Author Archives: SocialSignalCounter

How AI Overviews are impacting ad position and the fight for top spot

How AI Overviews are impacting ad position and the fight for top spot

Google’s AI Overviews have reshaped search almost overnight. For paid search marketers, the fight for above-the-fold visibility is no longer just about ad rank – it’s now a push to appear above the AI result itself. This shift follows the rapid surge in AI Overviews that Adthena highlighted in our previous study. That analysis showed […]

How to plan and manage paid media budgets in an AI-driven world

How to plan and manage paid media budgets in an AI-driven world

Managing budgets across multiple paid media channels is one of the most important skills in a PPC marketer’s toolkit.  You’re constantly deciding how to allocate spend across channels and campaigns, how to handle big budget swings, and whether to set total or daily budgets. In an AI-driven ad platform world, campaign budgets remain one of […]

Native Reels ads can lift purchase intent 5.3x

Native Reels ads can lift purchase intent 5.3x

Reels continue to surge as a go-to format for entertainment, education, and discovery. But Meta’s message to advertisers is clear: success requires native creative — not repurposed assets. Think 9:16 framing, platform-first audio, and rapid storytelling built for swipes, not scrolls. Brand advertiser takeaways (per Meta’s data): Show your brand early: Branding and messaging in […]

Google AI Mode sends traffic on 69% of transactional queries: New data

Google AI Mode sends traffic on 69% of transactional queries: New data

The narrative in SEO right now is simple: Google’s AI Mode doesn’t send traffic. If it becomes the default Google Search experience, your website will starve for clicks. There’s one problem, though: the studies claiming “AI doesn’t send traffic” focus almost entirely on informational queries. Yes, if someone wants to know what a basal cell […]

Google home page search bar upload feature goes directly to AI Mode results

Google home page search bar upload feature goes directly to AI Mode results

Google has changed its search bar on the Google home page by adding the ability to upload a file or an image, and then the user experience takes you directly to AI Mode. This is different from uploading an image and Google taking you to Google Search with image results and Google Lens features. Instead, […]

7 SEO, Marketing, And Tech Predictions For 2026

7 SEO, Marketing, And Tech Predictions For 2026

Previous predictions: 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 This is my 8th time publishing annual predictions. As always, the goal is not to be right but to practice thinking. For example, in 2018, I predicted “Niche communities will be discovered as a great channel for growth” and “Email marketing will return” in 2019. It took another 6 years. That same year, […]

Anatomy of an overambitious system shaping the future of search

Anatomy of an overambitious system shaping the future of search

Google’s Daily Hub is more complex than it first appears.  It’s part of the broader acceleration toward hyperpersonalization we’ve been seeing in recent months – Preferred Sources, Profile Pages with followable elements in Discover, Brand Profiles in Merchant Center – all converging toward a single goal: anticipating your needs before you even formulate a query.  […]

Quantifying Lost Organic Market Share

Quantifying Lost Organic Market Share

Every month, companies lose millions in unrealized search value not because their teams stopped optimizing, but because they stopped seeing where visibility converts into economic return. When search performance drops, most teams chase rankings. The real leaders chase equity. This is the Search Equity Gap – the measurable delta between the organic market share your […]

How To Maximize Paid Ads Profitability With A Strategic Landing Page Audit

How To Maximize Paid Ads Profitability With A Strategic Landing Page Audit

Your campaigns are only as strong as the pages they lead to. You can have the most targeted ads, the sharpest copy, and a budget that makes your CFO nervous. But if your landing page doesn’t deliver on what the ad promised, you’re leaving money on the table and feeding poor signals back into your […]