Today in Digital Marketing - Click Wars: How Companies Are Removing Their Competitors' Ads

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Wednesday, February 7th. Today, an apparent bug at Google lets your competitors take your ads offline. Snapchat's numbers are growing, but revenue is slowing. The digital ad industry still doesn't like Google's post-cookie plans. And why TikTok wants to add a second app to your phone's home screen. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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,

Starting point is 00:00:38 your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Reports say a strange but devastating loophole in Google's business profile system is letting companies knock their competitors' ads offline. Quoting SE Roundtable, quote, you can essentially hijack or destroy a Google business profile that is also using local service ads. What happens is if someone else links their local service ads to that same Google business profile, the local service ads will stop performing.

Starting point is 00:01:21 There is a complaint about this in the Google business profiles forum. Quote, a company makes a new local service ad for a competitor. stop performing. There is a complaint about this in the Google Business Profiles forum, quote, a company makes a new local service ad for a competitor, and because the link to Google Business Profile is automatic, the system will essentially nuke the competitor out of existence, unquote. The story quotes one business owner, quote, we had a Google local service ad account that was working pretty well. All of a sudden, we quit getting leads and even spam. Every time I call Google customer support, they give me a scripted runaround. I finally got a rep to look into it, and he told me that our Google My Business profile has two local service ads linked to it, which is causing our ads to be invisible.

Starting point is 00:02:02 When I check our business profile, there's only one account linked to us, and it's the one I set up. I've only ever set up one LSA account, and I'm the only one with access and credentials to do so. I'm being told that I cannot unlink this other unknown LSA account because I don't know any of the credentials of that other account. Their solution was for me to unlink our 10-year-old account with established reviews and start a new Google business profile from scratch, unquote. These reports only recently started circulating around social media. Google's liaison to the ad community said she would alert the appropriate team inside Google. But if you've noticed a sudden drop off

Starting point is 00:02:45 with your brand's local service ads, this might be something to check up on. Snapchat reported its Q4 numbers yesterday. Daily active users rose to 414 million. That's a 10% year-over-year increase. But the platform lost a million users in North America during the holiday period, with most growth coming from the rest-of-the-world segment. The company says it now plans to shift focus to more mature markets like North America and Europe. User engagement on Snapchat's Spotlight feed surged, although funding for Snap Originals programming was discontinued. Instead, Snapchat aims to collaborate with popular creators and facilitate brand deals for them.

Starting point is 00:03:28 Augmented reality remains a focal point for Snap, with more than 350,000 creators building AR lenses. The company shut down its third-party AR development platform last fall to cut costs. Revenue for the quarter was up 5% year over year, which fell short of analyst expectations. One thing is clear, despite its niche audience appeal, especially among teens, Snapchat does face some big limitations in resonating beyond its core demographic. And its AR ambitions now face new competition from tech giants like Meta and Apple. TikTok has for some time now been trying to position itself as a search app too,

Starting point is 00:04:15 kind of like how YouTube was once thought of as only a place for entertainment. But now many people, myself included, often turn to it first if I need a walkthrough of how to program my coffee machine or which kitchen weight scale is the best. Now, TikTok is upping the ante with a dedicated mobile shortcut people can add to their home screens that when tapped will bypass the usual for you feed and pop people right into a search bar. How much of a threat is TikTok search to Google search?

Starting point is 00:04:40 Consider this, back in 2021, Cloudflare said in that year, more people went to TikTok's website than they went to Google's. Quoting social media today. Back in 2022, a Google executive even acknowledged the threat that TikTok poses to its core search business. It's not close as yet, but if TikTok can encourage more search related activity, it could become a more embedded process for the next generation of consumers. And, as noted, that'll also give the platform more opportunity to build on what users go looking for in-stream. In China, for example, on the local version of TikTok, you can already search for local businesses, restaurants, entertainment, etc. You can even order food to be delivered direct from the app. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

Starting point is 00:05:36 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Google's Privacy Sandbox, their alternative to traditional online tracking cookies, is facing more scrutiny from the digital advertising industry. The IAB Tech Lab recently released a 106-page analysis highlighting how the privacy sandbox falls short in supporting crucial advertising functions, like measurement and brand safety,

Starting point is 00:06:16 compared to the current cookie-based system. Critics argue that while striving for a privacy-focused digital advertising future is important, the focus on Sandbox's limitations might hinder that process. Quoting martech.org, quote, events-based impressions and click metrics will be abandoned in favor of aggregated reporting. IAB Tech Lab says this will make bid loss analysis impossible. The implementation of an ad exchange and ad server itself will The IAB spent more than six months consulting with leaders from 65 companies has criticized the report, saying it contains errors and inaccuracies, but expressed a willingness to work with the IAB Tech Lab toward more private advertising solutions. The analysis is now open for public comment until March 22nd. We have a direct link to the full report on our newsletter today, which you can sign up to by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter.

Starting point is 00:07:32 One of the big complaints people had about TikTok is there wasn't a tablet version. Sure, you could use the regular mobile app, but the tablet would just increase the whole screen size and call it a day. That meant all the UI elements were bigger, the video quality wasn't as good, and so on. Well, now TikTok has unveiled a tablet edition. It comes with orientation support. In other words, you can rotate it 90 degrees. Why would you want to do that? Well, to watch landscape videos like the ones TikTok started recently pushing its creators to upload, apparently in a full frontal assault against YouTube and its lucrative ad dollars.

Starting point is 00:08:09 And finally, YouTube is adding live streams to its vertical video feed, much in the same way TikTok does. Viewers can join the live streams by tapping on the watch live button that pops up. While the vertical live streaming isn't new on YouTube, this is the first time these broadcasts have been put in the Shorts feed, which many people just swipe through from video to video. Another update, they're letting podcasters upload their RSS feeds directly into YouTube Studio. This will create a static image for each podcast episode, making it a little easier for users to discover and listen to podcast content through that app. If you're trying to reach marketing decision makers, an ad on this podcast or newsletter,

Starting point is 00:08:55 some slots, just seven bucks, tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash ads. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Click Wars: How Companies Are Removing Their Competitors' Ads

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