Meta highlights key trends for advertisers
In the wake of its most recent earnings call, Meta has released a series of insights and recommendations for advertisers, identifying key trends across its platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp.
The company emphasised the growing importance of artificial intelligence in campaign performance. According to Meta, recent upgrades to its recommendation systems have led to a 7% increase in time spent on Facebook, a 6% rise on Instagram, and a 35% increase on Threads within the last six months.
To capitalise on this, Meta is encouraging advertisers to explore its Advantage+ campaigns, which use AI to enhance ad relevance and engagement. The company also highlighted the effectiveness of its Generative Ads Recommendation (GEM) tool, reporting up to a 5% rise in ad conversions for Facebook Reels. Advertisers using Advantage+ products have reportedly seen an average return of $4.52 in revenue for every dollar spent, a 22% improvement compared to standard campaigns.
LinkedIn launches BrandLink, bringing video ads to top creator content
LinkedIn has expanded its video advertising programme to help brands increase campaign effectiveness by sponsoring premium creator-led content. Rebranded from the Wire Program to BrandLink, the initiative allows marketers to align their video ads with exclusive shows produced by prominent industry figures and trusted publishers.
Industry creators and premium content now available to advertisers
The BrandLink expansion introduces content partnerships with high-profile creators such as Steven Bartlett, Bernard Marr, Allie K. Miller, Rebecca Minkoff, Candace Nelson, Guy Raz, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Shelley Zalis. These voices bring a diverse range of expertise, from entrepreneurship and AI to business strategy and innovation. Through BrandLink, advertisers can now run in-stream video ads ahead of curated episodes featuring these thought leaders.
At launch, the new creator shows focus on key themes including the CEO playbook, artificial intelligence and innovation, startup growth, female entrepreneurship, and small business journeys. The content is designed to resonate with LinkedIn’s global audience of over one billion members, offering marketers a way to reach decision-makers with contextually relevant messaging.
Google is planning to bring ads to AI chatbots
Google has long been the dominant player in the search market, but the tech giant is finally seeing some competition to its dominant revenue stream, with generative AI coming into the picture. As it turns out, Google is now planning to display ads within conversations with AI chatbots in a bid to maintain its position in the digital advertising space, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Reportedly, Google’s AdSense for Search network, which is responsible for showing ads within search results on websites, has been expanded to include conversations with chatbots run by AI startups. The move comes after the company conducted tests last year and this year with a handful of AI search app startups, such as iAsk and Liner.
Top 3 Q-com firms see daily orders double in March
The number of orders delivered each day by the top three quick commerce firms — Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart —doubled in March compared to the same month last year, industry data showed.
Underscoring increasing adoption of quick commerce, the daily average orders on these platforms rose to around 4.5 million in March against around 2.2 million orders in the same month last year.
The top three firms continued to dominate the quick commerce space, accounting for over 85% of all orders during the month. The next two biggest players currently are BBNow and Flipkart Minutes.
AI Overviews Shown To Reduce Clicks by 34.5%
Despite Google consistently saying that AI Overviews (AIOs) drive more traffic to websites, that’s not what many sites (if not most) are reporting. In another analysis by Ahrefs, data from 300,000 keywords showed that the top ranked organic web pages experienced a 34.5% drop in click through rates when AIOs were present. That number seems to be widely affirmed by SEOs (including us) regarding the sites they manage.
But what about those links inside the AI Overviews that point to webpages? Surely those links would make up for it to some degree, right? That’s what I was asking myself at least. Then I remembered an instance where a client’s site ranks #1 organically and has the first AIO featured site link for a query that has an average of 12,000 monthly searches.
Swiggy’s Bolt zooms to 500+ cities as Zomato scraps 10-minute delivery
Swiggy has rapidly scaled its 10-minute food delivery service, Bolt, to over 500 cities across India. Introduced in October 2024, Bolt now contributes to over 10% of Swiggy’s total food orders, delivering from a curated menu of high-demand dishes within a 2 km radius.
Swiggy says the service is powered by a network of 45,000+ restaurant brands, including popular QSRs like KFC, McDonald’s, Subway, Faasos, and Burger King. With more than 47 lakh dishes across 26 cuisines, Bolt delivers everything from dosas to biryani and shakes to sandwiches, aiming to maintain both speed and quality. The feature appears as a dedicated tile on the Swiggy app and is designed to meet on-the-go food cravings without compromising consistency.
In contrast, rival Zomato has shut down its 10-minute delivery service, Quick, which was succeeded by Zomato Everyday which has also vanished from the app. In its Q4 FY25 report, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal admitted that while the company aimed to scale the business, the lack of kitchen infrastructure and low restaurant density led to inconsistent customer experiences, making the model unsustainable at this time.
That’s it today.
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