Today in Digital Marketing - The Performance Max Bug That Google Isn't Talking About

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, why are Google's Performance Max campaigns delivering way outside their targeted audience? Plus, Instagram yesterday, don't copy any other creators. Instagram today, hey, here's some templates you can use to copy other creators. Also, Bezos unthrones the Walmart greeter. Snapchat offers 13 million reasons to advertise on its platform. And why one brand shut down its website today. It is Friday, April 22nd. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:00:27 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start today with an exclusive story you're hearing here first. There appears to be a big issue with at least some of Google's Performance Max campaigns. The issue? Even though you might be targeting a specific country, Google is showing your ad mostly to other countries. Google ads expert Jill Saskin-Gales uncovered this. Jill spent six years at Google helping some of the largest brands maximize results from their campaigns. Today, she is one of the most sought after experts in the space. And she joins me now. Hello.

Starting point is 00:01:01 Hello. Thank you for having me once again. So of course, I want to get to this issue. But before we get there, can you give us a quick recap on what Performance Max campaigns are, how they're different than the usual keyword and banner ads that we did before? Yes. Performance Max is Google Ads' new one campaign to rule them all. Out of a single campaign type, advertisers can now run search, display, discovery, video, shopping, local, pretty much any kind of campaign type all in one. So lots of automation means a lot less work for the advertiser, but of course, a, videos, and then Google just puts them into a paper bag, I presume, and shuffles them all and spits it out and see which combination and permutation works best. I think that's exactly how it works, literally. But in addition to that,

Starting point is 00:01:55 you do get to give Performance Max an audience signal. And that's something that was actually quite new for Google because the other automated campaign types like smart display or app campaigns or local campaigns, you get zero control over targeting. With Performance Max, you create something called an audience signal, which kind of guides the automation in the right direction, I guess, does whatever it wants, shows them whatever assets it wants based on what you told it, and just tries to get you as many conversions or as much conversion value as possible. And the opposite of that, which is traditionally what we've been doing, is being very specific about our media buy and saying, you know, no, I want these people. I want 65 and older women in the UK who like Chuck Norris or follow this account or whatever, you know, that level of specificity. Generally speaking, have you found Performance Max to have better performance? With a lot of caveats, but generally, yes, it can drive good performance. The big question is how it's driving that performance. And it's not always so easy to figure out exactly who those conversions

Starting point is 00:03:04 are coming from and where those conversions are coming from. And once's not always so easy to figure out exactly who those conversions are coming from and where those conversions are coming from. And once you are potentially able to figure that out, which we'll talk about in a bit, it may change your mind about whether or not you're actually having good performance. All right. So you discovered, we were chatting over Slack this morning and you discovered this. What do we call this? A bug? A hole? A glitch? Like an exploit? It's a feature. I'm going to say it's a feature. Okay. But yes, what I discovered is that Performance Max location targeting is set up a little differently from location targeting on other Google Ads campaigns.

Starting point is 00:03:49 Usually when you create a Google Ads campaign, you can decide if you want to only target people in Toronto or target people who are in Toronto or interested in Toronto. And of course, most of us don't want the interested in. We just want the located in. Because those people are usually going to be tourists. Tourists or just someone who lives in the UK who happens to be interested in Toronto. Who knows? When you set up a Performance Max campaign, you don't get to choose. And what I have discovered is that by default, it's people located in or interested in. And so I actually saw with one business owner that they had set Canada as the targeting for their campaign in Google ads

Starting point is 00:04:16 that said all impressions, clicks, conversions were from Canada. But when I looked in Google analytics, I saw that actually 60% of traffic from this campaign was coming from users in India and Pakistan, not Canada. And it should be noted this business owner does not do business in India or Pakistan. What? Wait a minute. So even though they had specified Canada is my target and Google Ads Manager was saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're sending it just to Canada. Google's own analytics product in another department is showing that that's not actually true. Yes. And so at first I thought, oh, crap, like what what got what went and in the account, it specifically says targeted location Canada, matched location Canada. But in Google Analytics, it's showing that a lot of that traffic and conversions are not actually from Canada at all.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Our full discussion covered things like how to mitigate this, the special exclusions you'll need to set up. Plus, we talked about how to extract more reporting data than the black box of PMax campaigns allow you. The full interview is in today's premium episode. You can subscribe to the premium feed at todayindigital.com slash premium or tap the link in the show notes. Jill also has a training program designed specifically for marketers who are running Google Ads, but maybe aren't as up to speed on the platform as they should be? I launched Inside Google Ads because I saw a real gap in the market for Google Ads education. You have your free certifications from Google Skill Shop,

Starting point is 00:05:53 which teach you the theory of how things work, but don't give you any practical knowledge. And then you have YouTube videos that people are putting out. Who knows if they know what they're talking about? And then these $1,000, $2,000 courses from gurus that are really unattainable. And so I wanted to launch a platform that was really affordable, designed for practitioners and can take people from beginner to intermediate or intermediate to advanced. And that's just $29 a month, so that it can be

Starting point is 00:06:19 accessible to as many people as possible. Jill has kindly provided us with the code as well. And you can take advantage of a exclusive discount for podcast listeners at this URL today in digital.com slash Google ads training. That link is in the show notes as well. Remember, not even 24 hours ago, when we reported that Instagram was changing how its algorithm would be ranking your brand's content and reducing distribution for content that isn't original? Well, now, and I think we're going to need the goofy Facebook music for this one, Steph. Now it appears Meta cannot make up its mind. The platform confirmed today it is testing templates, a feature that does exactly the opposite of what they said they wanted us to not do yesterday.

