta’s automation will make decisions in your best interest. Monitor campaigns closely, especially when running time-sensitive or audience-specific messaging. Segment your data, double-check settings, and be wary of default opt-ins.

If you’re unsure whether Advantage+ is working for you, or need help navigating Meta’s increasingly automated platform, get in touch. We’re always happy to chat.

Last November, Google Ad Grants received a new feature passed down from Google Ads: Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. This was the first major update to Grants since Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) were sunsetted across the entire Google Ads platform and replaced by Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) in June 2022.

For those not familiar, Performance Max is Google’s goal-based campaign type that uses automation to deliver ads across all Google inventory — including Search, Maps, Display, and more. In the context of Google Ad Grants, only Search and Maps are available.

Now that the dust has settled, we have a clearer understanding of what this campaign offers – and what its limits are. In this blog, we’ll explore the benefits and drawbacks of PMax, and explain how to make the most of it.

What is a Performance Max Campaign, anyway?

The PMax campaign was launched across Google Ads in November 2021. It brings increased automation, and therefore convenience, at the cost of less control over your ad copy and bids.

It’s defined by Google as “a goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.”

‘Inventory’ here refers to Search, Maps, YouTube, Display, Shopping and Gmail – though for Ad Grants, that inventory only includes Search and Maps. A ‘goal-based campaign’, meanwhile, just means a campaign with a conversion-focused bidding strategy, such as Maximise Conversions or Maximise Conversion Values.

Similarly to Dynamic Search Campaigns (DSCs), PMax enables you to run ads to your entire website. It provides you the option to send users to either one specific URL, or to the page that Google deems most relevant to the search intent – with the ability to exclude URLs. As with DSCs, you don’t input keywords yourself; it is automated through Google AI. It’s worth noting that you still provide your initial ad copy for the AI to build variations around.

As for PMax’s effectiveness, we’ve tested it extensively across a variety of accounts, campaigns and contexts. Across Paid accounts, we’ve consistently found that the area PMax performs best at is ecommerce, where it regularly outperforms manual Shopping campaigns. Since Google Ad Grants doesn’t allow you to run Shopping ads, the benefit for Grants isn’t quite as pronounced.

We’ve also found that, compared to goal-based Ad Grants campaigns, the average clickthrough rate is lower for PMax than for non-PMax, but average conversion rate is slightly higher. This means that a well-deployed PMax in Grants can be an effective tool for driving conversions, such as donations.

Let’s break down the pros and cons…

Benefits of Performance Max for Ad Grants

Resource-efficient.

With the ability to create a single ad that directs to any (or every) page on your website, PMax is a great campaign for charities looking to bid competitively with limited time and resources. You do not need to research keywords and optimise your ad copy to these – you can let Google do the hard work for you. Google’s AI uses your landing pages to generate relevant ad copy. Though this convenience can come at the cost of message control and brand consistency, which we’ll come to later.

Can improve budget utilisation.

With PMax relying on Google AI rather than keywords, it’s able to bid on more varied search terms and gather a wider pool of traffic. As a result, we’ve seen that PMax campaigns are more reliably able to spend their allocated budget, whereas identical non-PMax search campaigns are limited by search volume. PMax is a great way of utilising the full potential of the Grants budget.

Ideal for advertising shops.

As discussed already, PMax is unique among Ad Grants campaign types in that it can target Google Maps as well as Search, making it a powerful tool for charities looking to promote physical locations, such as high street shops.

Provides more control than DSCs.

When it comes to ad copy, you have slightly more control with PMax than with DSCs, where you can add headlines and descriptions similar to an RSA. However, if you’re running your campaign to more than one landing page, text enhancements must be turned on, which changes your copy to fit the landing page. If you’re already running DSCs in your Ad Grants, it’s definitely worth experimenting with PMax.

Low CTR won’t penalise your account.

One rather unique benefit to Grants is that PMax campaigns are not included in the 5% CTR minimum threshold policy. With recent trends showing CTR falling dramatically, this gives charities the option to still run ads below a 5% CTR limit.

However, there are some drawbacks to all of this…

Downsides of Performance Max for Ad Grants

We’re already discussed how the limited range of ad channels compared to the Paid campaign is a large downside, but let’s focus on the drawbacks to actually using the campaign format itself.

It’s worth noting that these disadvantages aren’t specific to Ad Grants, but apply to PMax broadly.

Lack of control over ad copy.

The largest downside of PMax is the lack of creative control. We just said in the Benefits section that the ability to outsource your ad copy to AI is convenient if you’re low on time and resources. But as a charity, this tradeoff may not be worth it. With PMax, ad copy that you provide can be entirely ignored in favour of Google’s AI-generated headlines and descriptions. You may decide it’s more important to control the language and brand voice across all your messaging, and PMax limits your ability to do so. Particularly if you’re a charity dealing with sensitive subjects, you might decide the convenience of generative AI isn’t worth the tradeoff.

There is the option to turn off Text Customisation, but this prevents you from having URL Expansion on, which allows you to run ads to multiple landing pages. Also worth noting that PMax still offers more control than DSCs, since you’re able to determine your headlines.

Lack of control on bidding can waste budget.

That lack of control also extends to bidding. PMax doesn’t allow input keywords but instead focuses on a combination of machine learning and audience signals (groups of users that you provide, based on demographics, interests, search intent, etc.) allowing it to bid on broadly relevant searches. As a result, there’s the risk of wasting budget by bidding on irrelevant search terms.

In March, Google added the negative keyword feature to PMax. Using negative keywords to eliminate irrelevant bids as and when you notice them can go a long way to addressing the issue of wasted spend, so make sure to regularly monitor your search term report for unhelpful search terms to eliminate. Unfortunately, the search term report is always an incomplete picture (we’ll come to that in the next point), which means your ability to identify all instances of wasted spend is limited.

Lack of transparency around certain data.

Google doesn’t allow you to access some useful data:

• There’s no breakdown of channel performance (i.e. performance in Search vs performance in Maps). Google claims this feature will be added soon, but at present, there is no way to compare performance across the different channels and networks, which can make it difficult to identify whether a PMax campaign should be used instead of a search campaign.
• Your search term report is limited to only a small share of total search. Google automatically categorises your search terms under common themes, and you can only view a handful of search terms for each category – which results in an incomplete breakdown. Fortunately, the traditional search terms report from Google Ads is very likely coming soon to PMax.

Higher cost per click on average.

Our data comparisons show that, across our Grants accounts, the average CPC of our PMax campaigns is 21% higher than standard, non-PMax campaigns. This means less traffic for the same budget. This is true even when they’re using the same (goal-based) bid strategy. We discussed how one of the benefits of PMax is cost-efficiency, thanks to automation, but an overreliance on Performance Max campaigns can result in inefficient spending.

