Today in Digital Marketing - Blue Monday

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

The U.S. declares Google an illegal monopoly. What's next for one of the world's biggest ad platforms? Netflix's ad prices keep dropping. Apple has another privacy feature your web site isn't going to like. And why you might have paid for your competitor's ads last week.Links to today's stories Rate and Review Us • Contact Us 📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usGO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our SlackUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Tuesday, August 6th. Today, the U.S. declares Google an illegal monopoly. What's next for one of the world's biggest ad platforms? Netflix's ad prices keep dropping. Apple has another privacy feature your website isn't going to like. And why you might have paid for your competitor's ads last week. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. Historians will remember the time that Microsoft decided to bundle its Internet Explorer browser

with Windows. Prior to that, there were a handful of third-party browsers, Opera, Netscape Navigator, but Microsoft put its then-new Internet Explorer into every install of Windows. The result was obvious. Internet Explorer became the dominant browser. The other thing that happened was that put the company on the radar of regulators. And in 1998, the American Justice Department

and 20 states filed a lawsuit against the company for monopolistic practices. It was messy. Bill Gates was called evasive and non-responsive at his deposition. He argued over the definition of words like ask and we. He said the phrase, I don't recall, so many times it made the presiding judge laugh.

In one case, Microsoft submitted a video showing how fast and easy it was for users to install Netscape onto their PCs. But the government submitted its own video, which showed that Microsoft had edited out a long and complex part of the process. A company vice president eventually conceded they'd falsified the video. Microsoft lost its case. Google's antitrust case, which has been going on since last fall, didn't really surface any eye-popping gotcha moments like those, but apparently it didn't need any. Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that Google unlawfully held a monopoly in the online search and ad market, and in particular, called out the payments Google makes to companies like Apple to be the default search engine on those devices. Those are huge payments, by the way. The deal Apple has with Google provides

it 17% of its profits. If history is any guide, the relief could be divisive. After Microsoft lost its case, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft into two separate units, one for its Windows operating system, the other for everything else. Microsoft appealed and won. But it didn't win on the merits of the ruling, rather on a technicality. The judge, it seemed, had discussed the case with news media while it was still in progress, violating a code of conduct. So while the main findings still stood, Microsoft did bad things, the breakup order was overturned. In the end, all Microsoft had to do was to agree to share its APIs with third-party companies and appoint an independent panel of reviewers to monitor that for five years. Many industry watchers at the time said that Microsoft had won, even though it had lost.

So what's next for Google? Well, everyone now moves to the penalty phase where the judge will decide how to remedy the monopoly. What exactly that looks like is anyone's guess. It could order the cancellation of that lucrative Google-Apple deal. It could require Google to split its browser and operating system. And in just over a month,

Google will be back in court for a different antitrust trial, this one focusing on its ads platform. The American Justice Department says in that case, Google has an illegal dominance in the digital ad market, allegedly boosting its revenue while raising costs for advertisers. We have the entire Google court ruling in our email newsletter today. Just tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. If you run Google ads, you may have noticed that the reporting side of the platform was down for several days at the start of this month.

And one important part of it is still down. Now we have more details on what caused that outage. And it ain't pretty. It turns out it wasn't a bug or scheduled maintenance. Instead, Google turned the reporting functionality off manually after it was discovered to be surfacing confidential information. Specifically, some advertisers reported they could see the ad performance data of their direct competitors

by searching for their product titles, and presumably their competitors could see their data. This meant that some advertisers unknowingly ran ads for their competitors could see their data. This meant that some advertisers unknowingly ran ads for their competitors. Here's SEO professional Greg Finn on the Search Engine Roundtable podcast. You're saying it wasn't necessarily a reporting issue, that it was an actual serving issue, and they took down reporting based on the serving issue? Yes. There were other products that were being assigned to your Google Ads account from a different merchant center, then you were going out and paying for them. So Barry, you're running a sock company and you

are having Morty's underwear come into your feed and that is causing the issue. So instead of just like seeing it, they shut the reporting down, which in turn makes my life hard. It's just like, I just want to see what's happening. Like, let me see if there's something out there. So the way they worded that is like made it sound like it was like an issue with the reports and now they're going back and they said they temporarily paused access to certain reports on so they paused those for products product groups and listing groups which are the actual like blueprints for shopping campaigns google did acknowledge the issue saying,

quote, starting on July 30th, a small fraction of advertisers started serving ads for products from other Google Merchant Center accounts and were able to see those products in their ads reporting, unquote. A Google spokesperson said they'd be contacting all affected advertisers soon

and will hand out credits in compensation, though it's kind of hard to put a value on revenue loss if your competitors were able to see how your product ads perform. This afternoon, Google reported that most reports were back up, with the exception of some competitive metrics. It also said it has removed the incorrect data from affected accounts. More control is being taken from the hands of media buyers. Meta is removing detailed targeting exclusions for all new campaigns going forward.

