Today in Digital Marketing - One Tiny Toggle

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Google Ads now default to Broad Match. Facebook's new AI tool could spell trouble for brands that get a lot of comments. Another door into TV ads has opened for small businesses. YouTube's Shorts get a small upgrade; Google Docs gets a big nerdy one. And the world's worst ads will soon appear on one of the world's most trusted brands.Links to today's stories Rate and Review Us • Contact Us 📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usGO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our SlackUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Wednesday, July 17th. Today, Facebook's new AI tool could spell trouble for brands that get a lot of comments. Another door into TV ads has opened up for small businesses. YouTube's shorts get a small upgrade. Google Docs gets a big nerdy one. And the world's worst ads will soon appear on one of the world's most trusted brands. I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. But first, it's time to check in with our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskengales. Jill spent

six years at Google Ads and today runs the Inside Google Ads training program for practitioners and is host of the excellent Inside Google Ads podcast. Jill, I have been reading a ton about this new broad match default setting. What is happening here? What is happening is that when you set up a new search campaign in Google Ads, there's among the many settings you can choose from this little box called broad match keywords. And that box has been there for some time. And if you turn broad match keywords on, then Google will ignore all the match types of

your keywords in that campaign and set everything to broad match. And if you have this setting off, Google will respect your match types. And so until recently, the default was off and you could use match types as you please. But now if you go to set up a new search campaign, the default is that this broad match keyword setting is turned on. And so practically what that means is if you just kind of zoom by and don't notice, you go add in your keywords and phrase match or exact match. Once you hit save, Google's going to remove your match types. And unless you see the very small writing, not tell you about it. And

in the future, if you go to add keywords to that campaign, even if you add them with phrase or exact match types, the moment you hit save, Google just strips out your match types. This sounds like a bad idea. Is it? Am I reading this wrong? I mean, for Google, it's probably a very good idea. I joked that for my business, it's a good idea. But yeah, I don't think this is a very good idea.

I see a lot of confusion happening because, of course, you know, most people who use Google ads, they're not experts. They're trying to follow some tutorial as they go through to set up their campaigns. And if they even notice that their match types are disappearing, they will probably have no idea why, especially if you go to start working on existing campaign and you don't think to check this new thing in the campaign settings. You could want to bash your head against the wall to try to figure out why you keep typing in your match types and they keep not showing up. It's important to note that no changes are made to existing campaigns.

So if you have existing search campaigns with your match types, those will work as intended. But if someone turns on the setting accidentally or on purpose in an existing campaign, or when you go to set up a new campaign, this could really impact the kinds of searches you're eligible to show on. Because of course, broad match means you're eligible to show on any user search that is related to the idea of your keyword versus something like exact match, which means you can show on searches that at least share the same meaning as your keyword. You know, we've seen all the platforms sort of broaden out targeting. Google, I think, has been one of the more aggressive at that, especially with Performance Max. When it first

launched, they kind of tightened things up a little bit here and there. But this kind of sounds like another move toward just opening it up. And then I guess the theory inside Google is that the AI will then kind of sort it out. Is this just trying to collect more data for machine learning? It is. And it's also, you know, Google really wants us to use Broadmatch. Does it make Google more money? Sure. But when I try to put on my hat of like, OK, you know, other than making more money, like what might be the impact here? What might be the good in this? There are some potential good reasons to use broad match. One of them is that broad match incorporates more signals than exact or phrase match. For example, it will use the context of your website and other keywords in the ad group

to help figure out what searches to serve on. And exact and phrase don't do that. Kind of like how when you use a smart bidding strategy, right, AI, it incorporates a lot more signals than a manual bidding strategy. There's also relatively new features called broad match inclusions, where you can actually use broad match keywords to just advertise on your brand name, something you couldn't do before. So there are potential benefits, of course, to using broad match. And if you're at large budget levels, I'd absolutely recommend Broadmatch. But this setting, even for me, who's, you know, very Google supporter and half drunk on Google Kool-Aid still,

it feels a bit aggressive towards new advertisers who aren't going to know what they aren't going to know and might be shocked to find out what they end up advertising on. Yeah, because I think there's a sort of a common feeling among people who are not in it that often that while you go in and you type, you know, if you sell shoes, you have a list of 10 keywords. Inexpensive shoes, fashion shoes, cheap shoes. Can you kind of put your head in, put your brain as if you were an advertiser 10 years ago, Google advertiser 10 years ago, and a Google advertiser today, and compare the different versions of broad match that we have between those between last decade and this decade, is today's broad match any smarter than broad match was 10 years ago? Absolutely. It's smarter than it was two years ago. You know, as much as we like, say, Oh, we want our control bad. We don't want to go so broad. Like it absolutely is a better product than it used to be.

