Is AI catching up with Google’s ads?

Today’s social media advertising rates are… actually, that’s not the truth, Ellen.

↗️ META: $10.61 | ↘️ TIKTOK: $1.88 | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $14.92

In this week’s edition:

• 📺 Instagram wants your next 90 minutes

• Check your PMax settings: Google may be choosing your videos 🔎

• ⚾ What MLB’s postseason taught us about creator marketing

But first…

📉 More searches, slower revenue growth: a warning for Google?

Google’s parent company Alphabet had its worst day ever yesterday, shedding half a trillion dollars in market value. The culprit? A shortfall in search-ad revenue growth.

Did ad revenue decline? No. It was up 12% year over year. But it was expected to grow 17%. And that was enough to prompt a huge sell-off.

Google claimed it saw the largest year-over-year increase in search queries in five years. But as search queries spiked, search revenue growth slowed.

Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, told the Wall Street Journal that growth in AI Mode queries “was having an impact because they were monetized at a lower rate than in traditional search.”

Translation: Google’s embrace of AI is finally starting to catch up with its pocketbook. More searches with more zero-click results still means less revenue per search. And that math is unlikely to change anytime soon.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta is going even bigger on video with the blockbuster announcement this week that Instagram is testing long-form horizontal videos called Features.

The big question: As Instagram seeks to position itself as the place where you watch both a 90-second video and a 90-minute video, will it work? And will it be able to make the jump to your TV?

🛜 Instagram also announced updates to connect those viewing experiences:

• Linked Reels: Select creators can post Reels to their feed that include links to the entire Feature. These clips act as awareness drivers for long-form videos posted in the app.

• Instagram is updating its TV app to prioritize Features, helping creators reach long-form audiences across Samsung, Fire TV, and Google TV. Apple TV is coming soon.

🛬 Meta’s Maximize Number of Landing Page Views performance goal will now both optimize for and report on app landing page views. Previously, landing page views only supported the website conversion location.

• During alpha testing, landing page views optimization drove a 28% lower cost per web/app landing page view compared to link click optimization.

• A landing page view is when a person clicks on your ad link and then successfully loads at least some of your ad’s destination URL. A link click is when a person clicks on your ad.

• You do not need a specific SDK or pixel setup for tracking. Meta receives signals from the phone’s OS indicating whether the app was opened.

• Meta recommends first running this as an A/B test against your current approach and evaluating performance using cost per landing page view as the KPI.

• Landing page views are supported by the traffic, engagement, leads, and sales objectives.

• Note: This does not work with Browser of Choice.

🔁 Remember our warning last week about Meta’s commercial terms? The platform has delayed the release following pushback from regulators, prompted by publishers, in the E.U. and U.K.

• These stakeholders were particularly concerned about the clause pertaining to Meta’s right to scrape and create credentials for any website relevant to the advertiser or product.

• The new date is November 20, 2026; conveniently right before Black Friday. Thanks, Meta!

🎯 Meta has added a new option to its Marketing API that allows third-party platforms to set specific age range and gender targeting details for individual creative elements within a campaign. By adding targeting information directly to the creative, rather than at the ad set level, advertisers can help Meta’s system ensure that the most relevant visuals are displayed to the right audiences.

🪇 Meta’s Entertainment Advertiser Playbook features updated creative diversity examples along with recommended creative. An email address is required to view it.

🔔 Meta released a new best practices guide for the holiday season, encouraging advertisers to give campaigns enough time and data to optimize before making adjustments. The guide emphasizes setting clear campaign goals, allowing sufficient learning time, and avoiding frequent changes based on short-term performance fluctuations.

• According to Meta, 42% of shoppers planned to spend less during last year’s holiday shopping season but actually spent 4.2% more year over year, highlighting the importance of optimizing campaigns to capture unexpected demand.

• Meta recommends aiming for roughly 50 conversions per ad set per week to give its system enough data to optimize effectively. According to Meta, ad sets below this threshold had approximately 28% higher costs per purchase.

• Advertisers should clearly define campaign objectives, budgets, bid strategies, and attribution settings from the start to help Meta’s system optimize toward the intended outcomes.

• Meta also recommends using A/B testing and Conversion Lift studies to better evaluate performance rather than making frequent adjustments based on early results.

🧠 When Meta displays an in-app AI summary about a brand, it’s pulling from that brand’s page information—name, bio, contact info, etc.—its recent public posts, and the rest of the internet outside of Meta. Brands cannot edit this summary directly, pay to change it, or use ads to influence it.

