Searchlight is Aztek's marketing news roundup that brings together the week’s most relevant developments in marketing, search, AI, and digital strategy, all in one place. We update this article throughout the week with news we think is worth your time, along with context to help you understand what changed, why it matters, and what it could mean for your business.
This week's topics:
10/13: TikTok and Meta Are Giving AI More Control Over Advertising
For years, advertising platforms have used AI to make campaign decisions based on user behavior and performance data, reducing the amount of manual work advertisers need to do. Most advertisers have gotten comfortable letting those systems handle at least some of the work.
Now, TikTok and Meta want to take things further. During Advertising Week New York earlier this month, both companies announced new AI capabilities that could handle more of the day-to-day responsibilities of managing advertising campaigns. As these platforms take on more of the work, advertisers have to decide how much control they're comfortable giving up, especially when the platforms making those decisions are also selling them the ad space.
What TikTok and Meta Announced
On Oct. 5, TikTok introduced several AI-powered advertising updates designed to make campaign management more automated. Meta made similar announcements on Oct. 6.
Some of the notable updates include:
- TikTok Smart+ Creative Selection: Recommends combinations of existing brand assets, AI-generated creative, and creator content for advertisers to review and approve.
- TikTok Search Advertising Automation: Gives the platform more control over decisions about keywords and ad creative within search campaigns.
- TikTok Agentic Leads: Uses AI-powered conversations to engage potential customers and help businesses qualify leads.
- Meta AI Business Assistant: Helps advertisers understand campaign performance and receive recommendations.
Some of these features are still being tested, so advertisers shouldn't expect to find every option in their accounts just yet.
AI Ad Buying Is Moving Beyond Basic Automation
Automated bidding and audience targeting are nothing new. What's changing is the amount of responsibility these platforms want AI to take on. The term agentic AI comes up frequently in these announcements. Essentially, it refers to AI systems that can combine an LLM with instructions, tools, and access to information so that it can act toward a specific goal instead of simply offering suggestions.
Think about the difference between a platform recommending that you adjust your advertising budget and one that can actually make the adjustment after you approve it. For smaller marketing teams, that could be genuinely helpful. Campaign management takes time, and having AI handle repetitive tasks could make it easier to maintain campaigns without constantly monitoring every setting.
Of course, the less time advertisers spend making those decisions themselves, the more important it becomes to understand how the platform is making them.
What Happens When AI Makes More Advertising Decisions?
Consider a manufacturer running paid campaigns to generate sales inquiries. An automated system might find that a particular audience generates more form submissions at a lower cost, so it shifts more of the budget toward that audience.
From the advertising platform's perspective, the campaign could be performing well. The business might see things differently if those submissions are coming from people looking for products it doesn't manufacture. This scenario is where AI ad buying becomes more complicated. Advertising platforms generally optimize around the goals and information they're given. They don't automatically know which leads are worth pursuing or how much a customer might be worth over several years.
There's also the issue of creative control. AI can generate variations of an ad quickly, but someone still needs to make sure the messaging is accurate and relevant to the people the business wants to reach. None of these concerns are new to digital advertising. Greater automation simply gives marketers more reason to pay attention to them.
How Should Businesses Approach AI Ad Buying?
There's no reason to avoid these tools simply because they automate more of the process. If they can help improve campaign performance or reduce unnecessary work, they're worth exploring. However, businesses should understand what they're agreeing to automate before turning on new features.
Start by reviewing the settings within existing campaigns.
- Which decisions are already automated?
- What performance goals are those systems working toward?
- Do those goals reflect what the sales team considers a successful lead?
As new capabilities become available, test them with a manageable budget and compare the results against existing campaigns. Look beyond the advertising dashboard when evaluating success, particularly if lead quality has historically been an issue.
Better Tools Still Need Someone Paying Attention
TikTok and Meta are making it increasingly possible for advertisers to manage campaigns with less manual involvement. For busy marketing teams, there's plenty of potential value in that.
