Google Kills DSAs, Mandates API Multi-Factor Auth, and a Wave of Mystery Ad Disapprovals: PPC Platform Updates, Week of April 14–20, 2026

Seventeen updates hit the ZATO PPC News Dashboard this week, and this was one of those weeks where a few of them genuinely made me sit up in my chair. We've got a major campaign type being retired, a security mandate rolling out literally tomorrow, and a wave of ad disapprovals that nobody can fully explain yet. So let's not waste time on preamble, let's get into it.

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🚨 Important Updates (Act on These)

Google Is Retiring Dynamic Search Ads in Favor of AI Max — Search Engine Land | Google Ads & Commerce Blog

This is the big one. Google announced that Dynamic Search Ads are being retired, with an auto-migration path to AI Max. New DSA campaign creation will be blocked starting September 2026, and existing DSA, ACA, and broad match campaigns will be automatically migrated to AI Max. Google's own blog frames this as AI Max "moving out of beta" with improved targeting, creative capabilities, and enhanced controls.

Here's how this could impact your account: If you're running DSA campaigns right now (and a lot of ecommerce and lead gen accounts still are), you need to start thinking about this transition today, not in September. Auto-migrations have a way of not going exactly the way you'd hope, and the advertisers who will come out of this best are the ones who test AI Max on their own terms before Google forces the switch.

My honest read on this: AI Max is genuinely interesting technology, and from what I've seen in early testing it can perform well. But "Google is auto-migrating your campaigns" has historically been a sentence that should make you nervous, not because the destination is necessarily bad, but because the migration process tends to flatten nuances you've built into your account over time. If your DSA campaigns have specific targeting logic, negative keyword strategies, or ad group structures you care about, document all of that now. Understand what AI Max can and can't replicate. Run a parallel test before September if you can.

This also had zero industry articles covering the Google blog announcement itself (Search Engine Land covered it, but the first-party Google post was flagged as "uncovered" on the dashboard), which tells me the industry is focused on the reaction to this news but not necessarily digging into the specifics of what Google is actually saying about the upgrade path. Worth reading both sources.

Google Ads Advertisers Report Wave of Unexplained Ad Disapprovals — Search Engine Land

This is the kind of update that makes you close your laptop, take a deep breath, and open it again very slowly. Advertisers across the board are reporting unexplained ad disapprovals that are disrupting campaigns and raising concerns about lost traffic and wasted spend. There's no clear pattern yet, no specific policy violation being cited consistently, just... disapprovals.

Here's how this could impact your account: Go check your ad statuses right now. I'm not being dramatic. If you manage multiple accounts, check all of them. The frustrating thing about waves like this is that there's often no satisfying answer for why they happen (automated policy enforcement systems are imperfect, and when they misfire at scale it tends to look exactly like this), but the practical impact is very real: ads getting paused means lost impressions, lost clicks, and lost revenue while you wait for appeals to process.

If you're seeing disapprovals that don't make sense, appeal them. Document everything. And if you're an agency managing client accounts, get ahead of this by proactively checking and communicating with your clients before they come to you wondering why their ads stopped running. Nobody likes to be surprised by that conversation.

Google Ads MCC Security (Still Relevant From Last Week) — Search Engine Land

I covered this last week but it's still showing up in this week's dashboard view, and honestly it deserves the continued attention. If you haven't audited your MCC admin access and enabled 2FA yet, this is your second nudge. Don't make me give you a third one.

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⚠️ May Impact (Worth Understanding Soon)

Multi-Factor Authentication Required for Google Ads API Starting April 21 — Google Ads Developer Blog | Search Engine Land

This one is rolling out tomorrow as I write this, so the timeline here is not "put it on your list," it's "handle it today." Google is requiring MFA for all Google Ads API users, with the rollout starting April 21 and expanding to all users over the coming weeks.

Here's how this could impact your account: If you or your team access the Google Ads API directly (whether through custom scripts, third-party tools, or automated workflows), you need to verify that your authentication setup supports MFA before this rolls out to your account. The good news is that MFA is a genuinely good security practice, and if you're already using it for your Google account more broadly, you may be fine. The risk is for teams that have API access configured through service accounts or automated pipelines where MFA wasn't previously required, because those workflows could break if they're not updated.

This had low industry coverage on the dashboard (only one matching article beyond Google's own announcement), which surprises me given that this is a mandatory change with a hard rollout date. If you have a developer or technical team that manages your API integrations, forward them the Google blog post today. Not next week. Today.

Google Ads Tests Direct Google Tag Manager Integration for Conversion Setup — Search Engine Land

Google is testing a flow where you can set up conversion tracking directly through a Tag Manager integration inside the Google Ads interface, rather than bouncing between platforms to configure everything.

Here's how this could impact your account: On the surface, this is a quality-of-life improvement that could save some headaches during the conversion setup process, especially for advertisers who aren't super comfortable jumping between Ads and GTM. But I want to see how this actually works in practice before getting too excited. Every time Google tries to simplify a technical setup, there's a tension between "making it easier" and "making it so abstracted that you lose visibility into what's actually happening." If they get this right, it could be genuinely great for smaller advertisers who struggle with conversion tracking configuration. If they abstract it too much, it could create a new category of "I set up conversions but something isn't tracking right and I don't know why" problems.

Worth watching. Not worth changing your workflow yet.

Google's Product Feed Strategy Points to the Future of Retail Discovery — Search Engine Journal

This one came through the dashboard as a "May Impact" Merchant Center update, and I think it deserves more attention than it's getting. The core argument is that Google's approach to product feeds is shifting away from being purely a paid media input and toward being a broader signal for how products get discovered across AI-powered search surfaces.