What I would say is the way exact match works today is probably the way broad match worked five years ago. So things are getting broader. But I will also give Google credit that on the negative keyword side, negative keywords are also getting broader. So before, if you wanted to exclude people searching for, I don't know, Adidas, you would have to also include every possible misspelling of Adidas. Because if you just exclude Adidas and someone writes, you know, Adidas or Adisa, you could still show an ad. Now, negative keywords are going to start excluding misspellings as well. So it's not just in the positive that Google is broadening things. also something like negative keywords, Google is broadening things. But this is really just yet another march towards a fundamental shift in the way keywords work. You know, Google Ads is no longer a game of picking the exact kind of searches you want to show up on and showing ads. It's much more about picking general ideas and themes and audiences and letting machine learning do the rest. Yeah, there was a whole industry around it.

I mean, people got, you know, practically got PhDs in keyword planner just to kind of move around the thing. There were courses and white papers galore around how to and services. I mean, dozens and dozens of SaaS products that would help you pick just the right keywords. With Broadmatch, can you tell me, remind me a bit about the reporting? You know, can we see what keywords are performing? And then maybe, you know, say, well, look, when they did broad match, it found these 10 and they're really crappy. So I'm just going to negative those out.

Do we have that level of transparency? You do have that level of transparency with a big caveat. You have your search terms report. But in your search terms report, you may see a lot of search terms are not visible. They get bucketed under other search terms. We spoke about this a few weeks ago. And so Google has made advances there as well. It used to be that you would only see something in your search term report if you got at least one click on that search. Now you just need to have impressions on that search. So you can start to see all these searches which you were showing for and didn't get clicks for. And those can potentially be helpful things to add as negatives. And then

recently, just last week, Google also announced that misspellings can start to show up in the search terms report as well, because before a misspelling would be such low search volume that you wouldn't see it. Now you are going to be able to see it. So you can't see everything you're advertising on, whether using broad phrase or exact match keywords. But you can see more in your search terms report today than you could two years ago. All right. Good stuff. Thanks, Jill. Thank you. Jill Saskengale 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 todayindigital.com slash GA. 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. Many brands spend a lot of time

curating the comments on their social media ads, replying to questions, praising the good comments, hiding the bad, and so on. Some do it on their own. ads, replying to questions, praising the good comments, hiding the bad, and so on. Some do it on their own, some hire agencies like ours to do it for them. Well, regardless of how these brands handle it, it's been clear for more than a decade

that comments on social media posts, paid or organic, can make or break a reputation. So you might be surprised or not to learn that Meta plans to throw a tiny wrench into it with their new AI comment summaries. These will appear at the top of Facebook post comment sections and we'll try to wrap up what the general vibe of the comments below it are. Certainly a nice touch for users, but this could be a disaster for risk-averse brands. For one thing, AI gets it

wrong more times than it should. It's also not great at understanding evolving internet speak, though that might be less of an issue on Facebook than on, say, Snapchat. The big question, can you turn this off on your brand page? Yes and no. Yes, there is a setting to remove a content summary from a single post, but there's no way to guarantee that it won't keep adding them to your brand's posts in the future. They do also have a toggle switch which claims to disable these summaries on your posts entirely, but there's one big catch. Right below that toggle, Meta says that regardless of where you set that on-off switch, these new AI comment summaries may still show up on your ads, whether you, the advertiser,

wants them or not. To be fair, this does exist on other platforms, and they can be helpful. I've joined several YouTube lives, and there's been a quick summary of what people were saying in the live chat before I joined. But not everyone is a fan. Quoting social media today, quote, Again, this is another AI element that seemingly detracts from the core offering of social media apps in that they're social and designed to facilitate human reaction. Sure, reading through every comment is going to be tedious on some popular posts, and having a summary of the general view could make it a bit easier to get an understanding of how people feel. But most Facebook users aren't surveying public opinion.