Still, a campaign that runs efficiently isn't necessarily a campaign that's helping the business grow. Marketers need to understand what the automation is doing and be willing to intervene when the numbers look good but the actual business results tell a different story.
10/15: New UX Research Shows Why Website Navigation Still Deserves Attention
Businesses spend plenty of time figuring out how to bring more people to their websites. Between paid advertising, SEO, and newer AI search opportunities, there's no shortage of ways to invest in attracting visitors. Yet something as basic as website navigation can still make it difficult for those visitors to find what they need.
According to updated research from Baymard Institute, 61% of desktop websites and 65% of mobile websites in its 2026 benchmark delivered mediocre-to-poor homepage and category navigation experiences. The research evaluated more than 180 leading ecommerce websites across the U.S. and Europe.
Those findings are a good reminder that even well-established businesses can struggle to make their websites easy to navigate. Yes, Baymard's research focuses on ecommerce, but many of the same issues apply to B2B websites, especially when visitors need to dig into products or services before deciding whether to reach out.
Why Website Navigation Still Creates Problems
Most businesses know their own websites pretty well. They understand their services, recognize the industry terminology, and know exactly where to find important information. Unfortunately, that familiarity can make it difficult to recognize when a website is confusing to someone visiting for the first time.
A manufacturer, for example, might organize its website around internal business divisions. That organization makes perfect sense to employees but may mean very little to a purchasing manager searching for a specific manufacturing capability.
Navigation can also become cluttered as businesses grow. New products get added, services expand, and pages accumulate without much consideration for how everything fits together. Eventually, visitors are left sorting through menus that reflect the company's history more than their own needs.
Baymard's research identified category organization as the weakest-performing navigation area across desktop and mobile websites. The findings reinforce the importance of organizing information in ways that make sense to the people actually using the site.
How Poor Website Navigation Can Affect Conversions
Consider someone researching a potential supplier. They've found a company through Google and want to confirm that it offers a particular service before reaching out. The service is available, but it's buried under an unfamiliar menu category. After a few unsuccessful attempts to find the right information, the visitor returns to the search results and tries another company.
When visitors struggle to find information, businesses risk losing opportunities they've already invested in attracting. This is especially relevant for B2B companies, where buyers often need detailed information before they're comfortable contacting a sales representative.
Good website navigation helps visitors understand what a business offers and find the information they need to move forward. It should also make the next step easy to identify when someone is ready to request a quote or start a conversation.
Website Navigation Best Practices Worth Revisiting
Improving website navigation doesn't automatically mean investing in a complete redesign. Sometimes the most useful improvements come from reviewing your existing website through a visitor's eyes.
A quick navigation audit is a good place to start:
- Review your menu labels. Would someone unfamiliar with your company understand what each option means? Replace internal terminology with language your customers are more likely to recognize.
- Evaluate how information is organized. Related products and services should be easy to find without forcing visitors to guess which category they belong to.
- Test the mobile experience. Make sure menus work properly on smaller screens and don't make visitors dig through unnecessary layers to reach important pages.
- Follow your conversion paths. Choose a common customer task, such as finding a product specification and requesting a quote. See how easily someone can complete it.
- Ask someone unfamiliar with the site to try it. Give them a specific task and watch where they struggle. Their experience may reveal problems that employees have stopped noticing.
These website navigation best practices are relatively simple to evaluate, although deciding how to address the issues may require a closer look at your site's structure.
If you're unsure where to start, focus on the products or services that generate the most business inquiries. Improvements to those paths may offer more immediate value than reorganizing every page at once.
Better Website Experiences Start With the Basics
There's always another marketing tool or technology promising to help businesses reach more customers. Those investments can be worthwhile, but they won't do much good if visitors arrive at a website and struggle to find what they're looking for.
Baymard's findings suggest that website navigation remains an area where many businesses have room to improve. Taking another look at how your own site is organized is a reasonable place to start. After all, you've already done the work to get someone interested enough to visit. Your website design should make it easy for them to keep going.