Your conversion tracking must be strong.

This isn’t so much a disadvantage as a major caveat. Conversion tracking is a critical factor in making PMax campaigns successful. If you’re not sending high-quality conversion signals, PMax has little to optimise around. So before attempting any PMax campaigns, make sure your conversion tracking is accurate and meaningful — whether it’s donations, signups, or volunteer interest.

If you’re unsure whether your current setup is giving Google the right signals, our team can audit your conversion tracking to ensure your campaigns are set up for success.

The Future of PMax in Ad Grants

Thankfully, the drawbacks of PMax are not all permanent. We’ve already mentioned that Google recently added negative keywords to PMax across Paid and Grants accounts. They’re also slowly rolling out new search term reports, which is a step towards addressing the missing data problem. And they’ve indicated that Ad Grants will be expanded with more channels in the future, but this is unlikely to be Display and YouTube due to their revenue-sharing models. It could, however, include Shopping and Gmail.

For the near future at least, our recommended use for PMax would be, first and foremost, setting up campaigns on weekends, where other campaign types typically struggle to spend. We’ve found PMax particularly effective at utilising budget when it would otherwise go to waste. Even a 5% increase in clicks for a 50% increase in budget is not a problem when that budget would be wasted by campaigns that can’t bid as broadly.

It’s possible that, sooner or later, Google will force automated solutions like PMax upon users as the only option for managing Grants – so at the very least, it’s worthwhile testing it now to gain familiarity and pinpoint what works for your charity and strategy.

Want tailored advice for your charity’s campaigns? Reach out to our team for a free strategy chat — or sign up to our newsletter for practical insights and updates.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s landmark antitrust case against Google has reached another milestone.

The DoJ has proposed five interventions aimed at levelling the playing field of Search currently monopolised by Google. Threatened with the forced divestment of Chrome and potentially Android too, along with an end to its dealings with Apple that have long placed Google Search as the default search engine on iPhones, the tech giant is predictably reluctant to play ball, rebuking the proposals with claims they would harm users’ data security.

Last August, US District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of illegally monopolising the search advertising market, breaking Section 2 of the Sherman Act, by paying Apple $20 billion a year to place their product as the default search status on iPhones.

The DoJ has proposed the following set of remedies off the back of that ruling, which they argue would help dismantle the monopoly:

1. No more payments that “freeze the ecosystem in place,” which means terminating all search-based deals with distribution partners.
2. Google must divest itself of Chrome. This would throw the browser’s future into great uncertainty, a fact which Google will certainly use to justify refusal.
3. Google will share user-side data, search index coverage, and ad performance data. These metrics are necessary to compete at the same level.
4. Google will increase the transparency and control for advertisers, by providing advertisers with more information in search query reports, and allowing them to opt out of broad and automated keyword matching.
5. The DoJ will establish a technical committee to monitor Google’s compliance with these remedies. If competition hasn’t improved within five years, Google will be forced to divest itself of Android as well.

These proposals aren’t legally binding; their enactment is an ‘if’, not a ‘when’. And given the mutually profitable relationship between the Trump Administration and Silicon Valley, that’s a big if.

Google has wasted no time in pushing back, insisting that if enacted, these countermeasures would “force Google to share your most sensitive and private search queries with companies you may never have heard of, jeopardizing your privacy and security. Your private information would be exposed, without your permission, to companies that lack Google’s world-class security protections, where it could be exploited by bad actors.”

The experts are not convinced. Tasneem Chipty, an economist called in as the trial’s final witness, stated that the DoJ’s “remedies will have a better chance of restoring competition” than Google’s own, which she cautioned would “tend to preserve Google’s monopoly.”

It’s worth noting this trial is separate to Google’s other ongoing antitrust, litigating its monopoly in the ad tech realm. The outcome there could also have inordinate ramifications for the future of search advertising – and given that Google is first and foremost an advertising company, with 56% of all its revenue coming from Google Ads in 2024, we can expect even more reluctance and recalcitrance from them if antitrust interventions are proposed that would, for instance, force Google to stop artificially inflating bids for profit.

The next step in this Search trial is for Judge Mehta to consider the proposals from both sides, and issue a ruling on which measures will be legally compelled. Although undoubtedly possible, it is unlikely we see a forced divestiture of Chrome come to fruition. But whatever the decision is, we’ll keep you in the loop with a thorough breakdown of how it’ll impact advertisers and users alike.

Be sure to sign up to our quarterly newsletter for all the latest updates and insights from the world of Search and digital marketing!

It’s the time of year again for us to report on our B Corp impact for the last 12 months. It’s been a year since our last B Corp blog, and in an impeccable stroke of timing, March is also B Corp Month – a time to build awareness of the movement and celebrate what it means to be a B Corp.

Uprise Up has proudly been a B Corp for two years now. It was by no means an easy road to certification, but as a purpose-driven business, we felt it was a journey we should fully embrace. If you’re curious about what that journey looked like, you can read all about it here.

Who or what is B Corp?

In a nutshell, B Corp is a movement to use business for good. Certified businesses are demonstrating they meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. It’s a global movement and in the UK alone there are over 2,000 B Corps.

Why did we become a B Corp? 

We’ve always been closely aligned with the values of B Corp. Our ethos of continuous improvement means we are always looking for ways to make our business even better for its staff, customers, community, and the environment. B Corp is a driving force and a clear demonstration of our commitment. 

One B Corp requirement is that businesses report on their impact each year. They must recertify every 3 years, and in the interim businesses use the B Impact Assessment tool to estimate their score.

In this blog we’re proud to share how we’ve fared over the last year. You can see last year’s blog here.

80 is the magic number

A business has to score 80 points or more in B Corp’s Impact Assessment to be certified. Our verified score at certification in March 2023 was 105.9. We reported that, in March 2024, our score was 109.4. Having crunched the numbers, we’re delighted to report that as of March 2025 our score is 112.8.

How the scoring works

There are big changes planned for B Corp certification. At time of writing, the details of the revised process have not been announced, but B Corp have advised that the scoring (as shown below) will fundamentally change. Existing B Corps will have an extension to the recertification window to allow them to understand and adapt to the changes, so we wait to see what this will mean for us.  

There are currently five separate impact areas:

Workers – from 35.1 to 36.3

The Workers Impact Area evaluates our company’s contribution to our employees’ financial, physical, professional, and social wellbeing. Having made a significant impact in the previous report, we’re delighted to further improve our score over the last 12 months. 

What we wanted to do: Ensure Uprise Up continues to have great staff benefits and further increase staff engagement.