They're looking to engage and to interact. And they can only do that at an individual per comment level. Unquote. If you've ever wanted your brand to get more into television and video streaming, one major player just made it a lot easier. Paramount's ad division is rolling out a new self-service ad platform aimed at small and medium-sized businesses that might be new to television advertising. In the past, of course, getting your ad on TV meant phoning an ad rep, having several three martini lunches, and coughing up a lot of money. Paramount says campaign budgets for this new system can be as low as 500 bucks. They've also licensed some tech from Waymark, which produces AI-created video content. You know how these work by now. You give it your brand website or upload some assets,

and it makes an underwhelming video just a tiny step above a PowerPoint slide with animations. They're also using a company called Spaceback to turn social media posts into what they call TV-ready ads that will be coming later in the year. As for targeting, you can pick the geography and demographics, and Paramount says it can push your ads out to the right people in that group using your first-party data that you upload to their platform. YouTube moved pretty fast to capitalize on the vertical video trend made popular by TikTok. They called their version Shorts and by all accounts, it's done quite well. One thing they didn't copy, to the confusion of many, was the ability to add a custom thumbnail to your short.

Take a look at almost any TikTok profile page full of videos and you'll see how important thumbnails can be. But that's only if you're getting to videos from that bio page. Most discovery, whether it's TikTok, shorts, reels, or similar formats, happen because a video just starts playing after the previous one. No thumbnail is shown because, unlike YouTube's long-form videos, you're not really picking which video to watch. You're being fed them. Still, YouTube says it's working on a way for you to edit the short thumbnails that it auto-generates for each upload.

The company announcing yesterday they're testing letting brands and creators edit those images by adding text or filters to it. Still, not the solution many marketers and influencers want, but at least it's partway there. And that will bring us to the Pulitzer Prize winning lightning round. YouTube is testing a new feature called Community Spaces aimed at boosting fan engagement. This will let brands and creators interact more closely with their audience through dedicated community hubs. Instagram now lets users add multiple audio tracks to their Reels.

You can add up to 20 tracks in a single Reel. Once added, you can trim them to include only the part you want. In the next two weeks, Google Docs will roll out the ability to convert pasted Markdown copy into its documents. Markdown is a lightweight language that lets you add formatting elements to documents quickly. A couple of years ago, Google added some lightweight Markdown support.

Once this month's rollout is done, you'll be able to paste Markdown, import a Markdown document, or export a Google Doc as Markdown. And finally, you know those bottom feeder clickbait Taboola ads everywhere? 95% of low-credit customers in your city name here just got millions. Or you won't believe what skin cream this influencer just swam in. Of all of the apps you wouldn't expect those parasite ads to be in, did you think Apple would be on that list? It's true. Apple this week announced it will now let Taboola sell ads in its news and stocks apps.

You will believe how much Taboola's stock rose after the announcement. It was 20%. A number of years ago, I used to work for the CBC, which is Canada's public broadcaster. Americans, it's kind of like NPR and PBS put together, but with no budget. I was a national host and producer, and all the studios for the shows that I worked on were underground in Vancouver.

The national studios are a couple of stories underground. And, you know, after you do a show weekly or daily in the same dark room, even with podcasting, you kind of forget. I know it sounds weird, but you forget that other people are listening. Because the only people you see day to day are the people behind the glass. I still feel that way sometimes with podcasting, which is why I was really thrilled that someone in their car posted this yesterday.

It's an Instagram story. It says, we get asked about how we keep up with all the digital media landscape changing all the time. It's not easy. My days are full of podcasts, books, courses, and events to keep on top of Google and Meta spewing out new features all the time. Today in digital marketing is my on the way to work podcast.

So my thanks to the Arrow Agency in Australia for that. Nice bit of cheering up yesterday. You can do the same thing. Show me where you are listening to the podcast and tag us on Instagram and threads. We are at today in digital marketing on Tik TOK. We are at today in digital and on Mastodon. We are today in digital at mas.to.

That's it for today. Thanks for listening. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow, ma'am. We're discussing the. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow. Ma'am, we're discussing the rezoning for the Portillos. Do you have any comments on that? For what? We're discussing the rezoning on 53rd for... Well, I live on 63rd.

Again, we're here to hear comments about the rezoning. Well, I don't like Facebook. And I don't like the Internet. The library blocked my password. Now tell me, does that make any sense to you? Ma'am, we're not here to discuss your personal life. I'm sorry. Do you have any comments about the rezoning?

No, sir. Have a good day. Thank you.