Today in Digital Marketing - Is This the End of Keyword Buying?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, June 14th. Today, the new AI that might revolutionize clothing sales. How the ongoing Reddit strike is affecting ad campaigns. A new design coming for Google Ads UI. And on the Premium Podcast, which you can get by tapping Go Premium in the show notes, Jill Saskin-Gales breaks down Google's plans to convert all your phrase and exact match keywords into broad match. How soon before keyword buying doesn't exist? Surprise, it's already here. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. Google's new AI tool is taking online shopping to the next level for e-commerce retailers. The generative AI tool lets consumers virtually try on clothes from

Starting point is 00:00:46 hundreds of brands by displaying them on different models and in a range of skin tones and body types. The tool can take a single clothing image and accurately reflect how it would drape, fold, cling, stretch, even form wrinkles and shadows on real models ranging in sizes from extra extra small to 4XL. Starting today, U.S. consumers using Google Shopping can access the feature to try on women's tops from participating brands by tapping products with the new Try On badge on search. Google is also launching filtering options for clothing searches powered by AI and visual matching. These filters, available in product listings on shopping, let users refine their searches

Starting point is 00:01:29 based on color, style, and pattern. By the way, we did a brief video about this. If you want to see what the AI looks like, you can follow us on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. We're going to start doing daily news videos again. All our social media links are in the show notes, or you can go to todayindigital.com slash social media. From search to sale, Google is also working on a new shortcut to streamline the checkout process.

Starting point is 00:01:59 The tech giant is sending out emails to Google Merchant Center users, inviting them to test a new call to action button that sends shoppers who are ready to buy from search directly to a site's checkout page, bypassing the product page. Who is that going to convert? Jill Saskengales is our Google Ads correspondent. People who are already familiar with your brand,

Starting point is 00:02:18 people who've already done their research. So I think attribution there is going to be key. No one's going to start their journey by clicking a search ad and purchasing right away. And just by looking at kind of new customer acquisition versus retention, really layering in those audiences to see what that brings for the business. To participate in the pilot, users with access to the beta can log into Merchant Center, access the settings tab, and then add the desired checkout landing page link. You can choose between a dynamic URL template for the

Starting point is 00:02:45 entire brand or a unique checkout link for each product. The report recommends that advertisers setting up their URL template should include placeholder product data parameters like the product ID to make sure customers are directed to the correct checkout page. Google currently supports up to five parameters within the URL template. BARD, that's Google's chat GPT rival, has been blocked in the European Union over privacy concerns. The tech giant originally planned to launch its AI chatbot in the European Union this week, but the Irish Data Protection Commission said the company failed to show how it plans to comply with the EU's data protection rules.

Starting point is 00:03:29 Politico reported on this today. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has also clashed with EU regulators. The company's CEO recently said it might be forced to leave the bloc if it becomes too challenging to comply with proposed AI laws, which could force generative AI companies to reveal the materials used to train their models.

Starting point is 00:03:54 We are now three days into the Reddit blackout and advertisers are now starting to feel the consequences. In response to a new policy charging third-party apps for Reddit's previously free API, more than 8,000 Reddit communities have restricted user access. AdWeek reports that as a result, advertisers paying to reach Reddit users are now facing campaign holds, redirected impressions, and softer metrics. On Monday, the Reddit ad platform experienced a temporary outage along with the rest of the site, preventing media buyers from accessing reporting statistics, although the company says impressions were still being delivered. According to one media buyer quoted by Adweek, the company informed advertisers that impressions lost from blacked out subreddits were being redirected to the homepage. A spokesperson for a digital marketing agency pointed out that this redirection, though, undermines the contextually relevant locations that advertisers are trying to target, as the ads would be displayed to a much more general audience. The blackout has also resulted in slightly lower impression delivery and slightly higher CPMs for campaigns. If this performance weakness continues,

Starting point is 00:05:05 the agency suggests reducing spend with Reddit or allocating it to other platforms. Meanwhile, the moderator boycott at Reddit is also affecting the quality of Google's search results. Many people add Reddit to their search queries to find better results, like, for instance, cookie recipes Reddit. But now,

Starting point is 00:05:26 because of thousands of subreddits going dark, clicking on these links in the Google search results page usually leads to a message saying the subreddit is private. Even without this search trick, Reddit links often show up at the top of Google search results. But now a lot of those links are leading to nowhere. The blackout was supposed to end this morning. Some communities are back online. Others report their communities will stay down indefinitely. 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

Starting point is 00:06:11 disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. McDonald's and Burger King are beefing it out through AI-generated ad campaigns. McDonald's recently launched a billboard campaign in Brazil that features ChatGPT's response to the question, What is the most iconic burger in the world? The ad then shows a verbatim response from ChatGPT, which explains why the Big Mac deserves the title, tracing its origins back to 1967, and how it's so iconic that it's even used by the economist to measure the purchasing power of world currencies. A few days later, Burger King placed a billboard directly beside the McDonald's ad asking ChatGPT what burger was the biggest.

Starting point is 00:06:59 The chatbot's answer proclaims the Whopper as the heavyweight champion in terms of size and amount of ingredients and that it is an option, quote, for those who want a more substantial meal, unquote. Well, now Subway has jumped in, asking the bot how both burgers compare to its footlong sub. The response says, in terms of size, both are significantly smaller than a footlong sandwich. Subway, though, isn't buying any ad space. Instead, the company opted for a Photoshopped image of their billboard. Beside the other two, an image then shared across social media.

Starting point is 00:07:41 So yeah, you may have noticed this. Amazon Web Services yesterday had a major outage that temporarily broke a big chunk of the internet. The issue primarily affected the US East One cloud region. Reports quickly surfaced on Down Detector and similar sites about other web services experiencing disruptions downline. During the outage, thousands of companies across different sectors, including the Associated Press, McDonald's, and God help them, Reddit, suffered significant digital disruptions for several hours. Amazon says the problem has been resolved. In a very short but important correction yesterday in the podcast, we reported that Reddit's charges to the Apollo app would be $20 million a month. In fact, the number is $20 million a year.

Starting point is 00:08:28 Seeing a lot of people coming over here from our Pocket Cast ad. Welcome, and if any of you are Xbox players and play Rainbow Six Siege, please carry me out of copper. My gamertag is Radio 9573. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. So part of your job is to manage your brand's social media accounts. That can get busy, especially if you're running a paid campaign. You've got comments to moderate, reviews to reply to, issues to escalate to management, and that engagement comes in around the clock. That's why you might need a social media engagement firm, a partner who's handling all that for you,

Starting point is 00:09:23 either just evenings and weekends or offloading it entirely. Thank you. leave it to us. Our team can answer product questions, encourage purchases, thank your customers, hide or delete the bad stuff, reply to reviews and more. And best of all, your customers won't know it's not you. We don't outsource this. Every single person is an in-house employee here in North America. If you're interested, check us out at engageq.com. That's engageq.com. Look for the link in this episode's notes in the About This Podcast section. 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.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Is This the End of Keyword Buying?

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