- Links to primary social media channels
- Highlighted social media content
- Upcoming or current sales and promotions
- Brand images and videos
- Brand voice and values
- It gets monetized as an ad product
- Recruit more sellers via website referral tracking
The China tariffs are changing the ecommerce landscape in the US as the major players grapple with increased costs.
Temu and Shein have already cut average daily spending on social media platforms by 31% and 19% in the past 30 days
Temu backed out of Google Shopping entirely.
Auction pressure is going to be a lot different for advertisers.
Recent related tariff posts: analysis trap | ad spend impact
via The Daily Upside
It’s not the magnitude, it’s the trend.
For the first time since 2015, Google’s global share of the search market fell below the 90% threshold
The search giant’s global market share has dropped below 90% in six of the previous seven months
The splintering continues.
via ADWEEK
Google will start using “Landing Page Screenshots for Video Ads for Demand Gen Campaigns” “to improve your YouTube ad performance,” according to emails they’ve been sending to account holders.
I understand all those words, but don’t quite know what this will look like. Couldn’t find any examples.
Google Merchant Center now uses your marketing email content “in places across Google such as Search, Shopping, and Maps.”
From the docs:
What information does Google extract?
Google crawls through the marketing content to gather relevant data, including, but not limited to:
Not great if you like VIP offers for subscribers.
Opt-in by default. Big G may auto-subscribe or may need to be added to your list manually.
According to Semafor:
[YouTube] is currently developing a feature that would allow host-read ads to be dynamically inserted and swapped out within individual YouTube videos
Should make it more appealing for podcasters.
But what’s the long term plan? How does Google monetize these ads? Does YouTube want to become a legit podcast hosting platform? Will it build a host read marketplace?
And how does this impact current efforts to place podcast ads via Ads Manager?
Zig to your competitors’ zag and have much success.
contrarian investment funds far outperform their herd-fund rivals in several performance measurements, and that their managers have found ways to gather information that other managers haven’t figured out.
The study was specific to investment funds, but the thinking holds.
Do the same thing as everyone else and get worse results..
Herd behavior benefits the first movers.
YouTube is making changes to avoid the most annoying ad placement occurrence on the platform, a midroll ad cutting off a sentence.
Starting May 12, 2025, We’re improving the quality of mid-roll ads on YouTube. That means we’ll show more mid-roll ads at natural break points, like pauses and transitions, and fewer ads where they may feel interruptive or cause viewers to abandon the video, like in the middle of a sentence or action sequence.
Another example of AI (I’m assuming) turbocharging contextual features.
Amazon is running a beta called shop brand sites directly, which surfaces results for brands not sold on the platform, directing shoppers to the brand’s site to purchase.
Likely 1 of 2 plays here (maybe both):
Some interesting findings from a study comparing Google Search to chatbot traffic (caveat: chatbot volume is much smaller)
AI chatbot referrals stay more than a minute longer than Google traffic.
And visit more pages
The data indicates that homepages are more important in the “AI future” and that AI chatbots qualify users better before sending them out.
and
AI seems to go counter to the age-old study of “every second a page loads faster, it converts more people.”
Instead, it pre-qualifies users before they visit a site, which leads to those users being happy to spend more time.