Today in Digital Marketing - "They Talked a Lot and Said Nothing."

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Google’s annual event for advertisers was full of AI buzzwords, but lacking in anything beyond the expected obsession over AI and some incremental updates to existing marketing products. GO PREMIUM!  📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereGO 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✨ Already Premium? 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 Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE 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 Tuesday, May 21st. Today, heavy on buzzwords, light on detail. Google's big annual event for marketers had a number of industry insiders asking, where's the beef? We have full coverage in today's special episode, including a full hour-long panel discussion with me and three former Google ad executives.

I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Today should have been one of Google's best days of the year. Every year, Google's marketing live event showcases what they're working on in the year ahead for advertisers, new ad products, changes to existing tools, and so on. This year, this morning, Google had live audiences watching the event all over the world. And, almost as if we wouldn't believe it, they brought cameras to prove it. Hello to our friends in Dublin, New York. Hello, LA. And when a company does a live event like that and hypes it for months ahead, you expect there'll be, I don't know, something big?

To be honest, the last couple of years of Google Marketing Lives have been pretty disappointing, unless you're a fan of buzzwords. But since they are one of the world's biggest ad platforms, it is our duty to cover what's new, and we will do that for you today. Now, earlier today, our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskin-Gales, and I co-hosted our own pre-announcement event, along with two former Google Ad executives. We talked about what the last year on the Google marketing platform has been like, what the year ahead will likely have in store. That entire conversation is at the end of today's episode.

We also have the full video of the event and Google's recap of the announcements in our newsletter today. Tap the link in the show notes if you want to sign up. All right, on with the announcements. First, and we knew this was coming, ads will soon be inside those AI summary blocks at the top of Google search results. Their example was a search for how do I get wrinkles out of clothes? At the top of the results was, of course, the AI-generated summary, then a new sponsored section with a shopping carousel showing wrinkle spray available for sale by advertisers.

Google claims it'll only show the ads when they're relevant, though, of course, with these things, relevancy is in the eye of the beholder. And with much of today's hype fest, the particulars were lacking. Quoting Martek, quote, there aren't any details on exactly when Google will start testing ads in AI overviews, but it kind of defeats the purpose of using AI to get a quick summary of what you're looking for. If anything, it looks like it'll just clutter that experience even more, unquote. One interesting addition was that they're working on a way for ads to take in information

beyond the search query to personalize the ad in a way we haven't seen before. The example they used was someone searching for extra storage space. Then when the user tapped on a sponsored listing of a storage company, Google asks that user to upload some photos of their belongings. It would then recommend a specific storage product from that advertiser. Yet to be determined, how comfortable users will be sharing even more information in order to get a perhaps more relevant ad. Google says they'll start testing this with a small group of advertisers in the US over the coming weeks. Google also

announced new brand profiles are coming. There'll be a sort of homepage made on the fly from information in your Google Merchant Center profile. These are similar to the Google Business profiles also found in search results. It's not really clear to me why there are now two different types of profiles for businesses. And a bunch of changes to AI-generated images in ad campaigns. For one, they're making the image generation tools understand industries, but didn't really provide a lot of detail on why that would help, other than to say that this will generate, quote, high-quality performant assets, unquote.

See what I mean by the buzzwords? Regardless, this industry-aware generation is still some months away. One thing that was a nice touch, you'll soon be able to provide the AI with your brand's official colors and font to force the images it makes for you to be more brand compliant, if of course it honors your selections. In the coming weeks, you'll be able to edit images, including product images from your Google Merchant Center feed across Performance Max and other campaign types. They're also adding tools to add and remove objects, extend backgrounds, adjust images to fit any orientation and aspect ratio. The example they showed looks really similar to Photoshop's AI, where you lasso an area and then give it a text prompt like, add some flowers here.

