Today in Digital Marketing - The Future of Google Ads: No Keywords?!

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPotentially huge changes ahead for your Google Ad campaigns… Twitter pulls a popular marketing research tool… Google Analytics drops support for YouTube… and the clever QR code campaign in this weekend’s Superbowl that doesn’t use any QR codes.Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing us!About the Podcast:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterAdvertising and ClassifiedsLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, potentially huge changes ahead for your Google ad campaigns. Twitter pulls a popular marketing research tool. Google Analytics drops support for YouTube. And the clever QR code campaign in this weekend's Super Bowl that doesn't use any QR codes. It's Thursday, February 4th, 2021. Happy Lifeguard Day, Argentina. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And be sure to stay tuned to the end for a big announcement

about this podcast. All right, a bunch of Google stuff today for some reason. Heads up, if you run Google Ads for your brand, a potentially huge change is coming in the way you set your targeted keywords. In an announcement ironically titled, Making it easier to reach the right customers on search, Google today announced, it will begin making it harder to reach people, phasing out the broad match modifier keyword option. All right, let's back up for a moment.

So broad match modifier, those are those keywords that use a plus sign to force that keyword. In other words, to force that keyword. In other words, to indicate that the word marked with a plus sign must be in the search term for that ad set to fire. They are phasing that out. Now Google says that phrase match will expand and cover the previous broad match modified setups. They start rolling this out in a couple of weeks, and by July, that door will be closed.

You'll no longer be able to add those keywords to your campaigns. Google says they're doing this to help digital marketers save time in managing campaigns. I'm just going to go on a limb here and speak on behalf of all digital marketers when I say our top priority is not saving time. It's having better tools to more precisely define our perfect market audience. What we want is smarter campaigns, not dumber platforms. Here's Search Engine Journal's take on it. When taken in larger context, Google has been moving for years to get advertisers away

from fixating on the keyword level of search. While it might seem counterintuitive, given the history of search, persona-driven targeting and search themes are where Google wants advertisers to focus. In the past, Google's automation features were lacking. It was hard to justify taking your hands off those controls. However, many advertisers have found things like dynamic search ads and broad match, coupled with smart bidding, to perform light years ahead of where they used to. Brands have wondered for years if Google will achieve a no-keyword-needed environment. While that is still up for debate,

they are certainly trying to consolidate and streamline that part of their platform. Unquote. Yikes. Call me naive, but I didn't even realize this was a thing. Google says it will start suspending stores that sneakily change the price once a customer lands on the checkout page. It will look at the price you give it in your Merchant Center feed and make sure that that is the same price displayed at checkout. If there is a mismatch, you will be put in the timeout corner for 28 days while you get that fixed. If after that period, you're still doing this, Google says it may just kick you out entirely. To be clear, this is not a new rule. This has been around

forever. In fact, this past summer, we covered reports that Google's bot was going around adding things into carts and then abandoning them. Now we know why. Now what's new is only the enforcement of this rule. Enforcement that will start April 6th. While we're on Google for a moment, the company has stopped showing data from YouTube channels in Google Analytics. Now, there's nothing to freak out about. Nearly everyone who runs their brand's YouTube pages uses the analytics on YouTube, not those in Google Analytics. Now, it's nothing to freak out about. Nearly everyone who runs their brand's YouTube pages

uses the analytics on YouTube, not those in Google Analytics. Those analytics available in your YouTube channel are not going anywhere. It's just this connection to Google Analytics that stopped. They removed the ability to connect your YouTube to GA back in November. You'll still see your historical data there,

but they stopped collecting data this past Monday. Like I say, this is not a big deal for most brand marketers, but there are still some who preferred to see all their video stuff with the rest of their numbers on the GA platform. For those people, you may need to explore a third-party analytics tool now. One of the best-kept secrets among people who run ads on Facebook is their ads library. With it, you can look at almost any page and see the ads they're running. For instance, I searched Nike and found all the ads that they're running, the body copy, the image, the video.

You can even see how many admins they have and what country they're in. I probably don't have to tell you, this is fantastic for competitive research. Twitter had this too for political and issue-based advertisers until just recently. Late last month, turns out, Twitter quietly pulled it offline. As for why, well, that's up in the air. Twitter says, quote, we launched the Twitter Ads Transparency Center to provide greater insight around political and issue ads on the platform. With the official prohibition of both political and issue ads on Twitter in November 2019, it no longer provides its original intended value.

