Meta ad prices jump 14% as its AI agent Muse passes 10M users

Remember The Social Network? A billion dollars was the cool number.

Meta just booked $64.6B in one quarter.

Inflation, Meta edition: Meta’s Q3 results show ad prices outpacing ad volume, year over year:

• Revenue: $64.6B, up 26%
• Average price per ad: up 14%
• Ad impressions: up 10%
• Daily active people: 3.64B, up 3%

Meta expects $73B to $76B in Q4 revenue. We’d budget for pricier holiday auctions.

…and bots may also think about budgets: Muse, Meta’s AI agent app, browses stores and buys things once users approve.

Meta told investors Muse passed 10M users, with shopping being its top use. Over a quarter of engaged shoppers average $200+ per order. Whoa.

Age-appropriate creative, literally: Meta’s Marketing API now lets ad tools tag each creative with the age range and gender it suits best.

One ad set can aim a retirement-planning video at ages 50 to 65 and a savings video at all ages.

The glow-up you didn’t order: Buyers told Adweek Meta’s AI edits their ads without asking, adding sitelinks and AI images.

A reminder that from Oct 30, Meta’s updated terms make you “solely responsible” for whatever its AI features create or change, even ones Meta switches on.

Audit the Advantage+ settings behind these edits, collapsed menus included.

Less cool: A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25B after a jury found Facebook misled users about control over their data. Meta says it will appeal.

Separately, Q3 costs include a $9.89B charge for Meta’s teen mental health settlement with 52 attorneys general.

Still, $64.6B a quarter buys plenty of lawyers right?

Lifecycle bidding expands while PMax grabs your images and videos by default

Advertisers have asked Google for more PMax control for years and the monkey’s paw curled.

You get sharper control over who you bid on, and PMax helps itself to your images and videos.

Not every customer deserves the same bid. Customer lifecycle goals, which tell Google Ads to bid differently for new and existing customers, expand this month:

• Shopping gets New Customer High Value Mode, which bids up for new customers likely to spend more.
• PMax, Search and Shopping get three retention modes: Re-engagement for lapsed buyers, Loyalty for program members, and Retention Only for segments you name.
• Bid boosts in Search, Shopping, PMax and Demand Gen can now be percentages, so a 20% boost scales with cart size.

The catch: your customer data has to tell these groups apart.

Finders, keepers. Two features that pull your images and videos into PMax ads are switching to opt-out.

Sourced videos take clips from approved sources like your socials, site or YouTube channel. They’re on by default for new campaigns, and possibly some existing ones.

Landing page images use pictures from your landing pages. From December 4, they’re on for every new PMax campaign, even if you switched dynamic images off account-wide.

We’d check Asset optimization in every PMax campaign and confirm you own the rights to what Google can grab.

Next time, wish for fewer defaults.

Google AI Mode’s follow-up questions can be your free content gap audit

“Call us. We fight for you. Contingency means you pay nothing unless we win.”

Strong pitch.

Shame over a dozen other Michigan law firms use it almost word for word.

Claudia Tomina’s client had one of those pages, so she asked Google AI Mode what all of them were missing and wrote it up. Here are the takeaways.

AI Mode asks the questions that your page doesn’t: Claudia typed a real buyer query into AI Mode, “Do I need a lawyer after a car accident in Michigan?”, and clicked through its follow-ups.

None of them were about calling an attorney.

They dug into Michigan’s pain-and-suffering threshold, how comparative fault cuts a settlement and when vehicle damage goes to small claims court.

Every follow-up AI Mode keeps returning to needs an answer on the page.

UNKNOWN is a perfectly good answer: Her 10-phase prompt then tags every finding as OBSERVED, VERIFIED, CLIENT-SUPPLIED, INFERRED or UNKNOWN.

The labels keep the AI from passing off a plausible guess as fact.

Settlement ranges and years of experience came back UNKNOWN, each with a question for the attorney.

Your client already gave the interview: The attorney had answered most of those questions on podcasts, so Claudia fed 13 hours of YouTube transcripts into Claude.

They filled almost every gap, from the fee structure to real verdicts and settlements. Timestamps let the page link each claim to a 30-second clip.

No podcast? Record a one-hour call with the client instead.

The Crew’s tip: Podcast answers age. Get the expert to sign off on every fee and figure before the page goes live.

Each AI model cites something different: In Yext’s study of 17.2 million AI citations, Gemini favored official websites. Claude cited reviews and social content two to four times as often as other models.

Perplexity pulled from business-owned sites roughly 37% to 50% of the time.

A page that sounds like every competitor gives them nothing to pull out.

Before your next service page, run the buyer’s question through AI Mode.

Whatever your page can’t answer yet goes in the brief. Whatever every competitor already says can probably go.

Half of America still hasn’t tried an AI chatbot

AI feels like it’s everywhere. If you’re in a marketing “coterie”.

But Pew Research Center asked US adults if they’ve ever used a chatbot like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, and the country splits almost exactly in half.

The biggest drop comes at age 50.

Usage falls 19 points from the 30 to 49 group to the 50 to 64 group. Young adults are nearly 3x as likely as seniors to use a chatbot.

Younger adults run into AI at school and at work, so using it becomes a habit. Older adults have fewer reasons to try it, and for them the search bar still gets the job done.

Our take: Check your audience’s age before you move budget to AI search. If most of your buyers are over 50, most of them don’t use chatbots, so keep investing in the classics. For now.

Still, stay on alert.

It's only a matter of time before your dad starts feeding his blood test results to Gemini.