👀 A Look at Meta’s New Ad Customization Tools

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that reminds you to see the big picture, especially if your site was impacted by the HCU:

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ YouTube Keeps Growing (Somehow) 📈

→ Windows’ “Controversial” Search Feature 🚨

→ A Look at Meta’s New Ad Customization Tools👀

→ Core Update is Too Little, Too Late For Small Publishers 😵

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I share some new projects I have been working on lately, primarily focusing on directories to support local businesses. My goal is to create platforms that help businesses, like real estate agents, improve their online visibility. This involves ranking for important keywords, such as local realtor reviews and comparisons. So far, I’ve partnered with a few people, and together, we've built multiple directories. Tune in for more details.

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ One small publisher saw their Search traffic Quadruple in the 4 days following the update, trending to keep doubling every day. The problem? The company had already declared bankruptcy based on 11 months of having its Search traffic decimated by the HCU.

→ Some recoveries do seem to be in motion though, as 107 sites have experienced traffic increases of at least 100%.

→ New core update biggest winners include small publishers like: Reddit, Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube.

→ Don’t blame you at all if you totally tune out Google’s talking heads by now, but official word from the company is that automated SEO audits get a few things wrong, including: “The text to code ratio, for instance, is not a thing. Google search doesn’t care about it.”

→ There was a Search ranking bug for an embarrassing amount of time and then Google fixed it. Full saga here.

→ Google launched a new crawler, “Google-CloudVertexBot.” So did Meta, BTW— the “Meta External Agent.”

AI Insight 🤖

→ Windows will be releasing a “controversial” search feature called Recall AI to testers this fall While it will be turned off by default, Recall “takes screenshots of activity on screen so people can search for information they saw earlier.”

→ A lot of the AI strategy I share in this newsletter has become about very specific tactics. If you aren’t that far into your AI integration journey yet, though, here’s a good piece that offers some broader, more picture advice on how to transform the customer experience w/ AI. Advice includes: "Elevate marketing strategy and planning," "Hyper-personalize customer experiences," "Accelerate content creation," "Connect and orchestrate customer journeys," and "Scale asset variations for rigorous market testing." Sound good? Then get on it.

→ A generative AI company (Anthropic, this time) is getting sued for copyright infringement re: training data again.

→ On the other hand, after 16 weeks on the market, Anthropic’s Claude just hit its first $1M in mobile app revenue. While not even close to ChatGPT at this point, Claude still hit the mark faster than Copilot or Perplexity.

→ OpenAI has struck a deal with Condé Nast, meaning The New Yorker, Vogue, Wired, Pitchfork, and more are on the table for ChatGPT and SearchGPT.

→ If you’re an OpenAI fan-boy waiting around for Sora, have you considered trying one of the other AI video generators? This piece takes a look at the 7 major players on the market at the moment, Canva’s Magic Studio, InVideo AI, Kapwing, Lumen5, Pictory, Runway ML, and Synthesia. At the end of the day, the takeaway with AI-video is that it's efficient, fast, easy and versatile— but it also still requires a lot of human oversight on everything from pronunciation to cultural relevance to ensuring originality and creativity.

Social Media Round-up📲

→ Somehow, YouTube keeps growing, becoming the first streaming platform to ever reach 10% of TV viewing in the USA.

→ The YouTube Shopping affiliate program is getting a boost re: deeper Shopify integration. Shopify merchants can now “join the ranks of hundreds of U.S. brands using the YouTube Shopping affiliate program to enable thousands of eligible creators to showcase your products at scale in their videos,” and YouTube creators will have “access to up to thousands of new brands to tag in your shopping content across YouTube.”

→ ICYMI: Meta’s new ad customization tools include a new “Conversion Value Rules" tool, an Incremental Attribution Model, Enhanced Analytics Integration with external analytics platforms and Google Analytics, and Cross-Publisher Journey Optimization. For more on all of this, and commentary on why marketers are particularly interested in the Google Analytics integration, click through.

→ If you’re looking to step up your LinkedIn-posting game, here are 5 common mistakes to avoid as written from the POV of a woman with over 200K followers on there. TLDR; 1. No Personality 2. Viral Templates 3. No Credibility 4. Weak Profile 5. Unprofessional Photo…

Sounds very… LinkedIn… but you do you.

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

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