Today in Digital Marketing - The Online Ad Scam Plaguing (and Benefitting) Google Ads

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Friday, February 24th. Today, Google might be profiting from scam restaurant ads. How the bad economy means better metrics for marketers. Shopify changes up its partner program. Facebook's most popular links go to its competitors. The Figma-Adobe deal might be in trouble. And heads up, parents, there are bad words in our first story. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:26 Ad scammers are targeting local restaurants now and platforms like Google are reaping the rewards. Yesterday, technology blogger Cory Doctorow posted a thread about a local Thai restaurant in his neighborhood called Kin. He searched for their website on Google to order some takeout. But here's where things take a turn.

Starting point is 00:00:44 The top search result, which was an ad, was fake. That ad went to a site masquerading as the Thai restaurant to trick customers into ordering from them instead. Same name, same logo, similar URLs, convincing images. It even uses basic SEO, and honestly, it looks pretty legit to me. And so Corey got duped. He placed an order on the fake website. The fake site then placed the order in his name with the real site and marked up the

Starting point is 00:01:13 prices by 15%. He goes on to explain the restaurant is clearly aware of the scam and they contacted him within minutes to tell him they'd canceled the fraudsters order. Furthermore, he would need to cancel the payment to the fakers with his credit card company, Amex. As it turns out, the scammers conveniently charged him twice. But that's not all. The business phone number for the fake restaurant on the Amex bill is the phone number for Wix,

Starting point is 00:01:37 the company that provides the scammers website. Quoting Corey, how the actual fuck did these obvious scammers get an Amex merchant account in the name of the restaurant, Quoting Corey, ads for a business that they already have a knowledge box for. Google knows what the real kin restaurant is, and yet they're accepting payment to put a fake kin listing two slots above the real one. There's never just one ant. I guarantee you that these same creeps have a thousand other fakes websites with a thousand fake Amex merchant accounts for a thousand real businesses, and that Google has sold them ads for every one, unquote. Moral of the story, search for your brand and check for fake sponsored links.

Starting point is 00:02:36 Well, it's often difficult to know whether that dip in the performance of your digital ad campaign is because of seasonal changes or industry trends, or maybe your creative just sucks. That's why it's often helpful to get a benchmark, find out what CPM others in your industry are paying, what your competitors click through rates are, or what direction the average order value is trending for brands who sell at the same price point you do. Those data have been difficult to get. One of our favorite tools makes it easy. It's called Veros.com. And every so often we like to invite them on to give us a look at the overall media buying scene.

Starting point is 00:03:10 Yarden Shaked is the CEO of Veros and he joins me now. Before we start on sort of the metrics, can you walk us through briefly how the Veros platform works and how you get these numbers? Yeah, so basically it's one big data cooperative. So a brand or an agency actually connects via API into Veros. That's, you know, Facebook ads, Google ads, TikTok ads, Shopify, all those connections. We aggregate and we anonymize that data, we tag it by a bunch of companies, and then we let you sort of filter on your own. So it's all first party clean data. There's no scraping or anything like that.

Starting point is 00:03:56 So I can't go in and specifically find my competitor, but I would be able to see my industry. Right. that sell glasses with average order values between $70 to $100 and that are spending between $50,000 to $100,000 in Canada. You can just set those filters as you want. Do you have to connect your ad account in order to see other people's ad data? You do. That's the model. And that's how the product works. But we're hypersensitive about data security. We have large public companies already sharing data on our platform. And at least part of it is free, right? Yeah, there's a free plan. And even though the paid plans are super cheap right now, it's $19 a month for a brand and $99 a month for an agency. So let's start with the CPMs. How should we break this down by platform?

Starting point is 00:04:48 Actually, year over year, up until now, late February, mid to late February, overall CPMs are down 22%. And cost per purchase is down 31%. And then if you look, fashion and food and bev are both, CPMs are down 16%. And beauty and home are down around 30%. So we're seeing big dips and cost per purchase across these categories, fashion, beauty, food and bed, home and garden, is between 35% to 45% down. So it's a really good start of the year for media buying. And that's cost per purchase, those last numbers? Yeah, it's cost per purchase. Conversion rates are pretty significantly up.

Starting point is 00:05:40 AOVs are actually flat, but conversion rates are up. And spend is up 10%. Interesting, because, you know, you expect CPMs to be down in a sort of an economic, you know, where there's some sort of bad headwinds, as you might say, because there's fewer people in the market. The market is an auction. The competition is less. Therefore, CPMs are less.