Some new bells and whistles are coming for shopping ads, 3D rotation ads, and virtual try-ons. Google also says advertisers will be able to include product videos, summaries, and similar product recommendations within the ad itself. This is something we saw from time to time in organic results, but it's now coming to ads. There are a few nice touches for the data nerds. Google will start soon surfacing YouTube videos in placement reports. So you know where your PMAX ads are showing on that platform and offer exclusions in case you want to block

certain channels. This is something they actually announced a while back, as was asset level reporting, apparently still coming to performance max in the coming months. So you'll be able to review metrics for each creative asset. It might not be flashy,

but it's actually kind of a pretty big deal for marketers who like to get into the weeds of their campaign reports. And they say they are introducing a new diagnostics experience for PMax, DemandGen, and search video and display campaigns. The company says, quote,

this will unify insights across areas like bidding assets, conversion setup, and billing into a single view with the option to drill in for more details. Diagnostic insights are also expanding to your campaign level overview. Critical issues will be immediately flagged at the top of the page so you can easily check whether your campaign is working as intended, unquote. There were a bunch of little announcements as well regarding demand gen, animated image ads, lower minimums for lookalikes, and a bunch more. And maybe I'm jaded, but I was expecting a little

more. At least one big meaty thing to get excited about. Our Google Ads correspondent Jill Sasking Gales has been with me all this time. Jill, you spent six years at Google Ads. I was a little underwhelmed by today's announcements. How did you feel? I felt very underwhelmed. There was nothing innovative here and barely anything new. A lot of the announcements was stuff they announced last year and just haven't launched yet. Yeah, it kind of feels like this was an announcement of like, here's the next 10% on everything we already have.

Exactly. It was tons of little features, but nothing that made me or anyone I was talking to go like, wow, that's cool. Like I did not have that. Wow, that's cool reaction once, sadly. Yeah, we were talking just before we started recording that there were clearly moments where their teleprompter said pause for applause. And then there was just this awkward silence while that happened. And, you know, I feel like in the past, Google has been able to get away with this kind of incremental low buzz kind of announcements from year to year because they've been the dominant player. But, you know, open AI is becoming a thing. Perplexity is stealing views from the AI summaries. Bing is becoming more of an issue.

How serious is this, if we can call it a misstep by Google, in the overall kind of history of internet marketing, do you think? Is this opening up a significant enough gap for these other competitors to come in in a way that maybe they didn't have that gap before? Google has many competitors in the many markets in which they operate. That's the party line, I remember. But from an ad perspective, you know, I see the competitors more as Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and I didn't see that much here to really respond to that. You know, one thing that I did pick up on a lot that really does feel responding to ad competitors was a lot of this kind of visual search and visual results. For example, they shared some monstrous stuff about how many people are using Google Lens to search. That's where you can take a picture of something like a suitcase and then find the exact product.

Or you can take a screenshot from social media, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, circle something and find that product. So that felt really interesting. And we can see how a product like Performance Max is necessary for that to work. If you're using an image to search, you know, you don't have keywords. So that part was interesting to me as a subtle response to competition.

But yeah, still didn't blow me away in its demonstration. Your Inside Google Ads training. You'll be having a special event tomorrow for your members exclusively. To recap that, people can join there at our affiliate link, which is b.link slash GA training. And you and I are going to be doing a special for the premium members of the podcast here tomorrow at 2 o'clock Eastern. I'm very much looking forward to getting into the weeds and speaking maybe a little bit more candidly about some of the non-announcements. Off the record.

Thanks, Jill. Thanks. If you want to join that, there is still time to become a premium member. Just go to todayindigital.com slash premium or tap the link at the top of the show notes. 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. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, Be Zen.

There was other news, of course. We will have all of that in tomorrow's episode. Now, as promised, the panel discussion that we held this morning, it was myself, Jill, and two former Google ad executives. Remember, this was recorded one hour before Google Marketing Live, but lots of information in here about what they think the past year has been like and where they see the Google space in the year ahead. That replay is about to start now. Thank you for listening. I'll see you tomorrow. Jill, let me start with you. I'm going to ask each of you to just kind of do a quick 30-second introduction, where you are, what your background is, how you know Google Marketing, all that kind of stuff. Jill, let's start with you.

Absolutely. I'm calling in from Toronto today. I used to work at Google for six years in the large customer sales organization. And for the last three years, I've been a Google Ads coach, consultant, and teacher. I run my Inside Google Ads training program, the Inside Google Ads podcast. And I'm happy to be the Google Ads correspondent for the Today in Digital Marketing podcast. Hi, my name is Solange. I am dialing in from Dublin, which is where I live. I worked at Google until February this year, so I'm fresh out. I started in the agency division and then went into our multi-channel division, where we manage and marry the offline and online platforms to each other. In short, that's what I did.

