- Chrome sold off
- no playing favorites on Android (& maybe sold)
- can’t buy default status
- no favoring Google services in other Google services
- license search index data to others
- ad cost transparency
- blah blah AI training access blah
- Branded email: name and logo in Mail
- Branded payments: logo in Tap to Pay
- Branded incoming call screen with Business Caller ID (coming soon)
- Ads in AI overviews
- Conversational interface for Search ad creation
- “Better” AI image generation for ads
- New Customer High Value, Win-Back, and High Value Win-Back Mode
- “Search Bidding Exploration”: I’m guessing AI audience expansion for Search, next gen Dynamic Search Ads without needing a new campaign type?
- New stuff for Shorts & video ads
- Shopping discounts for new & loyal customers
- New Shopping ad format: Video Highlights
- New Shopping bidding type: optimize for gross profit
- Time
- Click Type (consistently set to cross-network clicks)
- Conversions
- Device
- Network (showing cross-network by default)
- Top vs. Others
- More ads: current load is in the range of 2-3.5 minutes of ads per hour, which could increase. Mid-stream ads could also be added.
- Shoppable ads: including carousel, pause, and trivia formats (absolutely not surprise on this one).
- Overhauled DSP experience, now with AI! (And the obligatory campaign type named Performance+)
- Frequency cap controls
- Amazon Ads 🤝 first-party data
- More generative AI: audio this time
- More full-funnel and audience tools through managed services and partnerships
- Personalized promotions “based on what they’ve searched and pinned”
- Deals ads modules “making ads more visible for consumers across the Home Feed”
- Smart+: Performance Advantage+ Max in TikTok for most objectives
- GMV Max: Performance Advantage+ Max in TikTok for shopping, focused on gross merchandise value
- Out of Phone: a clever play on out-of-home that places TikTok ads in in-store retail settings
- Conversion Lift Studies.
- PETs: no, not those ones. Privacy-Enhancing Technologies via third-party integrations.
- More Live Events promo features
- Wire program expansion: videos in “trusted publisher” content
- Additional video options in automated campaigns
Your creative is more important than your targeting.Don’t leave the ad content as an afterthought.Your ad creative is more important than your ad targeting.You’ve got to grab attention. Spend at least as much time on your creative strategy as your targeting strategy.
Creative is the new targeting.
Google may not be killing off cookies, but it is ramping up first-party data features for marketers.
You can now use customer match to supplement Analytics audiences exported to your linked Google advertising products
If your data includes user-provided data, any audience exported to Google advertising products will match your consented, hashed customer data with Google data.
Money follows data.
Interesting to see Google continue to shift features into the third-party realm. This time, it’s ad creation tools for YouTube and Display.
Google will sunset Ads Creative Studio by the end of March 2025, shifting its focus to new growth areas and enhancing partnerships with creative agencies to deliver tailored campaigns at scale.
For YouTube-specific customizations, advertisers are encouraged to engage third-party partners.
"What's ChatGPT's share of search?"
— Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) (@randfish) November 19, 2024
Very tough to answer. But, if we assume:
- Every LLM prompt is a "search"
- Desktop + mobile web traffic, excluding apps, is close enough
- Mixing data from multiple panels is kosher
Here's what it looks like 👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/aIzvvMIplf
Some big ifs, but this means GPT is not an insignificant player.
Google won’t be overtaken by one player, but by all these other slices growing over time. Chipping away and taking more and more search share.
Reddit traffic is exploding thanks to its recent licensing deal with Google.
And some of those visitors are turning into users, adding 31 million daily actives in the last year.
“Reddit also says that its Weekly Active Unique user count (WAUq) averaged 365.4 million in the third quarter, an increase of 53% year-over-year. The amount of daily to weekly usage here is unusual for social apps, which usually see about 2.3x usage between daily and monthly actives. Reddit seemingly sees a lot more than this, which could point to the less consistent way in which visitors use the app.”
The headline:
OpenAI is thinking about making its own browser
Not a surprise. They’re also rumored to be working on a phone and more integrations with hardware makers.
“The New Google” is a pretty obvious avenue for them to pursue.
This is why regulator’s reasoning for forcing Big G to sell Chrome feels off.
Google is getting chipped away at from many angles as options proliferate. But a better option is the only thing that will knock the company synonymous with search out of its number 1 spot.
Regulators have submitted their Google punishment wishlist to the judge, and it rivals many a kid’s Christmas list.
The Justice Department wants:
No. 3 is the most obvious one on the list. The others range from 🤷 to 😮
Not sure this is the obvious outcome:
A sale of Chrome “will permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet”
How much better does Google Search get if $20B a year gets reinvested instead of paid to Apple?
Google Analytics 4 adds benchmarking data
reference metrics that help you compare your business performance against the performance of other businesses in your industry.
in percentiles (median, 25th, and 75th) based on peer groups of businesses for a wide range of industry categories. The businesses that form the peer groups are determined by an industry category assigned to each property. This industry category is determined by a combination of factors including the broad industry category provided in setup and signals from things like a property’s URLs and App attributes.
Google’s getting ready for shopping szn
Google Lens
Google Lens can quickly show you product insights tailored to the store you’re in. Just snap a photo to find product information, similar products in-stock, whether a store’s price is competitive and shopper reviews.
Shop Via Maps
search for products in Maps and find nearby stores selling them
As the moat around Google’s Knowledge Graph erodes in a post-AI world, the “Shopping Graph” may be the next fulcrum for revenue growth.
