Today in Digital Marketing - Google's Auction Changes Today = More Expensive Ads

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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, Google has changed the way its ad auction works, and the first victim may be your media budget.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Also, a new enterprise version of Google Analytics. YouTube kills off its annual retrospective. And which huge platform is copying porn sites? You may be surprised. It's Thursday, October 7th, 2021. Happy National Poetry Day, United Kingdom. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 479.

Starting point is 00:01:32 We start with some news from Google, which could increase the cost of your ads, perhaps by a lot. As you probably know, some Google ad placements are on blogs and websites of individuals. They give Google access to a couple of slots on each page. Google fills those slots with ads and pays them for it. The program is known as Google AdSense. It's mostly used as a way for people and small brands to earn a bit of extra money from space on their website.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Today, Google announced a small but important change to how those ads are priced. When they first launched the program, the final price an advertiser would pay was the amount of the second highest bid. Digital ads are sold at auction, so if there are two advertisers competing for the same inventory, and one bids $4 maximum, one bids $5 maximum, the winning advertiser would pay $4.01. Now, though, AdSense ads will be priced at the first highest bid, in this case, the full $5. If that sounds a little unfair to you,

Starting point is 00:02:35 it shouldn't. This is how pretty much all the other Google ads from Ad Manager and AdMob are priced. Interestingly, though, Google says that while this will increase revenue for the publishers of those sites, they don't expect it to be a dramatic increase. But whether it's a tiny increase or a huge one, that increase comes out of the budgets of digital marketers. Also, briefly, in Google News this afternoon, the company announced it would no longer allow advertisers, publishers, or YouTube creators to monetize content that contradicts scientific consensus around the existence of climate change. Earlier this week, we reported on the new Google Analytics. Today, the company rolled out a new version of Analytics 360.

Starting point is 00:03:23 360 is the premium version of GA. It adds things larger brands tend to need, like remarketing integrations for display and video 360, integration with Google BigQuery, audience sharing to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and so on. Unlike the base Google Analytics, 360 does cost money. Here's what's new, quoting from their announcement. As a large company, you may have multiple teams that need access to different insights,

Starting point is 00:03:48 depending on their job function, products, and markets. Let's say your teams are in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and they need to view the data about your four product lines to understand what's driving sales in their markets. With the new Analytics 360, you can create four product line sub-properties for each country team and customize their settings. You can create dedicated roll-up properties for the US, Canada, and Mexico across all four product lines. You'll also be able to create your own user roles in Analytics 360

Starting point is 00:04:16 to control feature access for certain groups of users. For instance, you could create a role for a partner agency so that they can understand which campaigns are driving conversions on your website, but can't access data about your revenue or organic traffic, unquote. You'll also get increased limits on 360, 125 custom dimensions, 400 audiences, 50 conversion types. For the risk-averse among you, Google says this new version will include uptime guarantees for BigQuery daily imports. The new Analytics 360 is now in open beta for all existing clients.

Starting point is 00:04:52 Today's premium newsletter has the link to upgrade your Google Analytics 4 properties to the Analytics 360 beta. 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. aimed at helping your brand's video viewers find the most compelling parts of your video, is probably inspired by porn sites. It's called the engagement graph. The way it works is when a viewer scrubs through your video,

Starting point is 00:05:55 a small chart appears above the progress bar, showing them what parts of the video got the highest level of engagement. This kind of engagement graph is pretty much exactly how porn videos work. The graph shows where people paused or rewound. That's what I'm told, anyway. YouTube's is almost identical, showing where people rewatched a portion of the video. This is something Facebook was testing for live videos five years ago, though theirs also added reactions and comments as a signal.

Starting point is 00:06:22 It doesn't appear that YouTube's version takes those into account. Also, in shameless feature copying news, the company announced it's launching Member Milestones, which lets people who've been a paid member of a YouTube channel send a special highlighted message during a livestream to brag about renewing their membership. This is a feature directly ripped off from the live streaming platform Twitch. And that brings close to another episode of Who's Copying Who?

Starting point is 00:06:53 And finally, YouTube Rewind, the company's annual retrospective video, has been canned permanently. The video started out as a way to celebrate the year's most popular trends, memes, and creators, but has fallen flat on its face the last couple of years. Everything was fine until 2018's video, which people said ignored the actually popular creators in favor of advertiser-friendly channels. That video remains the single most disliked video on the entire YouTube platform. Then in 2019, they shifted from a highly produced mashup to a more ordinary video that most people found rather boring and uninspiring. Last year, they didn't produce one at all,

Starting point is 00:07:37 citing COVID. Now they say they'll, quote, refocus our energies on celebrating you and the trends that make YouTube with a different and updated kind of experience. Unquote. They did not specify what that experience would be or when it would come out. So in the Slack community today, we are talking about the effectiveness of Twitter ads, recommendations for heat map tools, Facebook's advanced analytics. 636 digital marketers just like you are in there. Remember, we are planning to make this a paid community in the near future.

Starting point is 00:08:10 But if you get in now, you will be grandfathered in for free for life. Tap the link in the episode notes or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. Also, whether you are on Team Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant, you can listen anytime by saying, play the podcast today in digital marketing. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Google's Auction Changes Today = More Expensive Ads

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