Happy Monday.
Seriously, when did a switch from a t-shirt to a full raincoat in one day become a thing? We’re inside, eyeing the thermostat like it owes us money.
Where did gentle transitions go? Ah wait, we know… Still, there’s something to be said for a cozy desk, warm hands, and a very good excuse to stay inside and read. Or work.
Choose where your bid ceiling lives before Black Friday, plus bigger LSAs
Ad platforms are pulling a Marie Kondo on manual controls. Or… if a setting doesn’t spark automation, the platform will thank it and throw it out.
Four changes, one direction: Both engines are either removing or quietly discouraging the per-click ceiling..
- Microsoft allows max CPC on new campaigns only via portfolio strategies from 1 October, and its API drops the field on 12 January 2027.
- Google locks Target ROAS during promotion mode, leaving only the tolerance adjustable, and now confirms Demand Gen bills display images by CPM, so there’s no click price to cap.
Scripts, beware: The January API cut covers portfolio strategies too, and past use won’t grandfather you in. Audit bulk uploads and bid tools that set MaxCpc.
Holiday homework? For each campaign, settle what holds the line now: a portfolio cap, a ROAS tolerance, or plain old budget. The defaults won’t do it for you.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Google Ads:
- Match me if you can: Customer Match now accepts IP addresses and timestamps, uploaded unhashed, for bigger audiences. Not for EEA, UK or Swiss users.
- Local rules apply: The Legal Requirements policy adds self-regulatory codes for Argentina, Australia, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and South Africa.
- Supersized: Google is testing bigger Local Services Ads with larger images and a highlight box. Still a test, but home-services advertisers should keep watch.
Plenty to reconfigure before the holiday rush.
The AI agent race gets serious and search shifts again
Barbie had Oppenheimer. Now Meta’s shiny new assistant has its own opening-weekend rival.
The box office numbers are in: Muse keeps surging, passing 3.4M downloads per Sensor Tower. It’s #1 on both the U.S. App Store and Google Play.
In its first two weeks, Muse averaged 55% day-over-day download growth. ChatGPT managed 24%.
Meta is pushing it with house ads across its apps, plus Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube. Yet ads drove only 6% of impressions.
Organic pull like that makes Muse a channel worth watching early.
Enter the rival: Microsoft is adding agentic capabilities to Copilot, targeting the work before an ad goes live:
- Launch plans in Word and budgets in Excel, without switching apps.
- Campaign recaps generated in PowerPoint.
- Custom Meta or Google pixels built in Code, no engineers needed.
Meanwhile, Google hired a detective: Its new SAFE spam system uses multiple AI agents to investigate publishing bursts, shared infrastructure, and “spirit of policy” violations. It’s already deployed.
If you’re scaling AI content, tighten your quality control.
Organic might get some air: Google is testing a shorter AI Overview on desktop, leaving more room for organic results to earn clicks.
And blogs are crashing the shopping aisle: AI Mode’s product carousel now mixes in blog posts. Helpful guides can now compete for product clicks.
Stop deleting customers just to keep your email bill down
Hollywood loves a comeback story. Per-contact pricing makes you cut the comeback kid before the second act.
Every list clean-out is a bet. The contact who went quiet in March might be the one who buys three things on Black Friday.
Per-contact pricing forces that bet. Keep them, and they cost you every month. Delete them, and they’re gone for good.
Brevo bills on emails sent, not contacts stored. So you can:
- Keep dormant buyers until the moment they’re worth emailing
- Grow your list without the invoice automatically growing with it
Spending $1,000+/month on Klaviyo? Share an invoice, get 50% off your first three months.
An AI checklist to get your shop ready for Black Friday
Yep, it’s almost November already.
And Amanda Silvernale, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft AI, published a four-part readiness list for AI-driven holiday shopping.
Vendor post, yes. Useful timing math, also yes. Here’s what she says.
1) Your feed is the whole storefront now. Feeds carrying only advertised SKUs leave the rest of the catalog invisible to AI experiences.
Amanda’s fix: Upload the full eligible catalog, refresh inventory, UCP attributes, and store policies, clear Merchant Center alerts, label holiday hero products, and build a separate promotions feed.
2) Thirty conversions, or the bidder is guessing: Campaigns under 30 conversions in 30 days give bidding strategies thin data and volatile performance.
Consolidation is the recommended cure.
What to do: Count conversions per campaign before Q4, not after. Anything under the line gets merged now, while there’s still runway.
3) Four weeks is the actual deadline: New bidding strategies need at least four weeks to stabilize, and Amanda suggests moving budgets or targets about 15% at a time to avoid a disruptive reset.
The Crew’s take: Work backwards from Black Friday, and late September is already the last comfortable window.
Panic-editing in November resets learning at the worst possible moment.
4) Values beat volume: Connect UET and CAPI across website, app, CRM, and offline sources.
Pass conversion values rather than counts alone, and validate every priority goal with “Test This Goal” before traffic arrives.
The Crew’s take: Optimizing to count in a discount-heavy season buys a mountain of cheap orders and a flat revenue line.
5) Two case studies, one raised eyebrow: Amsive reported 1,042% ROAS and hit profitability 2X faster.
Alexander Del Rossa saw over 3X higher conversion rates in Brand Agent-assisted sessions.
The Crew’s take: Assisted sessions self-select. Shoppers who engage a Brand Agent were already closer to buying, so treat that number as directional rather than a promise.
Get it done. It’s just feed hygiene, measurement plumbing, and leaving automation alone long enough to learn. All boring in September, and impossible in November.
What if doing nothing beats 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
But over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience, and that’s hard when your portfolio is an abstract index fund. Thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Squeezing ads into AI search? Consumers aren’t buying it
Placing paid ads inside AI search results might sound like a monetization dream for ad networks.
But for consumers, it feels more like finding a sponsored fly in their algorithmic soup.
Data from Marketing Charts reveals a massive skepticism hurdle for AI ad formats:
- Trust erosion: A whopping 63% of Americans agree that ads in AI search results make them trust the output less—with 27% strongly agreeing.
- Friction over convenience: Over half (52%) disagree that AI ads will simplify their buying experience, compared to only 36% who think it helps.
Users treat AI tools as “no-bs” advisors. Forcing sponsored plugs into generative answers triggers instant suspicion, proving that shoehorning traditional ad formats into conversational search breaks user trust fast.
Actionable Tip: Double down on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) over forced paid placements.
Earn natural AI citations through high-authority PR, detailed comparison specs, and clear product documentation so LLMs quote your brand organically.
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MICROSOFT ADS: Microsoft Advertising’s LinkedIn-profile targeting is out of beta and live for everyone, so you can size company-list and job-seniority audiences in the Audience planner before launch. Lists still cap at 10,000 companies, and each ad group can target up to 1,000.
META: A New Mexico jury found Meta misled users about privacy and content moderation, racking up nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection law. Each could cost up to $5,000, with fines set at a later hearing. The trial? Mostly about Cambridge Analytica.
INSTAGRAM: Adam Mosseri kicked off a video series demystifying how the algorithm ranks your posts. His four principles: originality, recency, testing small creators with non-followers, and bigger AI models. His advice? Chase engagement rate, not total views or likes, and experiment with trial Reels. Mostly generic, but straight from the source.
*This is a sponsored post.
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