And Matthew? Yeah, I'm also here in Toronto. I was part of the large client, large customer sales team as well in the automotive vertical. So I worked for many years with many of the large automotive brands and then also spent a lot of time solving problems, answering questions for dealers and auto groups. Excellent. That's your background in the past. Before we leave this in just under an hour, I'll ask you to chat a bit about what you're doing now. But let's just sort of get a heads up view of what's going to happen in an hour from now on

a stage somewhere in, I don't know, California, maybe Seattle, something like that. Or Google. Mountain View, come on. There we go. Downtown Mountain View. I'm so much of an Apple fanboy. I'm like, why isn't it in the Steve Jobs theater? I don't understand.

Jill, can you just kind of, before we dig into what we expect to see, what it means for marketers in the year ahead, and even talk a bit about what hits and misses happened in the year prior. Can you just give us kind of an overview? What is this that we're about to see in an hour? What is Google Marketing Live? Google Marketing Live is Google's annual event where they announce what's to come in Google Ads and Google's other ad platforms over the next year. So it happens every year in May, it's a week after IO. And whereas IO had announcements about what's happening to like Google search generally and devices and things like that, Google Marketing Live is very focused on ad products. So we can

expect, well, hopefully some big announcements of some big changes that are coming. And then that's what we'll see roll out over 2024 and 2025. Gotcha. So, Lancia, I want to have you start us off here by taking us back in the last year. You know, they do these Google Marketing Live events. We sort of get a look at what's to come. Some of these things work out really well. Some of these things do not. From your perspective, both as what you're doing right now,

which we'll get into, and also as a former Googler, what do you think, like, what single change to the Google marketing platform in the last year do you think made the biggest difference to marketers' day-to-day lives? Yeah, I mean, aside from the new interface, which I think was a shock to everybody when that rolled out. I know it certainly was a bit of a pain for myself. I think, honestly, the move and the push towards consolidation, we saw that with Performance Max, and we're now seeing that also with DemandGen. There are things that I love about both, but I think the biggest challenge has been navigating sort of that black box that comes with that, right?

We're not used to not having access to all of those points of data, to all of that measurement. And so in the day to day, really having to change the way that we think about what makes something successful, what makes the campaign successful, what metrics should I be looking at, knowing that we have less and less access to those metrics that we actually are used to and that we've built our businesses on. So in the day-to-day, the cool thing about it is demand gen especially has made full funnel video more accessible. So it's cool that we see smaller companies being able to utilize that more. And the flip side to that is learning how do I navigate that black box of data? How do I drive my business in this push of consolidation?

Matthew? I think the biggest change. So I have two in the last year and neither of them are sexy, like neither. And in fact, we've, we've either forgotten about them or we've purposefully removed them from our memory. Like we've like pushed them out because they were so painful.

But when I think about even myself at Google and the things that I used to get questions about, if I were to, if I had X, if I could take Gemini and then read my old Google emails and then summarize them and then have it spew back the, what, what was significant, it would say two things. And one was advertiser verification. It was just painful, just a painful little exercise. And, you know, it didn't get a lot of fanfare kind of Jill in your update, you sort of commented on the company name company logo, but that was sort of like a weird tangential benefits of advertiser verification. And the other was GA4, like wasn't actually in the ad platform. It was all of the changes in GA4. It wasn't actually in the ad platform.

It was all of the changes in GA4. And now how do I actually make sure that I'm collecting any kind of event conversion data? How do I put that back into Google ads? And I think there's still a lot of the accurate word is ignorance. There's still a lot of people who don't understand what actually changed there from, you know, the universal analytics to GA4. And, and it's, it was so pervasive.

Everyone had to do both of those things and we've just removed them from our brain. Like they didn't actually happen at all. Like we've forced, forced amnesia on the two most painful parts of the last year. Solange mentioned the black box sort of concept to marketing, which is happening not only with Google, but also meta. The more sort of into machine learning we get, it seems the less control that we marketers have. Performance Max is sort of the poster child of this, really.

