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Top 2025 Google Ads updates.

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Data-Supported Reels Strategies

DECEMBER 2, 2025

Meta has shared some research-backed tips to help you get more performance out of your Reels.

The study, conducted with Toluna across a wide range of brand-originated content, highlights what actually moves the needle on Facebook and Instagram.

Here are 5 Reels strategies for brand building:

State your case early. Brand + main message in the first 5 seconds = 1.7x higher purchase intent.
Dynamic branding. Show the brand more than once for a 1.8x lift.
Speech + music. Doubles the likelihood of ranking high for brand interest.
Louder. – Reinforce your message in both audio and visuals for a 1.8x boost.
Slice of life. Everyday scenes lift purchase intent by 1.5x.

And here are 6 Reels strategies for direct response:

Show the product repeatedly.
Support the product with limited branding (<25% of duration).
Add context: features, benefits, USPs.
Use a clear CTA.
Combine speech and music.
Experiment with native elements like emojis.

Put a pin in it for 2026.

Marketing Trends for 2026

DECEMBER 1, 2025

Not to be dramatic, but 2026 is looking to be a year of structural shifts.

Here are the 7 trends shaping the next year:

Marketers become product managers. AI prototyping tools let us turn insights into shippable product concepts. Marketing is moving upstream, influencing features, shaping UX, and embedding growth loops directly into the product.
SEO blogging returns, but for AEO. AI search rewards lived experience and niche depth. Bottom-of-funnel content (comparisons, “best for X,” hyper-specific reviews) becomes a conversion engine that influences both SERPs and AI Overviews.
Employees become internal influencers. The most credible content comes from the people building the product. Marketers who can communicate publicly become career-defensible.
AI video ads level up. With generative tools, the creative bar rises. Taste and narrative will determine winners.
Network effects become the new moat. Distribution gets baked into the product. Templates, communities, and sharing loops turn customers into marketers.
Design taste becomes the #1 skill. Clarity, craft, and aesthetic judgment become true differentiators across content, UX, and product.
Human-first media takes over. Trusted creators, niche newsletters, and employee-led storytelling become premium ad real estate. There’s hope!

Think like a builder, design like a creator, and communicate like a real person. Take a closer look at Marketer Milk.

“Evergreen” Content in the AI Era

NOVEMBER 27, 2025

Evergreen content isn’t looking so evergreen anymore. *Collective sigh.*

LLMs prioritize signs of active upkeep over age, authority, or word count. A post updated last month often beats a masterpiece from 2023.

Our lifesaving “evergreen” content now decays in 90 days. LLMs reward new examples, updated data, current screenshots, and clear signals that the infi reflects the moment.

To stay visible, you need refresh cycles.

Here’s what LLMs treat as “fresh” content:

Recency indicators: visible modified dates, new backlinks, updated schema, fresh mentions.
Structural upgrades: 500+ new words, new sections, expanded FAQs, current screenshots.
External validation: press hits in the last 6–12 months, new research citations, refreshed outbound links.

Treat evergreen pieces like they have a built-in expiration date. Add refresh tasks to your content calendar, tier your library by business impact, and schedule updates before visibility slips.

Check out MarTech for more.

Creators Lift TikTok Campaigns

NOVEMBER 25, 2025

TikTok’s new data suggests creator-led ads outperform traditional brand ads across every meaningful metric.

At the same CPM, creator content drives a 70% higher CTR and a 159% higher engagement rate.

Why? Because creators are native to TikTok’s rhythms in a way brands rarely are. They understand the jokes, the jump cuts, the micro-communities, and the unwritten rules that make content feel native rather than forced. And that creator fluency shows up in performance.

Here are the three core advantages creators offer campaigns:

Cultural translation: Creators interpret a brand through TikTok’s lens, whether that’s #CleanBeauty, eco-lifestyle, or niche aesthetic cores, unlocking angles internal teams might overlook.
High-velocity production: They concept and produce quickly, giving brands more high-quality iterations without creative fatigue.
The halo effect: Audiences trust messages from voices they already follow. When ads run on creator accounts, engagement and view-through rates climb.