Starting point is 00:07:08 It lets creators make a reel using an existing template from another reel. This is a tool that will allow users to easily copy a creator's formatting to their own videos. Doesn't sound very original to me. Not only the product of that, but also the idea by itself is a ripoff of TikTok's templates. Why am I in this business again? For the first time, American consumers are now spending more of their money at Amazon than they are at Walmart. A new report indicates that Amazon

Starting point is 00:07:45 finally surpassed Walmart as the biggest retailer in the U.S. in 2021. Almost 9.5% of consumers' total retail spending went to Amazon, compared to 8.5% going to Walmart. Over the years, Amazon has steadily gained ground on Walmart in the retail sector. Prior to the pandemic in 2018, the e-commerce giant received almost 6% of consumers' total retail spending, while Walmart has held steady at over 9% since 2014, at least up until last year. Amazon especially dominates Walmart in two segments, electronics and appliances, and sporting goods, hobby, music, and books. For each of those segments, Amazon captured nearly five times as much U.S. household spending as

Starting point is 00:08:32 Walmart in 2021. Bezos' empire also garnered more than double the clothing and apparel spend than Walmart. But when it comes to groceries, Walmart still can't be beat, at least not yet. Consumers spent almost 10 times more on food and drink at Walmart than they did at Amazon. The data comes from Payments Amazon versus Walmart Q4 2021 report. 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. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters.

Starting point is 00:09:14 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. TikTok and Instagram get all the headlines, but spare a thought for the dark horse of the social media platforms, Snapchat. And it's doing just fine, thank you very much. The platform has released its latest performance update showing it added 13 million daily users in Q1 and has seen a steady increase in revenue. That takes the social media platform up to 332 million daily users. The data indicates that most of the new users come from the rest of the world category,

Starting point is 00:09:52 while most of the revenue is coming from North America. The company might have a bit of a problem here, as reaching consumers is one thing, but generating revenue is another. In terms of revenue, Snap Inc. had a 38% year-over-year increase, topping over a billion dollars for the quarter. The company says dynamic ads contributed significantly to revenue for the quarter, with the ad format more than tripling in revenue year-over-year. By using dynamic ads, advertisers upload their product catalogs so that Snapchat can match users with the most relevant products and ad formats

Starting point is 00:10:20 based on their interests in real time, which of course might be something you want to look at if you are in that space. Their report also suggests your brand might want to consider its own AR lens on the app, with more than 250 million Snapchatters now engaging with its augmented reality tools every day. We talk a lot about WordPress here, but there is another big, big, big CMS service out there, and it is called Drupal. And today, Drupal announced two vulnerabilities affecting versions 9.2 and 9.3 that could allow an attacker to upload malicious files and take control of a site. The first vulnerability affects Drupal's core form API has a vulnerability where certain contributed or custom modules forms may be vulnerable to improper input validation.

Starting point is 00:11:11 This could allow an attacker to inject disallowed values or overwrite data, unquote. enables a possible access bypass for users who have access to use revisions of content generally, but who do not have access to individual items of node and media content. Drupal has released security updates to address the vulnerabilities and is encouraging users to review security advisories and apply the updates. Have you ever thought about your digital carbon footprint as a marketer? Brands are taking part in Earth Day initiatives across the industry today, and one company is taking part by switching its website off. Although rather than completely shutting down its website, Volkswagen has replaced it with a carbon neutral net, which includes a more simple landing page

Starting point is 00:12:04 explaining the move, as well a more simple landing page explaining the move, as well as the brand's commitment to the environment. So if you're looking to shop for a new car, today is not the day. It is, though, a single page website. According to the Digital Carbon Emissions Calculator on website carbon.com, the page is 99% cleaner than over 2 million other websites. Whereas today in digital.com oh i see where this is going steph nice whereas today in digital.com is cleaner than only 75 you know what it's time to end the show cue the music hello d so there you go That's the info you need.

Starting point is 00:12:45 Okay. So I would just take a picture of that. This is our general contractor. We may be hours away from getting our green light from the structural engineer, which means that if everything is good, we may be able to have a hot tub on our deck very, very soon. Emily 425 reviewed us on Apple Podcasts saying, I love this podcast.

Starting point is 00:13:07 Super helpful, succinct, helps me keep up to date with the market while also keeping me entertained. Definitely worth adding to your daily ritual. Thank you, Emily, for your review. If you'd like to review the show, have a chance of me reading it out. Just tap the link in the episode notes or go to todayindigital.com slash rate us. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Station on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn.

Starting point is 00:13:36 Production coordinator, Sarah Guild. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. And a lot of people don't know this, but our theme composer, Mark Levis, and I wrote a book together. That's actually true. Although, honestly, I don't know how I survived the experience

Starting point is 00:13:52 because he used to scratch and bite me before he was much, much meaner. But now all the poodles run to my house for the funky cold medina. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday. Instagram women,

Starting point is 00:14:09 I is it to take in. I will double click your pics for some skin. I will triple click your pics for some ink. Will click it again for bare feet. Eye candy, eye candy, I can't see.

Starting point is 00:14:20 So go ahead, disconnect me safely. Instagram got me overdosed on beauty So pour me another one, I'm off duty Too many beautiful women up in my feed Too many good weed seeds in my fridge So let my time bleed, let it bleed slow

Starting point is 00:14:34 Let my rhymes kiss, let it be flow Bro, I'm down for the mission Flash, flash, post it up, easy decisions You need attention, I need a scene You need affection, let the games begin But yo

Today in Digital Marketing - The Performance Max Bug That Google Isn't Talking About

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