But I felt in the last year that they were starting to give us a little bit of control back, you know, like here and there, the stuff that had been put into this very black box was beginning to, you know, they're like, well, maybe we maybe we'll let you touch this up a little bit more and maybe, you know, and so on. Jill, which trend do you think we are going to see in the year ahead? More toward the old school, can't believe I'm saying old school performance max, you know, where it's basically just give us a budget, give us your website and press go. Or do you think the trend line in the next year is going to be a return to some of these micromanaging controls that we market that some marketers appreciate? There's no return. I mean, that is what I think what the biggest, surprisingly biggest change was over the last year was the ability to get more insights out of Performance Max, to add search themes, to be able to do brand exclusions, because all those analysis reports, seeing search partner and display placements, like a lot of control did come. But none of that was announced. Most of that

was not announced in GML. I don't think that was on the roadmap. It sort of came from outside pressures. And so I think my fellow ex-Googlers will agree that we are not moving towards more control, more transparency. We are moving towards less. Less choice, less visibility, less opportunities to have Google Ads do the exact thing you want it to do. So really, this is not going to sound revolutionary at all. Like more performance max, more performance max features. I think we'll see more campaign type deprecations or feature deprecations to roll up into performance max. And of course, get your bingo cards out for AI because AI is going to be mentioned every 10 seconds of this GML. Will they beat the IO count?

Do you think they'll count? Like, do you think they'll count like do you think they'll also at the end afterwards um the i think i agree i i think the the the product thought exercise exercise seems to be what is the level of control we can grant back without giving control back? It's like, how do we appease some of the ongoing feedback that we've received that it's a black box, that I need visibility, that I... So how do you provide enough of that so that people feel like they're being listened to without actually providing the level of control and specificity they might have

had in search and display previously. There's just a huge amount of value though, on the other side, like the flip side argument is that when the machine has more data, right? Like when the, when the tool has more data to pull in from all of those sources, it works better. And that's true in the Google ecosystem. That's true in the meta ecosystem. So I think it's, you know, what else can performance max eat is probably a good way to think about it. Like, what else could it swallow whole and provide back? The, you know, and there's sort of an ongoing joke, I think, internally around, like, when is there going to be a performance max for brand right so is outside of what is being done in um in youtube products specifically already on its own or what's being done in in demand gen like could you could you envision and this probably won't get announced today because it's probably too big a thing to swallow all at once but could you build

a campaign type where you literally just have, you throw it all of your assets that you're already doing in those other two campaign types and you just tell, and you focus it on multiple goals, right? Which is something Google has not always been good at kind of multi-goal within a single campaign has been a challenge, but you're like, but you can almost envision a slider of like my brand goal for this campaign is, you know, a quarter of what I want to focus on, but my lower funnel demand capture is 75%. So give me 25 awareness and you know, whatever it is, you could see a world where they could build that product. I don't think they've built that product yet, but, um, and you could

just let it do its own thing. And so for your small and medium advertisers, that's a really wonderful idea for your large brand advertisers could get to a world where you simply say this is the overall campaign and then it moves individuals through the funnel itself. You know, it knows that they've been exposed to top funnel. It knows that they've responded to mid funnel. Now is the time to does that exist anywhere else in the marketing world? Have I missed that? No, I don't. Like funnels don't actually work like that in real life. Funnels don't exist.

There is no funnel. The truth is there is no funnel. Is that what you're saying? There is no funnel. No, just because, like, it's not that the journey is, like, view this ad, view this ad, convert. I remember that slide from, like, 2018 in all of our, you know, decks where it's, like, you know, the user journey actually goes like this and all over the place. And so there's something like ad sequencing, for example, with YouTube. But I don't think that, you know, user decisions and user journeys really work that way. So I think it's a compelling idea,

Gauri, but I don't know how many advertisers would use something like that, right? Like, most of them want conversions in ROAS and conversions in ROAS and are not even, you know, impressed with Performance Max's ability to do that at more modest budgets. I just want to say, I just want to say for the record that this whole concept of there's no such thing as watch an ad, watch an ad,

then convert. Jill has clearly never seen my purchase history for Fortnite cosmetics because that is absolutely a funnel that works. Just show me a fallout skin coming to fortnight and i i just need one ad and then i'll convert the one thing that worked for me for that was do you remember that like little dancing cactus toy that was like all over yes yes oh yes so i bought it newsflash it never arrived i had to file a charge back but that thing thing, the moment I saw it, buy. It's like the only time that's happened. That and Momofuku Chili Crunch on Instagram, which was a good purchase.

