Today in Digital Marketing - A Deep Dive Into Google's New "Ads Data Manager"

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Wednesday, October 11th. Today, piles of data, tangles of connections. Google offers a solution to first-party data overload, and we have expert analysis. Plus, how will California's latest privacy bill shake up the digital ad market? Your brand's business profiles might have edits you're not aware of, and a major programming announcement about this very podcast. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Google today launched a new tool it says will help you organize your first party data. First party data, of course, is becoming more important for marketers as the

Starting point is 00:01:02 traditional third party data foundation on which the digital ad industry was built starts to fall apart. When consumers reject third-party cookies or browsers do it for them, marketers have to collect that information themselves. This is partly why there's been an explosion of brand-specific apps and a resurgence in mailing lists. Sign up for either,

Starting point is 00:01:26 the brand doesn't need to get that data from someone else, a third party. They got it direct from the consumer. But as these new stacks of consented data pile up, getting them organized, categorized and monetized is becoming a challenge. Today, Google stepped in with what it believes is a solution, the Google Ads Data Manager. To walk us through that and what it means for marketers, I'm joined by our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskengales. Jill spent six years at Google and today runs the Inside Google Ads training program. All right, so what is this thing? The new Google Ads Data Manager promises to be a new tool that makes it quick, easy, simple to upload your first party data. So practically, it looks like it's kind of a combination of some audience manager features.

Starting point is 00:02:15 That's where you upload customer lists right now. Some conversion settings features. That's where you do things like upload offline conversions now. Some linked accounts settings where you might link things like Google Analytics to Google Ads. So bringing a bunch of things together that's going to help everyday marketers make better use of this first party data. Wait a minute. So is this like an actual separate site that happens to borrow from these other pools? Or is this much more like Meta's version of Advantage Plus, where there is no like Advantage Plus site, it's just a branding that it gave all of its generic, loose bits of AI?

Starting point is 00:02:52 Well, this one actually isn't about AI. This is one of the few announcements that hasn't been about AI that Google Ads is making. But Google Ads has been making a lot of updates to the interface and how Google Ads looks. And so from the screenshots we see in this announcement, we see a very different looking Google Ads interface where they brought a bunch of features together to one place. So this sounds like not a brand new tool or somewhere else to go to. It's within Google Ads, it's within tools and settings, and it's just pulling all the different things that have to do with first party data in tools and settings into one place together. So most of it is just a reorganization, simplification, better-to-use interface.

Starting point is 00:03:30 The only thing that looks to be brand new is allowing you to connect more of your marketing tools to Google Ads. So, for example, you'll soon be able to connect ActiveCampaign directly to Google Ads, which is great for conversion tracking and audience building. Right now, if you want to do that, you have to use a third-party tool like Zapier. But more of these direct integrations are coming, according to Google. And I do see in this screenshot that we also have in our newsletter today, Zapier is actually one of the connected products. So it's not like they're eliminating the middleware providers like Zapier,

Starting point is 00:04:08 but they're just letting you have more. It looks like they're building their own connections directly with some of these first party data pools like ActiveCampaign. Like what else do I see in here? Shopify is in here. Shopify is mentioned, Shopify audiences, which is so overdue, by the way. It's kind of crazy that today the only one that you can have a direct integration with is Salesforce. What small business uses Salesforce to manage their data? So I do think the simplification message is the key message they're pushing, mostly just trying to make it easier to use, which, you know, if we know how the Google Ads product team works, doesn't mean it will necessarily be easier to use. But making these connections easier and native within Google Ads should definitely make it easier for those who use these new integrated tools. These things are sometimes a little

Starting point is 00:04:53 confusing. So correct me if I'm wrong. This is my understanding of sort of the benefit of it is that you pull in all of these different, you know, you've got some Shopify audiences, you've got some mailing lists, maybe you've got some on HubSpot, you can pull all of these in to Google, which, you know, side note, I'm sure Google loves having, you know, even more massive amounts of data, which, you know, is their business model. And then can we then create like a Google ad audience out of that pooled data? Is that what the intention of this is? That's exactly it. There's two main intentions here. One is, as you mentioned, pulling in your own data. So it makes it much easier to use a feature like customer match, which lets you

Starting point is 00:05:35 advertise to people who are on your customer list and use that for bidding purposes and audience bidding purposes. Right now, if you want to do that, you have to set up a zap through Zapier, or you have to manually upload a spreadsheet. So this direct integration will make that simpler from an audience perspective. And then the other big use case is something that a lot of B2B and lead gen businesses use, which is called offline conversion import, OCT. And that's what happens when the only conversion you can track through Google Ads is if someone fills out a form or books a demo. And then you want to let Google Ads know, was this a qualified lead or not? Did it become a customer? Right now, the way you do that is uploading a bunch of that data back into Google Ads, which may already have that data, by connecting it directly to Google Ads, you won't have to manually do that anymore. It'll know not just who clicked to book the demo, but who actually later on became a customer, what the value was, integrating that all together. So it's useful for conversion tracking and audience building purposes. I wonder if down the line, they'll ever give us the ability to

Starting point is 00:06:46 run reports on the demographic components. You know, if you've got some in HubSpot, some from pulling from sources that Zapier is grabbing, some from Shopify audiences, you've got all of these silos of data, each of which may have their own demographic. You know, your HubSpot may lean more male, whereas your Shopify may lean more female. I wonder if by pooling- You can already do that, Todd. Oh, can you? Okay, tell me how.

