Pinterest’s revenue jumped 12% to $981 million in Q4, 2023. Ad earnings surged as the platform’s global monthly active users increased 11% year-on-year to reach an all-time high of 498 million. The company credited its success in part to launching a record number of ad solutions that have been utilized by brands to enhance campaign…
One of the great tragedies of the digital marketing world is that “PPC” folks and “paid social” folks don’t see themselves at the same marketing table – even as ad networks push them closer and closer. Advertisers who are “Google-first” or “Meta-first” tend to struggle to make the leap to the alternate platform. Yet, as…
Speech recognition technology has become a cornerstone for various applications, enabling machines to understand and process human speech. The field continuously seeks advancements in algorithms and models to improve accuracy and efficiency in recognizing speech across multiple languages and contexts. The main challenge in speech recognition is developing models that accurately transcribe speech from…
More advertisers are exploring the potential of value-based bidding (VBB). But what exactly is this method and why does it matter? This article discusses what you need to know about value-based bidding, how it differs from “Maximize conversions,” and two approaches to implement VBB for your Google Ads account. We’ll also explore perspectives from the…
Google is investigating a devastating Local Service Ads (LSA) tactic that could “nuke competitors out of existence.” When more than one LSA is linked to a Google Business Profile (GBP), the ad becomes invisible, killing off all leads. Alarmingly, competitors can use this loophole to intentionally create an LSA linked to your GBP without your…
The MIT-Pillar AI Collective has announced six fellows for the spring 2024 semester. With support from the program, the graduate students, who are in their final year of a master’s or PhD program, will conduct research in the areas of AI, machine learning, and data science with the aim of commercializing their innovations. Launched…
SMX Advanced, the premier conference for experienced senior-level search marketers, returns online June 11-12. As you know, 2023 was an unprecedented year for search and the pace of change will continue through 2024. There’s a growing sentiment that Google search is not serving search marketers well. How do we continue to optimize search efforts and…
Microsoft Copilot announced a trio of updates to its platform, including: A new homepage design. New inline editing of AI-generated images with Microsoft Designer integration. New video highlights in Edge. Why we care. Microsoft’s updated Copilot homepage is designed to make navigation smoother, though it might take a bit of getting used to. Meanwhile, the…
Google Ads will phase out commissions (per stay) and commissions (per conversion) bid strategies for hotel ads in October. Instead, the platform is introducing target Return on Ads Spend (tROAS) for hotel campaigns, along with an expanded Performance Max for travel goals, as alternative bid strategies. Why we care. Advertisers will need to shift bid…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has proven to be an indispensable technique in AI, particularly in pretraining representations on vast, unlabeled datasets. This significantly reduces the dependency on labeled data, often a major bottleneck in machine learning. Despite the merits, a major challenge in SSL, particularly in Joint Embedding (JE) architectures, is evaluating the quality of…
