- Protected Audiences (formerly FLEDGE & who knows how many other acronyms)
- Enhanced conversions
- Consent Mode (not new, but more important)
Google Ads match types:
Exact Match is really phrase match
Phrase Match is really broad match
Broad Match is really garbage
Instacart is an advertising platform that dabbles in grocery delivery, just in time for the Retail Media Renaissance
From Bloomberg:
Instacart will show advertisements on the high-tech shopping carts [which include self-checkout and are equipped with cameras and sensors to detect items] it sells to grocery stores
& a Google Shopping Ads partnership:
powered by Instacart’s first-party retail media data and closed-loop insights, to reach high-intent consumers searching on Google and get their products into consumers' hands in as fast as an hour.
YouTube—the unofficial king of podcasts—is coming for the crown.
If you’re a podcast creator, you can use YouTube Studio to upload your podcasts to YouTube through an RSS feed.
via Google
About that Google kicking cookies to the curb thing…
Google is phasing out third-party cookies this fall, but some sites will be able to temporarily re-enable them until the year end.
via MarTech
It’s GA4 all over again
🍪 ☠️
The day has come, with Google activating the first stage of its cookie-removal strategy today [January 4]
via SocialMediaToday
I’ve heard many references to the
incentive misalignment that we see on Google where what the user needs is traded off against what the advertiser needs and the experience is compromised
Lately. Not sure if the rise in frequency is because of the anti-trust trial or because LLM chat interfaces have shown a 10 blue links alternative.
this quote from Azeem Azhar
Called “Active Listening,” CMG claims the capability can identify potential customers “based on casual conversations in real time.”
I got the pitch 404 Media mentions via a client, but I’m skeptical.
I don’t see Amazon & Google selling smart speaker convo data when they make piles of money off advertising.
I think this would be tough to pull off on iOS devices (but someone with more knowledge of the SDKs would be better to ask).
Smart TVs are a lawless frontier, so sure.
I would think most of this data is from Cox Media property apps on Android devices.
Or maybe I’m thinking wishfully.
🚫🍪
On January 4, we’ll begin testing Tracking Protection, a new feature that limits cross-site tracking by restricting website access to third-party cookies by default. We’ll roll this out to 1% of Chrome users globally, a key milestone in our Privacy Sandbox initiative to phase out third-party cookies for everyone in the second half of 2024
Google is killing the cookie (for real this time!)
The cookie is about to actually crumble
This is one of the biggest things I’ve taken away from recent Google search algo updates: topical relevance.
Write about topics related to your brand, don’t chase trends and clickbait.
Google is stupid. It’s not smart. It’s math. It’s counting things.
So it it’s counting more little leagues than it’s counting electrical distribution equipment, there you go: topical confusion.
Eric Schwartzman on the Myth of Organic SEO and what he learned delving into the realms of black hat and negative SEO:
Google is doing updates daily to its [search] algorithm. We’re just hearing about the ones that have PR value.
The reason that they want to keep us in line [with their ideal SEO best practices] is because they want it to be less expensive to have to process what’s going on on the internet to decide what to index and what to serve.
This is about more than [just] SEO.
The thin gray line
Google’s big drop is a horizontal line.
Ads may be easier to distinguish from organic results again with the return of a dividing line between the two on search results pages.
And everything old is new again?
Looks like Google realized Signals-based thresholding was annoying to everyone:
Google signals will be removed from the reporting identity on February 12, 2024. This change will apply to all of your Google Analytics 4 properties and will only affect reporting features. Google Analytics will still collect Google signals, when enabled, to be used in demographics and interests reporting. Google signals will also still support audience and conversion use cases, like remarketing and conversion optimization in linked Google advertising products.
🚨 GA4 Error Warning
Starting on (roughly) November 30, some UTM data has stopped populating in GA4.
I can’t see anything more granular than campaign level data from my UTM tags. A friend reports the same issue.
It appears the Google team is working on a fix.
In case you haven’t heard:
Consider this your final warning: Google is going to start wiping inactive accounts on Friday, December 1.
It only impacts personal (non-Google Workspace) accounts.
To avoid The Purge, just do something in your account to make it look active.
Google Ads added more algorithm signals (robot food) to Performance Max campaigns.
Search themes in Performance Max allow you to provide Google AI with valuable information about what your customers are searching for and which topics lead to conversions for your business.
It’s keyword (up to 25) targeting for PMax. Both a way to help bridge the gap in instances of minimal or missing data for Big G to pull from your site and (I imagine) to make more search marketers comfortable with the new campaign type.
It’s found via the Signals card in a campaigns asset groups tab.
It’s going to be really interesting to watch how AI impacts product development. Especially with Google’s new search feature.
Use generative AI to create an image of what you’re looking for. Then use image search to find similar items that actually exist.
One day this could evolve into generating an image of exactly what you want and sending it to a factory to be made for you.
The shopping experience will soon be very different.
Just heard from a Google rep that it takes up to 7 days for data to properly populate GA4’s attribution models.