Today in Digital Marketing - Non Mingito in Natatoria

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, April 10th. Today, a new report on the PPC industry is out. We have expert analysis. Google is training its AI on your public Google Docs. Hootsuite buys a major social listening platform. And the guy selling an empty bottle might just be this year's most innovative product marketer. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:00:24 That's ahead today in digital marketing. The 2024 State of PPC Global Report just came out, and it's pretty comprehensive. 60 pages of paid ads industry analysis and insights based on input from more than 1,000 marketing professionals. To examine some of the most interesting takeaways from the report. We turn to our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskin-Gales. Jill spent six years at Google Ads and today runs the Inside Google Ads training program for practitioners. She was also named the 37th most influential PPC expert in the world. Jill, you read this report.

Starting point is 00:01:00 What stood out for you? What stood out for me are a few things. I think, first of all, just that, you know, people love to rail against the system, right? People have lots of complaints about lack of control, lack of transparency. But then there were some unexpected findings as well. And so the first thing that really surfaced in this report is how hard it is to find PPC talent in 2024. And this survey asked both people who are in-house or people who work at agencies. And for both of them,

Starting point is 00:01:30 they said their number one challenge with PPC is not profitability or managing campaigns or finding clients or outpacing the competition. The number one challenge is finding PPC talent, which tells me it's a great time to be a PPC practitioner. It makes sense because, I mean, every time you see in any of these industry slacks or on Reddit or on X, you know, people are always like, does anyone know a PPC person that I can bring in? So it makes sense. What about like platform features? Did the report dive into

Starting point is 00:01:59 what's popular on there in terms of like keyword use or any of that stuff? It did. It focused most on Google Ads practitioners. I think 98% of respondents use Google Ads. And so not surprisingly, the number one most used feature is exact match keywords. Almost everyone uses them. And number two was phrase match keywords. So as much as Google is pushing us more towards broad match and dynamic ad groups and automation, practitioners are really trying to hold on to more of that keyword control. And then on the flip side, the least used Google Ads features were demand gen campaigns, which breaks my heart. I love demand gen and display prospecting.

Starting point is 00:02:37 So those are kind of your two image based campaign choices that just don't seem to have really high adoption. What was, you know, really high is actually Performance Max. And that's been with us for two to two and a half years now. And there are actually more people now using Performance Max than standard shopping. So the PPC game, at least for Google Ads practitioners in 2024, appears to be a story of search campaigns, you know, the bread and butter and PMAX. I am a little surprised that DemandGen was lower. Did that surprise you? I mean, to be fair, DemandGen is also the newest campaign type. It used to be called Discovery. And I think it's the one that Google does the worst job of selling and explaining,

Starting point is 00:03:16 whether it's on their public materials or whether with the various reps. But display prospecting was also down there. So it tells us just image ads on their own just don't seem to be very high in adoption. And YouTube wasn't far behind. I think when people think of Google ads, they're still very much thinking keywords, search, intent. And then because they have to, performance max as well. And all of these campaign types eventually are merging. Performance max probably being the best example of it are merging into use of AI and creative generation, writing ad copy, all those sorts of things. What did the report have to say about the adoption of generative AI

Starting point is 00:03:50 in PPC? That was interesting. It said that a lot of these practitioners, in fact, the majority, are using generative AI, whether it's in-platform or a tool like ChatGPT or Gemini, to actually write ads and do keyword research. So kind of those core basic building blocks of the campaign and to write emails. I think we're all using it to try to help us write those tedious emails. But not much else in terms of like analyzing performance, gleaning insights, doesn't seem to be high adoption yet. And in my opinion, that's a place where there really is a lot of opportunity to save a lot of time, not just with the keywords and ads, but in analyzing huge amounts of data and reports and letting the AI find insights for us. That's what machines are just better at than humans. So

Starting point is 00:04:34 I'll be curious to see if they repeat this another year, if we see more adoption of generative AI in various ways, since we know the platforms themselves are really trying to do that and surface that for users. It really is a good report. They put it out every year. Where can people track this report down if they want to read it for themselves? It's at ppcsurvey.com, and you don't need to enter email address. You can just download the report. And the team that put it together, there's a few guys who work together to do it. They spent a lot of time on this. It's taken a couple of months and it's really comprehensive. So in addition to the report at ppcsurvey.com,

Starting point is 00:05:09 there is also the list of the top 50 most influential PPC experts. Well, Jill, thank you for reading it all. Thanks for your time. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. See you then. Jill Saskin-Gales is our Google Ads correspondent. She's here every second Wednesday. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link at b.link slash

Starting point is 00:05:29 GA training. And you can watch our full unedited interview. There's a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Imagine watching the Super Bowl and instead of everyone getting the same commercial breaks, your ads are tailor-made just for you. That's the promise of dynamic ad insertion, and Marketing Brew has a great piece on their site about it. This past Super Bowl, while millions saw Beyonce promoting her new album in a Verizon ad, the future could have served up something completely different for each viewer based

Starting point is 00:06:10 on personal tastes. The concept isn't flawless, though. Marketing executive Dan Rayburn, quoted in the piece, pointed out that while the idea is great for personalization, it's got its share of problems. Mainly, it doesn't always work as intended on a large scale. But experts believe there's potential if these issues can be smoothed over. Right now, the most dependable method is the traditional burned-in ads that everyone sees. Quoting Marketing Brew, There is some hope that generative AI tools could potentially be used in the future to help deliver personalized creative efficiently,

