Week 35 2026: Pricing changes, Google Ads fixes, and Pulse analytics expansion

What changed this week

Week 35 brought significant updates across pricing, platform stability, and analytics capabilities. The most visible change is Vendably's new entry-level pricing, now starting at GBP199 per month for catalogues. On the operations side, several critical fixes address Google Ads permission errors and account management issues that were blocking agency workflows and multi-account setups. Pulse, the analytics module, received substantial feature additions including live visitor tracking, city-level geography data, and storefront notices.

Pricing and account access

Vendably pricing now starts at GBP199 a month for catalogues, making the platform more accessible for smaller merchants and agencies managing multiple client accounts.

Agency workflows received two important fixes:

• Google Merchant Center import visibility: When signing up as an agency and importing client accounts, Google Merchant Center accounts now appear in the platform list alongside other connected services. Previously these accounts could go missing from the list entirely, forcing manual reconnection.
• Google Merchant Center-only signup route: The dedicated Google Merchant Center signup path now correctly shows only Google Merchant Center as a connection option, eliminating confusion when importing existing accounts through this route.

Google Ads stability and account management

Three critical fixes address reliability issues that were blocking campaign management and reporting:

These fixes are particularly important for agencies managing client accounts through manager account hierarchies, as they remove friction from daily campaign operations and prevent unnecessary reconnection cycles.

Product catalogue and search improvements

The Products list received four improvements that speed up daily merchant workflows:

• Search ranking by relevance: Searching your product list now ranks results by how closely they match your query, not by most recently updated. An exact match appears at the top instead of potentially buried below loosely related products.
• Name sorting: Sorting by Name A to Z or Name Z to A now works without errors, and unrecognised sort options fall back cleanly to default order instead of showing error pages.
• Product images: Images now display correctly while being prepared, and uploads in the content library show the real image rather than a placeholder.
• Full-page content delivery: The Content Delivery Images page now opens as a full page with navigation and filters, instead of showing a single unstyled image.

Permissions and approval workflows

Owners and Admins can now approve advertising plans again. A permissions fault had been rejecting all users from approving plans, even account owners. Approval now works correctly for the roles meant to have it.

A separate fix ensures that when an Able request is turned down because your spending cap has been reached, the message now clearly states this. Previously the system wrongly reported that your monthly allowance was used up, conflating two different limits.

Data accuracy and reporting

Several fixes ensure your reporting data stays accurate:

• Organic search data: Your organic search figures now always come from your own connected Search Console account. Data is never pulled from a connection you have since removed or that has stopped working, so figures stay accurate.
• Store insights consistency: Store insights now refresh cleanly even if two refreshes are triggered close together. Previously overlapping runs could interrupt progress and leave the state corrupted.
• Transaction accuracy: Your Transactions list no longer shows empty purchase rows with no order reference, items, or value. Only genuine purchases are counted.
• Campaign performance reliability: Campaign performance data now keeps updating even when duplicate performance rows have built up on an account, preventing import delays on large stores.
• Refund and return tracking: Vendably now captures refund and return details from Shopify orders, including refund amounts, return status, and which items came back.

Pulse analytics: live tracking and geography

Pulse received substantial feature additions this week:

Live view and real-time data:
- A new Live view shows what is happening on your storefront right now: active sessions, per-minute pageviews, most-viewed pages, and a rolling feed of recent activity, all updating every 15 seconds.
- Today's traffic now appears as it happens, updated every hour, with final figures confirmed overnight.
- Revenue trend now appears on the dashboard chart alongside visitors, average order value, and a consent health stat.

Geography and channel insights:
- Geography panel now has a dedicated page showing every country and, for the first time, city-level traffic breakdowns. City data builds from 16 July 2026 onwards.
- Click any channel on the Channels tab to see its dedicated page: sessions, revenue, transactions, average order value, and a trend chart for that channel alone.
- Click any product on the Products page to see its dedicated page: views, impressions, view rate, purchases, revenue, commerce funnel, and trend chart.

Date range picker:
- The date range picker on your dashboard, product analytics, and transactions pages now shows the exact dates you are looking at, not just preset names.
- You can pick your own custom start and end date directly instead of guessing what "last 30 days" actually means.

