The Daily Carnage

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TikTangled

TikTok US is off to a bumpy start.

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How Apple and Google Updates Shifted Email & SMS

JANUARY 28, 2026

Apple and Google’s 2025 platform updates have quietly rewired how email and SMS perform.

Now, inbox interfaces are more automated and filtered and less forgiving, which means we have to rethink visibility, measurement, and trust across owned channels.

What this means for email and SMS in 2026:

Inbox placement matters more. Apple Mail’s updated categorization and Gmail’s subscription management tools reduce passive visibility. Emails are increasingly grouped, summarized, or hidden behind extra taps, making “send and hope” a losing strategy.
Opens are even less reliable. AI-generated previews, collapsed messages, and background loading are further eroding open rate usefulness. Clicks, conversions, and downstream behavior now carry more weight.
Send frequency is under scrutiny. Gmail’s “Manage subscriptions” view makes it easy for users to spot and unsubscribe from brands that over-send. High-volume, low-value programs are most at risk.
Content has to earn the tap. Subject lines and preheaders no longer fully control first impressions. Clear value, relevance, and scannable copy matter more than cleverness.
SMS is no longer inbox-guaranteed. Apple’s expanded filtering for unknown senders can route brand texts away from the main message feed, especially for promotional traffic.
Trust signals are critical for SMS. Saved contacts, conversational messaging, consistent sender IDs, and transactional value help messages bypass filtering.
Cross-channel orchestration wins. Email and SMS need to work together. Use SMS for urgency and confirmation, email for depth and storytelling.
List quality beats list size. Engagement-based segmentation, suppression of inactive users, and preference centers are now defensive tactics, not “nice-to-haves.”

Whew, that’s a lot. Take a closer look at MarTech.

How to Track Email Traffic in GA4

JANUARY 28, 2026

IYKYK: Email service provider metrics have their place (like opens and clicks), but they don’t tell the full story of post-click engagement and conversion.

GA4 lets you see how email-driven sessions behave on your site in the same analytics property where you track other channels.

Here’s how to track email traffic in GA4:

Add UTM parameters to links. Tag all email URLs with campaign source, medium, and name so GA4 properly attributes visits to your email sends.
Use GA4 Reports & Explorations. In Acquisition reports or a custom Explore, filter by email traffic to see sessions, engagement, and conversions tied to your campaigns.
Track vital metrics beyond opens. Look at sessions from email, engagement rate, conversions, time on site, and pages per session to judge real audience interest.
Compare traffic by campaign and landing page. Break down performance to see which emails and pages drive the strongest results.
Export and share reports. Save and share your GA4 explorations for team visibility and strategic decisions.

Dig into the full guide by Designmodo.

What if AI Overviews Misrepresent My Brand?

JANUARY 26, 2026

So, you may have noticed… Google’s AI Overviews can get it wrong sometimes.

Egregious errors and minor mistakes have the potential to mislead users and misrepresent brands, which means marketers have a new reputation risk on our plates.

AI Overviews synthesize answers from across the web, but they don’t consistently represent context, nuance, or brand intent. Because they prioritize terseness and pattern matching over verification, they can strip out crucial detail and turn opinions or forum comments into de facto facts. Zoinks.

But users increasingly trust and act on whatever the AI summarizes first, often without clicking further.

Not to mention the impact on traffic and visibility. Brands featured in AI Overviews often see reduced CTR on their own sites because searchers get answers without visiting them.

What’s a brand to do?

Audit your AI footprint. Regularly search branded and category queries and document how AI Overviews describe you. Treat this like reputation monitoring, not keyword tracking.
Clarify facts everywhere. Publish simple, explicit statements on your site (FAQs, About pages, explainers) that clearly define what your brand does and doesn’t do. Ambiguity is AI bait.
Strengthen authoritative signals. Use structured data, expert bylines, original research, and citations. AI Overviews favor content that looks definitive.
Control third-party narratives. Review how forums, reviews, and comparison sites talk about you. AI often pulls from these, even when brands ignore them.
Optimize for summaries, not just clicks. Write content assuming it may be excerpted or paraphrased by AI. Clarity beats cleverness.

Check out the insight from Search Engine Land for more.

From AI Experimentation to Execution

JANUARY 25, 2026

Mediaocean released its 2026 Advertising Outlook, and it’s looking to be a transitional year.

Marketers are confident about digital investment and the potential of AI, but there’s a persistent execution gap restraining real impact.

Generative AI has moved beyond curiosity to become the top consumer trend cited by ~70% of marketers, but its adoption falls sharply the closer you get to actual campaign execution, from data analysis (~43%) to orchestration (~19%). So, enthusiasm hasn’t exactly translated into systematic use.

And then there’s the martech bottleneck. Most marketers recognize that cross-channel orchestration is important (86%), but only ~10% have fully unified systems to connect planning, activation, and measurement.

The report also shows selective rebound in media investment, especially in CTV, digital video, social, and AI-driven media on AI agents, while traditional channels like print and linear TV continue to lag.