TikTok made you buy it? TikTok made me buy it. The Momofuku was an interesting one. I just actually talked about that in my class this past week because I think that they did an exceptional job of mirroring that. But I do wonder. Again, I don't think that Google has built this, but it seems we're now in a world where it would be entirely possible. And again, the thing about Google, Google ad products is they don't all work for all customers, right? So there's a reason why Procter & Gamble doesn't buy local service ads. There's probably an ad format for everyone, but if they could find a way to demonstrate the AF,

you just also, if you had a bit more awareness of your business, of your brand, depending on how you think about it, you would get more conversions. So if they had a great way to articulate that, kind of the way they do in some of the you know planner tools keyword planner then maybe there would be a way that they could articulate it you're right not everyone would buy it like people would be like no i just want my lower funnel conversions and screw off if you are watching us live on tuesday may 21st you're watching the pre-show

essentially someone in the youtube chat has asked how are you all watching the event while also commenting on it? Are you actually all just AI replacements of yourselves? Believe me, I would have designed a much better looking AI replacement than what you've got here. No, so that show of Google is coming in 45 minutes from now. So we are sort of there in advance. But if you are watching us live, either on YouTube or on LinkedIn or wherever you're seeing this right now live, go to the comment section. We are able to see your comments

and we will respond. Of course, ask questions. This is a great opportunity. You've got three ex-Googlers here with just a ton of knowledge. All right. So the big question, and Solange, I'm going to start with you and then I think we'll kind of go around the table. This is, you know, as Jill said at the start, this is probably Google Marketing's biggest event. It's the one that sets the stage for not just the products, but also I think it's fair to say kind of the vibe going forward in the year. What do you expect to see announced here? Oh, I think that's such a good question. And it's always hard to pin down. But one thing that I expect to see slash hope to see are better tools to leverage our first party data. Because I think, Grouty, you mentioned, you know, kind of this trend of, okay, maybe one day we'll see a campaign where I give you my goals, I give you my budget, I give you my website and my assets. But I think in order for that to perform well, and even now in order for Performance Max to be able to eat the right things, we need to make sure that we're actually levering our first party data. So especially looking at

small to medium advertisers, are we giving them the resources to help them understand what that even means, what the value even is there, and how can you leverage that for your campaigns, especially if you're a multi-channel advertiser. If you're trying to connect the online to the offline, your first party data is so freaking instrumental. I can't underline that enough. And so I hope that we're going to see some new tools to leverage that. And a second one that I hope to see is hopefully more advanced audience targeting with AI. Because we're leaning on AI more and more. Are we going to see some new tools and solutions? Whereas AI is actually going to show us how we should target those audiences.

Are there any extra signals that we could get from AI that we don't currently can get from our own business so that it can help us get to the right place at the right time? And anything AI will probably show up. I'm sure there's an internal Google tally going on somewhere where we're kind of taking off the amount of times that we're hearing about AI. But I do think that we're going to see more about AI integrating with audience targeting. So, Lanja, can I ask you about the first one, the first party data? Because last year at GML, Google announced that, oh, some big thing is coming to help with that. And then it was data manager, which is not some big thing to help with that. And you just left Google a few months ago and worked with some of those small and medium sized advertisers. So I'd love to hear your perspective on like, the advertiser side, like, how is that message?

We just say first party data, first party data, like, in your experience, the business owners you worked with, like, do they understand that? Do you think Google is effectively explaining that? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I think Google could do a better job at that, because if I were to summarize my emails with AI would be, what does this consent mode thing mean? What are like, what's this thing about cookies? What do you mean data? Like what's going on? And I think because of the messy communication, sometimes a lot of the terms are getting conflated. So people are taking consent mode as consent, which is two separate things. And especially for my small to medium advertisers out in Europe, please know that those are two different things because GDPR will nail you. Okay. So in terms of your question,

