Today in Digital Marketing - Google Needs a Better Undo Button

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

The biggest threat to digital agencies may be their clients… Why a privacy-focused browser is now waiting for Google’s permission… Buffer adds Facebook engagement… And an update to Core Web Vitals is good news for some web sites.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. Be protected, be Zen. Today, the biggest threat to digital agencies may be their clients. Be protected. Be Zen. It's Monday, April 12th, 2021. Happy first day of Ramadan. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. While this was embarrassing, and if you're a media buyer, probably infuriating, Google appears to have accidentally filed paperwork in a court case that suggests they were using data from past auctions to give their own media buying

an advantage. And worse, that court case, the online antitrust lawsuit against the state of Texas. The judge let them refile the paperwork, but not before the media had seen it. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, Google for years operated a secret program that used data from past bids in the company's digital advertising exchange to allegedly give its own ad-buying system an advantage over competitors. The program, known as Project Bernanke, wasn't disclosed to publishers who sold ads through Google's ad-buying systems. It generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the company annually,

the documents show. In its lawsuit, Texas alleges that the project gave Google an unfair competitive advantage over rivals. Google's use of bidding information, Texas alleges, amounted to insider trading in digital ad markets. Because Google had exclusive information about what other ad buyers were willing to pay, it could unfairly compete against rival ad-buying tools and pay publishers less on its winning bids for ad inventory. Unquote. Yikes. In a Google presentation that was leaked, the program was shown to have generated about $230 million in additional revenue in 2013 alone. An interesting think piece today on Marketing Dive about whether in-house agencies are choking the talent pipeline.

It's been a trend for several years now that larger brands are trying to fashion internal agencies that serve the brand's various departments as if they were external clients. That may be good for the bottom line, but Brian Dolan, the CEO of WorkReduce, writing in Marketing Dive Today, suggests this may end up hurting the whole industry. Quoting from his piece, Amid the growing migration from agency to in-house advertising teams, the market has ignored the essential role that agencies have traditionally filled. Agencies have typically been the talent farms for our industry. They've owned the fundamental role of finding, nurturing,

and growing entry-level talent across all aspects of the advertising business. The shift of these responsibilities to in-house brand teams is choking the pool of top advertising talent, making it difficult for both in-house and agency teams to fill open roles with candidates who have the right skill sets, unquote. It is a big issue. A Digiday survey found 83% of marketers were now managing their marketing mostly in-house or completely in-house. It's really an excellent piece and well worth the read,

and you will find it today on marketingdive.com. As the various platforms ramp up their plans to counter the looming cookiepocalypse, the privacy-focused tools are deep into planning how to counter the counters. The people behind the DuckDuckGo search engine and browser say they plan to block Flock in their browser, Flock, F-L-O-C, of course being Google's new method of tracking browser activity in Chrome. And while Flock's whole thing is to group people into behavioral buckets rather than allow individuals to be tracked, users will be automatically opted into being part of these buckets in Chrome. Google says the new system is 95% as effective as third-party cookies,

though it's all too new to have had any studies on that. So DuckDuckGo is working on a flock block, but there's one problem. In order to block things in Chrome, they have to do it as a Chrome extension, which requires the approval of Google. One thing is certain, the next few months will be very volatile indeed in the digital marketing space. Some good news coming for social media community managers who use Buffer, the platform this morning announced they will be adding the ability to engage with Facebook comments on their platform.

It's been a buffy road for Buffer. A few years back, they bought an engagement tool that let its users reply to comments and posts on all the major platforms, rebranded it to Buffer Reply, and then only a year or two later shut it all down, saying they were not happy with the tool's performance. A couple of months ago, they rolled out a standalone Instagram engagement tool. Now they're adding Facebook to it, so it looks like they are slowly building that old reply functionality back in, one platform at a time.

This time, unlike the older version, they aren't pricing it as a separate product. It is being built into their main platform, at least for now. A small technical change to how Google calculates cumulative layout shift may be very good news indeed for websites that have long pages or single-page apps. Cumulative layout shift is one of three metrics that make up Google's new core web vitals. CLS measures how much your webpage jumps around. Now Google says it will use smaller capped maximum windows. This should help pages that use infinite scrollers or have many slow UI updates.

The effect? About 3% of pages will move from a needs improvement or poor rating to a good rating. Still with Google here, the company today announcing it will pull the plug on its mobile shopping apps for both iOS and Android. Users will be redirected to its web-based shopping site instead. This was uncovered by some programmers who found the term sunset in the code of a recent app update. This could be related to IDFA, but more likely is just part of Google's history of reducing its ecosystem footprint. And finally, some people on Twitter are reporting that they are having trouble creating new Google Docs today. If that's happening to you too, you are not alone.

Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter, too, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and even newsletter-exclusive content. And there's a free tier as well. You'll get an issue every Friday. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes.

Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.