Rabbbits Weeekly: Google Announces Some Things
Everything you need to know* from Google Marketing Live and Apple WWDC (*probably not). Plus, the usual headline roundup of ads, algorithms, audiences, analytics, attack vectors, and assorted bits.
Google Did It Live
Google’s Marketing Live dog and pony show happened last month so I will now recap a recap about what they announced.
Ads in YouTube Shorts (not a new revelation, but still)
Video ads in Google Discover (I think this is what they call the home screen of the Google app)
More robust targeting for connected TV ads (for Display & Video 360 users, will presumably roll out to us peasants at some point in the future if it works well)
Maximizing Performance Max:
Experimentation tools, like A/B testing for incrementality (def want to try this)
Better options for in-store results
More insights and explanations to aid decision making
Optimization scores and recommendations coming soon, if you pay attention to those things (really geared towards high rolling advertisers, so keep that in mind)
New Insights that “only Google can surface” (sounds defensive): attribution, budget, first-party audience data
Automatically generated ad assets for responsive search ads (and probably display next (more below))
Better looks for responsive display ads on mobile
New asset library and YouTube ad templates (we’ll see if this is actually useful)
Better lead form extensions and integrations
Conversion List Tests coming soon! (also want to try this, all the tests!)
One tag to rule them all as Global Site Tag becomes Google Tag (this sounds like welcome relief and also like something that should have been rolled out long before the last year of Universal Analytics so some year-over-year data could build up in GA4)
Targeting Topics (or whatever they are calling their post-cookiepocalypse, privacy-tolerating idea these days)
Better ad control for users
At one point during the event an engineer also apparently said (I didn’t watch this live, heard about it on the Today in Digital podcast) that the future for Google Search is a "never ending stream of visual inspiration". So the future of Google is to be Pinterest? What is the future of actual, useful search? Maybe DuckDuckGo and/or Ecosia (or Apple).
Apple Did A Thing, Too
Apple held WWDC22 earlier this week and announced some things coming to iOS16:
Push notifications are coming to Safari next year. Does anyone use these?
The death of the password via Passkeys
Security updates without os updates
BNPL with Apple Wallet. Totally great news for the players like Klarna and Affirm who were already struggling a bit.
And the official opening of AppleBank as they will be handling it all themselves (AppleCard is backed by Goldman Sachs).
iPhone as webcam, natively
Ads
Google continues to make it easier for people to start advertising, now they're beta testing automatically creating ad assets based on your landing page(s), similar pages on your site, other ads and keywords in your ad group. "These assets can take the form of entire sentences, phrases, or paraphrasing while retaining the original meaning."
Need help wrapping your head around The Goog's automation and keyword systems for ads? They've made guides for that.
Soon you may be able to book travel via Snapchat, kind of. They are launching Dynamic Ads for Travel, which lets you connect a catalog (guess that's the Official Name™ now that all platforms seem to use it) to retarget or algorithmically target travel-interested humans (and bots, presumably).
According to some data provided to the Today in Digital Marketing podcast, average CPMs across brands using the Varos tool are up to $16 on Facebook and $15 on Google.
Might be time to test out connected TV ads, CTV reaches 92% of US households.
The future of connected TV isn't ads between the content, but ads within / around the content.
Amazon is taking their ads to the streets. Kind of. They are hiring for a Local Ads team that appears focused on getting a share of small business ad budgets via partnerships with city-specific ad companies (cough cough newspapers cough).
Snapchat commissioned and released a report on how to get better results from their ads. So there's that. But there are some findings that may be a little more universal, or at least kicking the tires on no matter where you advertise.
Use multiple ad formats
Use multiple pieces of creative. Being exposed to 11+ pieces of creative dramatically increased a user's "purchase intent index"
Use more persistence. They recommend a frequency of 4x/week (which feels really aggressive to me) and a total saturation point of 8x/week. But I guess with all this content and time spent your message needs more hits to stick.
Analytics
Google Analytics is illegal in France since it transfers user data to the US. Regulatory roulette continues.
GA4 added a nice new feature to custom audiences, you can select how many days into the past (up to 60) you want to include matching users from.
YouTube (or Google Video) has decided to make their analytics more useful by splitting out metrics by video format type.
Unpacking DTC retail as a poster child example of renaming / rebranding lingo, jargon, and terminology does not change the underlying business model. (Take note tech platforms.)
