In this week’s digital news, you can now categorise ad networks by priority in Google and allocate budget to secondary channels to test them safely. Meta announced new advertising tools, introducing Ads Super Burst, First Impression Ads, expanded Reels Trending Ads and a new way to measure video attention.
Google is changing how links appear in AI Mode and AI Overviews, moving inline links higher and expanding the carousels that highlight Preferred Sources. Prepare for a potential Panda-style Google update by tackling scaled AI content and fake authors that could put your entire site’s rankings at risk.
You can now choose where your Google Ads budget goes first
Google is introducing two new optional controls for budget management across Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns: channel prioritisation and budget allocation.
Channel prioritisation lets advertisers designate inventory as high or low priority, ensuring high-priority channels are fully funded first before remaining budget flows to lower-priority ones. Budget allocation then lets advertisers cap spend on low-priority channels as a maximum percentage of daily budget, useful particularly for Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns where channel prioritisation alone may have limited effect.
The controls apply at account and campaign level, including shared budgets. Advertisers who have historically opted out of Search partners or the Google Display Network can use these levers to test those networks with defined spending limits rather than a blanket exclusion. From February 2027, the existing spend allocation setup for Search campaigns with the Google Display Network enabled will be retired, so advertisers wishing to maintain their current configuration should set GDN to low priority with a 50% budget allocation ahead of that date.
Read more here.
Meta introduces new brand advertising formats across Facebook and Instagram
Meta has announced four new tools aimed at brand advertisers. Ads Super Burst lets brands reserve a concentrated 3- to 24-hour window to reach large audiences with optional category exclusivity, with early results showing a median 2.9-point ad recall lift and around 34 million people reached per flight. First Impression Ads, currently a limited US test, give one advertiser per day the first ad placement users see when opening Facebook Feed. Reels Trending Ads have expanded to 15 content topics including new Home & Garden and Spanish-language categories, with Meta reporting a 5-point lift in action intent and unaided brand awareness. Finally, Aggregated View Time is an alpha-stage measurement tool tracking cumulative video attention across multiple exposures rather than individual views, with Meta’s research suggesting this approach correlates with 32% higher offline sales. Availability varies across all four features.
Read more here.
Google puts inline links higher in more AI Search responses
Prediction model warns of a major panda-style core update within a month
How long should a reel be?
Video length barely matters on Instagram until the 3-minute mark, where recommendations to new audiences stop. Reels from 10 seconds to 3 minutes all perform within 2% of each creator’s median, while longer ones fall to 0.91x. TikTok rewards length instead, with 3-to-10-minute videos earning 1.22x and beating the same creator’s 10-to-19-second clips for 68% of creators.
Read more here.
Meta unveils Muse Spark Open, the new top U.S. open weights model
Muse Spark Open is an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model that can run on relatively affordable consumer hardware. Meta’s benchmark tests used a pair of M5 Ultra Mac Studios with an unknown memory configuration. The model uses a mixture-of-experts design and activates 42 billion parameters for each token. It supports a context of up to 1 million tokens and accepts text, images, video, and audio, but only outputs text.
Read more here.
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