Product-level tracking:
- Pulse now credits every item in an order to its own product in your analytics, not just the first one in the basket.
- The Products page gains an impressions count and view rate, showing how often each product was seen in a list before it was opened.
- Click any product mention in your live feed or transaction item list to jump straight to its funnel and trend.

Search tracking:
- Pulse now tracks what visitors search for on your site, whether your search updates the page address or not, with a simple setting for stores whose search results carry the term in the URL.

Consent and reliability:
- Pulse now honours analytics consent from any Consent Mode compatible cookie tool, including Cookiebot, OneTrust, and Osano, with no extra setup.
- Pulse now remembers a shopper's cookie consent across every page, so checkout and purchase activity is credited to the same visitor as their browsing.
- Sessions are no longer split when a shopper uses more than one tab.
- Sales and basket events fired before the analytics script finished loading are now queued and delivered rather than lost.
- Tracking snippet now installs correctly through Google Tag Manager, with console warnings if your site key is missing or misconfigured.

Pulse storefront notices

Storefront notices received significant improvements:

Visibility and placement:
- Storefront notices now appear on far more product pages: when a product has not sold recently but is being viewed, Pulse can show this instead of staying silent.
- When your whole site has not had enough recent orders to show a weekly notice, Pulse now checks the last month instead, so a quiet week does not mean silence for a month.
- Storefront notices never appear on basket or checkout pages, so shoppers already buying are never distracted.
- Notices now pace themselves across a shopper's whole visit, not just one page, so shoppers no longer see the same purchase notice on every page they browse.

Configuration and preview:
- You can now set how many storefront notices a shopper sees during a single visit, from your Pulse setup page.
- You can preview your storefront notice on Setup before switching it on, choose which corner it appears in, its size, and light or dark styling, with instant updates as you change choices.
- A small "Powered by Pulse" link appears on the notice by default; you can hide it if you prefer.
- Wording is now clearer and more accurate about what the notice is showing.

Public transparency:
- Pulse now has its own public page explaining what a "someone just bought this" storefront notice is and why it is safe: no personal data is ever collected or shown, only anonymised counts and coarse timing or location.
- Shoppers can reach it by clicking the small badge on any notice.
- The Pulse explainer page now appears in the visitor's own language, and the "Powered by Pulse" badge links straight to it.

Product-page notices:
- Product-page notices now work without any template change on stores with standard Google Analytics ecommerce tracking: Pulse can read the product from your existing tracking data when the usual product marker is not present.

Google Tag Manager integration

Pulse Setup now offers two streamlined installation paths:

• Download GTM container: A ready-to-import file for your own Google Tag Manager account, built for your site and your consent-management setup, with nothing left to configure by hand once you import.
• Install now: If you connect a Google account with Tag Manager access, Setup offers "Install now" to create a dedicated workspace in your own Google Tag Manager container, add the tags, and publish in one click.

Pulse can now read commerce events straight from your site's existing tagging data layer. Switch it on in Setup with no relay tags to build or maintain.

Custom events and event naming

You can now name your own custom events once in Setup, see them labelled by name in the live feed instead of a generic tag, and set goals on a specific custom event rather than only on custom events as a whole.

Product feed and Google Shopping

You can now edit the exact title, price, description, or other field values sent to Google Shopping for a single product, without waiting for a rule change or your next sync. Edited fields show clearly which value is yours and which came from your rules, and you can revert to the automatic value at any time.

We now tell you when a product change moves your advertising performance, naming what you changed and how it affected your return on ad spend.

OpenAI Ads and platform integrations

OpenAI Ads received critical fixes and improvements:

• Performance sync fix: OpenAI Ads performance figures now sync back into Vendably. Previously every performance read from a connected OpenAI Ads account failed.
• Campaign discovery: Campaigns you create directly in OpenAI's own Ads Manager now appear in Vendably automatically on your next sync, not just campaigns created inside Vendably.
• Campaign configuration: When creating an OpenAI Ads campaign you can now set a daily budget, choose a maximum cost per click, and pick a clicks objective, matching what the OpenAI platform supports.
• SFTP reliability: Sending your product feed to OpenAI Commerce over SFTP now succeeds on every run. Previously later runs could fail, so the feed stopped updating.

