Today in Digital Marketing - Mobile Gaming Grows Up: Is It the Next Big Ad Space?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, January 18th. Today, that garbage inventory you've been avoiding might have just turned into a gold mine. Now even science says Google's search results are getting worse. Did Bing's bet on AI pay off in the search wars? And the new tracking tech that's as old as our industry itself. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:33 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. If it seems like a lot of the old ad platforms feel tired, no new ad products, no new audiences, there is one which some analysts believe will finally break out this year. Mobile gaming advertising is gaining traction. Last year, mobile gaming ad revenue saw significant growth. Applovin, a mobile marketing platform, reported a record-breaking Q4 last year for mobile gaming advertisers. Traditionally, the in-game digital advertising world has consisted of two places.

Starting point is 00:01:24 First, bottom-of-the-barrel audience network type placements, the kind you end up with when you let the ad platform choose its recommended or automatic placements option. These placements are usually high reach and low CPM, but terrible for conversion and not really good for much more than general brand awareness. And second, ads in big-budget console games from developers like Nintendo and Electric Arts. Think product placements in movies, except they're in games. Recent trends, though, show a shift.

Starting point is 00:01:55 In Q4 last year, mobile gaming apps, particularly casual games, made more money. Applovin noted a 10% year-over-year spending increase from Q4 of 2022 to Q4 of last year. And mobile gamers engaged more with ads as average ad impressions per user rose by 7%. Also, tech giants like Microsoft, having acquired Activision Blizzard,

Starting point is 00:02:21 are making significant strides in mobile gaming advertising. Activision Blizzard's in-game ad division contributes substantially to their revenues. Well, if it feels like Google results are getting worse, you are not alone. A new study by Leipzig University and the Center for Scalable and artificial intelligence has revealed that google is struggling against low quality junk sites that dominate search results due to affiliate marketing strategies affiliate marketing sites of course use unique links in product reviews and roundups when a purchase is made through those links the referring site earns a commission this practice widespread, even among reputable journalistic sites, but it's often exploited by less ethical sites, leading to a proliferation of subpar content. across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo found that the top-ranking pages on Google often featured more affiliate links and lower-quality text,

Starting point is 00:03:31 and that sites with poor content but effective SEO techniques are more likely to appear first in search results. While Google's results showed some improvement during the study and performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo. The general trend suggests a decline in the overall quality of Google searches. Google says it's always working to improve its algorithms and filter out low quality content. But the effectiveness of these efforts remains in question. While Google tries to weed out the crap, they're also adding a bit of bling.

Starting point is 00:04:08 The company this week announcing two updates to its search engine. First, Circle to Search lets Android users select images, text, or videos on their screen through various gestures, like circling it or highlighting it or tapping it. The highlighted region will then be searched. This could end up being a pretty powerful marketing tool. Someone finds a photo of, I don't know, Usher, circles his shoes, and up pops a list of places they can be bought. The shoes, not Usher.

Starting point is 00:04:37 Initially, Circle to Search will be available on select premium Android smartphones, including the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, and the new Samsung Galaxy S24 series, all starting January 31st. The second enhances the multi-search feature in Google Lens, which was first introduced in 2022. Multi-search lets users combine image and text searches. People can point the camera at something, upload a photo, add a question about it, and get overviews that amalgamate relevant information from across the web. Google competitor Bing, owned by Microsoft, bet the house on AI,

Starting point is 00:05:17 integrating their chatbot directly into the search engine. They recently rebranded it Copilot, but it is essentially a fork of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4. The idea was that it could provide a wedge into that enormous pie chunk that Google holds in the search market. So it's been about a year since Bing did that. Have they grown their market share any in the search wars? The answer? Not really. Quoting seroundtable.com, quote, Bing's market share has only grown less than 1% according to StatCounter. Most of you may not be surprised since our poll shared shortly after Bing chat launched had most of you thinking that Bing won't gain that much market share from the feature. Bloomberg reported on the stat counter data saying, quote,

Starting point is 00:06:11 but Microsoft search engine ended 2023 with just 3.4% of the global search market, according to data analytics firm stat counter up less than one percentage point since the chat GPT announcement, unquote. So as of December 31st, according to StatCounter, here are the numbers. Yahoo, still in there with a 1.1% share. Yandex, 1.6%. The giant group of everything else called Other, 2.2%. Bing is 3.4% market share. And Google, 91.6. 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.