What we did: 

• We are hybrid workers with the option to work from home on Mondays and Fridays. We have flexibility each day to work the hours that best suit us, and we are trialling extra flexibility to enable staff to easily enjoy long weekends by shifting their work patterns by taking a Friday afternoon and Monday morning off without using up annual leave.

• Made sure everyone is aware of what we offer in health benefits, including access to BUPA healthcare for staff and their partners and/or children, the option of a free professional health check every year (our last company wide health checks were in June 2024 and had a high take-up), and free access to the Headspace app. We also offer free flu vaccination vouchers.

• We have evolved our 6-monthly appraisals to become Career Development Meetings, which focus more clearly on joint development objectives to grow our employees and get them exactly where they want to be.

• As we have focused on training and development, we have strengthened our programme of weekly company-wide training sessions to complement team and individual training, and have a dedicated (and fantastic) trainer on the team. 

• Continued to ensure all our staff are fairly remunerated.

What we would like to do next year: Continually consider how best to maintain a healthy work-life balance for our staff, and make sure everyone remains well rewarded.

Customers – from 28.7 to 32.3 

This area evaluates our company’s value to our customers and our customer’s own beneficiaries. We provide marketing services predominantly helping charities and socially positive organisations, many of whom work with underserved populations*. We contribute to providing better outcomes for their beneficiaries (e.g. through campaigns to increase fundraising, volunteers, information, support, and campaigning).

This area saw the biggest increase, largely due to more of our work being focused on helping charities make a difference. 

What we wanted to do:  Further develop the Charity Digital Benchmark so it becomes an invaluable toolkit for as many charities as possible, creating improvements for the whole charity sector, including our own clients. The Charity Digital Benchmark helps charities make better decisions on their digital activity, driving better results for their causes. 

What we did: 

• We have continued to invest heavily in and significantly develop the Charity Digital Benchmark. It’s a benchmarking tool to identify trends, highlight opportunities and learn from other charities. The Charity Digital Benchmark at time of writing has 40+ members.

• We are incredibly proud of the impact our work has for our clients, and we’ve become even more focused on working with charities.

What we would like to do next year: Grow membership of the Charity Digital Benchmark and share more digital metrics. More data from more members will better inform users and allow them to improve the effectiveness of their digital campaigns, resulting in improved end results for charities and their beneficiaries. 

Community – from 16.5 to 15.1

This area evaluates our company’s positive impact on the external communities in which we operate. With a challenging market is the one area where we’ve seen a small decrease in our score. It is still a great score, on a par with our initial score at verification. 

What we wanted to do: Increase our volunteering, improve our diversity, and continue to give back to the local community.

What we did: 

• Welcomed three Year 10 students from local schools to join us for work experience programmes as an introduction to digital marketing and the world of work.

• Gave to local charities. Also, for the first time, our Secret Santa exchange was solely gifts purchased from charity shops (resulting in some memorable presents).

• Continued to undertake pro bono work. 

• Improved our gender split.

• Continued to monitor our diversity with anonymous surveys including gender, ethnicity, religion/belief, disability, and social economic background. 

• Continued our annual diversity, equity and inclusion training.

What we would like to do next year: Increase our volunteering to give more back to the local community. We’ll continue our efforts to maintain and improve our own diversity.

Environment – 10.8

The Environment Impact Area evaluates our company’s overall environmental stewardship, including how we identify and manage general environmental impacts, our management of air and climate issues, water sustainability, and impacts on land and life. We maintained our strong score.

What we wanted to do: Further reduce our energy usage where possible; find more sustainable consumables; continue composting; and roll that out to more companies using the same office premises.

What we did: 

• Continued to create compost from our food waste, and that of other companies in the same shared buildings, for local charity Chesham in Bloom. 

• Started collecting and recycling plastics not recycled at home, such as plastic bags.

• Switched to more energy-efficient power cables to feed our office workstations.

• Held company discussions to brainstorm how we can reduce our energy usage and waste. This included an interesting session around the wider environmental impact of digital marketing.

• Continued our environmental awareness training. 

• Continued to monitor and offset our carbon emissions.

What we would like to do next year: Continue keeping energy usage and sustainability front of mind across the company and minimise wastage.

Governance – 18.1 

This area looks at our mission, ethics, accountability and transparency – an area we already scored highly in. We hadn’t identified any areas for improvement here and our priorities for next year lie largely in the other areas.

Summary

We are always trying to improve and we are proud to see that reflected in our overall report.

After a number of new worker initiatives and benefits were taken into account in the previous report, we are pleased that we have further increased our score in this area. We continue our strong performance in the Environment and Governance areas, and hope to be able to further increase our score in the Community area over this year and beyond.

Our specialty of working with the charity sector has seen our most significant score increase in the Customer area. And we continue to drive digital results through our investment in the Charity Digital Benchmark.

As mentioned, B Corp are changing their certification process. There will likely be new impact topics and different standards by size and sector, so recertification (extended to the end of 2026) will look different for us, as no doubt will these future Impact Reports.

Work With Us 

If you’re a charity looking for a responsible, data-driven digital media agency, we’d love to hear from you! You can either contact us with an enquiry or take a look at the digital media services we offer.

If you like the sound of our company, and want to work as part of our award-winning team getting up in the morning to make a real difference, you can also take a look at available roles on our careers page. 

* ‘Underserved’ is a term used by B Corp to describe groups that do not traditionally have access to positive social or economic outcomes. This can be low-income, poor, or very poor individuals or a group lacking access due to chronic discrimination which may include discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, colour, disability, political opinion, sexual orientation, age, religion, or social origin.

We’re a month into 2025, and it’s time to have a look at what New Year’s Resolutions the Google Ad Grant stuck to. Last month I talked extensively about the extra budget allocated to Grants. Now that the budgets have returned to normal, how have stats responded?

Effects of Increased Budget

The first and most obvious effect of the budget decrease is the drastic drop in cost per click, and the associated drop in total spend.

Neither of these drops is surprising; I talked last month about the fact that many campaigns with additional budget simply spent more for their traffic rather than bringing in new traffic, which led to dramatically inflated CPC numbers.

However, it is interesting to look at the CPCs pre- and post-budget periods:

Here we can see that CPCs did not return to pre-budget increase levels. CPCs were on an upwards trend before the Christmas period, so this may simply be a continuation of that trend, but it could also be due to many accounts not fully switching off from the more aggressive bidding strategies they had been on. This causes the competition in the Grant space to go up, and in turn, CPCs to see a jump. Which is it? That is hard to say for sure, but I would guess it’s a mixture of both.

But spend was always going to decrease with budget – let’s get into the interesting stats. I talked about CTR seeming to recover last month, and I mentioned that it could simply be an artifact of the additional budget and not a true recovery. I also said I hoped I was wrong on this assessment.

