Today in Digital Marketing - How Google’s Ad Rep Layoffs Will Affect Marketers

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, January 17th. Today, hundreds laid off. But how will the downsizing at Google Ads affect marketers? A former insider tells us. WhatsApp and Instagram add some nice updates. Turns out YouTube isn't to blame for its slow website. And how did that Snoop Dogg, I just quit smoking campaign go? Well, not so good. I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:48 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:01:15 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. Yesterday, we reported on big changes at Google Ads. Hundreds of sales reps laid off from its large customer group, so it can focus more on its customer solutions group,

Starting point is 00:01:39 a group which is aimed more at small businesses. So how will this impact marketers and media buyers? For more on that, I'm joined by our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskin-Gales. Jill spent six years at Google and joins us here every two weeks. If Google Ads is not a concern for you, you can either skip to the six minute and 40 second mark, or if you're a premium member, just tap the next story. Jill, you used to work in the division we're talking about here. Yes, from 2015 to 2021, I worked in large customer sales at Google. Specifically, I was a specialist there, an international growth specialist. And so as

Starting point is 00:02:15 you might imagine, large customer sales is for the customers who spend millions on Google Ads a year. And so in addition to their typical kind of account manager, account executive, account team, they also get access, at least for now, to a whole suite of mobile specialists, conversion tracking specialists, international specialists, etc. So that's what I did there. And I'm definitely nervous to see what's going to happen to a lot of my friends in that organization. So large customer sales is that. What is the Google Customer Solutions Group? Google Customer Solutions is? Google Customer Solutions is a euphemism basically for SMB. So the ad sales organization has been through a lot of reorgs, but at least as it is right now, there's large customer sales. And to qualify as a large customer,

Starting point is 00:02:57 it depends what country you're in. So I can say at least in Canada, as of a few years ago, you'd be spending at least seven figures a year on Google ads to make it in there. In some smaller countries, that might be lower. In a country like the U.S., it would be much higher. And then Google Customer Solutions is everyone else. And so it's important to know it doesn't mean large business, small business. It means large Google Ad spend, smaller Google Ad spend. So you can actually find some very large blue chip companies being served out of the Google Customer Solutions organization. And you mentioned some of the service offerings in large customer sales group. What is sort of the difference between that and customer solutions group that a client might expect? Because I think what we're talking about here is that they're shifting

Starting point is 00:03:40 people out of large customer sales and into this smaller group. Is that right? That is right. And at least from my perspective, I think the easiest way to think about the core difference is actually from the account rep perspective. If you're an account manager or account executive in large customer sales, you have one to three clients, maybe five. So you can imagine how much attention and effort and detail those clients get when your rep only has kind of one to three clients. Whereas in Google customer solutions, your rep will have anywhere from 20 clients to 200 clients. So again, from a client perspective, you can imagine how much service you get when your rep has 20 to 200 other clients they're working with. So in large customer sales, you know, we really thought of ourselves as business partners, not just in a like, oh, euphemism, we're your business partner,

Starting point is 00:04:30 but like we knew our clients' businesses inside out. We talked to them weekly or multiple times a week. We were like part of their team. Google Customer Solutions isn't able to do that in the same way. So it's a more scaled support solution, not as personalized, more reliance on recommendations, not as many specialists to work with, etc. Am I wrong in saying that the smaller group, Google Customer Solutions, exists mostly to tell advertisers to just do whatever Google's automated system tells them to do? I'm not going to say that that's why they exist. But I will say that the way my understanding now, the way the training works and the incentives and promotions work, that that's a lot of what they're trained and told to do. You know, here's your recommendations,

Starting point is 00:05:19 go sell them, go get them implemented. And what surprises me about this announcement is saying, oh, because of AI, large customer sales, we don't need those people anymore. I'm like, oh, I'm trying to imagine these multi-million dollar a year advertisers being told, yeah, just opt into auto-apply recommendations. Like, I don't think that's going to go so well, but no one asked my opinion. So from a day-to-day point of view, you know, when you look at sort of the average marketer, and let's sort of go small business here, will that have any significant change to the way that they're serviced? No, if you're a small business and a small spender, you already are on a scaled solutions team or you have a third party contractor. So like not even part of Google customer solutions or you have no support.

Starting point is 00:06:03 So for you, this doesn't really impact you. What does impact is those kind of medium spenders because those account teams are probably going to have even more clients to manage now. And of course, if you're one of those few larger advertisers, you can expect your service levels to probably go down. So I'd say across the board, your service level will stay the same or go down. Well, I have you. You have your eye in sort of a whole bunch of different Google Ads accounts. Can you just kind of give me the post January 1st view of things? How are you finding CPCs, CPMs? How is the ad market feeling to you

Starting point is 00:06:35 right now on the Google side? Oh, how's the ad market feeling right now? Things are definitely stabilized after the holiday season. Can't say across the board whether CPCs are up or down, but the one thing I will notice that kind of everyone's talking about and I'm noticing in a lot of accounts is the changes with keyword match types. Google has not spoken publicly about this, but the way keyword match types work has completely changed. What used to be exact match now works like phrase match, and what used to be phrase match now works like phrase match. And what used to be phrase match now works like broad match. Google has not updated any documentation, offered any explanation. But I've seen this in so many accounts now that you're definitely going to want to check your search terms report if you haven't in a while.

