Happy Friday.
Quick pro tip before you dive in: when you actually rest, rest.
Don’t doomscroll Reels. Don’t grind that mobile game. Don’t fall into a Reddit thread reading essays. Just step outside and breathe. Take a nap if you can.
Your brain does its best work after you’ve left it alone for a bit. Trust us on this one.
AI Overviews may be favouring your competitors, and Customer Match goes auto-classified
Turns out being “seen” isn’t the same as being “chosen.”
The plot twist nobody asked for: Google’s AI Overviews recommend your competitors 69% of the time, even when they cite your own self-promotional “best” listicle.
Lily Ray studied 100 B2B “best [category] software” queries across three dates. Of the 80 that triggered an AI Overview, Google cited these self-serving listicles 323 times.
But in 224 of those, roughly 70%, Google cited the brand’s own page and recommended someone else.
Case in point: For “best LMS for selling courses,” Google cited Oasis LMS, then recommended Kajabi, Thinkific, and others, all names found inside the Oasis article. Ouch.
Stronger brands with real third-party mentions and solid link profiles still made the cut. The self-rankers? Not so much.
Now for the part that stings: Organic visibility for these sites slid around Jan. 20 and dropped harder through Google’s May 2026 core update.
Google now leans on Reddit, Forbes, and YouTube instead.
Meanwhile, over in the world of ad targeting: Google is also reshaping Customer Match.
From August 2026, it’ll automatically sort your conversion-based lists by customer type, and you’ll lose the option to leave eligible lists unclassified.
Get the labels wrong, and you could throw off how automated bidding reads your customers from first click to loyal fan.
Your move: Audit your lists in Audience Manager now, and ask whether automatic classification will match your own definitions before it becomes mandatory.
Buyers are making up their minds, so meet them mid-decision
Turns out the internet’s front page doubles as its fitting room.
Lurkers before they leap: A fresh Reddit study with WPP surveyed 13,000+ users and found that 77% of Redditors hop across two or more communities before they buy.
Why it matters: Most marketing playbooks chase awareness and buzz.
But the actual yes-or-no moment happens later, during that quiet stretch where shoppers go digging to double-check what they’ve seen.
Trust runs deeper here:
- 63% feel surer about choices shaped by Reddit threads than by rival platforms.
- 58% say a brand answering a customer question publicly earns their confidence.
The payoff for showing up right: Ads dropped into relevant communities have pushed purchase intent up to 16x higher than keyword targeting on its own.
Folks are also 30% more likely to engage when your ad fits the subreddit.
What this means for you: Reddit’s 493M weekly visitors come to learn, weigh sides, and sense-check before anyone pitches them.
Pivot your effort from broad placement toward consideration and comparison.
AI chatbot links and Google referrals now funnel even more traffic into that quiet research moment, so the fitting room is getting crowded.
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The 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.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
- The Indonesian conglomerate that put 280 million people on wheels.
- The Californian salvage yard that quietly became a $32B marketplace.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Push Delivery to This Ad: How to use it?
Jon Loomer got his hands on Meta’s Push Delivery to This Ad test feature, poked at its edges, and reported back. Here’s what he found.
When you run multiple ads in one ad set, Meta’s algorithm tends to favor a chosen few and starve the rest. Push delivery forces a designated slice of budget toward the ad you pick.
What it needs: The campaign objective, performance goal, and ad format don’t matter.
Push delivery appears across every setup Jon tested. The only real requirement is having at least two ads in the ad set.
How it works: With two ads in place, open Ad Setup, find the push delivery toggle under Multi-Advertiser Ads, and switch it on.
Enter a budget percentage and duration, and Meta dedicates that slice to your ad before delivery returns to normal.
The limitations? There are a few worth knowing before you flip the switch.
- Push length: Tooltip says seven days, but the real range is one to 30.
- Multiple ads: Meta warns against it, yet Jon split 10% across five ads with no issues.
- No creative tests: Tests gray out during a push, and likely vice versa.
The gap between Meta’s stated rules and actual behavior is the real story here. Test the boundaries, because the tooltips clearly don’t tell the whole truth.
Push delivery borrows heavily from the creative testing tool but also differs. You can only have two ads and testing only works on new ads. Push delivery works on active ones, too.
Also, testing runs an actual A/B competition with a declared winner. Pushing simply reserves the budget for one ad.
The “active ads” advantage is the upgrade. Anyone forced to duplicate a live ad just to test it knows how annoying that limitation was.
When to push delivery: Rarely, according to Jon. Let the algorithm run untouched by default.
Two exceptions earn a push: reviving a starved ad in an underperforming ad set, or forcing budget toward time-sensitive promo ads inside an existing set.
Push delivery is a handy fix for a real problem, but lean on it out of habit, and often you’re just paying extra to micromanage. So be extra careful when working with it.
Being early is kind of your thing
Some call this newsletter the closest thing to a free MBA.
The Daily Upside keeps you there on business and money—what’s happening and why it matters, in five minutes. Produced by former investment bankers but built for normal people.
If you want trust, bring 5-star reviews
We like to pour money into influencers and fancy funnels.
But it turns out the most powerful marketing asset is still good old-fashioned social proof:
In a world of paid placements, the most valuable currency is still the opinion of a stranger.
Trust in “reviews from other users” has skyrocketed from 49% in 2020 to a projected 64% by late 2025. Funny enough, trust in companies themselves is climbing to 47%.
The flip side? Influencers sit at the very bottom at just 22%, lower than TV ads and even AI-generated search results. Users value peer verification over paid personality apparently.
So users trust ads, but there are just too many. As feeds get saturated with sponsored content, they are retreating to the one thing that feels unbuyable: verified reviews.
What you may do: Audit your post-purchase flows.
If you aren’t aggressively incentivizing and collecting user-generated content (UGC) and reviews, you are ignoring the single most trusted channel available to you.
AI MARKETING: The Deep View gives you the AI context in five minutes a day: what changed, why it matters, and what to watch next. It is built for people who need signal, not another feed to manage. Free, clear, and trusted by 700,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond. Subscribe here. *
META: Live shopping grew up fast. You can now run live video ads on Instagram and across Facebook, with in-stream product tabs, virtual cards for safer checkout, and AI that builds the best ad per viewer on the fly. The lesson is to meet shoppers where their thumbs already are.
SNAP: A full AI toolkit landed across the ads stack. There’s a Smart Assistant for setup, an MCP server for outside agents, agentic product picks, image-to-video creative tools, and a Creator Network to match you with talent. Less busywork means more time for strategy.
YOUTUBE: Time to rethink your audio buy. A March 2026 Harris Poll and EMARKETER survey found the platform reaches 51% of US digital audio listeners, the only one past the halfway mark. So if you box it in as video-only, you’re skipping the spot where people press play.
LINKEDIN: Your feed is about to get wigglier. GIFs now work right inside comments, with no MP4 conversion needed. Reaction GIFs might read as a touch “unc” to younger folks, but they liven up your replies to announcements and updates, so use them to sound human.
*This is a sponsored post.
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