I think that it's really important to understand why we have those different things in place and what they actually offer for your business and understanding that first party data is literally anything that your customers will give you directly. Okay. Now what you can do with that information will depend on what country you're in, what continent you're in. Again, GDPR does not play around. So please don't try to play it. But I think that's really important. And I think, I hope that as we go forward, Google's going to do a better job at explaining the differences there. Because now what we've seen is, especially in Q1 this year, all of a sudden, it was all hands on deck for consent mode. But Google's not your legal advisor. So we couldn't

actually tell you, are you doing the right things? Are you following the law? All we could tell you is you need to do this thing. And then there were very limited resources, especially for accounts that don't have account managers, right, to start implementing these things. So I hope to see that become a little bit more accessible for our small to medium sized advertisers. You know, it was exactly the same when GDPR rolled out. My role was on the international growth team. And so I worked with Canadian businesses to help them expand internationally. And so I was the de facto GDPR girl in the office who had to learn about that.

And same thing, all these big Canadian companies who operate internationally were asking, what do I need to know? What do I need to know? We would just say, we're not your lawyers. Here's some basic information on what it means and that's it. And it was frustrating for us, but also frustrating for clients, these regulations and things that impact everything we do. We do have a comment, which we'll get to just shortly. I just don't want to leave Matthew hanging because I did ask what each of you expected to see announced in this year ahead or in this announcement that we're seeing about 40 minutes from now.

Matthew, what are you expecting? Well, Joe, first I'll say I don't think anyone called you GDPR girl. I don't think that was actually a name. I don't think that was actually a thing. But as long as you internalized it that way. That's why I left. I'm out of here. Um, when you think about GML, they've got a bunch of boxes to check because they, they got a, you know, they do have to appease that kind of what's going on with brand advertisers

and what's going on with, you know, your kind of full funnel advertisers, what's going on with small and medium businesses that are more conversion focused. And so I think, you know, we can expect to see announcements that address all of those types of businesses and their concerns. If I were going to think about it like that and break some things down, I'm surprised the Netflix announcement actually came out last week, that they were able to now, using, you know, DB360, access that ad inventory. I would have expected that to be. They're going to reiterate it. It's going to get,

it's going to get repeated today. It's too big of news to not announce a few times, but I think that that's a huge win for, you know, Google, Google platform and for those brand advertisers. I inevitably, there's going to be something

that is more product vertical specific. And so with all the stuff that they were talking about last week with Gemini, I would expect some new travel ad news, right? If we're, if we're now in a place where we're like, now Gemini is recommending how you should be traveling. There's probably got to be some backup ad format for that.

And then further to that, there has to be some disclosure announcements around how do I advertise in the generative search experience? Like what do ads look like in that context? And because they haven't really articulated that yet. So those are the first things that come to mind. And I could probably occupy the remainder of our time talking about other things that I might expect to see. Things I would like to see that will probably not get any headline or spaces. You know, I made the quip about local service ads. I think that, you know, they've been rolled out very well in the US. They've not gone anywhere else in the world very well, or they've not, the available options in Canada are very

limited. And so I would think that it would be cool if that got expanded. Probably not. Google's done a bad job at lead gen. Like we always talk about it, but there isn't a product, like there isn't a lead gen product. And there probably could be, should be, that would be fun. I mean, I think people, there's a whole bunch of businesses that would eat that up. What do you mean performance max for lead gen? Yeah, I mean, I like that we all laughed. I like that we all laughed, right? Well, and you think of all the experiments that they've run with like lead gen and search that have just never really worked, right? Because no one wants to click on a thing and open up a form and put that into the Google

experience. But that doesn't mean there isn't a version of something that might work better. And last, blah, blah, blah, video. Like I think the push internally for them is so centered around those brand dollars and so centered around like, what else can we be doing with video? They've got to have some new, you know, hand-waving around AI and video that we just haven't conceived of yet that no one's talking about yet. Over on YouTube, we have a comment that says, or a question from Blue Ion that says,

what should marketers know about the privacy sandbox? We've been through so many different iterations of this, it seems, ever since Google announced that they're going to be stripping third-party cookies from Chrome, which is something that is now scheduled for the year 2174. We've had Flock, we've had PopX, we've had Privacy Sandbox. It's not clear to me whether they're all the same.