To replace it and maintain the same levels of transparency, Twitter is now providing an archived version of data from political ads. You can download this information by clicking on your account in the Settings and Privacy tab. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, which is a shame because the Ads Transparency Center was helpful in getting a better understanding of Twitter campaigns being run and how the platform was being used, not just in terms of political campaigns,

but also more generally, in working to understand how different brands were looking to use their tweet campaigns to best effect. Unquote. looking to use their tweet campaigns to best effect, unquote. A clever digital ad campaign will run this Sunday during the Super Bowl. It's from Cheetos. And what they've done is to somehow embed hidden Snapchat codes into every frame of their ad. When you scan your screen with Snapchat, you will get a coupon for a new snack product

that they're launching. You won't have to pause the show. You won't have to find a QR code somewhere on the screen and aim your phone there. You literally just point your camera at the screen. This is the first time a brand has used this tech from Snapchat. Unless you think there is a mismatch between diehard football fans and the demographics of Snapchat's user base, 61% of Snapchat users recently

polled said, yeah, they plan to watch the game. Of those, two-thirds plan to be on Snapchat that day. This is, of course, a big improvement over our old lover, the QR code. Pringles, for instance, ran a live stream in 2019 that let people scan a QR code and then they would get launched over to Kellogg's Amazon store. Here's Marketing Dive's take on it. Removing a layer of user friction and the visual obtrusiveness of actual codes on the screen could lead more mobile customers to adopt the scannable technology.

Access to Cheetos Snap Codes will be limited to when the commercial airs live during the game's third quarter and all day Sunday on the YouTube version of the spot. As for fans not on Snapchat, live during the game's third quarter and all day Sunday on the YouTube version of the spot, unquote. As for fans not on Snapchat, Cheetos plans to tweet every time there's a turnover. People can reply to that and maybe win some branded merch. More moves from Walmart to dive deeply into the digital marketing space, today announcing it has acquired the technology and IP of Thunder, an ad tech firm that worked mostly in the creative automation space.

It's all part of Walmart's self-serve ad portal that they've been working on for a while now, planned to launch later this year. Yes, one more platform to learn. As we reported here earlier, Walmart recently partnered with the Trade Desk to develop the demand-side platform. The company's chief customer officer said, quote, Thunder will also increase ad effectiveness over time with creative versioning, testing, and optimization, unlocking advertiser-specific insights for higher return on ad spend, unquote. That's a lot of gobbledygook.

I mean, let's face it, the thing that provides ROI is the quality of your audience and creative. Not how cool any back-end tech is, but, you know, whatever. Most of Thunder's employees are crossing the floor to Walmart as part of the deal. If you currently do business with Thunder, that business is not part of the deal, and they will be sunsetting those relationships soon. Financial terms were not disclosed. Everyone, it seems, is building out this kind of automation tech. Just last month, Pinterest launched a customizable ad format that lets marketers automate the building of personalized creative to target specific audiences.

Forrester Research expects that within two years, 11% of creative and agency tasks will be fully automated. All right, and to the big announcement. So one thing I heard from the listener survey was that many people wanted an option to get the podcast as an email newsletter, complete with all the stories, related links, images, videos of things we report on, that kind of thing. So I'm pleased to announce that is now possible. You can now get the full show's text in your email box every day. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in this episode's notes. And this is much more than a transcript.

Not only will you get the full text of all the stories we cover every day on the podcast, you'll also get direct links to follow the story deeper, contextual links within each story, the full text of all our weekend edition episodes. Some issues will have a newsletter exclusive, which will be a deeper story or an interesting digital marketing tool

or service we've uncovered. Today's newsletter exclusive, for instance, is a tool we've tested and love that will let you download any Twitter account's full list of followers or its tweet timeline and get that download as an Excel file. And because it's email, you'll get images and videos in the newsletter.

In today's issue, diagrams, showing how broad match modifier will change and a table of examples. And yes, this will be a premium newsletter, so it's $5 a month or $50 for the year. But for current listeners, I'm running a Founders Club promotion where you can get every show as an email newsletter for a full year for only $30 this weekend only.

If you want to preview it, you can read today's issue free. Just click the link that says, let me read it first. So again, todayindigital.com slash newsletter, or tap the link in this episode's notes. And now here it is, your moment of digital marketing zen. I'm Claire. We are here in the BA Test Kitchen, and today I'm going to try to make a gourmet Cheeto. It's breaking apart.

Too much baking powder, I think. See, it's like too flat. Oh. You happy with the base? I feel like it's- Not anymore. You just told me it was bad. Brad, your honesty is admirable, but also kind of soul crushing.