Advertisers on Meta may be unknowingly competing against suspected scam ads that stay in auctions at higher “penalty bid” prices. Internal documents obtained by Reuters estimate that around 10% of Meta’s 2024 ad revenue, approximately $16 billion, would come from scam ads and banned goods. Although Meta disagrees with these estimates, the real impact for […]
Black Friday doesn’t sneak up on anyone, yet somehow it still catches advertisers off guard every year. Campaigns launch at the last minute, budgets aren’t ready, and tracking issues surface once performance starts to spike. If you’ve managed PPC through Q4, you know how quickly small mistakes can turn into costly ones. CPCs rise, competition […]
A year and a half ago, I wrote “The rise of forums: Why Google prefers them and how to adapt,” arguing that brands should build their own online forums and communities. Let’s look at what’s happened since. As of this writing, Reddit’s stock price has risen 177.6%. If you’d bought 100 shares of RDDT then, […]
It’s that time of year again. The John Lewis Christmas ad has dropped – a little earlier than usual – and with it, the annual debate over whether the retailer has rekindled its emotional magic or lost its festive sparkle. This year’s ad, “Where Love Lives,” created by Saatchi & Saatchi, tells the story of […]
Whether you call your SEO efforts a strategy, campaign, or channel, many SEO programs start strong but slowly drift. That could be in the form of reports getting routine, dashboards taking over for thinking, and moving into a mode of “doing SEO” versus challenging and building it. In many cases, there’s an initial audit, roadmap, […]
An SEO strategy is the foundation for improving organic visibility and driving conversions – whether that means owning Google’s front page or earning mentions in LLMs. A strong strategy aligns stakeholders, unifies teams, and sets clear expectations. Without one, SEO can feel scattered – a collection of disconnected tactics or endless optimizations thrown at the […]
Lawyers representing Automattic, the for-profit founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, sent a trademark complaint letter to WordPress developer Kevin Geary, asking him to rebrand his WordPress CSS framework, which is currently named Automatic.css, claiming that the similarity to Mullenweg’s Automattic could lead to consumer confusion. The letter caught some in the WordPress industry by […]
This post was sponsored by TAC Marketing. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. After years of trying to understand the black box that is Google search, SEO professionals have a seemingly even more opaque challenge these days – how to earn AI citations. While at first glance inclusion in AI answers […]
Microsoft has released an upgrade to Copilot, bringing what it calls “the best of AI Search” to its AI engine – Copilot. Microsoft said its Copilot responses “will now include more prominent, clickable citations and the option to see aggregated sources.” Plus, Microsoft added a new dedicated search experiment within Copilot. Prominent citations. Microsoft said […]
Grappling with innovation and changing consumer attitudes is second nature to marketers, who have already lived through many technological shifts over the past two decades. But forecasting where things are going is especially hard when it comes to modern AI, which has such unusual, non-deterministic properties. You can’t just extrapolate from the state of AI […]