Today in Digital Marketing - The 'Other' Bucket: What is Google Ads Hiding?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, June 5th. Today, why is Google dumping up to three quarters of your ad results into an unmarked bucket? HubSpot is about to get more expensive. Finally, a framework for data deletion requests. And Microsoft's change to shopping campaigns is coming, whether you want it or not. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. Every other Wednesday, our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskin-Gales, joins me.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Jill spent six years at Google Ads and now runs the Inside Google Ads training program for practitioners. If Google Ads isn't relevant to your day-to-day work, premium members, you can just skip to the next chapter by tapping the next story. Or if you're not a premium member, skip to about the seven minute and five second mark.

Starting point is 00:00:48 Jill, hello. Hello. It's been a couple of weeks since Google's big marketing live event. And one of the things that they like to talk up at these events is just how much transparency and control they're giving advertisers. And then out the back door, they're removing controls, putting more things into the black box. Am I just a grumpy old man? Is that your sense too? Well, you may be a grumpy old man, but I do share the same sense with you.

Starting point is 00:01:19 Google announced some more transparency and control features coming to Performance Max. For example, more asset group reporting, more opportunity to add exclusions. But on the whole, if you're a Google Ads practitioner in 2024, you have way less transparency and control over your campaigns than you even did in, let's say, 2020. Can you give me a couple of examples of that? Like, how have we been losing control in Google Ads over the last few years? I think one of the big ways is actually the other search terms. So when you run a search campaign, you enter your keywords into Google Ads, and then you check your search terms report to see which user searches actually match to your keywords. And usually you would be able to actually see those search terms and add negatives and optimize based on it. But now, due to privacy, according to Google, a lot of those search terms you're advertising on, you can't actually see.

Starting point is 00:02:07 And with some of my coaching clients, I can see that as much as 50% or even 75% of their search ad spend is going to other search terms that they can't even see. So they don't even know what they're advertising on. Is this similar to when Google Analytics, you know, back in the day, Google Analytics, you'd be able to see every keyword, everything that came in. And then one day they just basically deleted all of them and put them. What was the keyword they use? Like not provided or not available or something like all of a sudden, all of them disappeared. Is this kind of the same thing on the ad side? It's a similar kind of idea.

Starting point is 00:02:41 I'm not familiar with the specifics of the Google Analytics example. But in the last, I'd say, five or so years, Google has become much more conscious of user privacy, thinking about privacy thresholds. Like another example of this is back in 2017 or so, you could advertise to people based on words in their Gmail inbox. Right. So you could keyword based advertise based on the emails people had. You cannot do that anymore. Was it effective though? I mean, privacy issues aside. Highly effective. The clients I worked with at Google who use this,

Starting point is 00:03:14 you could advertise to people who you know were getting emails from your competitors. There were lots of really creative ways to use that when Gmail's were their own separate campaign type. Now Gmail's been brought under the umbrella of DemandGen and Performance Max, so you can use audience targeting, but it's not quite the same as targeting ads based on what people have in their inbox. Is it unfair for me to call this a scam?

Starting point is 00:03:39 Like Google has you paying, you know, ostensibly to advertise on searches that you pick, but you can't actually see those searches? Yeah, there are definitely folks in the industry who, especially after, you know, all the news Google has had recently about the way they may have misled SEOs or the DOJ case about, you know, bid floors and things. So some people think like, oh, it's just a way to get you to advertise on garbage and ignore your negative keywords. We have no way to prove or disprove that. What I can say as someone who worked there is like, that's not the Google I know. And I think on the whole, Google does intend to do right by its advertisers. Is it because of privacy or some other reason? I don't know. But if you're someone

Starting point is 00:04:18 who has not checked your search terms report in a while, or maybe you have, but you've never scrolled down to the bottom to see that other search terms line, you're going to want to check. You know, I was on a coaching call yesterday, and my client, actually, their other search terms performed way better than their search terms. So, you know, not so concerned there. But then a client call I had last week, their other search terms performed way worse than the search terms we could see. So it's definitely worth looking into. And ultimately, you have to rely on something like your bid strategy to guide Google, whether it's search terms you can or can't see towards the outcomes you want to achieve. I wonder if this is in the

Starting point is 00:04:56 long run, a good thing, because, you know, like, I mean, one of the sort of debates, I think, in the digital marketing space is that when when AI first entered the media buying space, it was terrible. Now, I think most people have accepted that, you know, AI, especially around targeting, especially around generating audiences, much less so on the creative side. But, you know, the targeting part has actually done pretty well. And, you know, I'm not as familiar with Google as I am with metaa, but I would say most senior Meta media buyers have said that it actually performs a little bit better than when the marketer has got their hands, you know, the human has got their hands in kind of micromanaging stuff. Is that do we see that in this kind of big, mysterious, lumped other search terms? I guess yes, with asterisk. So like, yes, the automation, whether it's optimized targeting, or the search terms you can't see, or running a PMAX campaign, like yes,

Starting point is 00:05:51 the AI and automation can do better targeting than humans if given the right information. And that's the gap that I think, you know, Google product managers have a blind spot around. Because in many cases, with your small business owners or your small budget accounts, you know, they don't have the correct data feeding in or complete data feeding in. If you're a lead gen advertiser, you may not have the full funnel leading in. You may not have conversion tracking set up. You may not be sharing first party audiences. So when all of those foundations of the account are in place, the AI has the data it needs to drive good results for you. But so frequently, for so many

Starting point is 00:06:25 different reasons, we don't live in an ideal world. And so you don't have all those fundamentals in place. So the AI doesn't have the correct data to work off of. And as a result, it's not able to drive the best results for your business. So I don't think that's Google's fault. You know, AI does exactly what we tell it to do. But at the same time, it's not the business owner's fault either that they can't properly implement these things that are really complicated. Yeah, fair. OK, Jill, thank you.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Thank you. Jill Sasking-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 gatraining.