Instead, Meta recommends making sure the page’s profile information reflects what you want displayed in AI summaries, making sure recent posts reflect current priorities, and implementing other standard SEO best practices.

⚖️ And in regional news, Meta is being brought back to court by Rhode Island. The state is the first to sue the company over allegations that it failed to crack down on false advertising, including fraudulent product and financial scams. The lawsuit claims that Meta made $16 billion from advertising restricted goods or fraudulent advertisements. Meta contests these claims.

🔎 Google is rolling out two new asset optimization features in Performance Max: Landing page images and Sourced videos. These will allow Google to automatically pull creative from your website, linked YouTube channels, and social media.

While these tools aim to reduce manual upload time, early reports indicate that Sourced videos may be enabled by default. To disable these features, go into your PMax settings and switch the optimization toggles off.

🚀 Google Ads is rolling out expanded customer acquisition and retention controls across Performance Max, Shopping, and Search campaigns.

The updates introduce a New Customer High Value Mode for Shopping, new percentage-based bidding multipliers that scale with order value, and three new retention goals—Re-engagement, Loyalty, and Retention Only—to help advertisers more strategically segment and re-engage their existing customer base.

💬 Google has added documentation around a new feature spotted by eagle-eyed media buyers earlier this year: Review Summaries. As described by Google, Google AI automatically aggregates online reviews from across the web to generate review summaries.

• These summaries are positive only, and represent customer experiences and key insights about your business.

• On Search ads, review summaries appear as short AI-generated commentary.

⏰ TikTok released a new High-Impact Ad Formats Playbook. TikTok reports that its Pulse and TopView formats outpace standard brand auctions, driving 4x and 3x higher revenue per impression, respectively.

🚨 Buyer Beware: With the TikTok Smart+ unified workflow rollout, catalog signals may be incorporated into the ad creation experience by default, even when the Catalog Sales Campaign toggle is disabled.

📦 Amazon DSP—now called Amazon Ads Agent—has added Pinterest inventory within CVA+, opening access to the platform with the ability to layer on Amazon first-party audiences. It is available across the Americas.

🍿 Attribution reporting for Netflix supply will be available in the DSP beginning November 1.

• Five conversion metrics will be available: Purchases, Sales, Sales (converted), Detail page views, and Conversions (off-Amazon).

• Conversion metrics that will not be available: Units Sold, promoted vs. Brand Halo split, ROAS, and calculated metrics such as Cost per Purchase.

• Existing line items should begin reporting from November 1 onward and will not need to be rebuilt.

🔊 Alexa is expanding Asset Based Creative with a new video ad experience: a full-screen autoplay video ad on Alexa Home Screen (AHS). With this offering, Amazon DSP advertisers’ 15-second video ads will appear as full-screen, muted videos that autoplay on Alexa+ Echo Show devices. Customers can tap or ask Alexa to play the full video with sound, then click through to the advertiser’s desired landing page.

🌎 Universal Ads no longer allows Peacock/NBCU-only content to be booked via Content Select as of October 22. Campaigns booked before that date are unaffected.

💌 Substack has released dynamic ad insertion for podcasts. Podcast hosts will have the option to serve ads at the time of podcast download or stream, update back-catalog episodes without having to re-edit files, and run host-read pre-, mid-, and post-roll slots.

Creators can bring their own sponsor deals or use programmatic and DSPs to fill slots.

⚾ Creator Marketing

MLB expanded its postseason influencer marketing, bringing more than 200 vetted creators to games, with an estimated 100 million organic views projected. With the Brewers’ World Series win Wednesday night bringing the postseason to a close, that view figure remains a projection rather than a final tally.

To avoid the viral etiquette disasters seen at this year’s US Open—where unbriefed influencers interrupted play with ring lights and flash photography—the league prioritized upfront vetting and behavioral guardrails.

The contrasting events show that while creators are essential for bringing new demographics to legacy sports, successful brand activations require explicit briefing and active on-the-ground management to ensure the game itself remains the main attraction.

Bonus read: How the Chicago Cubs got into the TikTok romance series game without alienating core baseball fans.

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.

This week’s edition of the Thread was created by Jess Dashner, Anoushka Madan, Kayleigh McDonald, Kiara Quigley, Lara Spijkerman, Liana Giacobbe, Mariya Samardzhieva, and Carly Carioli.