Industry News

Jason Knight wrote about a fascinating disconnect between how B2B product leaders rate themselves and how their teams see them. The data from his survey is striking:

Across the board, B2B Product Leaders think they’re doing pretty well in all of these areas, but B2B IC PMs are not convinced. The difference is stark, and they can’t both be right.

The survey measured six core responsibilities—setting strategy, aligning teams, enabling prioritization, fostering ownership, removing...

Daniel Parris wrote a statistical analysis of when rock became “classic rock”, and it’s not the story I expected.

He assumed the genre emerged organically from music nerds debating on message boards and in the pages of Rolling Stone. Instead:

What I found was a deliberate realignment engineered by music executives chasing an ephemeral advertising demographic. Like many entertainment industry decisions, it was a small (mostly male) group of executives quietly deciding the future of...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

I am seeing new signs of yet more Google Search ranking volatility and a possible tweak to the ranking search algorithm. Something kicked off yesterday, January 15th, that the third-party tools picked up on. With this update, there is limited chatter, unlike the previous unconfirmed Google Search ranking update.

It is another week and more Google Search ranking volatility but this was a weird one. Google launched Personal Intelligence in the Gemini app and it is coming to AI Mode in Google Search. Google AI Mode new ad format...

Rajan Patel, the VP of Engineering for Search, said on X that Google is making "changes to ranking" to remove prediction content from showing up in the Google Search top stories and news sections. This comes after some sites are posting "prediction" content, predicting that some sports trades may happen, that have not happened yet, and those "stories" show up in the news section as actually having occurred.

Over the past few weeks, Google has been showing AI Overviews for local packs, leading some businesses to see huge drops in visibility for their Google Business Profile and local listings. Some businesses are seeing 50% declines or more because of the local pack change.

Microsoft Advertising announced a slew of new features including new customer acquisition goals as an open beta, Share of voice (SOV) metrics, Asset group-level URL options and tracking templates, increased Search Theme limit, enhanced asset group import, Content Targeting now generally available, Location targeting improvements and Autogenerated assets in Responsive Search ads.

Google Ads has made the Campaign total budgets officially live as an open beta for any advertiser to sign up and use. Campaign total budgets are now available in Search, Performance Max and Shopping campaigns within Google Ads.

Google Ads has reportedly streamlined the selection capability of Manual CPC bidding during the campaign setup. Now the option can be found under the "Conversions" goal, labeled as "Manually set bids."