I wasn’t wrong.

Yes, unfortunately the CTR nosedive has returned in 2025, albeit at a slightly less extreme rate than it was in October and November. This is a worrying trend; the average CTR in Grants is now hovering dangerously close to the 5% policy limit, a limit we have not had to think about for many years now.

As I’ve explained in previous instalments, there is no obvious cause for this CTR drop in accounts, and it appears scheme-wide. If you were to look into your own account, I’m sure you would see a drop in a similar timeframe. The Google Ad Grants team have confirmed that they are not aware of any changes to the scheme that could cause such a drop, so until we find a root cause ourselves, we are going to be strapped to this rollercoaster wherever it goes.

Currently, CTR is back to where it was at the start of December, so stay tuned for next month, when we will discover exactly where this ride is going.

That was a lot of graphs going down, right? We should end on some positive news, otherwise this blog is going to be far too worrying. Let’s end on the fact that not every graph has gone down!

The big drop on these graphs is the Christmas week, which sees a significant drop in users online. Apart from that, we see a very positive trend pre and post-Christmas. Clicks saw a slight increase, and impressions are showing a strong, consistent increase week-on-week.

In fact, this strong increase in impressions is the only thing holding back the CTR drop from having a real impact on the performance of the Grants scheme (another reason why I am suspicious of a system-based change causing this effect – there is no reason for impressions to be rising this much).

Why did we get more clicks after budgets went down, you may ask? I think the simplest answer to this is that there are more people online now than there were in December. We are also bidding less per click, so the combination allows many accounts to bring in more traffic than they could in December, even if they had infinite budgets at that time.

So, that was the performance across Grants in January. A lot of movement, some good, some bad, and all interesting. I’m very interested to see how this evolves through February. Will CTR continue to drop? If so, will impressions continue to rise to counteract it, or will the CTR nosedive start to have effects on the tangible performance of the Grants scheme? Will Performance Max campaigns take over the Grant scheme? (That’s another blog entirely – keep your eyes peeled.) Whatever the case, we’ll have to find out in a month!

We are currently experiencing what Travis Tallent has described as the chaos phase of AI. We can see some clear parallels to the early internet era, where SEOs and digital marketers are panicking about how AI will affect or take our jobs, although we can safely say most are open and willing to accept and adapt – as long as we see improvements in some of the worryingly questionable—and, at times, amusing—answers to our questions. The impact of generative AI on search results is already creating new strategies SEOs can use to adapt to these AI-infused times.

For SEOs, AI-driven changes mean grappling with decreased organic traffic as Google’s AI Overviews and other AI-generated summaries answer more queries directly on search result pages (SERPs). Estimates suggest that organic traffic could drop by as much as 15-30% as AI-generated content increasingly fulfills user queries directly on SERPs, reducing the need for click-throughs to websites. This shift disrupts traditional SEO performance indicators and raises concerns about the future value of organic traffic as a metric.

(Quick note on terminology – This blog deals specifically with generative AI, rather than machine learning technologies such as those used for predictive modelling in medicine, which are arguably far more deserving of the term ‘intelligence’. AI is a big buzzwordy umbrella that people use to denote drastically different technologies and concepts. When I refer to AI here, bear in mind it’s shorthand for generative AI, particularly LLMs like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.)

Controversies and Concerns in AI-Driven SEO

Inaccurate AI Responses and the Need for E-E-A-T:

Generative AI models have no internal conception of truth, and so inevitably produce frequent factual errors. SEOs are thus emphasising Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines, particularly in high-stakes, Your Money Your Life (YMYL) content areas like finance and healthcare. Ensuring that AI-generated answers are accurate and based on credible sources has become essential, as errors can severely harm user trust and business credibility.

Plagiarism and Copyright Issues:

AI’s reliance on web-scraped data is arguably plagiaristic in nature; AI can only generate content that paraphrases or mimics existing work, so its deployment on SERPs actively diminishes the visibility and undermines the work of original creators. For smaller creators who rely on unique, insightful content to engage specific audiences, this practice can hurt revenue and limit visibility as AI content continues to colonise the SERPs. As always, legal frameworks are lagging behind tech and culture, leaving many content creators feeling under-protected from AI’s encroachment on their creative labour.

Elusive Google Guidance:

Despite the sweeping impact of AI-generated summaries and restructured SERPs, Google has provided limited guidance to help SEO professionals adapt. This lack of transparency leaves SEOs in a reactive position, often struggling to understand how Google’s AI-driven changes affect reporting, ranking, and revenue potential.

Reduced Click-Through Rates (CTR):

AI-generated answers often occupy top positions on SERPs, pushing traditional results further down the page and leading to lower CTR for first-page results. This placement threatens to reduce organic search sessions significantly, potentially down to zero in some cases, as users increasingly find their answers in Google’s AI summaries rather than visiting individual websites.

Unreliable Citations and Lack of Source Filtering:

AI-generated summaries have been observed to cite questionable or irrelevant sources, including satirical sites like The Onion, and their failure to detect satire or sarcasm in user-generated content has led to painfully misjudged answers sourced from Reddit and Quora comments.

Google’s recent updates aim to prevent these errors by reducing reliance on certain sources, but SEOs remain cautious as the tool is not yet foolproof.

How SEOs Can Navigate the Chaos Phase

Despite these concerns, SEOs need to adapt to this new world of AI-driven search results. Here are some steps SEOs can take to navigate the chaos phase:

Leverage SEO Analysis Tools with AI Insights:

Many SEO tools, including Ahrefs, SEMrush and SEO Monitor, now offer features specifically designed to analyse content within AI-driven ranking contexts. These tools can help SEOs understand which keywords or phrases are performing well in AI Overviews, track SERP positions more accurately, and adapt content strategies based on AI-driven performance indicators.

(Image from SEO Monitor)

Focus on E-E-A-T Centered Content:

Ensuring that content meets E-E-A-T guidelines is critical in this era of AI-generated summaries, especially for YMYL topics. Providing high-quality, authoritative, and reliable content, which includes the use of statistical data, increases the chances of being featured within AI-generated overviews.

Establishing strong author authority signals can improve trustworthiness and E-E-A-T in AI-overseen rankings. Creating dedicated author pages and bios, linking to professional profiles, as well as to content they have created published on industry leading sites, and using author schema markup all help search engines and AI models to recognise the expertise behind content, increasing its likelihood of being prioritised.

Maximise Brand and Content Presence Across Digital Channels:

Rand Fishkin suggests that establishing a presence on websites AI models often draw from, is essential for brand visibility in the AI era. By getting mentioned on these sites, Google is more likely to view your site and its content as a brand worth featuring and linking to in search overviews.