Starting point is 00:07:06 New data from BrightEdge confirms what we reported yesterday, that Google has quietly pulled way back on its AI summaries. Those summaries sit at the top of the search results page and were the big star at Google's recent IO event. But since launch, users found it giving nonsensical and sometimes dangerous answers, and marketers said it was all but plagiarizing their webpages with only a tiny credit link. Google responded by saying, essentially, working as intended, and blaming media outlets for reporting on outlying searches that don't get a lot of queries.

Starting point is 00:07:42 That said, clearly the attention spooked Google, with BrightEdge finding that now fewer than 15% of queries have that AI overview on them. Compare that to when they rolled it out, that number was almost 85%. So when do the summaries show up now? BrightEdge says there are a few things that make it more likely for them to trigger. They're almost three times as likely to show up when featured snippets are also on the page. They're also more likely to show up when the search query is a question. As for what keeps them away, so far questions about local topics or businesses are the least likely to have AI overviews. And site links are also less likely to trigger an AI overview,

Starting point is 00:08:22 presumably trying to keep the risk of providing inaccurate information about brands down. BrightEdge also looked at how often AI summaries now show up based on industry. 63% of keywords in healthcare will trigger an AI overview. In B2B tech, 32% of keywords will. In e-commerce, 23%. Restaurants and travel tend to barely show any. It's going to cost more to use the popular marketing platform HubSpot, the company announcing higher fees for payments processed through their commerce hub.

Starting point is 00:08:59 It'll also increase its surcharge on payments that go through Stripe. Specifically, the current HubSpot clearing fees are 0.5%. That's moving to 0.8%. The commerce platform itself was free. Not anymore. It will have an additional 0.5% fee to use it. And if you're using Stripe, you'll of course be paying Stripe's fees plus HubSpot's surcharge, which moves from a half percentage point to three quarters of a point. There is a way to hold off this increase a bit. If you are using HubSpot payments by June 20th, they say they will push that fee increase back a year for you. Some other updates, a new vertical sidebar navigation replaces the old top drop-down

Starting point is 00:09:42 menus, which might make it easier to navigate. Users can now add up to four custom fields to invoices. They've introduced navigation bookmarks, so you can keep most of your frequently used tools close at hand. For email metrics, HubSpot now separates bot-included and bot-excluded metrics, which should provide a more clear picture of actual human engagement. And leaders can now manage approvals directly from their mobile devices, and super admins are gaining more control over feature release timing.

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Starting point is 00:10:37 Be protected, be Zen. YouTube continues to hand out features that used to be locked behind minimum subscriber counts, and this latest escapee could be a pretty solid tool for your brand's social media efforts. In addition to videos, you can also post text updates, like you might on Facebook. They're called community posts on YouTube, and you can add polls, ask questions, get comments from it, that kind of thing. Previously, you had to hit a subscriber count threshold. Now, YouTube, in its weekly update video, says that soon everyone will have access to it.

Starting point is 00:11:07 These posts show up on the subscriber feed and occasionally in the main feed. Users can also find them on channel pages under the Community tab. This might take a couple of weeks to get to all accounts, but it is on the way. They've also revamped the Research tab in YouTube Studio Analytics to provide some recommendations for new video ideas. They've also renamed that tab from research to inspiration. One of the elements there will be what they call breakout videos. These are videos from similar channels to yours that have performed well. There's also a new kind of inspo search engine there. You type in a topic and it'll spit out some ideas based on what it thinks your viewers would respond to. This new Inspiration tab should now be available to everyone, everywhere,

Starting point is 00:11:47 except the EU, the UK, Switzerland, and India. YouTube says it's planning to get it global soon. Microsoft will be moving all your smart shopping campaigns to its version of Performance Max in the next few months. If this is something you want to do now for some reason, you can force the update by looking for Upgrade to Performance Max under Edit. Microsoft says all the related bits should stay the same. Setup, reporting, performance history, all that should carry over.

Starting point is 00:12:19 What won't carry over, though, is your campaign's learning data. The company says you can expect a new learning period to last up to two weeks after the move. A few other small updates. Their ad platform now speaks Thai, Turkish, Korean, Russian, Dutch, and Filipino. As we reported yesterday, video and connected TV ads are now in their ads editor, including Netflix's inventory. You can now use generative AI to create and edit graphics for your display ads, and they have started putting in some audiences specifically honed for the upcoming Olympics. If you've ever tried to get your website compliant with privacy legislation, you'll know it's a lot harder than it seems. Do you use the European version with its buttons or the American version with its don't use my data link? And which American version? The California one? Do you even know

Starting point is 00:13:12 the differences? The Interactive Ad Bureau recently released what it hopes will be a standard, a new data deletion request framework. Quoting Martek, quote, it lays out how to validate request origins, ensure requester authenticity, confirm receipt and employ cryptographic signatures for Quoting Martek, 16 U.S. state privacy laws, and additional privacy legislation, including Quebec Law 25, unquote. The Martech piece noted it's a little frustrating to see the private sector having to step in when this is something governments could create and mandate. The IAB says they can provide implementation support and guidance from their tech lab team. That is it for today. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The 'Other' Bucket: What is Google Ads Hiding?

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