Google’s AI: Fewer clicks, better buyers?

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are leafy green:

↘️ META: $8.19 CPM | ↗️ TIKTOK: $5.10 CPM | ↗️ SNAPCHAT: $10.27 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• ⚠️ Buyer beware: Meta’s “excluded” placements still get spend 

• Roblox goes TikTok? 🎮 

• 📺 Buying Netflix ads is about to get stupid easy

But first…

💙  Taking a moment to remember

You know us: here at The Thread, we’re usually waist-deep in funnels and frequency caps. But today, we’re breaking format to ask for something simpler: take a minute on September 11 to remember the lives that were lost, and the deeper connections that brought us together afterwards.

If you’re in Boston, New York, Minneapolis, or Cleveland, look up after dusk. Buildings will glow blue as part of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum’s Tribute in Light.

Here in Boston, you’ll see blue at landmarks including City Hall, Prudential Tower, Fenway Park, the Zakim Bridge, the Hub on Causeway, Berklee Performance Center, the Museum of Science, International Place, and nearly two dozen more. 

No KPIs, no UTM codes—just a shared pause. If your building can participate, ping us; we’ll be happy to connect you with the right folks. Otherwise, step outside, look up, and take that minute.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta is rolling out Flexible Media to all advertisers by the end of October. It lets Meta serve multiple aspect ratios across placements from a single ad, so you’re not rebuilding every size. The system also flags when key elements would be cropped and won’t serve in those cases. Meta reports early lifts of ~23% more conversions and +3% CTR. Check out their playbook for more details.

• Reminder: Flexible Media should not be confused with Related Media, which recommends existing assets to use in newly created ad campaigns.

💅 This week’s Meta Pro Tips: 

• ⛔ Meta will deprecate Publisher Allow Lists and Content Allow Lists on September 30. Going forward, Meta’s guidance is to manage brand suitability with Inventory Filter and third-party content blocklists instead. 

• 🧨 As of this month, Meta has begun defaulting to Dynamic Media for Advantage+ Catalog ads. (This is for Single Image, Carousel, and Collection formats only; video is not impacted). This could change functionality for existing ad campaigns that contain Advantage+ Catalog ads.

• 🤑 Value Rules are now available to all advertisers and are gradually expanding to include conversion “location” (for example, website vs. app vs. store).

⚠️ Buyer Beware: Your excluded placements on Meta may still get 5% of spend. That’s because Meta is rolling out  a placement “enhancement” on Sales-objective campaigns that can route up to 5% of spend to each placement you’ve excluded. You’ll be opted in by default—the rollout is expected to hit general availability by September 30—so make sure to opt out via checkbox when setting your manual placements.

🔎 Google Ads is alpha testing “Sales & Promotions Feature Bundle with Flighted Budgets,” which lets advertisers speed up spend and scale during short-term promos. After setting a campaign total budget spanning between three and 90 days, you can select specific promotion dates within that window. During that period, Google will prioritize volume over strict efficiency.

📊 Google is now reporting on two new metrics within AI Max campaigns:

• AI Max expanded matches show traffic from broad-match keywords generated by AI, based on the ones you’ve added.

• AI Max expanded landing pages show traffic from search queries triggered by your landing pages or assets, outside of your keywords.

💅 Pro Tip: Google Ads is now letting Demand Gen advertisers see separate performance metrics for YouTube In-Stream, In-Feed, and Shorts.

⏰ TikTok is moving “Target Frequency for Brand Auction Reach” to open beta on September 22. TikTok’s data says average weekly frequency is one of the top two drivers of brand lift, and that 90% of ad recall and awareness is captured by 2-3 impressions per week.

🧪 Coming soon to alpha: TikTok is testing the ability for advertisers to run multiple lead conversion journeys—for instance: native instant forms and external website forms—within a single Smart+ campaign. To improve efficiency, the system automatically routes each user to the most suitable destination based on their behavior and preferences.

🔎 A new study by WARC (World Advertising Research Center) shows that TikTok users are increasingly reliant on TikTok search for product insights, with TikTok Search now rivaling traditional Google discovery for younger consumers. While this is neither new nor surprising, it makes a more compelling case for tapping into TikTok Search Ads, especially when paired with TikTok’s own performance data:

• TikTok activations that included dedicated search campaigns drove 2x higher purchase lift compared to initiatives without.

• For enterprise advertisers, the impact of TikTok search campaigns grew even larger, achieving a 2.2x purchase lift versus initiatives without search campaigns.

• For enterprise retail specifically, dedicated search campaigns delivered a 1.9x purchase lift versus campaigns without, and notably higher incremental ROAS compared to non-search counterparts.

👀 Want a sneak peak at the upgraded version of Smart+? (It’s rolling out…slowly.) One-page description of the new experience here.

⛔ As of September 1, TikTok began tightening how Commercial Content Disclosures are enforced in the U.S. Here’s what you need to know: 

• TikTok flags videos as commercial content when they show clear marketing intent based on one of three factors: financial incentives, brand mentions, and product recommendations. 

• Creator accounts that post videos detected to contain commercial content without proper disclosure will receive an in-app notification within 2-3 hours of posting and then they have 24 hours to properly disclose or appeal. 

• If they don’t, the content could be ineligible for the For You feed and experience limited organic distribution.

👯 We’ve mentioned this in the past, but TikTok has now made widely available a new feature that allows you to duplicate multiple ads or ad groups at once, from the campaign list or during campaign creation flow. You can now bulk delete draft or published campaigns, ad groups, and ads during campaign setup.

👽 Reddit: As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, Reddit will be beta testing Reddit Max starting this month. This fully automated ad format will be fueled by AI, so all aspects beyond targeting will also become automated—including creative, budget allocation, and bidding. We’re hearing it’ll be in closed beta through the end of the year (subject to flight, budget, and creative minimums), with an open beta available in January.

🎮 Roblox is adding Roblox Moments, a TikTok-style short-form video feed, alongside new AI creation tools and an earnings boost for creators, all announced at its developer conference last week.

📺 CTV: We buried the lede. Starting in Q4, Netflix will make its ad inventory available to buy through Amazon DSP in 12 markets including the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. Ladies and germs: start your engines. 

🧠 Get smarter: What do AI Overviews mean for Google Search?

Advertisers are beginning to worry—understandably—about the impact of AI overviews on search performance. 

🤖 What’s Google saying? According to one rep we spoke to: “Google’s AI advancements, including AI Overviews, are designed to enhance the user experience by providing more direct and helpful information. While this may shift how users engage with search results and could impact CTR, our data shows that these changes often lead to more qualified clicks from users who are ready to take action. The new formats also create unique ad opportunities to connect with customers at key moments.”

💡 What’s the industry saying? Frankly, similar things. In a recent interview, one industry exec outlined a few points that track with what we’re hearing from other brands and publishers: 

• Tracking with Google, publishers and brands are seeing less traffic, but the traffic that arrives is more highly qualified: “You’re getting users further along in the journey, people more likely to engage or convert.”

• The rise of AI overviews and AI mode are leading to “zero click” search, which is putting an extra step ahead of SEM. “Historically it was query > ad. Now it’s query > organic engagement > ad. That’s a big shift.”

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

In the meantime, stay up to date with the latest performance marketing intelligence by following us on Linkedin, Instagram, and X.