Are You Sitting Out on Instagram's Best Marketing Feature?

In Today’s Issue:

📸 Instagram now lets you share stories to multiple group lists simultaneously

🎙 Amazon DSP introduces Amazon Audiences for podcast ads in the UK

🌐 Google rolls out its a broad core update and a spam update

🔒 GA4 releases features enhancing data security and report precision

🔍 Google Search had issues indexing new content; appears to be fixed

🔑 Google Ads discontinues Keyword Planner's individual & ad group forecasts

📱 Google Business Profiles lets users edit their brand’s social profiles

📰 X will bring headlines back to links. But only if you buy them as ads.

Everything About Meta’s New Generative-AI Ad Tools [✨ Premium Exclusive]

Meta this week announced three new generative AI tools will be coming to their ads manager. This week, Andrew and I discussed:

• Exactly what these three tools are

• Will marketers be able to opt-out?

• What kind of reporting will there be on the various iterations?

• What does the new budget-pacing feature do?

• And much more.

Andrew Foxwell is our Meta ads correspondent. He joins us every Friday, exclusively in the Premium Newsletter and Premium Podcast.

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

Instagram’s “Least Used by Marketers” Feature Gets an Upgrade

One of the broader trends in social media is a shift away from public posting on the large platforms, and a move to smaller groups — whether it’s a close friends circle, or a Discord channel, or a group DM.

Instagram has been trying to keep ahead of this, and today announced another move in that direction with a way to let you share a Story with multiple group lists at the same time.

Group lists are basically additional custom lists, like Instagram’s Close Friends list, which has been around for five years now.

This means you’d be able to share content with a specific set of people, and not have that post land on your main public feed.

How Marketers Are (Not) Using Group DMs

Marketers, as a whole, haven’t really used group DMs or similar small-group sharing tools, which may be a missed opportunity.

You could create a group for

• Confirmed customers only

• Or maybe VIP customers who’ve spent more than $X

• Or create a contest where the prize is you get added to a custom list that gets exclusive content.

Likely part of the reason marketers have been shy about using the platforms like this is that the various APIs don’t usually support that level of posting detail. Sure, you can post a Story or a Reel through an API, but the only distribution option is the main feed, not any lists.

There’s nothing to say the platforms couldn’t add this to their APIs, meaning third-party tools could get access to this functionality, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest this is even something they’re considering.

You can add up to 250 people to an Instagram group. That ability to share Stories to multiple groups at once is being rolled out starting today.

Better Targeting for Amazon Podcast Ads

Podcast ads on Amazon DSP will now offer Amazon Audiences to self-service advertisers. This gives advertisers the ability to reach audiences based on demographics (age range and gender) across all of the company’s podcast supply.

And if you’re thinking — wait, Amazon has podcasts? They do. They have several that are their own private label, but they also own the Wondery network, and have access to third-party publishers through their Amazon Publisher Direct.

For now this is only in the U.K. but for those media buyers, you’ll now have access to the targeting by:

• Demographics (age range and gender)

• Geography

• Genre (like true crime, news, history, or sports)

Google is Updating Its Search Algorithm

Another Google core update is rolling out starting today. These are roughly quarterly now, and tweak the search engine to provide better results.

This year, we had one in March, and another in August.

Google used to tell us all specifically what was changing, but now they just point to a generic help page.

This is their explanation on how these work:

The only advice Google offers if your site’s ranking drops is, as gamers would say, “get good.” They suggest making sure your content is genuinely helpful, trustworthy, and original.

At the same time as this core update is rolling out, they’re also doing a separate spam update to clean up spam in languages like Turkish, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. This will take about three weeks to fully roll out.

Four Google Stories

Besides the search updates, there are also four tiny updates about Google.

1. Google Analytics 4 Enhancements: Google Analytics 4 now lets marketers redact specific client-side text, such as email addresses, to minimize the inadvertent transmission of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). You can also now exclude certain demographic and interest data from your reports, especially data from signed-in users.

2. Google's Indexing and Serving Issues: Google acknowledged last night that there was a delay in indexing newly published content. Google said it was an indexing problem; Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable.com thought it was a serving issue. Either way, that appears to have been fixed now.

3. Changes to Google Keyword Planner: Google Ads has stopped maintaining the Keyword Planner's individual and ad group keyword forecasting data. A Google rep said only a few advertisers used those specific forecasts. However, campaign-level forecasts and historical keyword-level data remain accessible to users.

4. Editing Social Profiles in Google Business Profiles: Google Business Profiles now lets businesses edit their social media profiles directly. If you manage your brand on GBP, you can add, edit, or remove links to your social media profiles, and those updates reflect pretty quickly in search results.

Twitter Ads Do Still Have Headlines (For Now)

And finally, an update on our story yesterday about X removing headlines from link posts. Basically, links now just look like an image post — there’s no full URL, no headline, no description text.

Elon Musk said he did it because he thinks it looks better. I think it’s fair to say the overwhelming opinion is that it’s a horrible idea.

We wondered if this change would affect links on ads as well. We reached out to X for clarification, but the company almost never responds to media inquiries.

As of this morning, though, ads on Twitter do still have headlines.

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