Instagram moves metrics to the front, generates videos from text, and unifies your logins

Instagram has finally stopped hiding your skip rate three menus deep.

See why your Reels flop: The revamped Insights UI now surfaces skip rate, share rate, and views over time right on the main Insights page, covering both individual posts and Reels.

Skip rate and share rate are two of the most telling signals for content quality. If your skip rate is spiking, you’ll beat the algorithm in the race to spot it.

One catch: Collab posts, trial reels, and boosted content are still excluded, so this won’t tell the whole story yet.

Now put your camera down: Instagram’s Edits app now generates full video clips from a text prompt, a photo, or your existing footage.

Lower production barriers mean you’ll have more content competition and potentially more AI-generated noise to cut through.

Being a real human can be a strategy that brings competitive advantage.

One for your ops team: Meta’s Accounts Center now covers Threads, Meta Quest, and AI glasses, meaning one login handles them all.

Passkeys arrive on Instagram for faster, password-free login.

Separately, a unified Family Center dashboard now covers supervised teen accounts across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Meta Horizon.

If you’re juggling brand accounts across Meta’s platform family, one login is a small mercy.

…and if parents are in your audience, Meta wants you to know it’s a responsible adult.

YouTube’s got new ad placements, Demand Gen faces week-long delays

Like a landlord who just discovered they can charge for parking, Google and YouTube have put their hands on every spare inch of your screen.

What’s new:

• Side-by-side live stream ads that mute your stream mid-broadcast and then quietly disappear.
• Ads in the subscription feed, a tab users specifically curated to escape exactly this.

If you’re buying YouTube ads, these are worth a test. Just be mindful of your audience.

And Google “demands” patience: Demand Gen ads are stuck in review for up to 7 days across multiple accounts and industries, with no policy violations to explain the holdup.

Search and Performance Max are unaffected. Google’s Ads Liaison said the issue is on their end, but there’s no whiff of a timeline.

For campaigns built around rapid creative testing or seasonal moments, a week-long delay can quietly wreck your pacing. Something to note.

AIOs might not be the click killer you feared: Organic CTR on AIO searches hit a low of 1.3% in December 2025, then climbed to 2.4% by February 2026, an 85% jump in two months.

Here’s what the data shows:

• Cited in an AIO: ~2.1% CTR
• Not cited, AIO present: ~0.9% CTR
• No AIO at all: ~3.3% CTR

Getting featured in AIOs now drives real traffic. Comparison queries trigger AIOs roughly 95% of the time, question queries around 86%, so both are your best routes in.

The clicks aren’t gone. They’re just going somewhere more specific.

Here’s how you should change your approach to Meta Ads

The humbling truth: Experience can be a liability.

Jon Loomer, who’s been running Meta Ads for over 15 years, recently laid out exactly where he went wrong in the past. And has shared how his approach changed over the years.

1) Jon was obsessed with remarketing from 2015 to 2018. Micro-targeting, segmenting, and building out the most granular audience structures imaginable.

It worked brilliantly, partly because large organic audiences and a healthy email list made remarketing pools deep and cheap.

Then iOS 14 arrived. Audiences shrank, costs climbed, and Meta shifted toward algorithmic targeting. Jon resisted until Advantage+ Audience made it impossible to ignore.

When a strategy becomes part of your identity, admitting it’s outdated feels personal. That’s exactly when you’re most at risk of falling behind.

2) Targeting control. Interests, behaviors, lookalikes, and age brackets; Jon stacked them all. It was the accepted playbook for reaching new but relevant audiences.

Then Meta introduced Advantage+ Detailed Targeting and Advantage+ Lookalikes, forcing expansion for most common performance goals.

The instinct to control who sees your ads is understandable. But Meta’s algorithm was already finding those people anyway. Fighting it just added friction.

3) For years, Jon was convinced that sharp targeting could carry mediocre creative.

It wasn’t until the Andromeda period that he was forced to build 10, 20, even 50 ads per ad set and finally engage seriously with copy, personas, and sales psychology.

Once targeting stops being your safety net, the quality of your ads becomes impossible to ignore.

4) Complexity. Separate remarketing ad sets. Evergreen funnel campaigns split by engagement window. Multiple ad sets for every audience variant…

Once the algorithm absorbed those jobs, all that structure became pure overhead. Cutting it didn’t hurt performance; it improved it.

Good results come from good ads, not from a magical combination of settings that one wrong move can shatter. Oh, and if this helped, you can read the full thing here.

How to earn long term loyalty from your customers?

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applies to marketing, too.

You can’t build a penthouse of “exclusive perks” if the foundation of “product quality” is cracking. No, we won’t take back that allegory.

First, the baseline: To earn loyalty, reliable product quality and fair pricing are the absolute non-negotiables that executives and customers agree on.

The differentiators: Once the basics are met, personalized experiences and exclusive rewards are where brands can actually earn “lasting loyalty” rather than just a one-off sale.

There is a notable gap in seamless customer experience, where executives think they are doing better or value it more than the impact it actually has on loyalty.

You cannot “perk” your way out of a bad product. Loyalty programs are multipliers, but they aren’t fixers. If the product works and the price is right, then the rewards program kicks in.

The Crew’s suggestion: Audit your “table stakes.”

Before launching a new membership or a VIP membership, ensure your return rate and customer support ticket volume regarding product quality are low.

You can’t reward your way out of product problems. Pro delivers insights on loyalty fundamentals, perception gaps, and tactical audits to ensure you’re building on solid ground.

$349/year for your entire team (up to 10 people).