Today's News:

• Meta • Great Numbers; How Will 2024 Look for Marke …

• Google • Responsive Search Ads Update

• Browsers • Arc Wants to Just Bypass Google

• TikTok • Your Brands Videos Might Be Muted

• Mastodon • 40% Engagement Levels?! Yes Please!

• Google • Goodbye Cache, We Hardly Knew You

Meta • Great Numbers; How Will 2024 Look for Marketers?

A big day for Meta today, which reported some great financials — well above analyst expectations.

The good numbers shouldn’t be a huge surprise, though, given the large-scale layoffs that made the company a lot leaner.

For more on all this and what Meta’s results means for marketers in the year ahead, I spoke with our Meta Ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell. Andrew has visibility into $300 million dollars in Meta ad spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders.¹

WATCH NOW:

Summary

Meta's Q4 financial results exceeded expectations, with a 29% year-over-year growth. Factors contributing to Meta's success include increased ad spend, improved ad targeting algorithms, Reels monetization, and the contribution of Temu.

Meta's Instant Form ad unit and Reality Labs division are driving revenue growth.

Marketers and media buyers can expect more AI and automation, consolidation, interactive advertising, improved cost controls, and increased product tagging on the Meta platform.

Video Chapters

• 00:00 Meta's Q4 Financial Results

• 01:12 Contributors to Meta's Earnings

• 02:10 Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns and Reels Monetization

• 03:09 Temu’s Contribution to Ad Revenue

• 04:42 Instant Form Fill Ad Unit

• 07:08 Reality Labs and Virtual Reality

• 08:33 Changes in Marketing and Media Buying

Be sure to check out Andrew’s Foxwell Founders community of digital ad buyers and his extensive training in the digital ad space.¹

Google • Responsive Search Ads Update

Google is updating its Responsive Search Ads product.

Single Line Headlines

First, Google Ads will now sometimes display just one headline instead of the usual two. Google said it found a single headline usually performs better.

Campaign Level Headlines and Descriptions

Google is also rolling out the ability to attach up to three headlines and two descriptions to campaigns at the campaign level.

This is especially handy for advertisers looking to highlight specific promotions or sales, complete with scheduled start and end dates.

The flexibility extends to pinning these elements in preferred positions, ensuring they show up just where you want them in every responsive search ad within your campaign.

Account-Level Automated Assets

Last, Google is making changes to account-level automated assets. Dynamic assets like images, sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets can now replace or appear alongside manually created assets.

This is for Google's AI to select assets it thinks are most likely to enhance ad performance, even if it means mixing dynamic and manually created sitelinks for optimal engagement.

Browsers • Arc Wants to Just Bypass Google

A new web browser has taken a bold swipe at Google's dominance in the search engine world.

The browser is Arc, it’s been around for about a year now. Sort of a different way of browsing — it conflates bookmarks and open tabs, it has some helpful AI.. I’ve been using it as my primary browser for a while now.

This week, though, the company took a big shot at Google with its new feature called Instant Links.

This skips the traditional search results page, instead opening links and tabs related to the user's query right away. This move not only speeds up the search process but also sidesteps the advertisement revenue that typically comes with search queries.

Another feature uses AI to scan the Internet and offer suggestions tailored to the user's interests, like new dining spots or recipes, all neatly presented on a user-friendly webpage. This is similar to its new iOS app released on the weekend which will create custom webpages with bullet-point information on queries.

⬇️ An example: When you search for my name, it returns this web page — which does not actually exist on the Internet, and is instead a page created on the fly by AI.

Both these features, of course, remove Google from the loop entirely. You never see a Google page, and Google never sees the ad revenue.

Related:

TikTok • Your Brands Videos Might Be Muted

So, it happened. Music from top artists like Taylor Swift and Drake have gone silent on TikTok.

The blackout came about early yesterday when TikTok and Universal Music Group couldn't see eye to eye on a new licensing deal.

This has left many brands and TikTok creators, especially those who frequently feature music from UMG artists in their content, in a bind.

Not only can they no longer use that music in their videos, any of their previous videos that used that music — even if at a barely audible level — have been muted entirely. The whole video.

This is especially frustrating, given how much TikTok pushed music as part of its best practices with brands.

And it raises questions about the future of unofficial remixes and mashups, which are integral to TikTok's viral culture.

But all that to say if your brand had used music in your TikTok videos, it’s worth going through the videos on your channel and perhaps setting any muted videos back to draft status.

Mastodon • 40% Engagement Levels?! Yes Please!

I don’t usually talk about my own home life in this news section of the newsletter, but today, I wanted to share some data based on a social media post I made.

First — a quick explainer on the issue.

My wife and I booked a vacation package through Westjet (which one of two major airlines in Canada). The package included transportation from the airport to the hotel. My wife is paraplegic and uses a wheelchair. I called Westjet this week to just make sure they’d set up an accessible transfer, as they’d always done for our previous holiday bookings. Suffice to say, no they hadn’t, and they said no, they wouldn’t, and we were basically on our own — even though they do provide that to able-bodied customers.

(This is, of course, against the law in Canada, and wheels are in motion there.)

But this story isn’t about the issue, as much as the social media post around it.

After getting off the phone with the Westjet person, I did what many people do — I fired off an angry social media post.

• I posted it on Bluesky, where I have 87 followers

• I posted it on Threads, where I have 580 followers

• I posted it on Mastodon, where I have 865 followers

• I posted it on LinkedIn, where I have 2,400 followers

• I posted it on X where I have about 10,000 followers.

Worst performing: X. Even though I have way more followers there, it generated no retweets, no likes, and only got a comment because it came from a friend of ours. To be fair, I basically stopped posting on X more than a year ago, and now only go there when I want to get the attention of a company that’s been shitty.

The others were underwhelming too… all except for Mastodon which was ridiculously viral — 349 engagements, more than half of which were reposts.

So, when ranking engagement as measured by followers:

Of course, this is a sample size of one, causation correlation, and all that — but still, 40% engagement… I’ll take that any day.

Google • Goodbye Cache, We Hardly Knew You

Google is waving goodbye to an old friend: the cache link in its search results.

When you clicked it, you got a view of what Google’s systems saw when it crawled that web page — it was designed to help users access pages during the internet's more unreliable days.

But now a Google spokesperson said the Internet is reliable enough to not need the link.

Except the cache link wasn't just a workaround for slow-loading pages; it was a Swiss Army knife for SEO experts and journalists alike. It allowed for debugging websites, monitoring competitors, and even served as a makeshift VPN by offering a view of sites blocked in certain regions.

This change doesn't mean Google is ruling out all forms of historical webpage access. Danny Sullivan from Google hinted at a potential collaboration with the Internet Archive to fill the gap. But for now, no promises were made.

As the digital landscape evolves, so does Google's toolkit, leaving the cache feature as a relic of the past.

¹ Some links in this newsletter may provide affiliate revenue to us.