One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Ad Copy
Here is the rare tactic that costs nothing and is sitting in plain sight. Go and read your competitors' one-star reviews. Search Engine Land makes the case that negative reviews are a goldmine of positioning, because people tell you exactly what they expected, what annoyed them, and what they wish the company had done differently. Pull 30 to 50 negative or mixed reviews from two or three rivals, let AI cluster them into patterns, and you have a list of everything your market is furious about. Here is the clever part. You compare that list against what your business genuinely does better, and each match becomes an ad test. Slow delivery complaints become a shipping headline. Hidden fee rage becomes a transparent pricing line. As the piece puts it, sometimes the opportunity is not inventing a new advantage, it's noticing you already have one and making sure the customer sees it before they
Read the source →The AI Max Upgrade You Were Warned About Lands This Month
We flagged this in August and now the clock has actually run out. Through September, Google is moving campaigns that use Automatically Created Assets, which it has renamed Text Customization, and campaign-level Broad Match into AI Max. Google expects to have finished upgrading every eligible campaign by the end of the month. Once it lands, those campaigns run AI Max with Text Customization and Search Term Matching switched on. Dynamic Search Ads get a stay of execution until February 2027. Given what they found about exact match quietly drifting by 29%, " it upgrades itself by default " is not the most reassuring sentence Google has ever written. The window to dodge the migration altogether shut on 1 September, when you would have had to strip automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match out yourself. What you can still do is open each upgraded campaign and switch search te
Read the source →We Told You To Get In Early On ChatGPT Ads. Here Is The Small Print.
In August we called ChatGPT Ads a rare thing, a fresh inventory pool with no settled CPC floor, and said every platform gets exactly one cheap year. Six months of data has landed and the cheap year is taking its time. CPMs are still sitting well above what the same money buys you on search, click-through rates are landing somewhere between 0.6 and 0.9% where search would hand you around 2%, and audience matching is generous rather than precise. None of that is scandalous for a platform this young. It is simply the price of being in the room before the room is finished . The harder problem is not the pricing. It is that you cannot see what you bought. Six months in, OpenAI has still not published a single benchmark, so every advertiser is grading their own homework and we all know how that one goes. Sessions arriving from ChatGPT tend to be short and shallow, which may mean the intent is
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Your GA4 Audiences Can Finally Do Something Useful
Google has made GA4 audiences usable as Customer Match data inside Google Ads, and did it with all the fanfare of a man returning a library book. That turns a pile of segments you built, admired once and never touched again into something you can genuinely target and bid against. Every agency has a GA4 property full of beautifully constructed audiences doing absolutely nothing. Well, that changes now. This one will never trend, but it shifts the needle. A workhorse of an update, all steady pulling and no rosettes, while the show ponies get photographed at conferences. It closes the gap between the place you measure behaviour and the place you spend money. Check your data sharing settings, confirm your audiences actually qualify, and pick two or three with real intent behind them rather than pushing all forty across at once like a coked-up mad person. If your GA4 account is more museum th
Read the source →Meta Would Like You To Stop Telling It Where Your Ads Go
Meta is removing the Placements option from ad sets, so you can no longer exclude specific placements or platforms. No opting out of Facebook search results. No skipping the in-stream slot between Reels. Meta's system decides where your ad belongs now, and your opinion has been noted and filed somewhere you cannot reach it. This is Zuckerberg's stated endgame arriving bang on schedule, the one where you hand over a URL and the machine handles creative, targeting and placement, and you handle the invoice. It takes a particular kind of confidence to demand blind faith in your automation when your company has mislaid user data at industrial scale, from the access token breach that exposed tens of millions of accounts to the 533 million user records that ended up dumped online, and when your own advertisers still lose entire weeks every year to hijacked ad accounts and a support process best
Read the source →Pinterest Has Been Sitting On 80 Billion Searches A Month
Pinterest Presents landed on 17 September and produced the first genuinely interesting thing that platform has done in years. Visual Search Ads let you bid for placement inside Pinterest search results and Pin closeups, which is to say inside the exact moment somebody is comparing four sofas and cannot decide. The format blends keyword relevance with Pinterest's read of the image itself, supports lower funnel objectives, and plugs straight into Performance+. Beta opens across every Pinterest ad market in the coming weeks, Switzerland included, which is more than several newer platforms have managed all year. The number that should stop you is 80 billion searches a month, the vast majority of them visual and more than half of them commercial. Pinterest has been sitting on search intent this entire time and selling everybody awareness campaigns instead. If you have ever been talked out of
Read the source →Until next time, may your CTRs be high, your bounce rates be low.