Digital industry updates

PHP Vulnerability

Two critical vulnerabilities have been discovered in PHP, the programming language powering approximately 70% of websites globally.

The potential impact has been serious enough for organisations to temporarily take websites offline while security measures are reviewed and implemented.

So, what should businesses be doing?

If your website uses PHP, including through platforms such as WordPress, it’s important to establish whether your website or hosting environment is affected and ensure the appropriate security updates have been applied.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued guidance recommending that organisations take immediate action to assess their exposure.

New Meta AI tools at Ad Week

How it works:
Meta’s business assistant can now generate creative, update targeting and change budgets through conversational prompts, with brand guideline imports and scheduled reports in testing. Advantage+ video generation from static images is now generally available, Ads Creative Studio is expanding, and Customer Lifecycle Strategy lets all advertisers set the audience for each campaign.

What’s the benefit?
Meta is moving towards AI-led campaign management and making video far easier to produce from existing assets. Test static-to-video for Reels, but keep human oversight of budgets, targeting and brand messaging.

Microsoft Advertising makes optimisation experiments generally available

How it works:
Microsoft Advertising has made Optimisation Experiments generally available for Search, Shopping, Audience and Performance Max campaigns. Advertisers can run controlled A/B tests covering areas such as bidding, targeting and creative, with results presented alongside the original campaign. Changes can then be applied to the original campaign or used to create a new campaign. 

What’s the benefit:
Advertisers can test significant campaign changes before rolling them out across an account. This gives PPC teams a more structured way to validate changes to bidding, targeting and creative, rather than relying solely on before-and-after performance comparisons 

Google expands AI Max reporting to show the full search journey

How it works:
Google is introducing a new reporting view for AI Max campaigns that brings together the search term and landing page associated with an ad interaction. 

Google says the aim is to give advertisers a clearer picture of how AI Max is matching queries with their creative and destinations. The update is being rolled out alongside an expansion of AI Brief into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. 

What’s the benefit:
This should make AI Max easier to analyse because advertisers can see more of the path between the search query and the experience delivered.
It could be particularly useful for identifying irrelevant query/creative combinations and understanding how Google’s AI-driven targeting is influencing campaign performance.

Google search result links now redirect through goto URL

Google is rolling out new technical measures to protect against evolving forms of abuse, including a redirect between Google search results and the destination webpage. Clicks now pass through a google.com/goto URL first. This should make it harder for third-party tools, scrapers and AI systems to collect search results data.

Whilst the change will barely impact searchers, SEO professionals or businesses using third-party Google Search tracking tools may need to monitor their data for any changes in how these platforms collect or report it. To be extra proactive, consider checking in with your providers to see if or how this will affect you.