Starting point is 00:06:47 and in some cases, create those personalized ads too. One executive used the example of a hypothetical McDonald's ad campaign to demonstrate how AI could convert user data into targeted ad creative. One viewer might see an ad promoting a Big Mac, while another might get an ad featuring French fries. The interesting thing about generative AI is that it could, to an extent, dynamically stitch assets together on the fly based on an understanding of a consumer's predilections toward certain McDonald's foods, unquote. This has always been the sales pitch to consumers for purchase-tracking opt-ins, like loyalty programs. Let us track what you buy, and we'll turn those irrelevant ads into ads you actually want to see. But when push came to shove, the level of customization the marketing industry has been able to serve up has been broad at best,

Starting point is 00:07:40 and consumers caught on, choosing privacy over an unfulfilled promise of increased relevancy. If the industry can get this right, though, it might have the potential to turn some of those opt-outs back into opt-ins. You may have heard media reports this week that Google plans to take publicly available Google Docs and use them for AI training. And if you're like me, you were like, wait, I'm sorry, what now? Yes, Google says not only does it plan to use publicly available Google Docs for its training, it's already vacuumed up a bunch. But don't worry, it's not quite what you think. Google says it will distinguish between documents you meant to make widely public

Starting point is 00:08:27 and those that you made open to anyone who has the specific link. While both are public, Google will assume that if the document is shared on social media or from a website, that you're okay with using that for training. Which, you know, you might not be, but these are the rules now. In other words, Google's web crawler would need to be able to find it on the public web. That is unlikely to happen with a file you and your colleague exchange. Speaking of Google Docs, you're probably familiar with the main document types, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms.

Starting point is 00:09:03 This week, Google announced those would soon have a new baby sibling, videos, or as they'll be called, Google Vids. This hasn't been released to the public yet, so all we have so far is a promotional video that's heavy on flashy animation and light on details. That could be because it seems to be a little less than they're making it out to be. Google Vids, as shown in their promotion video, appear to just be auto-playing slides presentations with some lightweight AI helping add backgrounds and voice narrations.

Starting point is 00:09:35 Quoting Ars Technica, quote, like all Google products after the rise of OpenAI, Google pitches Vids as an AI-powered video editor, even though there didn't seem to be many generative AI features in the presentation. The videos, images, and music were stock media, not AI-generated inventions. Slides can generate images, but that wasn't in this demo. There's nothing in here like OpenAI's Sora, which generates new videos out of its training data. There's probably a Gemini-powered Help Me Write feature for the script,

Starting point is 00:10:07 and Google describes the initial outline as being generated from your starting slides presentation, but that seemed to be it. Google Vids is scheduled to be released to their beta channel in June, and domain administrators will be able to opt in to testing it then. The social media platform Hootsuite says it will acquire Talkwalker, a site that monitors social mentions. Financial details remain under wraps, of course, but this partnership will fill the listening gap that Hootsuite has had for years. Users will be able to set up keyword alerts and monitor mentions in deeper ways than what's

Starting point is 00:10:44 currently available in Hootsuite. The acquisition comes at an interesting time, given the rising costs of API access, particularly with X and Reddit, both of which are staples in any social listening tool. It also comes at a time when companies are desperate to talk about AI, even if that hype is a little overstated. Here's part of Hootsuite's news release on the acquisition. Quote, By bringing together two complementary category leaders, businesses will, for the first time, have a social media performance engine to turn insights into action, into impact, all fueled by AI.

Starting point is 00:11:22 Unquote. I have a Talkwalker account. There's no AI in it. I have a Talkwalker account. There's no AI in it. I mean, no new AI. And even then, there really hasn't been, unless you consider the site being run by computers qualifies as artificial intelligence. No, Talkwalker is a giant suction hose

Starting point is 00:11:40 attached to the web and APIs. It hoovers up millions of pieces of content, indexes them, and makes it searchable and chartable. To say that this whole thing has been fueled by AI is a little disingenuous and feels, I don't know, desperate? Hootsuite anticipates wrapping up this acquisition by the second quarter of this year. The company says it has 200,000 users.

Starting point is 00:12:09 Okay, parents, if you have any kids listening, now is the time to turn it off because I am about to give away a big adult secret. I'm talking Santa Claus level secret. Okay, kids are gone? All right. So as some of you who've been listening to the podcast for a couple of years know, my wife and listening to the podcast for a couple of years know,

Starting point is 00:12:25 my wife and I bought a hot tub a couple of years back, enjoying it a great deal. And do you remember when you were a kid and you went to the swimming pool and they always told you, listen, if you pee in the swimming pool, it will glow blue all around you. There's a chemical that they put in the water. And when you pee, it'll reveal that you have urinated in the pool and you'll

Starting point is 00:12:50 be horribly embarrassed. Just this week, I discovered there's no such thing. How did I get to past 50 years old and still bought into this mythology? And the way I found it out was there's this YouTube channel that I

Starting point is 00:13:05 follow, this guy that has, he does like hot tub stuff. That's his niche. And his video has this product on it, like on the thumbnail that says urine detector. And it's in a bottle. It's clearly a product. And the title was like, you know, how to detect pee in your hot tub or pool. And then you play the video and he discloses that that chemical doesn't exist. And what he sells, he does actually sell a product. It is literally an empty bottle with a label on it that says urine detector. It looks really good. Like it looks absolutely compelling. It looks like one of the other products that he sells, you know, like kind of like a brand extension. And the idea is you buy the product, you fill it up with water or whatever, and you just put it near your hot tub. So when people get in, they think I better not be in here because

Starting point is 00:13:55 he's got this urine detector chemical, even though there's no such thing. So now listen, I am not encouraging you to pee in hot tubs. That is not what this is about. I just thought the whole thing was absolutely brilliant. And hey, I mean, considering he's selling an empty bottle for what? I don't know, 20 bucks, 25 bucks or something like that. It's basically a label is what you're buying. Gotta hand it to him. Pretty damn good marketing.

Starting point is 00:14:21 That's it for today. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Non Mingito in Natatoria

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