Starting point is 00:05:59 But interesting to hear conversion rate is up. Yeah, yeah, it is. And the spend is up. It's very interesting. You know, we get reached out a lot to buy publications and stuff to get data. And they're writing articles about people are, you know, pulling back spend and all this stuff. And we're going in our data, which is 3500 companies. And spend is actually either flat or up depending on the channel. So overall, advertisers aren't pulling back heavily.

Starting point is 00:06:31 Are there any other big outlier metrics you're seeing that have made some big shifts? No, we see Google gaining a little bit of ground from meta as well. Like in terms of share of spend or volume of spend? Share of spend, share of spend. Like we saw at the start of 2022, you know, TikTok having a big late 2021, early 2022, TikTok having a big, big trend from barely no share of spend, close to like that 7-8% range. And then that basically stayed flat up until then. And now it looks like they're staying around that 7, 8. And Google and Meta are sort of fighting over market share, which is

Starting point is 00:07:12 pretty interesting. Can you tell us about this new MediaMix feature you just released? So MediaMix is a really cool feature. And basically, it's showing you distribution of spend across channels. And so you can see your spend versus your peers' spend across Meta, Google, and TikTok, but also in the underlying channels within those. So you can see Facebook prospecting versus retargeting splits. You can see splits for performance max, YouTube search

Starting point is 00:07:48 on Google, different things on TikTok. And then you can also see all the prices for all those splits. So you can see what's cheap now, what's more expensive. But it's super interesting because a lot of times our clients will find, wow, we're putting 10% of our spend into YouTube, but our competitors are really only putting like 1%, 2%. But they're putting most of that into Performance Max or something else. So people are realigning their spend a lot using it and also thinking about new strategies that they haven't been thinking that people are actually putting money in that they're not. Yarden Shaked is CEO of Varos.com. That's V-A-R-O-S dot com. Shopify is changing its partner program.

Starting point is 00:08:41 Yesterday, the e-commerce giant launched the first phase of its expansion of the program. First, the company is offering new incentives to accelerate partner growth. Now, partners will be able to earn more money by working with Shopify Plus merchants, strategic accounts, and enterprise clients. Shopify is also introducing product referral incentives. This includes bonuses for every merchant referred to POS Pro as the top tier of subscriptions to its point of sale software. And U.S. partners can earn more when they launch merchants on Markets Pro. Partners can also earn money by creating e-commerce themes and then publishing them in the Shopify theme store and developing Shopify apps and publishing those in its app store. Shopify is also launching a certification program with both business foundation and technical certifications. Partners will have access to eight new courses starting

Starting point is 00:09:31 next month. They will also have expanded virtual and in-person training events. Meta has released its latest widely viewed content report, which shows the most viewed posts and stories across Facebook. So it was trending in Q4 last year. The most widely viewed domains, that is to say links from Facebook to other sites, were YouTube and TikTok. The report doesn't give specifics about which videos saw the most links, but as Social Media Today points out, the data suggests video content still performs well on Facebook, even if it's not posted directly to the platform. In terms of specific links,

Starting point is 00:10:12 stories about celebrities dominate the list, as well as a report on the closure of Splash Mountain, twins born from frozen embryos, and a story about a woman who bought nothing for an entire year. But to be fair, this sample of widely viewed stories, it's kind of less trashy. embryos and a story about a woman who bought nothing for an entire year. To be fair, this sample of widely viewed stories is kind of less trashy and spammy than what we've seen in the past. Plus, there are no stories that were later removed for violating Meta's policies.

Starting point is 00:10:36 Social media today also noted this could show the tech giant is getting better at detecting and removing content sooner. As for the most widely viewed Facebook pages, made-for-the-web publishers and recipe sites take the top spots. And finally, in terms of content, the top posts seem to show a selection of light-hearted jokey posts and fairly simple memes. 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.