Starting point is 00:07:18 And you might want to change up some of your match types. Good stuff. Thanks, Jill. See you in two weeks. Yes. Jill Saskengales is our Google Ads correspondent. You can learn more about her and her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link at b.link slash g a training.

Starting point is 00:07:39 All right, turning to some good news for Google Ads Now, the company rolling out a helpful way to schedule changes on your responsive search ads to account for sales or other events. Three campaign level headlines and two campaign level descriptions can be scheduled if you have assets that you want to show during a specific time period. These can be pinned to certain positions and will be applied to all enabled RSAs within the campaign. If you want to see if it's been activated on your account, look under assets, you should see headline and description there with a little new tag that reads new. Some people have actually had this in their account for a month, but it's only now being really mentioned by Google. The new interface will let you add a headline to a specific campaign, set a start date, and optionally an end date.

Starting point is 00:08:28 One person on LinkedIn in a post about this mentioned that they are seeing more data on those assets than they would have expected, including how many conversions are brought in by those specific headlines and descriptions. What's up? Channel owners now have the ability to share voice updates with followers, a move that might benefit podcast marketers who want to offer episode previews. Already about 7 billion voice messages are exchanged daily on the platform. Polls have also been added to channels, offering a new way for brands to interact with their audience beyond the previous just emoji reactions is all you had access to. Also, channel updates can now be shared on your personal WhatsApp status. So this is kind of similar to Instagram's feature that allows users posts from channels to be added to stories. WhatsApp channels were initially launched in Singapore and Colombia back in June of last year. They rolled out globally in September.

Starting point is 00:09:32 At first, they only permitted one admin. Now, up to 16 admins can manage each channel. Owners can invite others to become admins via the invite admins option on the channel description page. Meta says WhatsApp channels have more than 500 million monthly active users. losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Instagram now has an undo button of sorts. This week, the app added the ability to pause the upload of stories mid-process. This, of course, is good for catching errors or issues before the story becomes visible on the app. It's in the form of a button that will stop the publishing of a story after a user has pressed share. Definitely a nice addition for both social media managers and regular users like myself who, let's face it, sometimes make little mistakes like forgetting to tag profiles. YouTube has been under fire recently for seemingly slowing down their website for people who try to watch videos with an ad blocker on. The site itself even hinted it was doing that,

Starting point is 00:10:54 with a message telling people to expect reduced performance. Many people found the site to be nearly unusable, with long buffering times, errors, and incomplete page loads. But now it seems the problem comes not from YouTube, but from the ad blockers themselves. Specifically, the popular extensions Adblock and Adblock+. The bug has since been fixed in updates for both apps, so updating should restore smooth streaming. Interestingly, this isn't the first time these extensions have been criticized for resource hogging. With another free option,

Starting point is 00:11:29 uBlock Origin, often cited as a lighter alternative. Always good to remember that sometimes the real culprit might be lurking within your own browser extensions. And not related to this technical issue, but YouTube today confirmed it is laying off 100 people.

Starting point is 00:11:46 All told, that's more than 1,000 workers laid off at Google in the last week alone. Rapper and cannabis enthusiast Snoop Dogg recently took part in a marketing campaign for Solo's Stove, a company specializing in smokeless fire pits. In November, Snoop announced he was giving up the smoke, which was later revealed as a promotional stunt for the company. It was seen as a pretty clever campaign, was even ranked as the 18th best ad campaign of the year by Ad Age. So, the sales must have been bigger than Snoop's bong collection, right? Actually, no. Apparently, the collaboration, which must have cost a small fortune to get Snoop involved, did not really boost sales. And so, the CEO is out, being replaced this week by another executive. Though the partnership with

Starting point is 00:12:39 Snoop Dogg did not significantly increase sales, it wasn't without some success. The campaign did raise Solo Stove's profile, gaining 60,000 new social media followers the day after the ad's release. Our digital marketing tech support team is ready to handle your problems. Whether you can't figure out how to get your Google Analytics connected, or your CPCs are spiking, or you need help growing your agency, just speak your question into our voicemail, and we will get an expert to answer your question in the show. Go to todayindigital.com slash voicemail to submit your question. If we use your question on the show, you will get a free subscription to our premium newsletter, which comes with a free course, access to dozens of marketing science interviews and more. That's todayindigital.com slash voicemail or tap the link at the top of the show notes.

Starting point is 00:13:36 See you tomorrow. I put out the blood in the driveway. You can tell by the way I walk that I'm a gangster in these streets. By the way that I bend the corner when I pull up on the scene. 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.

Today in Digital Marketing - How Google’s Ad Rep Layoffs Will Affect Marketers

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