Happy Monday,
Four hours of sleep on Friday, and we woke up sharp, alert, ready to conquer.
Eight hours on Monday? We felt like a bag of wet sand.
It makes no sense. Then again, neither does the fact that our best ad ideas show up at 2am and our worst ones show up in the meeting scheduled to produce them.
Tell us you’ve been there too.
AI is rewriting your search results, your ad copy, and your shopping tab
The ten blue links are being pushed down the page like a support act nobody booked.
Ask, and you shall receive, unprompted: Google confirmed AI Overviews now expand into AI Mode by default on some queries, loading the “Ask anything” box automatically.
Organic results slide way down. Not great for publishers. Nor SEOs.
Meanwhile, in the Ads panel: Google is beta testing a Product titles report showing which AI-written titles ran instead of yours.
You get impressions, product clicks, CTR, cost, and avg. CPC. Add text guidelines in campaign settings to keep copy on-brand.
Cheap takes before expensive ones: Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash was released this weekend. It drafts video at 360p up to 60% faster, at a third of 720p’s cost.
The obvious workflow is to test three or four concepts, then upscale the best to 4K.
Shopping gets its own seat: OpenAI pinned a Shopping tab to the ChatGPT sidebar, with a dedicated landing and search page.
Product discovery is now a destination in ChatGPT.
Two more for the tab pile:
- Google’s Dreambeans personalized story feed dropped its paywall for US accounts.
- Anthropic warns infostealer malware is hijacking Claude sessions, strolling right past two-factor authentication.
That last one’s a good nudge to audit whatever else sits within your browser.
Google rewires its links, rewrites parasite SEO, and hands you two October deadlines
Google’s had the kind of week that makes your rank tracker sweat and your calendar fill up fast.
Anti-scraping era, activated: Google confirmed it’s rolling out google.com/goto passthrough URLs across search results, now near 100% coverage.
Those links can’t be decoded, so third-party tools must follow redirects. Expect turbulence in your SERP data.
Parasites, evolved: From August 30, Google is replacing EEA site reputation abuse penalties with separation.
Offending sections get split off and rank on their own merits. Four factors decide your fate:
- Presentation consistency
- Content quality
- Stated authorship
- Duplication across other sites
It’s not a to-do list: John Mueller says named updates are transparency notices.
Anything actionable lands in Google’s docs and policies first, usually well ahead of any rollout.
Mark your calendar twice: DV360’s October changes arrive unversioned. Oct. 1 removes most content label and sensitive category exclusions. Oct. 12 makes business name and logo mandatory for YouTube responsive ads.
Audit those brand-safety workflows now, not on Sept. 30.
Finally, some free wins: Google’s YouTube creative guidance comes with receipts. Human voice drives 12% higher conversions. Brand in the first five seconds, 4%. Text overlays, 3%.
A “human” way to wrap this up.
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 Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Want to optimize for customers who pay off? Try Meta’s pLTV
Not our words, but Jon Loomer’s.
According to him, most Meta campaigns optimize for the conversion but not for the customer who’s still spending 18 months later. Predicted lifetime value (pLTV) aims to fix this.
To see if that’s really the case, Loomer dug through Meta’s developer documentation.
What he found: pLTV is built around a single conversion event that predicts value. If the average free trial signup is worth $100, the trial becomes your conversion event.
Send the predicted value within seven days, and delivery skews toward the people you expect to be worth the most.
What we think: Meta is already guessing at customer value. This just means it guesses with your data instead of its own.
The entry requirements are steep. You need an existing web Conversions API integration, since app events aren’t supported yet.
Plus, you also need a validated pLTV model and at least 100 conversion events per week attributed to Meta for four straight weeks. Datasets in Core Setup are out.
Your predictions need a range. At least five distinct values, all positive, with the highest at least 3x the lowest. Passing $1, $3, $5, $7, and $10 works. Binary good-lead/bad-lead scoring does not.
Eligible events: Purchase, Subscribe, StartTrial, CompleteRegistration, AddPaymentInfo, and custom events, one per dataset.
Worth being clear: If your model can’t tell a $50 customer from a $500 one, you don’t have a pLTV model.
This one isn’t for everyone. Besides event volume, you also need the systems to establish, validate, and pass values consistently.
The best fit is higher-priced products with a lead funnel, where values can be passed based on how far a lead has progressed.
If you know what a customer is worth before they prove it, this is one of the few places Meta will listen.
#Sponsor
How to prime your customers’ minds to see your product as the obvious choice
You don’t need pressure tactics to convert customers.
Most people rely on mental shortcuts to make decisions. Like defaulting to the “most popular” option without even reading the fine print.
When you understand how people make decisions, you can position your products and offers more naturally.
… And make your messaging more relevant, sticky, and persuasive.
Psychology of Marketing shows you how to do this with one powerful insight each week, plus real-world ways to apply it.
Paid ads might buy the click, but your customers’ friends are closing the deal
Old-school word of mouth still punches way above its price tag.
Looking at WPP Media’s influence breakdown across purchase channels:
Earned trust dominates. Word-of-mouth recommendations lead with 48% influence, followed by customer reviews (36%).
Paid channels lag behind, with online ads tied with Email CRM at just 17% influence.
But legacy paid channels struggle the most. Outdoor ads (12%) and radio/podcasts (6%) sit at the bottom for active-stage influence.
What we think: Consumers trust people far more than pixels.
Paid ads create initial visibility, but final conversion decisions hinge on social proof. If your product experience isn’t naturally shareable, your ad spend is fighting an expensive uphill battle.
What you can do: Turn satisfied buyers into your primary sales force by embedding referral incentives directly into post-purchase email flows and actively collecting user reviews.
AI MARKETING: This daily newsletter condenses the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. They read the noise, pull out the signal, and explain what actually matters for work, strategy, and the tools your team is already using. Trusted by 700k+ readers. Subscribe right here.*
META: Part of last week’s $17B settlement came with new rules for teens. Night Mode blocks Feed, Stories, Explore, and Reels from midnight to 6 a.m, School Mode mutes weekday notifications, autoplay off, like counts hidden for US teens. And there’s more in the article.
TWITTER: Yes, that name again. Startup Operation Bluebird is testing a network built on the brand X retired, with early access at $20 and an AI engine, VERA, scoring posts for trustworthiness. X is already suing, of course. As we’ve mentioned before, paid social networks haven’t seen significant adoption, but we’ll keep you posted.
BEST BUY: The retailer’s ad network is on track to grow 10% this year off last year’s $900 million, pushing it toward the billion mark. Incoming CEO Jason Bonfig is openly repositioning the retailer as an advertising and technology company, so expect to see more of this.
YOUTUBE: Attest found Americans now give creator content 3 hours 54 minutes daily, beating the 3 hours 20 minutes going to live TV and streaming combined. Gen Z alone watches 2 hours 25 minutes. Worth checking the whole report to see where your audience spends more time.
*This is a sponsored post.
You have a drawer with 10 pairs of black socks and 10 pairs of white socks. How many times do you need to blindly reach inside the drawer and take out a sock, so that you get a matching pair?
You can find the answer here.
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