- Single headline responsive search ads
- Changes to account-level automated assets
- Protected Audiences (formerly FLEDGE & who knows how many other acronyms)
- Enhanced conversions
- Consent Mode (not new, but more important)
Google Search’s cache links are officially being retired
Google claims it’s less necessary now that internet reliability has improved.
Google is a cloud computing company. One with a robust PR department that likes to make everything a societal positive. One that needs to find profit, fast.
How do you increase cloud capacity without increasing hardware costs? You delete a bunch of stuff taking up space. Like Search cache. Or Universal Analytics data (148 days until deletion).
What will fill this space?
I’m sure some will be whatever paying customers put there. It mostly, AI.
If you want to glimpse the future of search, don’t look to Google.
Asked: Test or beta?
Answered: Google has now rolled out campaign level headlines and descriptions.
You can now have the option to associate up to three headlines and two descriptions at the campaign level. “If you need to show these assets during a specific time period, such as a sale, you’ll be able to schedule specific start and end dates for them.
Also:
Create Google search ads, with AI!
The conversational experience enables advertisers to generate relevant ad content, including creative and keywords, from a website URL.
You may have heard the Google Ads rule of thumb that you need 30 conversions before changing your bid strategy to Maximize Conversions. That’s not entirely true.
Max conversions can work on fewer than that. Target CPA or Target ROAS on the other hand, wait for 30.
per a Google Ads rep
Test or beta? Who knows, but hopefully it’s a toy we all get.
Google is toying with campaign-level headlines and descriptions.
This is all “as seen on LinkedIn,” but looks like you can add up to 3 headlines & 2 descriptions to an entire campaign and set on-off dates. Perfect for promos.
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?