Today in Digital Marketing - Are Google’s Brand-Keyword Changes Good for Marketers?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, June 29th. Today, big changes coming to Google campaigns targeting your brand name. TikTok clamps down on advertising to young people. With Reddit under siege, how does this affect your brand's safety on the platform? And why is Instagram suddenly deleting accounts, all from one specific category? I'm Todd Maffitt, That's ahead today in digital marketing. Google this morning announced it is adding new options for advertisers who use their own brand names as keywords. It's all a little complicated. So our Google Ads correspondent Jill Saskin-Gales

Starting point is 00:00:37 is here with the details. Jill, high level, what did they announce today? Google had previously announced that we are going to be able to put some brand restrictions around Performance Max campaigns. So if you didn't want your Performance Max to target mostly brand searches, you could exclude your brand. But what Ginny Marvin, the ads liaison, announced today is something called brand restrictions for broad match. And I'm going to read straight from her here because it's very new. She says, this allows you to restrict or limit your ads to searches that include the brands and products related to those brands you want to search for. So rather than trying to exclude brand from a broad match campaign, it's the opposite. You can limit your ads only to searches that include certain brands. It's the opposite of

Starting point is 00:01:24 what people are trying to do when you're trying to make your broad go out and be broad, right, and not be on your brand. But what's interesting is she's saying this enables you to use broad match to reach more relevant brand traffic. So now she's saying you can use broad match keywords for a branded search campaign. So let's say your brand is, I don't know, Nike, rather than having to put, you know, Nike, Nike shoes, whatever it'd be, in exact match, and then start to put negative keywords in because Adidas now matches your exact match and all these things. Instead, you can put this new brand restriction for broad match around the brand of Nike. And because of

Starting point is 00:02:01 the way Google's knowledge graph works, Google understands what's related to Nike and what's not. And that would be enough to use a broad match keyword for Nike to run a brand campaign. At least that's what the promise is. And if it turns out it works as suggested, this is truly revolutionary for the way keywords works because it's moving us more towards this search theme idea we saw in Performance Max rather than nitty gritty individual exact match phrase match keywords with negatives, etc. These brand restrictions for broad match keywords actually remind me of an audience signal in Performance Max. As we know, Performance Max is fully automated. You can't choose your targeting,

Starting point is 00:02:40 but you can provide an audience signal to guide the automation in the right direction. Ultimately, of course, it will try to find conversions to hit your CPA or ROAS goal. And so similarly, these brand restrictions for broad match, it's not guaranteeing you will or won't serve on certain keywords, but it allows you to guide the automation to say, here are the kind of brand searches I'm looking for. Find me more stuff like this. So giving you some, I wouldn't call it control, but at least guiding the missile rather than just launching it and sprang and prang. What's your gut feel on how this would affect the auction and the pricing of ads? It's going to get more advertisers advertising on more queries, so it's going to drive prices up. That's what I would guess. That's what Performance Facts does, right?

Starting point is 00:03:29 It gets more people advertising in more places they wouldn't previously have advertised. And more competition means an increase in pricing. But an increase in price isn't necessarily a bad thing because the flip side is for those advertisers with sufficient budget and sufficient data, it's also opening up a lot more opportunity that you probably wouldn't have found on your own without the AI's help. So it's kind of dual sides. Costs could go up, but performance can go up as well, at least for larger advertisers. I think smaller advertisers, again, are still going to struggle with this because Google does not have a concept of Joe Schmo shop around the corner and what constitutes a brand search for that or not the way it does for a large brand like Nike or Lululemon or Shopify or whatever it might be. Is this on the platform right now or is this something that's coming? Ginny says brand restrictions will roll out globally

Starting point is 00:04:15 next week. And so this is important. So now there's something called brand exclusions where you want to exclude your brand. This is now called brand restrictions. You are restricting to just your brand. I think the naming is confusing. In typical Google fashion, the naming is always confusing. But brand restrictions will roll out globally next week. Overall, do you see this as a net positive, net negative for advertisers and marketers? I think that a lot of people are going to see this as a negative because the more we lose control, the more people see it as a negative. But if you are like me and you accept the fact that keywords are going away, then I see this definitely as a net positive because it's allowing you to still have your good old fashioned brand campaign like you've always had before, but have

Starting point is 00:05:00 it be more targeted and more focused than just putting in a bunch of random broad match keywords and hoping and praying. Jill Sassengales is our Google Ads correspondent. She's also a Google Ads trainer and consultant. You can learn more about her at our affiliate link at b.link slash GA training. TikTok is making it harder for you to run ads to teenagers. The company updated its policies yesterday, eliminating off-platform activity from its ad targeting process for young people. From now on, people in the U.S., age 13 to 15,

Starting point is 00:05:37 will no longer see personalized ads on TikTok based on their activities off TikTok. While people in Europe, the UK, and Switzerland, aged 13 to 17, will no longer see personalized ads on TikTok based on their activities on or off TikTok. Those changes bring the platform into compliance with the upcoming EU Digital Services Act, which outlines new limitations on targeting young people.

