🤖 Weekend Update: How High-Growth Founders Are Using AI

GM dorks,

Welcome back to the newsletter that’s for all 3:

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ GA4’s Hidden Feature 👀

→ How High-Growth Founders Are Using AI 🤖

→ LinkedIn is Automating Entire Campaigns— Worth It? 🤔

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In the Building in Public Day 240 video, I got to share my experience with Ser clicks and Sur Empire, two popular CTR software options. I also discussed the impact of CTR campaigns on search engine rankings and whether or not they should be run indefinitely. So, if you're interested in improving your SEO and driving more traffic to your website, Tune in.

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ If you’re looking for a deeper dive into AI Overviews, this post explains how and why content ranking poorly for a query could still make its way into AI overviews. The TLDR; “you can still capture visibility in AIOs” if you “target top rankings for easier related queries the AI Overviews might be sourcing from to get visibility.” It's a good piece for understanding how AIO selects and links to sources.

→ To nobody’s surprise, it sure looks like Google has a site-level AI-generated score. Here’s a thread with some informed theorizing re: whether Google estimates the probability that a site's content is AI.

→ Earlier this week, Search Engine Land reported a hidden feature on GA4 that’s worth knowing about. Basically, there’s a concealed report that lets you compare conversions exported to Google Ads and can help explain discrepancies between the two. If you use Google Ads and GA4 heavily, this can help you make sense of differences in conversion data..

→ The story of Retrododo is an infamous case of the HCU’s Ls: struck down a good site to the tune of 90% and never made the necessary changes for the site to recover. This blog post is kinda interesting because Google’s Search Liason invited the site owner, Brandon Saltalamacchia, to the HQ in London to talk about it and maybe even give him some (false) hope. Even though Google “didn’t and couldn’t share any actionable advice,” it could still be worth a read for the morbidly curious.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ LinkedIn has opened up its fully-automated “Accelerate” campaign option to all users. Accelerate campaigns allow LinkedIn’s AI systems to take responsibility for putting your full campaign together. LinkedIn says that Accelerate campaigns, in their limited testing, have outperformed Classic campaigns by 15% when measured by campaign creation efficiency and by 52% when measured by lowered cost per action.

Sounds impressive, until you think of how some of those “Classic” campaigns are probably created by Jimmys who don’t even sub to Marketing Letter. SMH.

→ Sorry if I bang on the same drum too much here, but you should absolutely be doing the groundwork re: Reddit marketing by now. This post may be by Neil Patel, but when he’s right he’s right.

→ After getting dunked on by many on X, paid blue checks are now getting dunked on by the EU, who say “Elon Musk's overhaul of the Twitter verification system deceives users and violates the Digital Services Act.”

AI Insight 🤖

→ I read The 2024 AI Founder Report From Hampton so you don’t have to. You can if you want though, it’s pretty good.

ICYMI, Hampton is a private community for high-growth tech founders and CEOs. Its community of founders and owners was asked how AI has impacted their business, what tools they use, the budgets they set aside for AI research and development, and other more specific inquiries, like “the most common (and obscure) tools founders are using Measurable business impacts founders have seen through using.”

Here are five highlights from the report:

1. 35% have dedicated R&D budgets for AI, and Of those with dedicated budgets, 65% budgeted more than $100k

2. 37% of founders reported AI as having an impact on their staff size

3. 89.6% of founders are using AI or are working to implement it within their business, while only 3% have no intentions of using AI

4. the business roles LEAST impacted roles are expected to be Strategy & Consulting Trades & In-Person Sales; while the MOST impacted would be Customer Service & Support Content Creation Design & Creative (pour one out... or three)

5. The top 5 AI tools being used right now are Chatbots, Grammar checkers & rewording, Image generation, Content creation, and Meeting assistants & transcription (with Chatbots leading by a huge margin)

→ Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: OpenAI is, apparently, nearing a major breakthrough w/ “reasoning” AI. FWIW, when you hear this stuff, this is what they’re referencing:

Level 1: Chatbots, AI with conversational language
Level 2: Reasoners, human-level problem solving
Level 3: Agents, systems that can take actions
Level 4: Innovators, AI that can aid in invention
Level 5: Organizations, AI that can do the work of an organization

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

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