Starting point is 00:11:13 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. Adobe's big plans to acquire the design collaboration tool Figma might not happen after all. Bloomberg reporting that the Justice Department in the U.S. is preparing an antitrust lawsuit seeking to block the proposed $20 billion sale, according to people familiar with the matter. Figma is mainly used for designing app or website interfaces, and as the report noted, has trounced

Starting point is 00:11:50 Adobe's competing XD product in recent years. According to Adobe, the transaction isn't anti-competitive because the startup isn't a rival of products like Photoshop or Premiere. The antitrust division, though, is concerned that the deal would reduce options for design software used by creative professionals. The EU's antitrust watchdog says it has received requests to investigate the deal from national regulators, while the UK Competition and Markets Authority is also reviewing the merger, and the three jurisdictions often coordinate on their investigations. Sources say that Adobe had a meeting with the U.S. Justice Department this week and that a case is expected to be filed

Starting point is 00:12:28 as soon as next month. For its part, though, Adobe still expects the deal to close in 2023. The spokesperson said it is engaged in cooperative discussions with regulators in the U.S., U.K., and E.U., among others. And that will bring us to the Nobel Prize winning lightning round. YouTube is adding new metrics for shorts, including shown in feed and viewed versus

Starting point is 00:12:53 swiped away data. The platform is also adding new filters to display audience demographics by video format and a new moderator role with expanded actions for live chat. Oh, geez, I just dropped my bell. And broke it, maybe? No, I didn't. Twitter has removed closed captions from spaces on iOS. Within the iOS app, the three-dot menu

Starting point is 00:13:14 that previously let you turn on captions has disappeared. The accessibility-focused feature also doesn't seem to be working on the web or Android. LinkedIn has added more ways to integrate visual elements into your profile by filtering your activity section by types of content like videos, images, and articles. LinkedIn is also adding the ability to schedule newsletters directly in the app. And Pinterest's CEO this week warned that emerging AI tech like ChatGPT could accelerate the negative impact of social media on mental health. He said the AI amplifies, quote, And finally, we knew this was coming.

Starting point is 00:13:54 Some company called Futuri Media launched, or at least announced they're about to launch, Radio GPT, the world's first AI-driven localized radio hosts. The technology scans Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a bunch of other sources of news and information to create a script of local trending stories. And then, yes, uses AI voice technology and voice cloning to create audio content for use on radio stations. Stations can select from a variety of AI voices to create shows that can be hosted by a single voice

Starting point is 00:14:28 or by a team of two or three AI personalities. It also posts to social media. And so, friends, it looks like the buggles were wrong all along. It's really AI that ends up killing the radio star. I have mostly recovered from the poke holes in your eyeballs with a laser surgery that I had to do to ward off glaucoma. So, so far, no change in my prescription, which I'm very happy about. Steph, thank you, as usual, for jumping in. Of course.

Starting point is 00:14:58 So I don't think we've talked about this before, but in addition to producing the podcast, you are also an afternoon host on a couple of radio stations. Yes. So I do a show for a few stations in the GTA. I voice track, so it's all pre-recorded. The GTA is the Toronto area. So I have to ask, what do you think about this whole AI DJ thing? Well, if my career in radio wasn't already threatened, it's definitely doomed now. I really, I mean, who could not see this coming really? But I mean, and I would

Starting point is 00:15:34 like to think that maybe this is just a company that wants to get ahead of it and get an announcement out there. But truly, I mean, it was only a couple of days ago that I, and I'll admit without your consent, voice cloned you and ran you reading part of a story on the show. And it was, to me anyway, and to people in the Slack group, almost indistinguishable from you. What did you think, by the way, of your voice?

Starting point is 00:15:56 I didn't think, I definitely thought like I could hear the difference in it, but I played it for my husband and he thought it sounded exactly like me too. And the thing is, is that there's a lot less human error with your voice than when I used to be live on air. Yeah. And voice tracking, some people know is sort of you're not there live waiting for the song to end. And then you talk, you sort of you prepare all of the elements, you record them all. And then a computer just kind of chops them up and puts them after the songs in between between the spots and so on. Right. And it's one show for all three stations. So, I mean, it was already wiping out so many jobs anyways by doing it that way. Anyway, what stations are you on in case people are in your market?

Starting point is 00:16:35 Orangeville, Alliston and Milton. And you can hear Steph in the afternoon of those Ontario Canada stations. That will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is the aforementioned Steph Gunn, our production coordinator Sarah Guild,

Starting point is 00:16:54 music licensing by Source Audio, ad coordination by Red Circle, and you know, not many people know this, but our theme composer Mark Blevis holds the Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of Ritz crackers ever consumed in one sitting. He actually does this as

Starting point is 00:17:11 performance art now. It's a pretty popular event for the rich and famous. In the audience, often you'll see high hats and colored collars, white spats and $15, spending every dime on a wonderful time. Have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday.

Starting point is 00:17:27 Everybody from coast to coast Turn off your radio There's a new wave in the air Turn on your video And let's dance, dance

Today in Digital Marketing - The Online Ad Scam Plaguing (and Benefitting) Google Ads

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