Starting point is 00:07:12 Yeah, you can already do that in Google Ads in Audience Manager. So I don't know if they'll migrate this into this new tool or not, but if you have a customer list or a converters list that you've uploaded into Google Ads or connected to Google Ads. In Audience Manager, you go to, I believe it's called Audience Insights on the left-hand side, and it will tell you

Starting point is 00:07:29 what insights Google has about the people on your list. So kind of male, female location, sure. But then it goes beyond that, and it'll tell you which Google audiences members of your list belong to. So for example, are there a lot of them who are in market for certain products or in certain affinity groups? And you can also benchmark it against the US or Canada or whatever country you're in. So you can say, for example, people who are on my email subscriber list are three times more likely than the average Canadian to be in market for SEO and SEM services. For example, it will tell you that and that's functionality that's live in Google Ads today. And that's based on a customer list that you could create one massive customer list out of all of the pooled first party data that this new tool is promising to collect. Is that right? Like you import all of your different things, you create one big sort of

Starting point is 00:08:21 custom audience, and then you can run that analytics from there. Is that what you're talking about? Or are we still stuck to doing it by each silo? You can have one big customer list. You can segment it in different ways. The list just has to be big enough. So the smallest size today for a customer match list has to be a thousand matched email addresses or phone numbers. A thousand matched people it can identify, which usually means you have to upload a list of at least 1,100 to 1,200 people. Anecdotally, to see these kinds of insights,

Starting point is 00:08:49 I see you need a list that has closer to maybe 2,000 to 3,000 people. But if you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in your database, you can segment that in a variety of ways. Right now, you would do that manually. It remains to be seen if Google Ads Data Manager will make that process more simple,

Starting point is 00:09:05 or if in HubSpot or ActiveCampaign or whatever you use, you already have all these segmentations, that should then make it easier to use those same segmentations when analyzing your data in Google Ads. And like many things that Google has, don't go looking for it quite yet in your Ads Manager, is that right? That's right. They say this is just starting to roll out, which usually means it's rolling out to the largest accounts first, and it will be fully available in 2024, which I guess is only three months away. So next three to six months, you should start to see Google Ads Data Manager rolling out in your Google Ads account. Good stuff. Jill, thank you for this. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:09:41 That's Jill Saskin-Gales. She is our Google Ad correspondent. She is here every Wednesday. Most of those weeks, her column is exclusive to the Premium Podcast, which you can learn more about by tapping Go Premium in the show notes. Jill also has a fantastic Google Ads training program, which you can find at our affiliate link at b.link slash gatraining.

Starting point is 00:10:05 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:10:24 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is a slow news day, so let's just go to the lightning round, shall we? Amazon has reopened enrollment for its Seller Fulfilled Prime program. This is a program where merchants handle delivery but promise to get products to the customer within the two-day promised timeframe sold by the Prime program. Originally, Amazon had planned to charge a 2% fee on sales to the program, but then backed off.

Starting point is 00:10:52 We reported on this a couple of months ago that enrollment was coming back. Now it's back. A new California bill was signed into law yesterday. It will give residents of that American state the right to make a single request asking that data brokers delete their personal information. Californians already had a right sort of like this, but had to make multiple requests. It was hard to know which broker had what data. This aims to make it more consumer friendly. It doesn't go into effect until 2026.

Starting point is 00:11:19 And SE Roundtable is reporting today that Google appears to be editing the attributes of businesses which have Google business profiles. Things like changing cash only to no if any alternative payment option has been set to yes and removing the COVID testing center attribute entirely if it's set to no. The edits do make logical sense, but it's worth checking your brand's profile to make sure you're aware of any changes they may have done. And now a programming announcement. As you might know, this podcast is kind of a side project of our agency, EngageQ. We do engagement and moderation for brands. Well, we signed a big client last week. I'm off to the US for our brand briefing, the whole our team meet their team kind of stuff. I'm actually

Starting point is 00:12:10 really excited by this client. I'm hoping I can get permission to talk about them, but we'll see. Now, normally, in my absence, our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn fills in, but Steph is on mat leave. The rest of the team here is getting all the new client onboarding stuff worked out. So our next regular episode will be in a week's time next Wednesday. That doesn't mean our feed will be empty. We have lined up for deep dive interviews with marketing scientists and industry experts tomorrow. The surprising effect that privacy notices have on your brand's reputation.

Starting point is 00:12:45 Friday, new research showing that pushing ad frequency to uncomfortable levels can actually help your ad campaigns. Monday, marketing by DNA. Will genetic predisposition be a targeting criteria in Meta's ad manager soon? And Tuesday, how one little tweak to your product page can drive way more sales. The ins and outs of conversion rate optimization. So that is the next four days ahead before we are back to our regular episodes on Wednesday.

Starting point is 00:13:18 Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevins. Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. I'll be in your feed the next four days with those extended interviews.

Starting point is 00:13:37 Then we're back Wednesday, back to the normal daily newscasts. I'm Todd Mappin. Thanks for listening. See you then.

Today in Digital Marketing - A Deep Dive Into Google's New "Ads Data Manager"

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