Search themes give Performance Max ads more context

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Good morning!

In today’s newsletter,

This issue takes 4 minutes to read.

Let’s dive into it👇

DTC founders, your customers live on their phones. With Dreamflow, you can launch a branded mobile app for loyalty, subscriptions, drops, or VIP access without a big engineering team.

Use AI to sketch screens, then customize visually: product feeds, rewards wallets, push notifications, and checkout links.

Connect Shopify, Stripe, or your database in a few clicks and ship to iOS/Android fast so you can test, learn, and grow.

Google added a feature called Search Themes to Performance Max campaigns so advertisers can guide the algorithm with human insight, similar to how keywords used to signal relevance in classic Search campaigns. 

Performance Max relies on your assets, feeds, and landing pages to figure out where to show your ads. But what if your landing page doesn't fully explain your product? 

Search Themes act like broad/phrase signals that tell Google what your business is about (e.g., key product categories or customer needs) when your site or feed doesn’t fully reflect them

Advertisers can now add up to 25 custom search themes per asset group. You create these themes yourself, similar to keywords. Some themes may overlap in audience (for example, “kitchen” and “culinary”), and that’s fine.

How Google uses them:

Search Themes don’t replace keywords. They give Google direction when automation lacks context.

Credit - Practical Ecommerce

New series. Every week I'll share one brand's Meta Ad Library that's worth studying. These are brands running ads you can actually learn from and replicate.

This week: Obvi.

Obvi sells collagen supplements. They've scaled to over $60M in sales in under five years mostly through DTC and Amazon.

They run a healthy mix: before/after transformation content, benefit-focused creatives, limited-time offers, testimonial screenshots, product shots with bold claims and UGC.

No overproduced studio content. No celebrity endorsements. Just high-volume creative testing with ads that look like they came from a customer's phone.

What to do with this:

👉 View Obvi's Ad Library

I read this post from Amir and it stuck.

Every leader knows the moment.The room goes quiet. The pressure spikes.
Someone says, “We don’t really have a choice.”

That line is almost never true.

Most of the time, there are choices. They’re just uncomfortable.

One slows things down.
One risks being wrong.
One forces a hard no.
One protects the mission instead of the ego.

So we label the situation as “forced” and move on.

Good leaders don’t treat pressure as a threat. They treat it as information.

Pressure tells you what matters right now. What the team is avoiding.
What you risk by moving fast and by slowing down.

That’s why “we have no choice” is a red flag. It usually signals fatigue, not reality.

Next time something feels urgent, pause and write down:

You don’t need to like all three.
You just need to see them.

Once the choices are visible, you stop reacting and start deciding.

You don’t need the perfect choice.
You need the next wise one.

Credit: Amir Tabch, CEO of OFZA

-Ibhrahim

AI has changed how consumers shop, but people still drive decisions. Levanta’s research shows affiliate and creator content continues to influence conversions, plus it now shapes the product recommendations AI delivers. Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified.

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