COVID helped drive record ad revenue for big tech in Q3

Multiple tech companies announced quarterly earnings on the same day last week, including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. Apple is the only company in the “antitrust quartet” that doesn’t formally report ad revenue, although third party estimates argue that Apple might bring in $2 billion this year from search ads. Google, Facebook and Amazon each…

California’s ‘CCPA 2.0’ passed: Here’s what changes

Update: The California Privacy Rights Act did pass on Tuesday. While most people are focused Tuesday on the U.S. presidential election, Californians are voting (or have voted) on ballot proposition 24, the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA). Known in some quarters as “CCPA 2.0,” CPRA was intended by its sponsors to expand and…

New GPT-3 solutions can help speed up PPC ad and landing page copy creation

Artificial intelligence-written articles and copy have been around for several years now, but GPT-3 promises to take AI-produced copy to the next level. GPT-3 is Open AI’s powerful autoregressive language model that is capable of generating human-like natural language. What makes GPT-3 so much better than its predecessors is the size of its training data. GPT-3…

Google Ads Report Editor gets a new look

Google Ads has rolled out a new look for Report Editor (located under Reports in the UI). I started seeing this new layout for setting up Custom reports in some accounts a few weeks ago when I was looking into the changes to Location reporting. With this update, Report Editor is set up more like…

Tripadvisor launches new listings, reputation and data products to help hotels and restaurants gain insights, boost visibility

COVID-19 has taken a disproportionately large toll on Tripadvisor’s two primary customer audiences, hotels and restaurants, which have seen double-digit revenue declines compared with 2019. The company has been trying to help these groups with a number of new products and services that meet perceived needs and generate new subscription revenue. Listings and menu syndication.…

Could Google passage indexing be leveraging BERT?

It’s been 12 months since Google announced a new update called BERT in production search and there should be no surprise the recent Search On event, falling almost on the eve of production BERT’s first birthday, included so much talk of huge progress and breakthroughs using AI and BERT during the past year. A recap…