Marketing News & Analysis

Daily coverage of growth, search, paid ads, programmatic, and the tools reshaping digital marketing.

Risograph illustration of identical video thumbnails with anonymous presenters reading scripts, a red termination stamp, ghosts holding microphones, and linked accounts around cash

Ghost Creators Are the PBNs of Social, and YouTube Just Started Deindexing Them

Semafor reported on September 2, 2026 that a network of "ghost creator" channels tied to Virelox, a company selling spun-up creator accounts to brands, pulled more than 45 million YouTube views using paid actors reading AI-written scripts. YouTube terminated 20 of those channels the next day under its

Pop art illustration of a giant red price tag ceiling lifting off a search ad auction, with calendar pages marked October 1 and January 12 and an import arrow carrying campaigns

Microsoft Ads Is Dropping Max CPC, and Google Import Is Where It Bites

Microsoft Advertising will remove the Max CPC field from new standalone campaigns using Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value and Maximize Clicks starting October 1, 2026. Existing campaigns keep their caps, but a cap removed after that date can never be added back. A second deadline, January

Mixed-media collage of a three-way balance scale weighing cash, a percent sign, and a base fee plus commission, with a creator contract and 30-day sales chart

Flat Fee vs Revenue Share vs Hybrid: The Base Fee Is the Whole Negotiation

Creator compensation comes in three shapes: a flat fee for deliverables, a revenue share on tracked sales, or a hybrid with a smaller base plus commission. Marketers who found creators open to affiliate-only terms fell from 63% in 2024 to 26% in 2025, per a Modash survey of 50-plus marketers.

Pop art illustration of an auction gavel striking shipping boxes, a hidden FIRST PRICE tag behind a SECOND PRICE label, and a CPC-to-bid dial near 0.9

Amazon's $20 Billion Auction Surcharge Is Every DSP Buyer's Problem Now

The FTC and 22 states sued Amazon on August 31, 2026, alleging Sponsored Products advertisers paid their full bid about 80% of the time in 2024 despite Amazon calling the auction second-price. The complaint covers over 1 million advertisers and an estimated $20 billion in extra charges since 2019. For

Blueprint-style diagram of a Google EEA search results page with one expanded aggregator panel, collapsed tabs, and a row of hotel and airline supplier icons beneath

Google Handed EEA Search to Aggregators. Direct Brands Get a Box With No Prices.

Google rolled out two new result units across the European Economic Area on September 8, 2026: an aggregator unit for approved comparison sites and a supplier unit for direct providers, covering hotel, flight, long-distance train and bus, and product queries. The supplier unit only appears when an aggregator unit appears,

Isometric illustration of a calm family watching a TV ad beside a glass conference room of anxious media buyers staring at a chart comparing a 48 percent bar to a 10 percent bar

FreeWheel Says Only 10% of Viewers Dislike AI Ads (Buyers Guessed 48%)

FreeWheel's report "AI in TV Advertising: The Buyer, Seller, and Viewer Perspectives," published September 5, 2026, found that 48% of media buyers assume viewers dislike AI-generated ad creative. When Dynata surveyed 2,496 US adults in April 2026 for the same report, 10% said they disliked

Pop-art illustration of a crocodile jaw formed by two diverging chart lines: Shopping ad impressions falling while click-through rate rises under AI Overviews

Google Shopping CTR Rose to 1.55% Because AI Overviews Ate the Bad Queries

Smarter Ecommerce analyzed 175 billion Google Shopping ad impressions from mid-2025 to mid-2026 and found median impressions fell from about 1.85 million to 1.4 million while median click-through rate rose from 1.20% to roughly 1.55%. The CTR gain is mostly a shrinking-denominator effect: Google appears to

Dark data visualization of an A/B test: two variant lines crossing a 95% significance threshold early, beside a sample size readout and a two-week test calendar

Your A/B Test Hit 95% Significance. That's the Worst Time to Stop.

An A/B test should run until it reaches the sample size you calculated before launch, not until the dashboard shows a winner. Stopping at the first sign of 95% significance inflates the real false positive rate from 5% to roughly 26%, according to Evan Miller's simulations. Work

Dark data-viz illustration of three stacked SaaS pricing tier cards with the middle plan highlighted, a monthly-to-annual billing toggle, and a mobile view of the tiers.

The Best SaaS Pricing Pages All Pull the Same Three Levers

Three-tier pricing pages convert roughly 1.4 times better than two-tier ones, and pages with four or more tiers convert about 31% worse than a clean three-tier layout. The number that decides your signup rate usually isn't the price itself. It's how many options sit next

Dark data-visualization illustration: a locked signup gate filtering a crowd of users, a rising retention line chart, a credit card, and a seven-day streak badge.

When Making Signup Harder Actually Raises Retention

Adding friction to signup almost always lowers conversion, yet it can still raise retention. When GrowthMentor made a Typeform mandatory before granting access, top-of-funnel conversion fell more than 80%, from above 25% toward 5%, but the users who pushed through activated at a far higher rate. The rule: friction that