Marketing Data News

Google updates UI for paid results

Google now groups paid listings under a “Sponsored results” block and lets users hide that block entirely. This shifts how ads and organic compete for visual real estate and could impact ad viewability, click share, and organic CTRs. My take: The user still has to scroll over all the ads to collapse them, it might boost the ctr of the last add as people accidentally click it as they go to click the collapse button.

Google Blog

WPP closes $400M deal with Google

WPP has struck a five-year, $400M deal to embed Google’s generative models and AI infrastructure into its creative, targeting, and media operations. This signals that large agencies are betting AI as an infrastructure layer, meaning your martech stack must be able to interoperate with or compete against these generative systems. My take: over the next few years, winning marketers will be those whose data pipelines and modeling can plug directly into generative and agentic frameworks and agencies that combine creative + neural targeting + measurement will create powerful moats.

Financial Times press release

Meta using AI chats to personalize ads & content

Starting December 16, Meta will integrate user interactions with its AI chat/voice systems as data signals to tailor both content and ads on Facebook and Instagram. This elevates conversational signals into the personalization pipeline, giving marketers access to higher-fidelity intent data but also forcing new modeling and privacy guardrails. My take: conversational intent will eventually become a foundational signal in recommender systems across platforms, especially as AI chat gets more ingrained in the buying journey.

Facebook news release

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Quick GA4 tip

Make sure you have GA4 data retention set to 14 months to keep data longer. The default is 2, which is not nearly enough. To keep your data even longer, connect GA4 to BigQuery (its free as long as you don’t have thousands of users a day).