Who wants to take a crack at this? Is Privacy Sandbox the thing that we ended up with? Is that sticking? Does that exist? What does any of this mean? I was actually going to comment about that, too. i think the thing to know is there's nothing to know like i think there's there's it's a much ado about nothing right now that google will um and yes they they've really they've tried to frame it as if we're not doing this alone they're pretty much doing it alone like it's like that they're consulting with some other people

i'm sure. And I'm, if I worked at Google, I would have gotten in trouble for saying that right there. But, um, you're out now you're free. I know I'm free.

I'm free. The, um, the, I think the bulk of the work that is being done in privacy sandbox is being done by Google and they're trying to consult with other people. Other people kind of don't care. Um,

what would be interesting and, and there are some weird and Jill, I'm sure I would love to be I would love more of your what you're finding in Google support articles because there's probably so much to find that no one knows about. But the what is the

there's a weird API. I had it on the tip of my brain. I forgot it. Topics? Not topics. It's like there's a weird API. I had it on the tip of my brain. I forgot it. Um, is it not topics? It's like, uh, I would have to go, I would have to Google it.

There's like a weird API based version of remarketing that they built. It's the most complicated product I've seen in a long time. That's saying something. Yeah. And, and so there has to be a better answer. So like coming out of the experiments that have run in the privacy sandbox, it wouldn't surprise me if they've got a couple of nuggets around things like we have some new products coming that address the need for things like, you know, either onboarding first party data or a replacement for, for remarketing tactics that is, know born out of privacy sandbox but now it has a name and its name is blah um because they still don't have an answer for those things and

but otherwise i think the you know the average marketer news on privacy sandboxes there is no news there's nothing to talk about all right fair enough let me ask each of you this other than and we talk we joke about ai of course because it because it's the word that all of these platforms, except, interestingly enough, Apple will not say the word AI. They'll use some other phrase. They also have banned headset or VR goggles. They're very particular about their language. I'm going to not only be counting, I also have this button here

that every time they mention AI, I'm going to be pushing it here in Vancouver on Vancouver Island as the official count. Let me ask each of you. So other than AI, and for this question, I'm going to ban you from using AI as your answer. Other than AI, what do you think will have the biggest impact on marketers in the year ahead? You're not allowed to answer AI in any form, not audience development, not creative, not copywriting, nothing other than AI. What is going to have the biggest impact in the year ahead? So, Anjie, let's start with you. Yeah, it's going to be really hard not to use those letters. But I think that, you know,

something that I read more and more about is this concept of zero party data, which I think is interesting as compared to first party data. And it's getting our customers to willingly share data with us. So I think coming also back to kind of that lead generation conversation, it's going to be really interesting to see how we're going to use the ad landscape to try and see, can I actually get that zero party data from my customers, getting the control back of retargeting those customers through other channels. So I think something that we're going to see, and we see this also, I think, between Google Ads and Pinterest, there's been a deal that was closed, I think, earlier this year. So almost Google Ads becoming your broker when it comes to zero party data, maybe even first party data and designing your campaigns to get that data so that you then can

reuse it. I also think that we're going to see a stronger focus on the customer experience because there's been some research done. I think it said 60% of consumers that feel like any point of the customer journey has filled them will actually abandon ship and go for a new brand. And this could have been a brand that they've been loyal to for years. It doesn't matter. So customers expect us to know them, but they don't want to freely give us as much because they're aware now of the currency that is privacy. So I think we're going to have a lot of conversations this year about how do we get our customers to give us data? How do we use that? And how can we use advertising as a part of that

holistic customer journey to make sure that they're having a good experience across the board? Jill, your thoughts? Yeah, I won't use those letters letters i think the biggest thing that will impact advertisers this year probably isn't something being announced at gml just like kind of the biggest things that i think actually impacted your day in day out google ads users are not the big flashy things that are announced halfway which don't come to fruition um one that i've been grappling with a lot um in my coaching practice is the way keywords have completely changed and i know we've all been

