👀 Weekend Wrap-Up: Grok 3, New xAI Ad Tools Looking Good

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that your innie is stoked your outie subscribes to:

Or vice versa. Works either way.

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Google Ads Geotargeting Strategies 👀

→ AI Agents in Advertising: Myth vs. Fact👀👀

→ Does Google Traffic Impact YouTube Reccs 👀👀👀

→ Grok 3 Looking Good & Other New X Ad Tools 👀👀👀👀

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I dive into my journey with parasite SEO, its successes, setbacks, and the lessons learned. After generating significant revenue, I faced challenges that highlighted the volatility of this strategy. I share my insights, coding skills gained, and key takeaways for navigating affiliate marketing. Join me as I break down my results, partnership opportunities, and practical tips for success. Come through!​

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ People have been spotting Sponsored Ads in the “People Also Consider” box within the Google Search results.

→ Google just dropped a major update to its AI-powered Responsive Search Ads framework. The ads, which aim to give you “the power of Google AI to find the best combination of headlines, descriptions, and other assets to deliver the most relevant ads to your customers while meeting your performance goals,” now allow “up to two RSA headlines to serve in the space that previously only site links were eligible for when they’re predicted to improve performance.”

→ This write-up on 9 essential geotargeting tactics for Google Ads offers actionable advice re: better Google Ads campaigns that utilize advanced targeting. Advanced geotargeting tactics covered in the article include targeting based on location intent, competitor location targeting, weather-based geotargeting, hyperlocal targeting with geofencing, and local inventory ads for physical stores. Examples of these strategies- and specific instructions on how to implement each- are also covered. Nice piece.

→ A recent comment by “YouTube Liaison” got the discourse engine running re: the question of whether Google traffic affects YouTube recommendations. TLDR; No, Google traffic does not impact YouTube recommendations because YouTube evaluates watch time by traffic source and external views don’t lower internal engagement metrics. The more you know!

→ Speaking of Google— here we are… another week, another article on The Impact Of AI Overviews On SEO. This piece synthesizes 19 original analyses of AI Overviews and provides answers re: the frequency of AIOs, what triggers them, how AIOs impact CTRs, how to rank in AIOs, and more. TLDR; the data confirms that "AIOs occupy informational, long-tail queries with low search volume and negatively impact click-through rates unless you’re part of the citations."

→ The EU is coming at Google for violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA) because its proposed changes to SERPs are not satisfying regulators and rivals. Oh man— the EU vs. Google. Do I have to pick a side?

AI Insight 🤖

→ Speaking of Larry David, been messing around w/ grok-3 and it’s pretty, pretty, pretty good.

→ Referral traffic from ChatGPT to news sites keeps increasing (eg. from 435,000 in August to 3.5 million in January), but this traffic still accounts for a pretty small amount of total visits (eg. less than 0.1% of all visits). This article dives deep into both ChatGPT and Perplexity data and analyzes its impact on major news publishers.

→ 5 Myths About AI Agents, according to SalesForce: they’re just glorified chatbots, they’re unpredictable and uncontrollable, they’re complicated and time-consuming and expensive to set up, they’re always fully autonomous, and they won’t deliver real business value. This piece takes all of these myths head-on and offers strong counter-arguments.

→ Shaan Puri on the AI K-shaped economy is worth checking out. Smart guy.

→ Here’s a free pro tip: if you’re going to steal copyrighted intellectual property to train AI models, don’t have paper trails full of staffers saying things like “ask forgiveness, not permission.” That’s from me to you, Zuck.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ On the topic of AI, X is launching some Grok-powered ad tools that are generating some real buzz. As we all know, X has been working hard to get brands back to the platform, and these ad creation tools might help. TLDR; major upgrades to AI-powered Ad Customization, Real-time Content Generation, Campaign Performance Analysis and Enhanced Creative Flexibility all come to the fore in this update. Pretty huge.

→ And, if Grok improvements don’t work to bring advertisers back, sounds like Musk & co. have a back-up plan: good ol’ fashion threats.

→ Instagram just dropped some new Partnership Ad options, including Testimonials. Testimonials are “quick, text-only written endorsements that appear on an ad and allow creators … even more opportunities to earn through brand deals.”

→ Update for any of you on the LinkedIn newsletter grind: email-related analytics are now available for LinkedIn Newsletters. Don’t get too excited though— still no access to subscriber emails.

→ Mark Zuckerberg is living proof of another sad lesson: even the swaggiest makeover in the country won’t make people like you.

​

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

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