For SEOs, this means enhancing digital PR efforts, securing mentions on high-authority sites, and cultivating content that AI can easily access and attribute. By appearing in authoritative sources, brands can reinforce their relevance and authority, even as AI-generated content populates more search results.

The Future: Finding Stability in the Chaos

While the chaos phase of AI in SEO is challenging, it also represents a chance for growth, adaptation and looking at the wider SEO objective utilising other channels to enhance organic performance. This era requires SEOs to stay agile, testing new tactics while leaning into the core principles of authority, quality, and audience understanding. As AI integration in search continues to evolve, those who adapt early will be well-positioned to thrive in a future where AI-driven search is the norm.

The chaos phase might be unsettling, but it’s also a proving ground for the future of SEO. By embracing innovative tools, staying vigilant about industry changes, and crafting content that resonates with both humans and AI, SEOs can carve out a sustainable path through this era of upheaval.

If you’re curious what areas of SEO you should be focusing on to best capitalise on (and compete with) AI-generated content, please contact us. We’re always happy to chat.

The champagne may barely be flat, and the remains of fireworks may still be fluttering down out of the sky, but its still time for another Google Ad Grants monthly trends report!

I sit and write this at 9:30am on the first day back after the New Year break. I mention this so you have context when I say this is the most important thing I have done at Uprise Up all year.

Jokes aside, the last blog, reviewing November trends, was quite a dramatic one. We looked at impression rises, CTR drops, and I mentioned that we were soon going to be seeing the effects of a wave of additional budget being added to accounts over the holiday period. How has all of this evolved over December? And what will the Google Ad Grants scheme look like in 2025? Let’s take a look.

The reference line on the graphs is the point at which additional budget was added to accounts. We see some really interesting movement in here, and we’ll dive into it below. But let’s start with a really hot topic in the Google Ad Grants scheme at the moment, at least among experts, and that is…

Clickthrough Rate

After our discussion in the last update regarding the huge CTR drops that Grants have experienced over the previous two months, conversation really started to pick up among Google Ad Grants professionals on this topic. I’d love to claim responsibility for this, but I think many of us were seeing the data at around the same time, and drawing broadly similar conclusions. Namely, that this was not normal, and it was not being caused by an in-account change.

I also would love to say that we’ve had a clear explanation from Google, but aside from the Ad Grants team informing us that they have not made any intentional change to drop CTR, we’re still waiting for their investigation of the matter.

However, I do at least have one update for you, which is that, as you can see from the graph above, CTR has finally begun to increase again. It hasn’t, by any means, risen back to where it once was, as you can see in the year-long graph here:

But it isn’t in complete freefall any more. This is a relief, as some of our accounts were beginning to struggle with the 5% clickthrough rate policy limit enforced by Google.

However, there is a huge asterisk on this result. This CTR rise aligns very closely with the date of the additional budget being applied to accounts. This increased budget mainly seemed to manifest in increased competitiveness rather than increased traffic (I’ll justify this later on, I promise), and increased ability to compete means CTR should be rising.

Does this mean that now we are back in the world of regular budgets that CTR will drop again? Only time can tell, but I suspect it will at least level out over January. If I am wrong about this and CTR continues to rise, I will be more than happy to be wrong. That would raise more interesting questions though – why did the CTR suddenly turn around? Was it a change in the auction, or a change in the back end made, intentionally or not, by Google? Stay tuned next month for more on this dramatic tale.

I feel I need to give it a title. ‘The Curious Case of the Crashing Clickthrough Rate’. Yes, that’ll do.

Effects of Budget Increase

The biggest in-account change in December was the inclusion of additional budget into many accounts. This was a temporary doubling of budget, meaning that GrantsPro accounts (legacy accounts from a time long ago when Google offered a higher tier of Ad Grants, sadly no longer available) had an eye-watering $80,000 of spend available.

Surely this additional spend led to a massive jump in metrics across the board, right? Well, not quite. Let’s have a look.

First, the obvious one:

We got additional budget, and Cost went up! What will happen next, dogs making friends with cats?

Jokes aside, there is some interesting nuance here to examine. The first and most obvious feature is that the spend did not, in fact, double. Even at its peak, the spend only rose by around 33% from its baseline in November. Not all of our accounts were on this additional budget, but the vast majority were, so we are already getting signs here that there may have been a struggle to spend the budget (more on that later).

The second feature is that it actually took quite a while for the spend to pick up after the budget changes, only starting to truly peak after 3 weeks. I put this down to a phrase I uttered a lot in 2024, and one I expect to say more in 2025: machine learning. For most of our accounts, this additional budget came alongside some amount of significant in-account changes. Whether that be increasing campaign budgets or changing bidding strategies, this would have kicked bidding strategies back into a learning phase, which takes around 2 weeks to complete. I believe that is what we are seeing here.

I would love Google to take this into account in any later periods of increased budget – having it over a longer timescale, even if that means that the increase is dropped (say, 50% additional budget over 2 months rather than 100% additional budget over one month), would allow for more time for bidding strategies to adapt to these new levels of spend.

Finally, a token note of the huge drop in the last week of the year. This isn’t surprising, and it merely points out that no amount of additional budget can counteract the simple fact that many people simply are not online in the holiday period. This leads to the key graph:

Now, that is an interesting graph. It might not look it, but it is.

Clicks barely blinked at the additional budget. In fact, save for the first week, clicks only dropped week on week once the additional budget was introduced.

This might seem like a surprising result. It’s definitely one that a few of my colleagues were surprised by, but I can’t say that I was.

The crux of the issue is partly seasonal, and partly mechanical. It may take a little to explain it though, so stick with me.

The first point is simple – less people are online during December compared to other months. This is important, and a subtlety we have to communicate to clients in the planning phases of campaigns quite often. No matter how much money you have to put into paid search, you will always be limited by the maximum volume of relevant keywords to your topic. The way I always phrase it is that paid search is a wonderful awareness amplifier but a terrible awareness generator. What this means is that, especially for many of our smaller and more niche charities, we were already showing for most if not all of the relevant searches for that topic. There was simply not that much else to find.

The second point is a systematic one. Have you ever seen a search impression share graph for the Google Grants scheme? For context, here is the graph of one of our charity clients paid account search impression share over the last year:

Note that Google does not display search impression share below 0.1, so the graph does bottom out at this level. Do you want to see what our Grant’s impression share was over the last year?

Well, that’s a simple graph.

I could expand this graph over many years and its shape will not change. This is not because of our keywords, or our ads, or anything you will find inside of the Ad Grants account itself. This is due to something outside of the account entirely called the ad quality filter.

