By Jeff Allen (@JeffAllenUT)

The New PPC Hero site is live! We’ve cleaned up the site dramatically and taken a mobile first approach. Check out the PPC Hero site>>. We have also ungated all our White Papers, Case Studies and Toolkits (no more entering email to download the vast majority of our content) in the Resource Library on our Hanapin Marketing website. Hanapin Marketing Resource Library>>

Google Data Studio Studio is a cool new way to create dashboards for AdWords & Analytics data. It’s easy to use and customize. The big downside to it, is its Google centric. Adoption will be weak, but still fun to play around with and use if AdWords drives a huge portion of your spend/conversions. Read more on PPC Hero>>

The ANA released its Media Transparency report. It’s meant for large agencies, that hide fees, don’t share kick-backs, and use contracts as a defense mechanism instead of doing the right thing by clients. It’s alarming that agencies still operate this way, but they do. Hopefully this helps shed light on some pretty shady practices. Read More on ANA.

Verizon bought Yahoo! for $4.8b. It’s a whimpering end to the once search giant. Verizon is trying to become a media player, but still lags behind Google and Microsoft, likely meaning search volume and marketing dollars will continue to erode over the next decade. Read More on Reuters>>

Google has made a change to Shopping Campaigns. Focusing more on groupings by brand, that take you an expanded product list (still within Google) and then you only pay if the user then clicks a product and goes to your website. It feels like an attempt to remove the comparison shopping component of shopping ads, which drives down revenue for advertisers, and thus drives down CPC for Google. Read More on PPC Hero>>

Google is killing “Converted Clicks,” which means the conversions it will report will now include cross-device (based on their algo & logged in user tracking). While it’s likely to more fairly represent Google’s impact for advertisers (since just converted clicks underestimates the value), the shift will remove people’s control over how they view and measure marketing performance. Outside of cross-device, you will have flexibility in what you consider a conversion. It’s going to be very important to think through your settings for this metric before September. Read More on Search Engine Land>>

Governments requested user data 40,000 times in the second half of 2015. That’s an insane number, and 64% were reported to result in some information being shared. Read More on Search Engine Land>>