Search Console and data sources

Several fixes improve data source reliability and visibility:

• Error visibility: A data source that is failing to import now shows its error state clearly on its page, with the error badge and banner visible. Previously a failing source could still look healthy.
• Reliability labelling: Each source's reliability score is now labelled plainly as its import reliability.
• Export health: The export health view now shows the real number of products in each completed export, rather than always showing zero.
• Audit trail robustness: Your data source audit trail no longer errors when a date filter is typed or bookmarked in an unexpected format. An unreadable date is simply ignored and the history still loads.

Sitemaps and search engine access

Search engines can read sitemaps again. A firewall check was serving crawlers a security page in place of the sitemap, so Google saw no pages to index. Crawlers now reach every sitemap directly, restoring how help articles and public pages are discovered in search.

Onboarding and signup reliability

Merchant onboarding now completes reliably. Some merchants signing up to switch their Merchant Center to Vendably CSS could get stuck in a redirect loop that left the browser bouncing between pages until it gave up. The dashboard is reachable again, and links carrying a destination now return you to the right page after signing in.

Store insights and large-account performance

Store insights now finish and refresh on the very largest stores, instead of being cut off part-way and left stale for days. The refresh saves its progress as it runs and picks up where it left off, rather than starting over each time.

Intelligence insights now refresh reliably for stores with very large search-term histories. Previously the refresh could stall on the biggest accounts, leaving insights stale.

Product announcements and knowledge base

Product announcements now appear on the homepage, so you can see what is new the moment you land on the site, not just when you visit the knowledge base.

Links between articles in the knowledge base now work correctly. Previously some articles could fail to render their cross-links to related guides.

Platform language support

The review inbox count now shows for merchants using Vendably in any language. Previously the unread-reviews badge disappeared whenever the interface was set to a language other than English.

Store health and wins

Store health scores no longer count your wins as problems. Stores with active wins will see their score rise to reflect this.

What you should do

Immediate actions:

• If you use Google Ads through a nested manager account structure or have had accounts moved between managers, test your campaign changes to confirm they now sync without permission errors.
• If you are an agency importing client accounts, verify that Google Merchant Center accounts now appear in your import list.
• Review your data sources page to check for any failing imports now clearly flagged with error states.

This week:

• Explore Pulse's new Live view and geography pages to understand your traffic patterns better.
• If you use storefront notices, visit Pulse Setup to configure how many notices shoppers see per visit and preview your chosen styling and placement.
• Test the new product-level search tracking by checking your search terms in Pulse's live feed.
• If you manage OpenAI Ads campaigns, confirm that campaigns created in OpenAI's Ads Manager now sync into Vendably automatically.

Within the next two weeks:

• If you use Google Tag Manager, consider using the new "Install now" feature to set up Pulse tracking with one click instead of manual configuration.
• Review your product feed exports to Google Shopping and consider using the new single-product edit feature to adjust titles, prices, or descriptions without waiting for a full sync.
• Check your store health score to see if active wins now contribute positively to your overall score.
• If you use custom events, name them in Pulse Setup so they appear clearly labelled in your live feed and reports.

Planning ahead:

• City-level geography data in Pulse builds from 16 July 2026 onwards, so older date ranges will show fewer city results until more history accrues. Plan to review city-level breakdowns from mid-July forward.
• If you are not yet using storefront notices, read Pulse's new public explainer page to understand what data is and is not collected, then decide whether to enable them.

Summary

Week 35 focused on stability, agency workflows, and analytics depth. The pricing change makes Vendably more accessible at entry level. Critical Google Ads fixes remove friction from nested manager account structures and account moves, which is essential for agencies and multi-account merchants. Pulse's expansion into live tracking, city-level geography, and improved storefront notices gives merchants much deeper visibility into what is happening on their storefronts right now, not just historical trends. The combination of these updates makes the platform more reliable for complex account structures and more informative for merchants who want to understand their visitors and sales in real time.