An Instagram Link Now Costs More Than A Coffee In Zurich
For fifteen years Instagram's answer to " can I put a link in my post? " was no, go and use your link in bio. Meta has now found a better answer, which is yes for $49.99 a month. The new Meta One Advanced tier gets you clickable links in four posts and four Reels a month, which works out at roughly $6.25 per link, or a cappuccino on the Bahnhofstrasse without the foam. Want twelve of each? That is the Max plan at $499. Links cannot be edited once you post, and the ones you do not use vanish at renewal like an unclaimed gym membership. Let's call it what it is. Meta spent years throttling organic reach until posting for free felt like shouting into a cushion, and it is now selling the hyperlink, a feature the internet has handed out since 1991, back to the businesses that built its feed. Eight links a month will not change anybody's funnel. Put the money behind ads you can actually measur
Read the source →Your Google Ads Conversions Are Faking It
If your conversion numbers suddenly look better than your sales team's mood, we have bad news. On 8 October Google changed how Tag Manager containers start up. They now load on page load regardless of any gtag('config') command, and every config call shows up in the dataLayer as its own gtag.config event. Any Custom Event trigger set to .*, which matches literally every event, now has one more reason to fire, and that includes your Google Ads conversion tags. Google also used the release note to describe the popular shortcut of pairing a GTM snippet with a stray config line as " an unsupported implementation ", which is Google for " told you so ". The fix is not glamorous. Open Preview mode, see what fires on gtag.config, exclude that event from every wildcard trigger, and check that your conversion tags only fire when somebody has genuinely converted. If your container has been passed b
Read the source →X Marks The Spend: Give Grok Your URL, Your Budget And Your Dignity
At Advertising Week in New York, X launched X Lift, a tool that takes your website address and hands back ready-made ads with the copy, images and targeting already done. You pick the versions you like, set a budget and Grok handles the rest. X says active self-serve advertisers grew 50% year on year in the third quarter, and it would very much like you to help that number keep climbing. Make of it what you will. The system was trained on X ads, there is no independent performance data yet, and it is not clear how much you can change once Grok has built the campaign. Handing your targeting to the platform whose brand safety record sent a queue of big-name advertisers towards the exit is a bold move. If you want to test it, use money you would otherwise spend on a team lunch, check every placement it picks, and maybe keep it away from the logo. Read More //
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OnlyFans Creators Keep 80%. Google's Publishers Get 0.1%.
Google has started paying publishers when their content feeds AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini, which sounds like progress until you see the cheque. About 100 publishers are in the Search Console pilot, and for small and mid-sized sites the payments come to roughly one tenth of one percent of their ad revenue. Some have earned under $1,000 over several months. One early participant clears over $1 million a year, so the money clearly exists. It just is not travelling downhill. Nobody outside Google knows the formula, and one publisher executive summed it up neatly. Google " uses publishers' content and decides for itself what that content is worth ". Now add the other half of the story. A randomised experiment with 1,100 users found AI Mode cut clicks to external websites by 18.8 percentage points, and people liked the experience less rather than more. So Google takes the click, keeps the
Read the source →Your Next Customer Is A Bot With Your Credit Card
On 28 September Shopify opened checkout to AI agents across all its eligible merchants. An agent can now read the checkout, change the shipping address and place the order for its human, no squinting at screenshots required. TikTok followed on 5 October with an in-app AI shopping assistant. Amazon, on the other hand, is blocking outside agents from buying on its site, and Adidas reportedly is too. Do not mistake Amazon's caution for consumer protection. Amazon runs one of the biggest ad businesses on the planet, and every sponsored listing in it depends on a human scrolling past it. A bot that walks straight to the best option never sees a single ad, which makes it a terrible customer for anyone selling the scroll. For everyone else this is the moment to make sure your product feed, prices and stock data are clean enough for a machine to read, because the bot will not be charmed by your
Read the source →Tinder Charges To See Who Likes You. LinkedIn Just Made It Free.
For years LinkedIn has dangled the same notification. Someone from a large company viewed your profile, and the moment you click to find out who, it asks for your credit card. Advertisers now get the grown-up version for nothing. In Campaign Manager under Plan and then Companies, LinkedIn sorts every company your ads reached into groups like highly engaged, brand aware, surging and declining. It shows you each company's funnel, and it lets you search in plain language for things like companies where directors are engaging. For anyone running ABM this is properly useful. Exclude the companies that keep soaking up impressions without ever responding, push budget towards the ones that are surging, and find the accounts that are clearly interested but missing from your target list. It is the rare LinkedIn feature that tells you who fancies you without a Premium upsell attached, so use it bef
Read the source →Until next time, may your CTRs be high, your bounce rates be low.