Soku AIBlog
Insights, tutorials, and updates from the Soku AI team.
Meta Audience Network: Should You Keep It On?
Meta Audience Network is on by default inside Advantage+ placements, and excluding it is the most common reflex in paid social. What Audience Network actually is in Meta's own documentation, why the exclusion usually costs more than it saves, the two cases where turning it off is correct, and the account-level control that works even with Advantage+ on. Verified 2026-08-12.
14 min read · August 12, 2026
Server-Side Tracking Is Now an AI Bidding Input
Server-side tracking stopped being a measurement project when the platforms started weighting server-confirmed conversions more heavily in bid-model training. Meta's Advantage+ models now prefer CAPI-confirmed events over pixel-only ones — which makes signal quality a bidding lever, not a reporting one.
11 min read · August 12, 2026
Best Ad Spy Tools in 2026: 10 Platforms Compared
Four of the ten best ad spy tools are free, official, and run by the ad platforms themselves — which changes what the paid six are actually selling. Real 2026 pricing where vendors publish it, an honest note where they don't, and the coverage wall that limits every tool on this list. Verified 2026-08-11.
15 min read · August 11, 2026
ChatGPT Ads Now Prohibits Individual Housing and Job Listing Ads (Policy v1.4)
OpenAI's ad policies moved to v1.4 on 10 August 2026, adding a Housing and Jobs section that prohibits ads for individual job listings and housing rentals or sales — with a carve-out for platforms. A second, unannounced change added an ad preview endpoint to the Ads API. Neither appeared in an advertiser email. Verified 2026-08-11.
12 min read · August 11, 2026
Free Media Plan Template for Paid Advertising
A free media plan template that actually calculates something — budget split, forecast impressions, clicks, conversions, CAC and ROAS from your own assumptions, plus a reconciliation block that catches the two errors most media plans ship with. Download the CSV, or build it yourself from the column spec.
12 min read · August 11, 2026
Performance Max Explained: When PMax Wins and When It Doesn't
Performance Max is not a campaign type you either believe in or don't. It has a specific shape, documented controls most advertisers never turn on, and three situations where it structurally cannot work. Here is what Google's own documentation says PMax does, what it now reports, and the honest decision guide. Verified 2026-08-11.
14 min read · August 11, 2026
ChatGPT Ads Delta Feeds API: Update Product Availability Without Reuploading Your Catalog
OpenAI has quietly shipped a Delta Feeds API for ChatGPT Ads — PATCH /feeds/{feed_id}/products lets you flip availability and titles on individual variants instead of re-uploading the whole catalog over SFTP. What it does, what it refuses to do, and why the help centre still says the opposite. Verified 2026-08-10.
9 min read · August 10, 2026
Google Ads Management Software: The 2026 Buyer's Guide
We fetched every vendor's pricing page on the same day and half of them would not give us a number. A 2026 buyer's guide to Google Ads management software — what each category actually does, the real prices where they exist, and the spend-based pricing model that quietly punishes growth. Verified 2026-08-10.
15 min read · August 10, 2026
Google Merchant Center Setup for Shopping Ads
A Google Merchant Center setup guide ordered by what actually causes disapprovals, not by what the sign-up wizard asks for first. Includes the verified required attributes, the character limits, and the 500x500 image rule that becomes mandatory on 31 January 2027. Verified 2026-08-10.
12 min read · August 10, 2026
Meta Ad Library: Advanced Search Operators Most Advertisers Miss
Most Meta Ad Library guides tell you to use AND, OR and quotation marks. Meta's own API documentation supports none of them. Here is what the Ad Library actually supports — the exact search_type values, the eight filters the UI hides, and the coverage wall that decides whether you can see commercial ads at all. Verified 2026-08-10.
11 min read · August 10, 2026
40 Advertisement Examples That Actually Converted
40 advertisement examples organised by the mechanism that made them work — not a swipe file of pretty creative. Each entry names the persuasion job it does, why it converted, and how to rebuild it for your own product, with an explicit note on what evidence exists and what does not.
16 min read · August 7, 2026
ChatGPT Ads Just Rewrote Who Sees Your Ads: Age Assurance, Under-18 Exclusion, and Mature-Content Eligibility
On 2026-08-07 OpenAI rewrote how ChatGPT Ads decides who is under 18 — replacing 'tells us or we predict' with an age-assurance model built on stated age, account age, time-of-day and conversation topics — and disclosed a mature-content ad tier limited to eligible logged-in users. The exact before-and-after wording, what it changes for advertisers, and what it does not.
13 min read · August 7, 2026