Wednesday, February 18

🌟 Today’s Highlights:

• Google Ads might be automatically re-enabling paused keywords

• Wordpress’ new AI assistant edits sites with prompts

• This easy tool will outperform your branded ads by over 20%

• 📊 Stat of the Day: Text ads gained 7-13% of click share between January 2025 and January 2026. (Source: Aleyda Solis)

• 💡 Today’s Insight: Your marketing operations tech stack audit checklist

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⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

⏯️ Google Ads is automatically re-enabling paused keywords. The move is being spotted by some advertisers on a Google Ads system tool designed for low-activity bulk changes.

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🦾 WordPress’ new AI assistant lets users edit their sites with prompts. The new assistant is built into the platform’s site editor and media library with a sidebar that will allow users to ask it to edit and translate text, generate images, and more.

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🔗 Google launched more visible links in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The new, more visible links within the link cards appear in a pop-up window when users hover over them on desktop, showing more prominent details about the website.

💡 Today’s Insight 💡

Your marketing operations tech stack audit checklist

🗞 TL;DR - Let’s be honest, you probably have too many marketing tools. Gartner even estimates that only 49% of marketing tech tools are actively being used by teams, which means over half goes to waste. An audit of your martech stack can help you cut waste, improve data quality, and align tools to business goals – and HubSpot has the full audit walkthrough for us.

💡 Insight - Here’s how you can run an audit of your marketing operations tech stack:

1. Inventory everything. List all tools, owners, costs, usage frequency, and contracts.

2. Map data flows and identify the single system of record. Chart how customer and campaign data move between systems; identify your single source of truth.

3. Audit usage & ROI. Compare each tool’s cost versus real business impact (lead gen, conversion lift, reporting accuracy).

4. Score each tool for impact vs effort. How much impact does each tool provide for the effort required to maintain it? Decide what to keep, replace, or remove.

5. Identify redundancies and consolidation opportunities. Align lifecycle stages and reporting across all platforms while you’re at it.

6. Plan a roadmap. Build a 30-60-90-day action plan with owners, milestones, and sunset plans for retiring tech.

Make sure to run mini-audits quarterly and full reviews annually to keep the stack aligned with goals. Focus on tools that involve stakeholders across departments and improve data quality and integration to unlock better analytics and ROI.

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