Algorithms
TikTok announced creator subscriptions (more subscriptions, yay) and a late-night show "for the ad industry, by the ad industry." So, yeah, you can check that out. Or not.
As Meta continues to TikTok-ify, you can now pin up to 3 'grams to the top of your grid.
Another Meta device bites the dust. Their smartwatch has been halted and they will shift to "working on other devices for the wrist". Zuck desperately wants a hardware portfolio. Problem is he has no proof he can will this dream into existence.
Reddit has launched a video series aimed at helping companies use its platform for marketing.
Soon every brand will be droppin' products on...Twitter? Their new corporate motto - Just Ship It - in action, I suppose. (Whatever helps them grow, and fast, I guess.)
LinkedIn has decided to act like an actual B2B platform and create a Business Manager to allow for easier management by large entities. Or anyone that has more than one thing for their business. Truly groundbreaking work.
Or maybe this is more your thing, a whole bunch of LinkedIn metrics aggregated from a whole bunch of pages and posts. I'm going to highlight the immediately actionable takeaways (as always, grain of salt):
If you want clicks, use native documents (this is when you upload a PDF to LinkedIn and it displays like a carousel you can flip through)
If you want engagement, use video if you have under 50k followers, images if you are between 50k-100k, and native docs if your following is yuge. (But no matter your size, at least test out posting video content.)
Audiences
Don't focus on your positioning to the detriment of your salience. You care way more about your competitors than your customers do, and your competitor list is way bigger on their end. (Netflix has said they aren't competing against other TV, they are competing against every other way people can spend their time.) Salience is the power to be noticed or remembered when it's time to spend some money. Seems important for business.
Teens, they spend money too! A survey of American teens with various data points if it's a market of interest. My big takeaways are:
They are heavily iPhone and its ecosystem
If they're watching videos, it's probably either Netflix or YouTube
TikTok is #1 for social, followed closely by Snapchat (the previous #1), and then Instagram
Speaking of teens, people are spending less time on Facebook. The ship keeps sinking.
Social commerce is here, except for the actually checking out on a social platform part. Consumers are still worried about data privacy / protection and actually getting what they order. (Kind of like when you're on a slightly sketchy Shopify site so you use PayPal as a security blanket.)
Consumers want to see themselves portrayed in brands’ efforts as they are more likely to feel that the brand is for them, but a seamless, trustworthy experience is the first critical piece in encouraging them to shop.
Attack Vectors
Looks like we got a little China in our telcos, and it’s not a good thing. State-backed hackers gained access to a number of US telcos via unpatched network hardware, etc.
Lots can be said about this smart voice device that can take over story time duty for you, but this isn’t a parenting newsletter (it just exists at the whims of parenting). What this device does signal is the true commercialization of voice prints and the coming (potential) deep voice crisis. This technology has existed for a bit, and has been exploited for financial gain, but now it’s coming to a kids’ toy. The Future!
ICYMI, Spotify was offline recently. It's because they forgot to renew their SSL certificate. So, good reminder to check in on your various domain-related renewals so you don't get caught offline. (And another reminder that the weakest link in any tech chain is the human one.)
MongoDB is releasing a feature that might, actually, create secure databases. Can you imagine living in a world where our data could remain private? A digital utopia.
Didn't submit that form you filled out? It's fine, they may have gotten your email address anyway. This is the stuff that makes people dislike marketing.
Say goodbye to ad blocking in Chrome early next year, their new extensions platform will make it much harder for tools like these to function properly. Another good reminder that privacy is at odds with Google's core business model.
Alternates & Assorteds
More devices means more screens. But what if those screens didn't look like screens? Google is doing work (among others, I'm sure) to add screens to surfaces without, well, adding screens. Ambient computing continues to be way more interesting to me than VR.
Might we have a new phone worth paying attention to on the market? Nothing is getting ready to launch phone (1) and I'm intrigued. Mostly because of how awesome the earbuds look and their general aesthetic and philosophy is intriguing.
On the flipside of hope, it can be really tough to build a Google-free phone.
Space is the place for solar power plants! Maybe. NASA will tell us for sure at some point.
Algae-powered computers coming soon to a desk near you? I mean, probably not. At least the "soon" part. But this is really cool. Scientists made, essentially, a AA battery from blue-green algae that powered a computer chip for 6 months via photosynthesis.
I solemnly swear I'm up to no good. Invisibility cloaks may step out of the pages of fiction and into our reality. Which is both awesome and terrifying.