So, what does this mean for us?

Generative AI is now core to industry thinking but still immature in execution.
The biggest AI barriers are data quality/access (42%) and system connectivity (41%).
Most marketers are shifting from siloed, channel-level tactics to system-level intelligence and cross-platform orchestration.

Take a closer look at the data from Mediaocean.

Addressing the “Link in Comments” Problem

JANUARY 21, 2026

LinkedIn, like most socials, has increasingly deprioritized external links, not just in posts but even in comments, because they want people to stay on the platform.

And before you think it, “link in the first comment” isn’t an effective workaround anymore, because algorithms hide or bury those comments, making the links harder to see and reducing referral traffic.

SparkToro offers an approach focused on creating native content that sidesteps this penalty while still driving curiosity and value.

Here’s how:

Lead with value, not links: Create posts that don’t include links anywhere, so they get full distribution and engagement without algorithmic suppression.
Use “implied links”: Focus the post on content that naturally leads interested users to search for or find your site on their own (mention your brand/term in a way that sticks).
Craft engaging comment threads: Instead of saying “link in comments 👇,” write comments that spark real engagement. This helps the comment stay visible without explicitly calling attention to the link.
Leverage third‑party engagement: Get collaborators or friends to add the comment with the link so it appears more organic and gains traction.

Check out this clever solution over at SparkToro.

4 Ways to Build Website Authority

JANUARY 21, 2026

Website authority is a measure of how credible search engines and, increasingly, AI systems view your site. Strong authority means your content earns trust, ranks for more keywords, and attracts backlinks that signal relevance and reliability.

Building that authority takes consistently showing value to users and to other sites in your niche.

Try these 4 tactics to increase your site authority:

Earn good backlinks. Create content that other people want to link to: original research, comprehensive guides, visually engaging assets, and useful tools that naturally attract links from reputable domains.
Optimize for relevant keywords. Conduct thorough keyword research and craft topic clusters to demonstrate topical expertise and relevance across your niche.
Strengthen internal linking. Use your most authoritative pages to pass link equity across your site, connect topic clusters, and fix orphaned pages that lack internal links.
Boost online mentions. Build industry relationships through guest and expert appearances and contributions that generate brand mentions (and ideally backlinks) from authoritative sources.

Take a closer look at Semrush.

What is Loop Marketing?

JANUARY 20, 2026

We’ve figured out by now that static funnels are too slow and rigid to win in 2026.

Loop marketing, conversely, learns and adapts in real time, using AI to scale personalization and optimization across channels. In this way, every campaign becomes data for the next.

Here’s how the loop system works:

Define your brand identity and ideal customer profile (ICP) so AI-generated content reflects your unique voice and value.
Personalize messaging at scale by enriching data, segmenting audiences dynamically, and tailoring content to individual needs and behaviors.
Expand reach across channels. Optimize for AI search results, remix content formats (videos, articles, carousels), and partner with creators.
Optimize continuously with real-time performance monitoring, rapid experimentation, and AI-driven predictions so each loop feeds insights into the next.

Head over to Hubspot for the full scoop.

How Often Should You Post in 2026?

JANUARY 15, 2026

Buffer’s data‑backed frequency guide offers clear, platform‑specific benchmarks to help guide your posting strategy this year.

Fortunately, showing up regularly matters more than just posting as much as you can. Rather than treating frequency as a rule, think of it as part of a holistic strategy.

Posting too little can limit reach and growth, and posting too much can exhaust you and your audience. The goldilocks sweet spot is whatever is most sustainable for everyone.

Here’s a quick snapshot of Buffer’s recos:

Facebook: 1–2 posts per day
Instagram: 3–5 posts per week
TikTok: 2–5 posts per week
X (Twitter): 3–4 posts per day
LinkedIn: 2–5 posts per week
Pinterest: 15–25 pins per day
YouTube: 1 video per week
YouTube Shorts: 1–3 per week

Dig into Buffer’s big ol’ guide for more.

What tone is right for your social content?

JANUARY 14, 2026

New research shows that how you frame your social content signals what people should expect from you. And that signal shapes whether they follow.

If your content skews consistently positive, audiences read it as entertaining. No surprise there. But when people are looking for good vibes, highly positive accounts can drive up to 116% more followers.

That said, if your content includes a mix of positives and negatives, something interesting happens: you appear more competent.

Balanced takes boost credibility for people actively seeking information, comparisons, or advice.

So, it’s all about matching your tone to your audience’s intent.

If someone comes to you for laughs, inspo, or escapism, relentless positivity works. If they come to you for answers or recommendations, balance is better.

Let’s recap:

Entertainment-first brands: Lean into upbeat, feel-good content that’s easy to consume and emotionally rewarding.
Info-first brands: Share pros and cons, lessons learned, limitations, and trade-offs to signal trustworthiness.
Hybrid brands: Separate formats or channels; fun-forward content for reach, balanced content for conversion.

Decide whether you want to be seen as the most fun account in the feed, or the most reliable one.

Check out the research at Science Says.

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