Meta Hates Bots.
(Except Those It Creates.)

That Instagram influencer in your DMs isn't real — it's an AI bot that Meta created. Whatever happened to “authentic connections”?!

Meta Ads to Cost 30% More on Mobile Devices

Marketers, brace yourself — a new 30% tax is about to be applied to your Meta ads… but there is a way to avoid it.

The tax is Apple’s fees for spending money on its iOS devices. Apple collects 30% for those fees. Some companies have absorbed this, but more are passing this along to customers.

Earlier this year, Meta decided to do the latter in the U.S.; now, it’s expanding it worldwide.

Again, you’d only pay this extra fee if you’re paying for an ad or a boosted post in the Facebook or Instagram mobile apps. If you want to avoid this, just crank up a laptop or desktop and buy it there.

That will, of course, work for most people — but many solopreneurs, small businesses, and side hustles do their business almost entirely on their phones. So this will definitely have an impact.

Is a Restaurant’s Google Ranking Based on Business?

If your restaurant isn’t ranking as high in Google search as you’d like it to, try changing up your menu.

A new report suggests menu item names is likely a ranking factor — along with how busy you are.

SEO agency ReputationArm reports it discovered that adding a menu item to the Google Business Profile of a client improved the ranking of that item when someone searched for it. That, of course, makes sense. Google, after all, tries to match words searched for with words delivered.

But this also means you might want to consider renaming some of your menu items to be, well, less clever.

Also — and I don’t think I expected this — apparently busyness also factors in: The busier Google thinks a location is, the more of an algorithmic boost it gets.

This is, of course, just anecdotal evidence (which is to say, not really evidence at all) but you could definitely make an argument for its logic, and the menu items thing might be something you’d want to try out.

Google Ads’ New WordPress Tag System is Fishy

It could soon be easier to add Google’s pixels to your brand’s WordPress site — if you don’t take the whole thing down in the process, that is.

Some people are noticing the Google Ads platform is prompting some admins to put new WordPress-specific conversion codes onto their sites.

Oddly, this doesn’t connect to WordPress through a plugin — rather, Google’s system gives web site admins screenshots of a WordPress back-end and shows them step-by-step how to paste the new code into the header PHP file.

While it’s true that this would work, it’s kind of a brute force method of doing things. Some lower level admins might not have access to that file editor, and messing around with PHP files can be a little dicey. Accidentally delete a semi-colon in your header file, and you could effectively bring your site down. (Ask me how I know 😫)

This appears to have just started out in testing and has not yet been fully rolled out.

Meta Hates Bots. (Except Those It Creates.)

We knew this was coming… fans of major Instagram influencers will soon be able to chat one-on-one with them in DMs. Only of course it’s not the influencer themselves, it’s their AI representative, trained on that person’s personality and mannerisms.

Creators can also train their bots using their social media presence to make them more lifelike.

This started in testing this week in the U.S. with some Instagram influencers.

Meta says it’ll make sure users know they’re not interacting with real people and that its main purpose is to answer fact-based questions.

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