Today in Digital Marketing - Equal Parts Predictable and Sad

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, September 18th. Today, Google takes on Twitter's ads, but they don't seem thrilled about it. AdSense gains some real-time site verification. YouTube can now tell you how far clips of your brand's content has gone. And how far does a pebble ripple? AI will probably tell you. 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

Starting point is 00:00:31 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. A recent update to Google Ads has thrown a number of advertisers for a bit of a loop, and today the company apologized for the confusion. What happened was that the platform started migrating configurations from the old Universal Analytics system to the new GA4 system.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Quoting Martech.org, Google is automatically migrating configurations, such as goals, audiences, etc., from your UA property that have not been marked as complete to your GA4 property. This also includes conversion swapping and audience pairing in linked Google Ads accounts for opted-in properties. The update will impact anyone who has not opted out of automatically created GA4 properties, unquote. This had been communicated. Google says it sent emails out to account managers, but it still seems like the move surprised a lot of people. If you don't want Google to auto-configure your GA4 property, here's how to set that up. First, click on Admin

Starting point is 00:01:45 in your account. Select your Universal Analytics property. In the Property column, click GA4 Setup Assistant. Click on Disconnect next to your Connected property. Then go to your GA4 property and delete it. Also, if you're curious to know if this happened in your account, you can go to the Change History section. If you were affected, you will see system migration in the changed by column. Remember that this is a pretty simple move over. So if you have more specific setups or more complicated workflows, it's definitely worth double checking your GA4 to make sure things are working the way you want. You will soon be able to buy programmatic ads on X through Google's ad manager, making it simpler for media buyers to consolidate their work.

Starting point is 00:02:41 Google confirmed the deal with media earlier today with a more cautious sounding statement than they usually do. Normally, announcements like this come with overly excited statements attributed to vice presidents about how thrilled they are to welcome so-and-so to their growing list of partners, blah, blah, blah. This time, it was the head of ads policy communications at Google who spoke to Marketing Brew, saying, quote, this is an opportunity for our advertisers to reach a broader audience, but as always, they can choose what sites and apps their ads run on. Any publisher who participates in this type of partnership must abide by our publisher policies, unquote. Obviously, Google's aware of X's latest moves

Starting point is 00:03:16 and those of its owner, which have made some advertisers flee the platform. Elon Musk confirmed this past summer that ad revenue was down 50%. This is part of a recent change from X's previous Twitter-era practice of working directly with advertisers and not using a third-party platform. But earlier this year, X signed a deal with ad tech platform InMobi. X's CEO last week announced she was bringing in some new blood to the management ranks, people she'd worked with before at NBCUniversal, hiring a new head of content, talent and brand sales, a new global

Starting point is 00:03:49 agency leader and a new revenue operation lead. Earlier today, Elon Musk said the company was planning a less expensive tier of its premium program. So far, fewer than one third of one percent of X users have signed up for the paid blue checkmark. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com.

Starting point is 00:04:33 Be protected. Be Zen. Google AdSense has upgraded its site verification methods with a few changes aimed at making it easier to verify your site ownership and check your ads.txt status. Here is what's new. First, when you add a new site in AdSense, Google will now verify your site ownership and check your ads.txt status. Here is what's new. First, when you add a new site in AdSense, Google will now verify your site ownership in real time. They've added a new verification method, letting you use a meta tag in your HTML instead of the AdSense code snippet. They've added a last crawled date and time to the ads.txt section, so you can see when AdSense last checked the file. And they've also added a new check for updates button. So you can ask AdSense to recheck your ads.txt file. These updates were rolled out on Friday. T2 has a new name. The website sprung up

Starting point is 00:05:24 in the weeks after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, T2 meaning it was the second Twitter. It was started by a former Twitter product manager. Today, it rebranded to Pebble. And in a move that's equal parts predictable and sad, it now lets users ask generative AI to write posts from scratch for them. It'll even brainstorm what topics to write about. That's different from the current social media AI, like LinkedIn's PostWriter or Meta's AdWriter,

Starting point is 00:05:53 in that those tools need you to at least give it a topic of your own thinking or some starter text to grab onto. But no, in this case, bots can write posts without any prompting. And other bots can also reply to those in one of three user-selectable tones, joking, supportive, or disagreement. Users do have the option to review the suggested text and edit it before it goes out. And Pebble's CEO says most do, but it still seems like another disheartening step away from authenticity. Pebble had only been open to people who had invitations from current users,

Starting point is 00:06:27 but now anyone with an account on X can sign up. Also, Google actually owns Pebble.com, so this site has chosen Pebble.is as its domain. The company recently closed $1.4 million in funding and has four employees. It plans to monetize through ads and subscription products. From a marketing perspective, I'd put this one on your lowest priority list. Wired says the site only has about 15,000 registered users. For now, most brands looking for a home from X seem to have kicked the tires on threads, and a few have protected their usernames on Mastodon or Blue Sky. But there has been no clear winner in the race to replace Twitter.

Starting point is 00:07:15 We do have a Pebble account, which we had put on ice, but I think we'll start posting headlines there to it again. We have a Pebble account, a Spoutable account, a Blue Sky account, a Threads account, a Mastodon account, and a Post.News account. In addition to LinkedIn and Facebook group and Facebook post, we're almost everywhere. And the links to the social media channels that we have are in the show notes. It's also usually easiest to find us by just looking for Today in Digital. That's our usual account name.

Starting point is 00:07:43 And mine is just my name, Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Equal Parts Predictable and Sad

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