Starting point is 00:07:21 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 our industry as you know is facing a big shift as google chrome plans to phase out third party cookies by the end of the year a great long read today in ad week does a good job of walking through one of the old school methods that some marketers are falling back on, tracking consumer behavior through their IP address. Those addresses, while fundamental to internet communication, aren't considered privacy

Starting point is 00:08:12 safe and offer less tracking accuracy compared to cookies. But they are re-emerging as an alternative to third-party cookies for advertisers. For instance, IP addresses are becoming crucial in areas like streaming television and cross-device targeting. An executive from Raptive quoted in the piece highlights that IP addresses are often combined with first-party data or hashed emails. They do, though, have gaps. They don't on their own carry any information about the interests someone has or their demographics. And IP tracking doesn't really work if a user is behind a VPN or a corporate network. Plus, privacy looms larger as IP addresses

Starting point is 00:08:53 can't be easily reset like cookies in a browser. The piece is definitely worth a read if it interests you. You can find it at adweek.com. Look for the article called Marketers Shift to IP Address Band-Aids Amid Cookie Deprecation. You don't have to make YouTube videos for a long time before you realize that one of the most critical pieces is the thumbnail. Get that right, you get views. Get it wrong, you don't. Some big creators like MrBeast have people on their teams

Starting point is 00:09:26 who just do thumbnail testing and optimization full-time. That's how important it is. Which makes it all the weirder that YouTube itself still doesn't have an A-B testing tool for one of the most important parts of a video. Back in June, the company previewed the thumbnail testing tool it was working on. The tool would let you test three variations for up to two weeks, but they didn't have a release date, other than sometime in 2024. Today, the company's liaison to the creator community shared an update on where they are. Quote, thumbnail testing is still in testing. As of late last year, the testing ramped up to 50k channels of various types, sizes, and regions across YouTube, which is still a tiny number given how many channels are on

Starting point is 00:10:11 YouTube. That'll continue until the team feels like the product is delivering what it needs to for creators, and then it'll start moving into a launch mode. No timeline yet, because it's hard to predict how fast or slow tests of this size will go, but as soon as it's ready to launch, YouTube will absolutely let everyone know. Unquote. Beta has unveiled its new creator management tools within the business suite, and it's a nice update for agencies and content creators on Facebook. Clearly, the goal with this update was to improve the process of connecting with creators, which can reduce time spent on tasks like onboarding them, offboarding them, and so on. Creators can now more easily grant agencies the necessary permissions for managing their pages through a one-click approval process.

Starting point is 00:11:01 The new tools also enhance the payout process. Agencies can direct earnings to their own payout accounts. Definitely helpful for agencies looking to consolidate payments from various products like video ads, live video stars, fan subscriptions, and ads on Facebook Reels. Some other additions, you can import existing connections from Business Manager. It's easier to terminate an ongoing relationship with a creator. There are some new insights into a creator's page earnings and so on. For creators, there is also a new agency management tool to review and manage requests and relationships. On the show tomorrow, you've got that spam before telling you that your Facebook page is just seconds away from being deleted unless you click this very shady looking link.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Turns out there is a button to turn those off tomorrow on the show. We tell you where that button is. See you then. The way that you say my name, a whisper in the night They tell me that fools rush in But I'll put up a fight

Today in Digital Marketing - Mobile Gaming Grows Up: Is It the Next Big Ad Space?

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