Starting point is 00:06:04 TikTok is also introducing several new updates to increase transparency, including a new Clear My Activity feature, which lets users clear activity details shared by TikTok with advertising partners and businesses, an improved content transparency label that will indicate brand partnerships, and a limited data use feature to comply with U.S. state privacy laws. Protests on Reddit have now entered the third week where users are revolting against its massive API fees. But as The Drum reports today, these protests have taken a new turn that raises brand safety concerns for advertisers, specifically the practice known as porn bombing. When the protests started, thousands of popular subreddits went offline.

Starting point is 00:06:54 Now, protesters have adopted a more unconventional tactic, violating the platform's not-safe-for-work rules. Some moderators recently started letting users post porn and other NSFW content in communities without an NSFW tag, violating the CERN's terms and conditions and its moderator code of conduct. As a result, several subreddits were quickly flooded with porn. But as the report points out, porn bombing extends beyond upsetting leadership and causing chaos. It also jeopardizes the platform's advertising business. As it stands, Reddit prohibits advertising in NSFW subreddits or alongside NSFW content. But some of that content is leaking through anyway. A screenshot on Twitter showed a Lincoln ad displayed beneath a pornographic video on the Reddit all page, which essentially serves as the platform's homepage.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Aaron Metzger is the head of strategy at the Genius Marketing Agency in Texas. They've worked with clients like Timex, Post and GoodRx. I spoke with him this afternoon. Subreddits are going NSFW, which means some brands ads might end up appearing on the same screen full as nudity, which is, of course, a theoretical brand safety issue. But do we know whether consumers actually draw a negative parallel with the brand or are most users able to recognize that the brand didn't literally sponsor porn? anybody that goes to not safe for work subreddits or that are that are labeled that way you've got to be logged in or you have to go through that gate anyway that says you're over 18 so they kind of know what they're getting into but you know really this is for the power users or the regular users of reddit you know redditors that have been around for a while and it's more about making a statement from the mods than it is anything else. I don't think that there's any real concern with brands feeling like they're identifying with pornography. I don't think that that's

Starting point is 00:08:50 going to be a problem. I think it's more of a PR issue for Reddit than it is anything else. Where does Reddit stand in the media buying world? You own an agency. I've always thought of Reddit as part of that experimental spend part of the pie, like the, you know, the let's throw some money here and see what happens kind of a part of the pie. Is that accurate? How much of your agency's spend goes to Reddit? Not a whole lot. There's an opportunity for Reddit to be a really great advertising platform. I think one of the challenges are it's the community in general, right? I mean, the platform started 13, 14 years ago, something like that. And it's been historically very anti, you know, very anti-company, anti-advertising. And so it was kind of built into the platform to begin with. And the user base has been there for a long time, like I have.

Starting point is 00:09:39 Advertising just doesn't really make sense, especially in the capacity that they do it. You know, display advertisements might make sense, but really the power of the platform and people identifying with specific types of content and putting in identifiable information or demographic information, what they're into, what they like, who they engage with, all that stuff is really important for advertisers to be able to capitalize on. But Reddit's just never been a very big platform to get a lot of positive ad engagement. Aaron Metzger leads the Genius Marketing Agency in Texas. Their website is GeniusDM.com. A spokesperson for Reddit told media today

Starting point is 00:10:16 that its brand safety controls are currently working as intended. Do you have business insurance? as intended. to breaches and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Microsoft continues to push generative AI, this time the company adding several new AI-powered shopping tools for consumers to both Bing and Edge today. First, Bing now uses AI to generate buying guides based on the product or category of product shoppers are researching. It will also provide users with product suggestions and show the specifications of multiple similar items next to each other in an automatically generated compare table so consumers can compare options. U.S. users can now access buying guides in Bing and Edge's global rollout begins today. Microsoft is also launching AI-generated review summaries today, which will sum up online reviews of products when customers ask Bing chat

Starting point is 00:11:32 in Edge to summarize what people are saying about a product. And finally, Microsoft is also adding an interesting new price match feature that continuously monitors prices even after a customer purchases a product so they can request a price match retroactively from the retailer if the price drops. This feature will roll out in U.S. search results soon. LinkedIn is taking more steps toward luring creators to the platform. The professional network is reportedly experimenting with a new shared analytics feature, which would let creator mode users share data with businesses via collaborative campaigns. Quoting social media today, that would see LinkedIn moving in line with creator monetization approaches of other apps, providing a new pathway to targeted promotion for brands and a new way for LinkedIn influencers to actually generate direct revenue from their presence.

