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In this newsletter, youâll find:
đ The deliverability signal that quietly disappeared
đ YouTube quietly became the most efficient major platform, and most budgets havenât noticed
đ Ad of the day
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đ The deliverability signal that quietly disappeared
Microsoft pulled trap hit counts from its SNDS Data Report on July 22, removing a signal neither Google nor Yahoo ever offered.
If your team relied on that number to catch a bad list segment before it torched your sender reputation, that early warning is gone, nine weeks before Black Friday.
Most teams donât notice a monitoring signal is missing until the thing it caught shows up somewhere worse.
A spam trap hit means part of your list contains addresses that shouldnât be getting mail, dead accounts recycled into traps or scraped addresses never opted in.
Left uncaught, that segment erodes your sender score across all three major providers, not just the one that stopped reporting it.
Rebuild the visibility Microsoftâs tool used to give you
Google Postmaster Tools still reports spam rate, reputation, and authentication status, on primary domains only, as a rolling multi-day average, not the trap-specific signal Microsoft removed.
Cross-reference the two remaining sources you have. Pull spam complaint rate trend from Postmaster Tools weekly rather than checking only when something looks wrong, and treat any unexplained jump as the proxy signal you no longer get directly.
Audit list hygiene before volume ramps, not during it
Nearly one in six ecommerce brands earns at least 30% of annual orders during the holiday period, meaning send volume then can run several times a normal monthâs baseline. A segment borderline in October becomes the one that tips your complaint rate over threshold in November, exactly when the cost is highest.
Run a full suppression pass now: hard bounces from the last two sends, any address with zero opens across your last ten campaigns, and anything flagged by your platformâs own engagement scoring. Removing that segment before volume increases is cheaper than discovering the problem after a BFCM send lands in spam.
Choose infrastructure that carries this monitoring for you
Auditing deliverability signals manually across three separate provider dashboards is a real ongoing job, not a one-time cleanup, and itâs exactly the kind of overhead that becomes a liability the week before your biggest sales period.
A platform managing that monitoring as part of the send infrastructure itself, rather than leaving a team to reconstruct visibility Microsoft just took away, is worth weighing against whatever platform currently owns your list.
One agencyâs pre-BFCM migration to Omnisend closed with a client generating $113K over the holiday period, matching the prior yearâs revenue despite the switch. You can read the full story.
The signal disappearing didnât create the risk. It just removed your warning that the risk was building.
đ YouTube quietly became the most efficient major platform, and most budgets havenât noticed
Last weekâs media buyer index produced a mixed but readable signal set, CAC improved on several high-spend platforms while returns fragmented across the board, creating a clear divide between channels worth scaling and channels worth trimming heading into the final stretch of August.
The Breakdown:
CPC - Meta and Google saw click costs fall while TikTok and Pinterest pushed higher, where CPCs dropped alongside improving CAC like Meta and Google, test a controlled budget increase this week before auction pressure rebuilds and closes the window.
CAC - Meta, Google, YouTube, and Microsoft all improved while Snapchat and Pinterest worsened sharply, Pinterestâs +14.06% CAC spike makes it an immediate pause candidate; hold all spend increases there until costs stabilize and CvR shows a recovery signal.
ROAS - YouTube led at +8.42% and Snapchat posted +5.26% while Pinterest collapsed at -19.59% and Meta slipped to -0.35%, shift incremental budget toward YouTube now where CvR and ROAS are both moving in the right direction simultaneously.
Meta shed share to 54.47% with -0.35% ROAS despite improving CAC, he efficiency gains arenât reaching the return line yet, so hold Metaâs budget flat rather than scaling into a signal that hasnât fully confirmed.
YouTube at 3.15% posted +8.42% ROAS and +8.94% CvR in the same week, making it the clearest scaling case on the board. Move budget from Pinterest into YouTube this week and review mid-cycle before committing further.
đ Ad of the day
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