- Event = measure specific interactions or occurrences on your website or app
- Key Event = measure an event that you mark as important to your business
- Conversion = measure performance of your ad campaigns and optimize bidding
- Scaled content abuse (aka made by AI)
- Site reputation abuse (junk third-party content on quality sites)
- Expired domain abuse (grabbing an expired domain and starting a spam farm)
- The Reports section provides insights into how users engage with your websites and apps so you can improve your product and user experience.
- The Advertising section will become the hub to monitor and analyze your campaigns whether you’re a publisher or an advertiser.
Friday Bits & Bytes | 032224
Evolving Google Analytics for more insightful measurement
To make it easier to compare these actions across platforms, we are aligning how conversions are defined across Google Ads and Analytics to give you a consistent view of your Google advertising performance. With that, we are introducing key events in Google Analytics that will replace what currently exists as conversions for behavioral analytics.
Say what? A “conversion” in GA4 was not measured the same as a “conversion” in Google Ads, which is…confusing.
Now (or soon, it’s still rolling out) in GA4, what had been called “conversions” are now “key events”. Conversions will appear in the Advertising reports section and match what is in Google Ads.
From Google:
If you want to know more, this video is the best resource on it I’ve seen from Google so far.
How to write a landing page that converts
Purchase Rate = Desire - (Labor + Confusion)
To increase the purchase rate, increase the visitor’s desire to purchase while decreasing their labor (effort) and confusion
translate features into the value they’ll get from using it. And proactively handle any objections they might have.
Provide no-brainer value and make it easy.
Copywriting Friday: What part of France are you from?
To increase conversions, we need to understand and remove the objections that are stopping qualified prospects.
…
Look for these three types of objections: obvious, embarrassing, and assumed. Then use your best salespeople to help you craft the strongest counter-objections.
Think about your services or processes: Which of them might you combine into a named system that implies the work is being done for your customer?
I’m looking forward to using the “Objection/Counter-Objection” method in a project soon.
Concrete language boosts sales.
from the Nudge newsletter
Specific, tangible language significantly increases customer satisfaction and spending.
Use clear, concrete language.
Easy to understand. Hard to confuse.
February Marks a Turnaround for Existing Home Sales
Sick of waiting for the Federal Reserve to make a move, home buyers and sellers seem to be accepting the market for what it is.
…
In February, contracts closed on roughly 4.4 million existing homes, an increase of 9.5% from the month prior
The median existing-home sales price elevated to $384,500, the eighth consecutive month of year-over-year price gains. However, the sales prices across all US homes jumped only 0.6% from January to February, which resembles pre-pandemic trends
Changes in the housing market can have far reaching ripples.
Are the algorithms starting to turn on generative AI?
Google has updated Search to derank spam including:
The goal is to:
better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.
This change actually has teeth too, with plenty of manual actions.
Another Podcast’s episode Google Gemini and AI bias unpacks the weights and training data stuff I briefly mentioned yesterday.
Hidden patterns in data and models as bias amplifiers.
Also the excellent quote “the fake is in the caption,” because what is a prompt but a caption for a future image?
Quick Hit Google Bits
Google Analytics 4 launches new trend detection insight
trend change detection focuses on slower changes happening over a longer time. This gives users a detailed view of data changes, making it a useful tool to spot both quick and long-term trends.
Reddit signs AI content licensing deal with Google
reportedly paying Reddit $60 million per year to train its artificial intelligence models (e.g., Gemini).
OG journo-blogger Matt Welch on legacy media, like the Village Voice & LA Times:
Never could adapt to the new reality. It’s a success curse.
When you’re making that much money, you’re that powerful, the people who work for you—including yourselves—are not going to solve the industry once the industry turns and changes.
This is not just a media problem.
Same could be said of Google right now.
How do you change when the change threatens your business model?
Walmart is in talks to acquire Vizio, which sells a popular line of value-priced smart TVs that include an ad-supported free streaming service
which
could make Walmart a significant player in the connected-TV advertising business, competing with the likes of Roku, Amazon and Google/YouTube
via Variety
When users say “platform,” we mean software (increasingly cloud-based).
When platforms say “platform,” they mean hardware.
Every major ad platform wants a hardware platform of their own. For that sweet, sweet first-party data & to not be beholden to someone else (especially a competitor).
I’m turning into a Google bear 🐻
Competition from OpenAI: Develops Web Search Product in Challenge to Google
Arc Search getting buzz (I’ve used it & can easily see this being a glimpse of search’s future)
Earlier this month I asked if Google was now Microsoft.
Magic 8 ball says “Signs point to yes” 🎱
via Inside:
A U.S. federal judge has scheduled an antitrust trial against Google for Sept. 9, 2024. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit targets the search giant’s alleged monopoly over online advertising.
If, like Microsoft, Big G limits/unwinds development to avoid more antitrust actions, we may have seen the last of Google as portal to the Internet.
& yes, it’s an existing trend that is accelerating.
& yes, Microsoft pulled a phoenix so it’s not necessarily The End.