Starting point is 00:12:29 LinkedIn's creator mode, which is available to all users with more than 150 connections and a history of sharing original content, was a first step toward facilitating more direct brand building and presence in the app, which can boost your professional profile and better position you as a thought leader in your niche, unquote. Instagram is removing sex-positive accounts without warning, according to a report from Wired today. One of the affected accounts was Club Verboten, a London-based kink space and party venue with more than 70,000 followers. When the founder recently attempted to log into Instagram,

Starting point is 00:13:09 they discovered the account had been suspended, this despite adhering to the platform's guidelines by not posting nudity. This is not an isolated case. At least 45 sexuality-related accounts have been removed from Instagram in recent weeks, affecting sex workers, activists, fetish parties, and members of the sex-positive community. According to a Meta spokesperson, the removals were due to violations related to nudity and sexual solicitation. The spokesperson did admit, though, that some of the accounts were mistakenly removed and have since been reinstated. But the lack of transparency regarding the trigger for these removals has

Starting point is 00:13:45 raised concerns. Several suspended sex-positive users told Wired they weren't given an explanation for their suspension and didn't hear from Meta after appealing their bans. A new report suggests hate speech on Twitter has increased under Elon Musk, but it's not the only platform to see this. The Anti-Defamation League published a study this week that highlighted a broader rise in abusive language on several platforms over the past year. The study indicates a significant surge in online hate and harassment among adults and teenagers aged 13 to 17. A third of surveyed adults say they were harassed online within the last 12 months. Among teenagers, that number grows to half. The report found harassment was up on Twitter, but also on Reddit, TikTok, and WhatsApp.

Starting point is 00:14:46 On Twitter specifically, the report notes that the changes occurred after Elon Musk's acquisition. Musk welcomed back users previously banned for violating anti-hate policies and dissolved the Trust and Safety Council. Following his takeover, researchers documented a surge in anti-Semitism with reinstated accounts spreading anti-Semitic content and inciting harassment among their followers. Twitter also relaxed rules against anti-transgender hate and shifted its policy from removing violative hateful content to de-amplifying it instead. The report suggests these changes have contributed to an increase in abuse and harassment through tweets. And finally, with the end of Google's universal analytics just days away now, one brand marketing agency has found a way to poke a little fun at it. They produced a video about the impending GA4 rollout in the style of a movie trailer. The agency is BloomLTV.

Starting point is 00:15:45 They specialize in high growthgrowth tech scale-ups. Here's a clip. I have an idea. Take Universal Analytics and blow it up. What are you building out here? The future. Looks like you just made everything more confusing and got rid of reports

Starting point is 00:16:04 everyone loved. I call it GA4 People are saying it's hard to migrate to And even harder to understand They won't migrate to it until they understand it And they won't understand it Even if they've used it What? Desert must be making my GA4-Burdak funny.

Starting point is 00:16:30 I can't see the specific number of users I've had today. It keeps rounding them off. It's not acting funny. It's GA4. You're talking about blowing up a product that people have been using for 20 years. Don't worry. I'll send them reminders. And then remind them again with increasingly confusing reminders.

Starting point is 00:16:50 When we push that button, we destroy Universal Analytics. But we're keeping everyone's data, right? Right? Right? Right? Now I am become GA4, the destroyer of analytics. Everything comes down to this. My greatest creation. The video is definitely worth watching.

Starting point is 00:17:12 Super high production values. It's up on their Instagram account. Their account is at bloomltd. Friends, my coffee experiment might be coming to a close. If you've been following this, I've been off coffee because the creamer that I put in it, and I can't drink it black, is like 160 calories. So I've switched to these like energy drinks that are like 10 calories, but it might be all over. My wife ratted me out to our friend who is an ER nurse.

Starting point is 00:17:43 So I'm sure I will be told to knock it off soon. We'll see. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Are Google’s Brand-Keyword Changes Good for Marketers?

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