Here's how this could impact your account: If you manage Shopping campaigns or work with Merchant Center, you've probably built your feed primarily to serve paid media. That's been the right call for years. But as Google continues to surface products through Gemini, AI Mode, and other AI-driven experiences, the feeds that perform best will likely be the ones that are optimized for discovery broadly, not just for paid placements specifically. What does that mean practically? Better titles, richer descriptions, more complete product attributes, and thinking about your feed the way you'd think about SEO for a product page rather than just as structured data for Shopping ads.

I'll be honest: it's still a little early to know exactly how much this matters day-to-day. But the direction is clear, and the advertisers who start thinking about this now will have a head start when it becomes obvious to everyone else.

Microsoft Performance Max Updates and Product News for April 2026 — Microsoft Advertising Blog

Microsoft dropped their April 2026 product updates, including improvements to Performance Max, and the dashboard flagged this as completely uncovered by the industry. Zero articles. Nobody wrote about it.

Here's how this could impact your account: I bring this up partly because the updates themselves are worth knowing about if you run Microsoft campaigns, but also because this is a pattern I keep noticing: Microsoft ships meaningful product improvements and the PPC industry collectively shrugs because everyone is focused on Google. If you're running Microsoft PMax campaigns (and as I mentioned in a previous post, the CPCs on Microsoft are still significantly lower than Google for most verticals), it's worth reading the first-party blog post directly to see what's changed and whether any of the updates affect your setup.

Also worth noting from the Microsoft side this week: Microsoft made it easier to import Google PMax campaigns, which lowers the barrier to entry if you've been running PMax on Google but haven't brought it over to Microsoft yet. If that's you, this might be the nudge.

April 2026 Update to Display & Video 360 API — Google Ads Developer Blog

Another uncovered update from the dashboard. Google announced the April 2026 DV360 API update, which includes support for additional Exchange and ThirdPartyVendor values and AdAsset identifier fields in AdGroupAd resources.

Here's how this could impact your account: This is squarely a developer-facing update, and for most advertisers managing campaigns in the UI, it won't change anything about your day. But if you or your team use the DV360 API for programmatic campaign management, custom reporting, or automated workflows, it's worth reviewing the changelog to see if any of the new fields or values affect your integrations. These API updates tend to be boring right up until they break something you depend on.

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📋 Low Coverage Updates (Things the Industry Is Mostly Sleeping On)

Ads DevCast E3: Improving Your Advertising Workflows — Google Ads Developer Blog

Zero industry coverage on this one. Google's developer podcast continues with an episode focused on how AI is changing the way technical users interact with Google's ad platforms. The shift they're describing is from incremental API updates to more fundamental changes in how advertising workflows are built and managed.

Here's how this could impact your account: If you're a developer or work closely with one, this is worth a listen for the directional signal alone. Google is telegraphing where their platform is headed technically, and understanding that trajectory can help you make better decisions about what to build, what to migrate, and what to deprecate in your own tooling. For non-technical advertisers: the short version is that Google is investing heavily in making its APIs and tools more AI-native, which will eventually trickle down to how the features you use in the UI work.

Gemini Is Stopping Harmful Ads Before People Ever See Them — Google Blog

Google published their 2025 Ads Safety Report, highlighting how Gemini-powered tools are improving their ability to detect and block deceptive ads before they reach users. Zero industry articles covering this.

Here's how this could impact your account: On one hand, better ad safety enforcement is good for the ecosystem. Nobody wants their legitimate ads competing alongside scam content. On the other hand, and this is where my brain immediately goes, this connects directly to that wave of unexplained ad disapprovals we talked about earlier. If Google is aggressively ramping up AI-powered ad review systems, it's not a huge leap to wonder whether some of those systems are generating false positives at a higher rate than usual. I'm not saying that's definitively what's happening, but it's a thread worth pulling on.

Microsoft Publisher Release Roundup: Q1 2026 — Microsoft Advertising Blog

Low coverage. Microsoft's quarterly roundup of Monetize platform updates, covering usability improvements, deals updates, and ad quality changes from Q1. This is more relevant for publishers than advertisers, but if you run Microsoft campaigns and want to understand what's changing on the supply side, it's worth a skim.

How to Fix a Suspended Google Merchant Center Account — Search Engine Land

Not a platform update per se, but a practical guide that showed up in this week's window. If you've ever dealt with a Merchant Center suspension (and if you run Shopping long enough, you probably will), this is a good reference to bookmark. The suspensions process can feel opaque and frustrating, and having a clear walkthrough of the steps can save you a lot of panicked Googling when it happens.

The TL;DR

Three things I'd prioritize this week, in order:

First: Check your ad statuses across all accounts for the unexplained disapproval wave. Appeal anything that doesn't make sense. Do this today.

Second: If your team uses the Google Ads API, verify your MFA setup before the April 21 rollout hits your accounts. This is a mandatory change with a hard start date of tomorrow.

Third: Start planning your DSA-to-AI-Max migration strategy. September feels far away but it's not, especially if you want to test AI Max on your own terms before Google forces the switch.

Everything else can simmer on the back burner, but I'd put the product feed strategy piece and the Microsoft PMax updates on your reading list for later this week. Both are getting almost no industry coverage and both have the potential to quietly matter more than people are giving them credit for.

That's the week. Go check your ad statuses. Then go check your MFA. Then take a breath. You've earned it.

Kirk