Apple continues its services push:
Any verified business can now create a consistent brand and location presence across apps that customers use every day, including Apple Maps, Wallet, and Mail.
Now more than just a Google Business Profile clone, Business Connect adds:
Apple is turning its hardware network into an integrated marketing platform.
Google giving us more control?
With brand guidelines, you can control how your brand is represented in your Performance Max campaign automated assets or formats.Your Performance Max campaigns use Google AI to infer key brand elements using your final URL. You’ll be able to review the brand information Google infers, then can fine-tune your brand guidelines based on your brand and campaign goals.
Guidelines help control generated videos and responsive display and include font, color, name, and logo(s).
Brand marketers rejoice!
It seems Google is testing adding if there was a change to that score because of "competitive pressure" and might even list the competitor that is causing such pressure.
Might we be getting more helpful info from Google to help with ads management?
More context, more better.
Perplexity (AI) is adding to its competition with Google (and most major tech platforms), trying to carve itself a slice of that sweet e-commerce pie.
The Pro Shop feature promises free shipping on items bought through Perplexity, enabling customers to complete transactions without leaving the platform. While browsing for products, users will notice a “Buy with Pro” option for eligible items. After selecting it, they will need to enter their billing and shipping details to finalize their purchase.Perplexity will estimate taxes and purchase the product on behalf of the users on Pro Shop, and users can track purchase status on the platform.
If successful, I imagine this feature will evolve over time and become less manual/personal shopper style on the Perplexity side.
Or maybe it leans into that AI-as-assistant approach to create a new angle on a competitive feature set.
Trick-or-Treating With Ad Platform Announcements from October
From Google:
Performance Max and Standard Shopping ads will now compete head-to-head in the auction instead of PMax getting preference. A sign that Standard Shopping is here to stay?
Testing: expandable search ads and in-ad search refinements.
The former is like a Google Shopping layout but for search ads when expanded. The latter is your classic search filter like what you see on ecomm sites.
A “For You” feed for Shopping.
Google will use your recent searches and YouTube history to figure out which products you like.
Demand Gen campaigns now offer creative-level controls for video assets, empowering you to choose which video appears in each format.
More Performance Max insights!
Select Google Ads accounts can now access a new “segment” option for Performance (PMax) Asset Group performance, offering a long-awaited layer of granularity to campaign insights.
The segmentation feature enables advertisers to break down Pmax Asset Group performance by:
Use specific pages to guide PMax asset creation. (Assuming this means generative AI.)
From Snapchat:
Sponsored Snaps enable businesses to engage their customers through visual messaging, by delivering a full-screen vertical video Snap directly to Snapchatters. Snapchatters opt-in to opening the Snap and can reply by sending a message directly to the advertiser or using the call-to-action to open a predetermined link.
Pay to show up in the main inbox next to their friends.
Promoted Places highlight sponsored places of interest on the Snap Map, helping our community discover places that they want to visit. The Snap Map is used for exploration and browsing to learn more about what your friends are up to, what is happening nearby, and which places are “Top Picks” based on the Snapchat community’s visitation trends.
Sounds like this is paying to be a Top Pick.
From Meta:
Exactly what no one wanted:
Meta silently implemented “automatic adjustments” across several advertising accounts, giving its system authority to make significant changes to ad campaigns without explicit advertiser approval.
From Amazon:
Prime Video is turning the dial up in 2025:
From Pinterest:
The Performance+ Suite, which, yes, is a portmanteau of Google’s and Meta’s names for their AI-first ecommerce solutions.
Pinterest Performance+ campaigns can help any advertiser drive lower-funnel performance by optimizing targeting, managing budgets or deciding how much to bid.
I’ve been testing this with some success lately. The key is to be running upper-funnel campaigns in tandem. (A theme for a standalone post sometime soon.)
Tapping into the value zeitgeist:
From TikTok:
All the new toys…
From Microsoft:
Impression-based remarketing! (I’ve long wanted a more granular version of this on Meta.)
impression-based remarketing allows you to target users based on ad exposure. This means that you can reach people who saw your ad, and did not make it to your site.
As the AI search experience improves, so will the accompanying ads.
ads will be triggered considering the whole conversation within a single session and not just the last prompt. Before an ad block is shown, Copilot will share with the user how the following ad section connects to their conversation. For now, we are calling this feature ad voice
AI will also come to the ads manager to act as a…copilot for advertisers.
Plus some targeting and analytics updates.
From LinkedIn:
Boost a post directly from your page for lead generation (using lead gen forms).
I don’t know how well this avenue performs compared to building in the Ads Manager, but an easy way to test the concept for companies.
63% of B2B buyers say short-form social video content informs buying decisions.
From Reddit:
AI-powered keyword targeting features. Contextual advertising for a community-first platform.
From DoorDash:
Ads Manager for Enterprise Restaurants includes advanced targeting capabilities, marketing insights, new promos and collaborative marketing functionality aimed at regional marketing teams and franchisees.
The platform has made new high-visibility placements on the storefront and category pages widely available, helping CPG brands highlight seasonal moments, introduce new products and amplify promotions.
The ad platform now also offers advertisers offsite media, helping them reach consumers across search engines, programmatic displays and social media platforms with campaigns powered by DoorDash’s first-party data.
Any (large / public / venture funded) platform that has users and collects data on them will likely become an ad platform at some point.
From PayPal:
An ad network.
See the last line of the DoorDash section.