Did you know shopping season is starting? Looks like Google does.
Big G has rolled out some new features that could have a bigger impact than just this Q4.
First, a deals page for shoppers:
Search “shop deals” to access
Make sure to audit your deals in Merchant Center, Chrome now has tools that will show shoppers when “an active promotion is available.”
But the big one, no more pricing games to make deals seem better than they are. Chrome’s new shopping insights “will show that product’s typical price range and a price history graph for up to the last 90 days.” Plus price drop alerts.
Generative AI comes to Google Ads:
advertisers can generate all the assets they need for a campaign by simply providing the URL of a preferred landing page, rather than creating a range of text and image assets individually. From there, advertisers can view and edit AI-populated assets, including both stock and AI-generated images, with a guarantee that Google will never create two identical images, even when given the exact same prompt.
Platforms will increasingly give the levers advertisers are used to pulling to the robots.
We are all creative directors now.
I recently wrote that the current splintering of social media is
maybe time for the rebirth of blogging?
Search may be splintering too, but the current version is [good for blogging](Study: Blogs appear most often in top Google positions https://searchengineland.com/blogs-top-google-positions-study-433630) too.
Blog posts are the most common content type found in the top 5 Google positions
Multiple CTR studies show most organic clicks go to the top 5 positions on Google Search (around 69% to 74%).
Google is going Apple and hiding IP addresses.
The feature is called IP Protection (formerly Gnatcatcher, which sounds cooler, tbh), and it will limit IP tracking by third parties.
This “could mean that the IP address is not the viable post-cookie alternative some thought it might be.”
I don’t know why it was ever considered a viable alternative in the current privacy environment. Part of the reason GA4 dropped IP addresses was to conform with privacy regulations.
3rd party IP access is going the way of 3rd party cookies, not replacing them.
Big G runs on ads and AI and is still working to combine those 2 to create the future of Google Search.
In its earnings call for the third quarter of 2023, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company plans to experiment with a native ad format suitable for its Search Generative Experience (SGE) that is “customized to every step of the search journey.”
via TechCrunch
We might have reached peak vertical video:
Have consumers started to cool towards short-form video? That’s certainly one read from Google and Snap results.
If anything this serves as a good reminder to not go all in on one content format based on the platforms’ push du jour (just ask news publishers about social video). Different businesses do different forms of content better than others and different forms work better for different purposes.
Don’t give up on vertical video. But don’t go all in on it either.
Google is further signaling the decay of attribution modeling with the announcement:
First click, linear, time decay and position-based attribution models are going away
None of these were great. Data-driven replaced position-based and GA4’s shift to user (and event)-based measurement over session-based made first click redundant.
But I think this is an admission from Big G that (aside from last click) accurate attribution is hard to do in a post-cookie world, so it’s all about data modeling now.
ChatGPT can query the web again. Which means it’s crawling the web. Which means it’s indexing the web. Which means it’s a search engine.
Search 1.0 was hand built directories (Yahoo!)
Search 2.0 was algorithms (Google’s PageRank)
Search 3.0 will be information engines 🔮
Provide the answers without the user clicking all over. Worse for websites, better for users?
For Google Ads peeps, looks like Discovery campaigns are being auto-upgraded to Demand Gen.
X (Twitter) is desperate for money since Elon has been scaring off advertisers. If you can’t get paid directly, why not get that money indirectly? (Deception fits the current playbook perfectly.)
Enter: Google Display Network
advertisers will be able to tap into the X home feed inventory through Google Ads Display campaigns
Potentially more importantly for you, you can exclude the placement.
🎉🎉🎉
If you’ve enabled Google Signals for your property, simply disable “Include Google Signals in Reporting Identity” on the Admin’s Data Collection page.
Turning this option off helps to minimize data thresholding if your property uses Belnded or Observed reporting identity.
via MarTech
Apple has all the pieces for it’s own search engine. It just needs the appetite to give up $8B in guaranteed money from Google each year.
AI might be the catalyst. Models are built on data, and big companies aren’t going to want to share. (Plus, any antitrust action may make Big G less likely to shell out.)
Think about a Spotlight search experience built on full, cross-app/web indices and connections to various inputs types with a chat-like interface. All built on Apple’s privacy reputation. (And Apple’s adtech stack, of course.)
Google is on trial.
AI will reinvent search behavior.
Social is closing off, going private, and decentralizing (yeah, confusing).
Cookies will be naught but crumbs.
Apple is still trying to build an ad empire.
The digital ad duopoly has already been disrupted. Looking like that was just the start.
Here’s a fun attack vector
In practice, this means that bad actors are identifying websites that have an internal search function and are seen as trustworthy by Google — such as government, educational, and media websites — and putting in searches for things like “buy cocaine,” along with Telegram handles or a website address.
A change to Google’s indexing means your site search may be used as a webpage generator by bad actors. 🙃
Remember, drugs are sold in gas stations and fentanyl is in everything
The era of subsidizing subscriber numbers in a free money, growth-before-everything-else market is over. Streaming TV is is now cable and it will be ad-supported (but you can pay your way out of ads).
Amazon aims to show ‘meaningfully fewer ads’ than traditional TV or rival streaming platforms. An ad-free option will be available for an additional $2.99 per month.
TV has been fully unbundled. Which means it’s time to start bundling again.
I put Amazon, Apple, Google, and Roku at the front of the pack of potential bundlers due to saturation and having existing streaming hardware platforms.