Check out the insight at TikTok for Business.

What Makes Good Search Queries

NOVEMBER 24, 2025

A good search query tells search engines exactly what someone wants, why they want it, and how urgently they need it.

And as SEO shifts toward conversational queries, AI overviews, and intent-driven SERPs, the quality of that signal matters more than ever.

Instead of “Coffee,” we want “Best light roast coffee for cold brew under $20.”

Great queries consistently share three traits:

Clarity: The query reveals the user’s purpose without guesswork.
Specificity: It narrows the topic and removes ambiguity.
Natural language: It sounds like something a real person would say out loud.

When you target queries like this, you’re able to discover meaningful long-tail keywords, match content to user intent, build authority within a niche, and reduce bounce rates because readers find exactly what they came for.

If your query reflects how people truly search (messy, conversational, and full of context), you’re already optimizing for both human behavior and modern search systems.

Check out Clearscope for more.

Google’s New Metric: Original Conversion Value

NOVEMBER 23, 2025

Google Ads has introduced a new metric, Original Conversion Value (OCV). In practice, it looks like this:

Conversion Value – Rule Adjustments – Lifecycle Goal Adjustments = Original Conversion Value

It reveals the true, unadjusted revenue generated by campaigns. Unlike the standard Conversion Value metric, which incorporates adjustments like Conversion Value Rules or Lifecycle Goals, OCV strips all of these away.

It can be tricky to separate real conversion value from Google’s automated adjustments. Original Conversion Value is helpful for:

Revenue reporting: see true campaign-generated revenue without artificial adjustments
Post-campaign analysis: compare performance across campaigns more accurately
Troubleshooting inflated ROAS: identify when automated bidding is boosting reported value rather than real conversions
Auditing automated bid strategies: understand if Smart Bidding is driving actual results

Head to Search Engine Land for a closer look.

The Creator-First Holiday Marketing Guide

NOVEMBER 19, 2025

Holiday creator campaigns are failing because brands and creators are operating on completely different calendars and incentives.

Later’s new research suggests that the brands winning the holidays are those designing creator programs around creators instead of internal timelines.

By the time most brands slide into a creator’s inbox, those creators have already committed to competing campaigns or they simply don’t have the bandwidth. And then it’s a landslide: rushed briefs, unclear expectations, generic content, and weaker performance overall.

Here’s how to realign your creator planning for max ROI:

Start planning holiday campaigns in Q2, not late summer.
Pitch long-term partnership potential > single activations.
Use hybrid compensation models (base + performance).
Brief creators clearly but leave room for creative ownership.
Diversify channels, especially YouTube and Facebook, where competition is lower.
Expand beyond short-form video with long-form, carousels, and interactive formats.

Get the full scoop from Later.

Reply to The Comments

NOVEMBER 18, 2025

New data from Buffer confirms and illuminates the obvious: replying to comments lifts your overall reach.

When you interact with your audience, algorithms pick up on those signals, surface your activity to more users, and nudge the conversation forward. Plus, replies spark more replies, compounding total engagement.

Posts where the creator replied to comments generated up to 42% more engagement overall, with Threads showing the biggest lift of all.

Here’s how the comment-reply lift looks by platform:

LinkedIn: +30%
Instagram: +21%
Facebook: +9%
X (Twitter): +8%
Threads: 42%

With social posting declining and lurkers outnumbering active contributors, engagement remains the strongest signal of interest for platform algorithms. Replying is one of the easiest ways to spark it.

Check out Buffer’s study for more.

A Text Overlay Formula for Social Ads

NOVEMBER 17, 2025

New research shows that putting just the right amount of text in the right place can lift social engagement and clicks by up to 127%.

Across 4 experiments and 8,200+ real posts, researchers found that text overlays work by balancing visual attention. When the text and imagery don’t compete, and instead feel integrated, people are significantly more likely to click, comment, and like.

But size, placement, and platform all matter, too.

For dynamic visuals like videos and GIFs, medium-sized text performs best, especially when it sits on the edges rather than the center. On static images, it flips: centered and larger overlays tend to win.

Here’s a handy formula for higher performance: