- Protected Audiences (formerly FLEDGE & who knows how many other acronyms)
- Enhanced conversions
- Consent Mode (not new, but more important)
🚫🍪
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.
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.