What the ad industry knows – and the innocent public will hate to discover – is that browser pop-ups are early on a trend curve, and the slope is only getting steeper.

“When I asked some marketers to explain themselves, I started feeling like I was talking to an AI assigned to the prompt ‘tell me why pop-ups are good, actually,’” writes The Verge, in a story about the recent increase in pop-up notifications. And not just in Europe, where the GDPR demands consent pop-ups. Pop-up messages when you visit sites – publishers touting subscriptions to retailers offering discounts if you give them your email address – have proliferated across the web and the collective human psyche as a trigger for seething rage. And as TikTok and Meta evolve their search ad programs, marketers will be able to use more bells and whistles, like using tracking pixel data placed on their sites to retarget users on the social platform. They also don’t let advertisers control campaigns or even select keywords to target.īecause consumers, especially young people, buy en masse products that trend on TikTok, agencies and brands are becoming savvier with video captions, hashtags and popular terms so they rank higher in TikTok and Instagram search results – the new social SEO.

Neither TikTok nor Instagram offers search reporting, a necessary first step if they really want to commit.