You’ll find a lot written about this filter if you go searching, but in short, it can block ads from entering an auction for quality reasons. In normal accounts, this filter seems to be fairly light touch. You might have a few ads blocked, but not enough to notice (unless your ads are of questionable quality). In Ad Grants, however, the filter seems to go into overdrive.

What does all of this mean for the additional budget? To put it simply, we can have all the money in the world, but if the ad quality filter will not let ads show, then it won’t actually lead to increased spend. Its important to note that the ad quality filter does not care how much your bid is, or how much competition there is. It will simply block the ad before any of those matters.

I think this is one of the main reasons these increased budget periods never see the traffic increases people expect. Add on to that the seasonal drop that Christmas brings and you have the graph of traffic we see here.

But we did increase cost, so that must mean that our Cost per click still went up – how much by?

The answer is, quite a lot. We saw CPC soar to over $3 in the last week of the year – some of the highest levels I’ve ever seen for our Grants scheme in bulk. These levels will not last (I hope), as we will see drops once the budgets revert in January.

But I do worry about the scheme as a whole – will it drop back to where it was in November? If it doesn’t, we may once again be able to get less traffic out of our Grants as we need to bid more per click.

Effects of Christmas

Finally, I wanted to look at the effects of Christmas this year.

Interestingly, we did not see as distinct of a drop around Christmas day this year, and the bulk data backs this up as well. Clicks only dropped by 6% compared to November; for comparison, this was around 18% in 2023. This is undoubtably due, at least in part, to the additional budget in Grants.

That’s all for December, and it was another big one. I’m hoping for more stable data –and shorter updates– in the future! If you have any questions about anything I’ve discussed here, then please do get in touch!

November brought some interesting surprises, some expected patterns, and some mysteries. Let’s break down how each Ad Grants metric performed and why.

These numbers are still liable to shift slightly, as I’m writing this at the very beginning of December, and we must remember that the increased Christmas budget will make certain stats like cost go a little wild. Increased budget will have existed in the last two weeks, hence the last two data points:

Impressions

Firstly, let’s examine which stats haven’t seen much change in trend. Impressions continued to rise, having risen around 25% in the last 2 months. That’s an enormous increase, and if we look over a longer timescale (the last year):

You can see that a) this is the highest that impressions have been in that time, and b) this is a recovery from a hefty drop mid-year. This is strange – we’ve not been drastically expanding our keyword base for 6 months, so what is going on here? My guess is that keywords, particularly broad match keywords, are being allowed to match to more and more searches.

Interestingly, if we compare the graphs of impressions for keyword match type (so whether your keyword is exact, broad or phrase) to search term match type (whether the search term matched exactly, broadly or phrase-ly to the keyword it triggered) you see something interesting:

(Ignore the wacky scale on this one, it’s a log scale, and I used it to make sure the shape of all three lines was clear enough to make out the trends.)

On this graph, all the keywords are experiencing similar changes relative to their original positions, so it doesn’t appear keyword match type matters all that much.

Search term match type, however, is a different story. We can see that broad matches have actually just dropped, whilst exact matches have gone up significantly.

So what does this mean? It means that all keywords are acting a bit more like exact match than you might have expected, generating comparatively more impressions for the exact or close match variants of their searches than they were doing 6 months ago.

Why is this happening? I don’t know, Google won’t tell us – and we have asked. Our guess is that it has something to do with the Ad Quality filter, a system Google has often used quite aggressively in Google Ad Grants. It essentially blocks ads from entering certain auctions, limiting the impressions that can be achieved. We believe that as keywords are matching more exactly to searches, Google might be loosening up the Ad Quality filter, leading to an increase in impressions. This also might explain what’s been going on with Clickthrough Rate recently (but more on that later).

What should we do about it? Well, as always, if there is a particular search you’re desperate to target, make sure you’re using a keyword that closely or exactly matches that term. You might also want to add a few more broad match keywords than you normally might have from now on, just to capture as many exact match search terms as possible.

CTR

In summary: Oof. But there’s a light at the (very) end of the tunnel.

CTR has continued to plummet across almost all accounts. We’ve had a few clients comment on this, and I and others have been saying it’s a strange and anomalous drop. I think this graph showcases that best:

Clearly this is not normal. I’ve done further investigating but I can’t find a particular area of keywords or ads that are responsible. For any of you worried that pinning / lack of pinning is causing this, the graph of ad strength shows that all ads are experiencing this regardless of how much Google likes them:

However, maybe there is hope. Look here, right at the end of the graph:

Hey, now that’s a flat line!

It does look like literally last week we saw about the same CTR as the week before. Now you can’t make sweeping statements based on one data point, but we might be about to emerge from the full-on freefall. Equally, it could be a result of the extra budget and being able to get better positions for higher CPCs than you normally could.

CPC

The final non-changer is CPC. This one is steadily rising, and with the increased budgets it probably will be a little inflated for the next month. We’re well above the $2 mark at the moment ($2.24) but, as always, the best CPC for you is a matter of what brings in the best performance. CPC increasing is very common in Grants, and although I expect we’ll see a dip once the extra budget is removed, it will likely still be higher than it was before the budget got added.

The below graph shows that CPC increasing is by no means a strange occurrence, over the last 5 years it has been increasing consistently.

Clicks

Now onto some stats that have seen changes. Clicks have finally stopped dropping. They did so around the end of October and have stayed fairly level since then. We did see a little increase last week, which I’d guess is the result of additional budget kicking in. The CTR not continuing to drop will have been a big help, too.

Why the results remained level throughout November is another matter. Stats-wise, the reason is that impressions and CTR were increasing and decreasing at the same rate, meaning clicks stayed roughly consistent. On a non-stats basis, I can’t give you an answer, as I don’t know why either of those stats are moving in the way they are.

However, this is another clue that Google may be involved, as it’s a little coincidental that these stats are moving in just the right amount since November to keep traffic at the right level. It also looks conspicuously switch-like. The clicks were decreasing and then suddenly they weren’t anymore.

Here’s the larger time graph:

You’ll note that this is the only time that this sort of flatlining has happened. It looks similar to the summer holiday drop, but even that saw a steady decline over time.

I’ll keep an eye on it and get back to you in the new year, but I’m sure the additional budget and / or the influence of Christmas will hide many of the true trends.

Cost

Google recently got in touch offering to give a number of our accounts temporarily increased budget during the holiday period. This has doubled the budgets of Grants that have received the additional funding.

Cost therefore increased in the last two weeks of November; we can’t read too much into that. However, it should be noted that cost has increased considerably for only a slight increase in clicks, so it seems that for many accounts, the impact of that additional budget was not especially consequential.

