7 Months Down, 5 to Go

Can you believe we’re already one month into Q3? Black Friday sales are just 2 months away 😂 And who knows… maybe we see them even earlier this year?

Lets get right to it!

👀 Industry Updates:

• Amazon leaves Google Shopping: AMZN’s shopping impression share tanked to 0 this past week in the US, UK, and Germany. What do we make of this? Amazon not wanting Google to have their data b/c of the AI race or ad platform competition?

• Meta unveils GenAI Creative Roadmap: Meta is finally making big moves in the AI creative world. I broke down their 6 most important updates for marketers here.

• Consumer Sentiment: As tracked by the University of Michigan, Consumer Sentiment Index is on the rise since the April-May low. CSI trends are tied fairly closely to S&P 500 performance so this is not a surprise. We’re still lower than we were a year ago, so not all is great. But we’re headed in the right direction. We want this number to keep ticking higher. The more confident consumers are in this economy, the more they’ll spend on discretionary purchases, and the better our ads will perform.

  

1. AI Search: What media outlets are most frequently cited?

If I told you that Lemon8 is the TOP social media channel cited by LLMs, would you believe me?! 🤯

AI search optimization requires insight into each platform's algo. I'm going to show you how different ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO's models are.

At Avenue Z, we reverse engineer each model by tracking citation patterns over time for different product verticals.

In the image below, you'll find aggregate data from our AI Visibility Index on the media sources that were most frequently cited across models in July for beauty brands.

📝 Important to note:

• Lemon8 is the TOP social platform cited & RISING

• Byrdie had been the dominant publisher, but now in a steep decline

• LLMs are citing all types of media sources: editorial, social, and marketplace/corporate

👀 In the 3 images below, you'll see how it breaks out by LLM:

Oh, and it’s time you add THIS option to your post-purchase survey, do NOT forget:

Since AI search mentions far outweighs AI search direct links to your site, don’t rely on click-based attribution to measure AI search performance. Have customers tell you how they discovered your brand. This will fill in the gaps immensely. We’re seeing customer-reported responses far outweigh UTM-based ChatGPT/Perplexity/Google AIO conversions.

2. Event Quality is Directly Correlated to Ad Performance

If you have 2 CAPI solutions active simultaneously, you're likely limiting your ad performance ⚠️

I'll show you an example of this below.

Duplicate CAPI setups happen so frequently these days bc many SAAS tools now offer server-sided tracking:

• Blotout, Elevar, Popsixl

• Shopify <> Meta CAPI

• Triple Whale (Sonar) & Northbeam (Apex)

• Angler ... the list goes on!

Typically a brand is signed up for more than one of the above concurrently (for diff reasons) & ends up turning on CAPI integration for each rather than select ONE (and ONLY one).

This often goes undiagnosed by brands and marketers. It makes performance look BETTER in-platform since conversions are duplicated.

In reality? Business performance & 3P measurement tank. It's a hidden parasite.

Most marketers don't even know how to diagnose when this is happening to their brand.

So, how do you know if you have more than one CAPI firing? Check the image in the comments section for an easy way to spot it!

When this happens, you have the same event getting sent back to Meta from 2 diff sources which instantly crushes your Event Match Quality (EMQ) score.

Bc these SAAS companies don't communicate, events aren't properly deduplicated.

So what's the actual impact of a lower EMQ score?

In the image above, you'll see an example where a 2nd CAPI was activated on July 17.

Immediately following this, EMQ tanked below a 6/10. Each event was impacted similarly, but for illustrative purposes below I only included the "View Content" event.

Immediately following the EMQ decline, Triple Whale ROAS tanked at the same rate (platform-reported ROAS erroneously perceived to improve bc of the duplicate events).

On July 23 we identified the duplicate CAPI & shut it off. EMQ (and thus TW ROAS) immediately rebounded, as expected.

This is why we start every audit with the basics: EVENTS MANAGER.

Garbage in, garbage out. Without event health in place, you're feeding the platform's AI/ML trash. Your performance will be limited.

Events manager is not a sexy place to spend your time. But you MUST master it and have a pulse on EMQ at ALL TIMES.

It's usually the place where all the hidden issues live.

3. Media Mix for Ecom Brands: a 2H Update!

Northbeam has been putting out weekly data on its aggregate tracked spend. It’s super useful for brands to get a pulse on where spend is being allocated in ecommerce. I track it religiously.

AppLovin ($APP ( ▲ 1.23% ) ) is about to eclipse 4% of total budget share. Their share of the pie has grown 7% in 2 months.

📝 Things to note on AppLovin: still in closed beta & eligible brands have ~1 month wait right now to onboard.

There's actually far more to this graphic than AppLovin's rise:

➡️ TikTok gaining ground (yes it's still working; our investment there is increasing)

➡️ YouTube ($GOOGL ( ▲ 0.47% ) ): for the FIRST TIME EVER I am excited. Why? You can finally run Demand Gen campaigns with SHORTS ONLY placements. Seeing measurable click-through performance that deserves your attention. Going to spend a lot more of my time here moving forward.

➡️ Snapchat ($SNAP ( ▲ 0.99% ) ): meteoric rise (+29%) over the past couple weeks, surging past 1% of total budget share. We've been bringing budget to Snapchat for the first time in years over the past few months. This is all bc of their new 7DC0DV optimization window that's shown to drive performance (unlike the other models).

We're now living in a time where DTC brands have MULTIPLE top of funnel channels to choose from to diversify investment.

This doesn't mean $META ( ▲ 0.4% ) ad spend gets eaten. It means the pie will grow at a faster rate than it has in the past few years.

Exciting 📈

What I’m Listening to 🎧

Beats of the Week: Kitty Amor - Live From SDL Festival, Ibiza 2025

Kitty Amor is a vibe. Dark energy. Beats on beats. Listened to this set a few times already. Have this on repeat for your next deep work session.

You’re reading In The Snow, by Jonathan Snow.

This is where operators, media buyers, and digital execs stay ahead of the curve.

Feel free to reply directly with any thoughts or feedback.