These exclusions let advertisers remove cohorts from their campaigns based on demographics, interests, or behaviors. For instance, you could run ads to everyone interested in shoes, but exclude people who are interested in high-end fashion. But Meta says its AI knows better than you do, and that costs per conversion go down when those exclusions are removed. The company says it'll take a couple of months to drop this into all accounts, and that rollout actually started a couple of weeks ago. If your campaign already has these exclusions set up before your account gets hit by this, those settings will still work until the end of January. Getting to this point, though, was a little weird. Quoting social media

today, quote, Meta first announced a change to its ad targeting exclusions back in January, when it removed and consolidated some of its targeting options due to lack of use. Then in May, Meta sent out an alert to advertisers explaining that targeting exclusions would be removed entirely by June 28th, which it then clarified had been sent in error and that there were no plans to remove the option. It then removed them a month later. So those plans changed pretty quick, unquote. One important note, Meta is leaving in place the ability to exclude custom audiences. This, for instance, is what lets marketers keep ads away from people who've already bought the product being advertised. Do you have business insurance?

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Netflix is lowering its ad prices again, with CPMs now ranging between $20 and $30 for some inventory. Since announcing its plan to sell ads nearly two years ago, Netflix's ad rates have been dropping significantly. Initial CPMs were as high as $65 in 2022, but have since fallen to the current range of $20 to $30. The reduced ad prices make Netflix more competitive with rivals like Amazon's Prime Video, which launched its ad tier earlier this year with CPMs starting at $26. Despite having a smaller ad-supported audience than some competitors, Netflix still boasts the second-largest streaming viewership in the U.S. behind YouTube. The lower prices coincide with Netflix's push into programmatic advertising.

The streamer's partnering with ad tech firms like the Trade Desk, Google's Display & Video 360, and Magnite to test its new ad server. Is Apple a villain or a hero? Well, that depends on who you ask. Its customers might tell you it's the hero after crippling the ability for apps to track their behavior online.

Advertisers? Well, you can probably guess their feeling on that. Apple's moves a few years ago to block tracking shook up the digital ad space. Meta said it lost $10 billion because of it. Now, Apple is poised to bring one more good-for-users, bad-for-marketers tool to their devices, something it calls Distraction Control. It works in Apple's Safari browser, and users just need to tap the screen to remove content blocks.

Some of these blocks are used by marketers, auto-playing videos and content overlays like newsletter subscription signups. This feature has just started beta testing with developers. These choices hold over for future visits to the site, unless some content in that block changes, then that block will come back again. To be clear, this is not an ad blocker. You'll still need an extension like OneBlocker for that. Instead, this is closer to what the newish Arc browser calls boosts. Quoting Computer World, quote, because this new tool might reduce the

effectiveness of some of the most annoying on-page elements out there, it seems inevitable Apple will face resistance from the marketing world once again. Perhaps the most controversial part of this involves the economics of running websites. Many site publishers have seen income yields fall dramatically since tougher GDPR rules came into effect. The impact of these has been particularly tough on small web publishers who, in some cases, have seen incomes collapse. Many of these had turned to subscriptions and mailing lists in an attempt to claw back some of this income, and Apple's new feature could make the task of attracting those signups more difficult. That nice little third-party Yelp tool you use to manage your reviews or keep your page updated

might be turning off soon, and you can blame Elon Musk for it. Yelp recently shifted indie platform developers to paid accounts, saying they were using too much of the system's resources. And worse, it only gave the developers four days' notice. Developers were given a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting at $229 for just 1,000 API calls. Currently, that's priced at less than $10 for just 1,000 API calls. Currently, that's priced at less than $10 for those 1,000 calls. This, of course, sparked outrage among developers.

If this sounds like a familiar tactic, that's because, unfortunately, it's becoming a trend. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, he implemented huge price hikes in the API. That resulted in the shutdown of many third-party apps and tools. Later, Reddit basically carbon-copied Elon's API price hikes and, with short notice, hiked up the price for their services as well. Both platforms said they had to do it

because AI sites were coming along and stealing data, but one convenient side effect was the shutdown of many apps which didn't carry ads. This forced users to use the platform's own apps, which many users, especially in the case of Reddit, consider inferior. Well, some Yelp tools have already shut down because of the sudden and dramatic price hike. The developer of one Mac app called Restaurants said Yelp used to let him use up to 25,000 daily calls for free, a model that's been in place for a decade. They emailed him Friday with that four-day deadline. For its part, Yelp said it moved to a paid pricing model in 2019 and has been gradually transitioning developers to a paid plan.

It apologized for the way it communicated the change and extended free usage for 90 days. But many developers remain upset over the four-day deadline and the company's handling of the communication. Just a reminder that you can follow us on social media. We are almost everywhere. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Just go to todayindigital.com slash social or tap the link at the top of the show notes. Tomorrow, new research shows there is a right and wrong way to show discounted prices on a website.

And half of you are doing it the wrong way. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.