Good morning,
It’s been a bumpy ride on Meta. After another overspending incident last week, advertisers are frustrated and rightfully so. 😮💨
The Pilothouse Meta team explains the outage last Thursday coincided with Instagram’s sign-out issues:
Generally (acknowledging some variance case-by-case for brands) the team saw:
While the issue now seems to be resolved, make sure to still contact your Meta rep to get your refund if your ad account was impacted.
Here’s what you should share:
1️⃣ Date and time when overspending occurred
2️⃣ Your ad account ID and affected campaign IDs
3️⃣ A short description of how much your account overspent
Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:
You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Chef Bobo, Suit Society, and Red Bull. 👋
How much are you spending on support agents? Richpanel can confidently guess the answer is, “too much.”
Snow, the well-known teeth-whitening brand, scaled to $100M+ in revenue with only 10 support agents and a little bit of AI magic. 👀
Snow discovered that a majority of their customer inquiries fell into 8-10 categories. Using Richpanel, Snow was able to use their inquiry categories to create self-service flows, significantly reducing the volume of tickets reaching the support team. Plus, leveraging Richpanel's AI assistants enabled Snow to effectively double their team's productivity.
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Google Search and its ranking system have always made steady updates throughout the years but now they plan to roll out a new AI product called Search Generative Experience (SGE) that will transform how search looks and operates, and potentially impact visibility for SMBs.
Why? 🤔
Because search habits are changing.
While Google is still the heavy favorite when it comes to search, competing search engines like Pinterest and TikTok have emerged as alternatives and are increasingly favored by younger audiences like Gen Z.
Google hopes SGE will create an even better search experience by integrating AI so they maintain control of the search landscape.
But what exactly is Search Generative Experience?
Google is planning on rolling out this new way to search later this year.
SGE will use AI to find relevant content and place generative AI content above organic search results at the top of the fold.
Here is what the latest update to Search will look like:
Why does this matter?
This means that business owners who are trying to rank well in Google now face increased competition.
Ranking highly in Google’s SERPs could become more difficult.
And ranking matters. High rankings aren’t just for boasting rights.
The higher you appear, the more clicks you can get to your site. This article shows the click distribution for top rankings. The number one spot in Google search has an average CTR of 27.6%.
The potential impact on SMBs?
SGE may negatively impact your organic search traffic especially if AI is generating answers to queries and publishing them directly on a search results page. It is predicted that Google SGE could cause traffic to drop and publishers to lose about $2 billion in ad revenue.
What you can do to prepare:
For more SGE tips make sure to check out our podcast episode below for more insights on how SMBs can prepare for the AI search shake up.
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In this episode of the pod, we chat with Ismail, Pilothouse’s SEO Lead about the current state of SERPs (search engine results page) and the concept of Parasite SEO.
He touches on the importance of SEO for ecommerce brands and the need for a strong SEO strategy.
Ismail explains: “Google is now de-indexing websites if they don’t provide value. Low-quality and unoriginal content will be downranked or deindexed. If your content isn’t unique and helpful you won’t show up in search.”
In this podcast, we cover:
👉 You can listen to the full episode with Ismail here.
As you scale you don’t want your customer acquisition costs to skyrocket so optimization is key!
Do continuous CRO testing on your website so you don’t experience any growing pains.
🍪 Is your marketing strategy ready for a post-cookie world? Get the scoop on identity resolution using first-party data and how to shape your marketing strategy with it.Download the Identity Playbook for free here. *
💸 Product photoshoots can cost thousands, but product photos don’t have to… Snappr's AI image generator is a cost-effective solution developed specifically for ecommerce companies. Request a free trial. *
🥲 All marketers can agree: creating good copy is tough and time-consuming.Here’s a helpful tool you can use to find inspiration for email & SMS marketing from top DTC brands. Check it out! *
Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 160k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.
Have you heard our latest podcasts?
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.
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