Before that, cost was essentially following the same trend as clicks. This makes sense, as PPC is, well, PPC (pay per click). So if there are fewer clicks… I’m sure you can figure that one out.

Christmas Trends

Finally, a note on the month to come. Here’s what Christmas looked like last year:

You can see drops began in the second week, then really accelerated after the 20th. This is pretty normal, and we should expect the same sort of trend this year. Overall, clicks dropped by 18% in December. Your results may vary on this; different search areas are affected differently by the holidays, but you can quote that as a scheme average.

So those are the trends we’re seeing in November. There is a lot going on right now with additional budgets, CTR freefalls, and continued CPC increases. Keeping up with all of this can be a difficult task, but that is the challenge of operating one of these very unique accounts.

I’ll be back in the new year with a look at how Christmas affected accounts, the impact of the extra budget, and an update on what is going on with Impressions and CTR. If you have any questions before then, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

For charities, the $10,000/month Google Ad Grants scheme (let’s call it the Grant for short) is a great opportunity, particularly for smaller organisations with limited budgets, to expand their reach and raise awareness for their cause. However, the Grant comes with specific limitations that must be understood to utilise it effectively. This blog will explore the best strategies for leveraging the Grant and highlight areas where its impact might be limited.

Common areas where the Grant falls short

Donation campaigns (competitive searches)

As versatile as Ad Grants can be, they fall short when competing in a competitive search space against paid accounts, because they’re fundamentally designed to only compete against other Grants.

When charities receive a Google Ad Grants account, the instinct is often to focus on driving donations. With $10,000 in advertising, it seems logical to use the Grant to create fundraising campaigns to push donations. After all, spending $10,000 on donation campaigns should bring in plenty of donations, right? But this approach often underdelivers. The competitive nature of paid search means that keywords related to this type of activity are highly contested, with larger charities spending heavily to secure top positions on search results pages.

Google Ad Grants ads are penalised beneath paid search ads, so where a topic is competitive, Grants won’t be seen. Even in theory, bidding a higher amount (by utilising mechanisms that can stretch the official bid above the $2 limit, such as using ‘optimise to conversions’. As a result, Grant-funded ads often struggle to gain visibility, especially for donation campaigns, and often fail to spend at all.

Given these challenges, it’s advisable to avoid dedicating your Grant budget solely to donation campaigns. While there’s no harm in running them to capture occasional traffic, the time and effort could be more effectively allocated elsewhere.

Charity-specific events and activities (overly niche content)

Ad Grants are effective for general charity events – for targeting keywords like ‘charity sponsored swims’. But if the event is especially popular (London Marathon, for example) there will be paid advertisers bidding and thus your Ad Grant efforts will be lost among the competition. Conversely, if the event is niche, be sure to avoid targeting niche keywords that nobody will search for.

Similarly to donation keywords, charity challenge events often face stiff competition and can struggle to perform well under the Grant. However, promoting niche content with little to no searches will also lead to poor results. Ads for charity-specific challenge events and activities are an example of these that we see in Ad Grants.

It’s key to remember that Google Ads operates on a keyword-based system; your ads only appear when people search for relevant terms. This means that if there isn’t already awareness of your event, your ads won’t get much traction. Promoting Brand events and niche activities via the Grant can be challenging without support from other channels.

It’s also important to consider where people will search for your content. A great example is podcasts, as people are more likely to search on the platform that they listen on, rather than a Google search. Therefore, using your Grant to promote a podcast will likely not be the most optimal channel as searches for this content will be low.

Best ways to use a Grant

Understanding the marketing funnel

If driving donations isn’t the most effective use of the Grant, then what is? The key lies in understanding the unique role of the Google Ad Grants within the marketing funnel and your average user journey. While paid accounts are excellent for converting users who are ready to donate or take action (bottom of the funnel), Grants are better suited for users in the awareness or consideration stages (top of the funnel).

Think of the Grant as a tool for reaching cold users searching in your specialist area and nurturing potential supporters. A Grant can be a great way to introduce people to your organisation and be the first touch point. Instead of focusing on immediate donations, use it to encourage people to join your mailing list or sign up for a newsletter.

This engagement approach might not be as effective at soliciting an immediate donation, but will help with raising awareness and help bring users into a journey with your organisation that could result in a donation further down the road.

This approach is becoming increasingly important as we move toward a future without third-party cookies (we now strongly advise using server side tracking), where direct connections with your audience will be even more valuable.

Leveraging content to build awareness

The first point of contact is crucial in the user’s journey with your charity, and it’s up to the organisation to guide them through to eventual donation or participation. The Google Ad Grants are particularly effective when used to promote niche, less competitive content that can drive traffic to your site. Informative content—such as blogs, educational resources, and informational articles—tends to perform well under the Grant because it faces less keyword competition than conversion-focused pages. 

Paid accounts typically prioritise ads that drive specific actions—purchases, donations, volunteer sign-ups, etc – whereas the Grant shines with informational content. By targeting keywords that answer common questions related to your cause, you can position your ads at the top of search results, attracting more visitors to your site. One benefit of a Grant is that you can go much broader with keywords, which can help you reach traffic that might be missed by more focused exact keywords that paid accounts are using. 

While the likelihood of someone reading a blog on your site and immediately donating is small, the traffic generated is still valuable. Increased visibility helps build awareness of your cause and familiarity with your brand. Over time, as people become more familiar with your organisation, your brand’s reputation grows, making potential donors more likely to choose you when they’re ready to give. 

Supporting your beneficiaries

In addition to driving traffic, Google Ad Grants can be used to support your beneficiaries by providing them with valuable information, such as helplines or educational resources. These efforts may not result in immediate donations, but they can build long-term relationships. A beneficiary or their family may choose to donate, participate in a fundraiser, or volunteer in the future because your organisation helped them in a time of need.

Conclusion

There are exceptions to every rule, but in general, while Google Ad Grants offer charities an opportunity to expand their reach, their limitations require a thoughtful approach to fully leverage their potential. Rather than focusing solely on donation campaigns, which often face stiff competition, charities can maximise the impact of the Grant by using it to build awareness and nurture potential supporters through educational and niche content. By positioning the Grant as a tool for the early stages of the marketing funnel, organisations can increase visibility, support their beneficiaries, and create lasting connections that could lead to future engagement and donations.

The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving, and the way we run campaigns now is vastly different to the way we ran them even a year ago. So, when we think ahead, we have some bold predictions for what the coming years might look like in the PPC space. We’ve asked our paid search team to provide their hottest predictions, and we’ve collected them all below…

Jamie’s Predictions

AI-driven campaign and ad group creation will become the default

AI suggestions are currently in beta and are already being shown in the interface when creating campaigns and ads. At the time of writing, they can already provide headlines, descriptions and keyword suggestions for ads. With other AI such as ChatGPT already capable of recommending campaign structures and ideas just by giving a URL, it won’t be long until Google’s AI starts to do the same and develops to a level where the default way to create campaigns and ads is through an AI chatbot.

Costs per click (CPCs) will continue to rise

CPCs have been consistently increasing for a long time now, due to more advertisers increasing search budgets and competing with one another. There is little evidence to suggest that this will stop in the future.

Ad Grants compete in a similar way, against one another rather than against paying advertisers. This is being accelerated as Maximise Conversions slowly become the norm, as this allows charities to bid over the $2 limit.

George’s Predictions

Increased focus on non-text-based search functions

Among the marketing trends that provide the user with a unique experience and control are several new ways to search that are not text-based. Alongside voice search, one trend that has come into the fold recently is the use of visual search. According to new research, 62% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers want visual search capabilities, more than any other new technology.

It’s therefore not surprising that recently we have seen the launch of new and innovative ways to search. At the beginning of 2024, Google introduced the Circle to Search feature, which allows users to search for text, images or videos on their screen by circling, highlighting or tapping on them without switching apps; and it appears that Microsoft is now planning to take on Google’s search feature with its own version of Circle to Search called Circle to Copilot.

Search term changes will lead to keyword changes

In 2024, there has been a continuous rise in users engaging with search in a conversational manner, phrasing their queries as if they were talking to a real person. Adapting to these conversational queries will require both content optimisation with long-tail keywords made up of text that sounds natural when read aloud, and an understanding of the questions users are asking.

Additionally, voice search is taking centre stage, and we predict that this will only continue to grow. With people saying complete statements or asking questions when searching, pages will need to be optimised accordingly for full questions, and content will need to match user language. Phrases like that indicate user intentions (‘who’, ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘when’, ‘where’) should be used when optimising content to address these intents. This will be vital for SEO success.

Jessica’s Predictions

Expanded text ads (ETAs) will sunset

It’s been over two years since we stopped being able to edit ETAs. With responsive/dynamic formats the new norm, we think it’s only a matter of time before ETAs are sunset completely. The majority of advertisers have already transitioned fully to RSAs, but it may affect smaller advertisers or older accounts that still rely on legacy ETAs.

Lawsuits will force Google to allow other advertising providers on SERPs

This is another change that could come in the wake of the antitrust trials. The shopping experience on Google utilises various providers outside of Google, creating a fairer, non-monopolised system. In future, we may see other search advertising providers able to advertise on the Google search engine – changing the playing field in a big way.

The auction will be made more transparent

It was recently revealed that Google was using ‘knobs and tunings’ to raise prices in the ad auction. The only reason they can get away with this is because the auction itself is a black box. If Google wants to regain the trust of advertisers, they may have to make their auction process more transparent.

However, the thing about predictions is that they don’t always agree…

Dan’s Predictions

The auction will be made more opaque

With more and more machine learning being introduced to the way Google Ads operates, it’s only a matter of time until this gets rolled into the auction process to a significant extent. Since it’s nearly impossible to easily explain a machine learning algorithm, I predict that we will begin to learn LESS about what goes on in the auction process. I could anticipate things like quality score subfactors disappearing, and even quality score being replaced by something more akin to ad strength. I want to be wrong about this prediction, though.

The death of keywords is almost upon us

The trend within Google Ads for the last few years has been to push users towards broad match. Most recently, an option was added to campaigns that limited the user to only using broad match. This option is now on by default, meaning inexperienced advertisers are going to end up exclusively relying on broad match.

At the same time, Google has started talking a lot about ‘search trends’ – groupings of keywords that you apply to smart campaigns such as Performance Max.

My prediction is that Google is aiming to move to a keyword-less marketing model. Likely, they will be replaced with a sort of AI prompt, where we describe the type of search we want to target. For example, ‘I want to target users searching for information around the benefits of yoga’. Google would then use this to target to searches, rather than the more strict keyword system.

Ben’s Predictions

Keywords & ad copy will become AI-automated

In agreement with Dan, I believe we’re in the endgame with keywords, but I also believe this will extend to us losing the ability to optimise the ads themselves. Ad copy will be created through machine learning and generative AI trained on other ads and on the landing page itself.

Top-end digital media experts will assume more of a strategic role. This will mean increased emphasis on defining and differentiating the brand, rather than a product-centred approach, and this will result in a more complex channel mix. Moreover, more consideration should be given to the full user journey – including the landing page. Both landing page and brand strength will be increasingly important factors in improving PPC performance.

Will’s Predictions

Performance Max will impact the Ad Grants scheme – but not how you expect

It was announced last month that Performance Max (a goal-based campaign type allowing advertisers to reach their goals across all Google channels from a single campaign, by using machine learning to optimize ad delivery) is coming to Ad Grants. This caused much excitement as well as confusion across many advertisers, over how/whether this will benefit their accounts – with us at Uprise Up, generally airing on the sceptical side. I personally don’t think it will really benefit most of our accounts, or most accounts in the CPC community, which (at least in our case!) are well run, and will likely not benefit from a less hands-on / more automated approach.

However, for many smaller charities, with less expert involvement, this will likely provide an easier way to get started and bid on their key terms. I think this may increase the reach and budget utilisation for smaller Ad Grants accounts, which could lead to higher competition among Ad Grants accounts, higher CPCs, and generally lower levels of traffic generated from them going forward.

The death of manual bidding in Ad Grants

Since 2017, when Ad Grants using a Maximise Conversions bid strategy were then allowed to bid over $2, the adoption of automated bidding has skyrocketed. While it had a very shaky start, it has now become almost a necessity to use in most situations. This is due to the higher CPC allowance naturally raising the CPC across the whole Ad Grants scheme (bearing in mind, only Ad Grants can compete with Ad Grants), which means that in many cases, to even enter a bid auction, let alone rank, users bidding less than $2 hardly stand a chance. This leads to a vicious cycle of more and more advertisers adopting the strategy.

We find, even if the overall goal is to increase clicks, using a maximise conversion strategy can perform better than maximise clicks due to this reason i.e. expensive traffic is likely better than zero traffic. In addition to the Ad Grants scheme emphasising a focus on driving key site actions, we feel it’s only a matter of time before manual bidding disappears, and possibly maximise clicks too (at least without the option to bid above $2).

The predictions here are just that – predictions. It’s likely that some, if not most, of these will be proven wrong in the coming years. However, it’s always worth looking forwards into the future, and pondering over where our industry is headed.

Let us know what you think about our predictions, and any of your own!