talking about the demise of keywords for years. You know, Manal Khomeini has this tweet, he just surfaces every single time someone says keywords are dying. They are, they've definitely changed. You know, exact match is not exact anymore. Phrase match is not phrase anymore. Broad match is supposedly getting better with smart bidding, but for smaller budgets, that's just not accessible. So I think this removal of more control, as we spoke about earlier, is only going to continue. Audiences become trickier with third-party cookie deprecation. And yeah, I think that's what's really going to impact us most. And the way to mitigate that, I think, as a business owner, if you have less focus on intent and less focus on audiences and less control over exactly who's going to see your ad, then the thing you need

to focus on is the ad itself. And I think as Google Ads practitioners, that's the part we all suck at is creating compelling ads, writing really effective text, creating really compelling images, putting together strong video that drives people to feel something like that's just not normally in the Google Ads practitioner skill set. But I think it's going to become more important than ever this year as our targeting capabilities become worsened. So that's something I'm personally trying to really focus on in my own skill set and a place where there are tools out there that can assist us with that. Matthew, other than AI, what do you think is going to be the biggest thing that they announce on stage in terms of the day-to-day impact on marketers? I mean, I'm going to angle and agree with Jill, in fact, that I don't think Google can have that conversation without mentioning AI.

I think that it's actually impossible for them to do it. Yeah, I think they can't i think they can't that it's like you know and then we will use ai um the uh so it probably gml that that isn't possible in the the real in here in the real world um outside of the googleplex. I think the trend or what we will hear more of throughout the course of this year is algorithm resistant advertising or algorithm agnostic advertising.

So mechanisms that, you know, tried, trusted and true that have been with us since the dawn of the internet that we've all forgotten about, such as just contextual marketing. Just like maybe we should put these car ads beside the places where there are cars. Or email marketing, CRM marketing.

The number of advertisers who have either given up, failed, or do CRM marketing badly, I think it presents a huge opportunity for people to just get back into that in a more meaningful way. And so while, and even things like newsletters, like things like newsletter, I run a newsletter. And so it's one of the topics that is very, you know, a current that runs through a lot of the newsletter community is that this, you know, you can create a business, you can do advertising marketing digitally, and you don't need, you don't need SEO. You don't need, you don't need all of these other things that have become the mainstays and staples of what we kind of understand as the core of digital marketing, that there's other ways around it. So I think that there will be more of a trend to focus on those, you know, algorithm agnostic

things that are not where we're not at the mercy of X slash Twitter or, you know, whatever is going on on Instagram or however Performance Max wants to prioritize our ads. If you're watching us on Tuesday, May 21st, right now, you are watching us live. You can head over to either the feed, the comment section in YouTube or LinkedIn, wherever you're watching us. We do have a comment section. We are monitoring it.

We will answer your questions as well. Sarah from LinkedIn just said, my husband wonders if Google will be more like TV ads where the creative matters more and more. I actually think this has been the case for at least a year now where, you know, we're getting to the point where the only levers we as marketers have to pull is creative. You know, the audience targeting is being somewhat removed. I guess budget is still within our control for the time being.

You know, it's sort of interesting. Let me ask you folks this. I want a one word answer and I want the absolute truth. No lying at all here. Here is the question. When you need to search for something on the internet, do you use Google? Is that your first one? Is Google the default search on your browser?

I got a nod from Solange. I got a nod from Jill. Matthew, that was an awfully delayed nod. Yes. So it hinges a lot on what the question is for me. What's the default in your browser, though? The default is Google, 100%. Default is Google.

But I would say, depending on what I'm looking for, for an answer, and me and my friends at Google know that this is true, I'm a huge fan of perplexity. So I'm like a huge proponent of perplexity, that if I'm looking for an answer, because I still a lot of my day to day work is, you know, assembling insights, providing insights to folk in the automotive community or to my students in my classes. If I'm looking for an answer to something, I will use both. And I will increasingly find that perplexity is giving me a better AI-generated answer than what I might find if I was fishing through 10 blue links. I mean, one of the, I guess, benefits to AI being used as an answer engine, for lack of a better term, like Perplexity does, like ArcMobile now does, like a lot of them are starting to get into,

is that it is moving more toward that zero-click strategy that Google really kind of started with its knowledge panels, where you type in, you know, how old is Justin Trudeau, and it will just give you the answer. The practice of SEO used to be something that companies spent enormous amounts of energy on and money on to try to be in those top 10 links, ideally in the top screen full of links. I mean, does it matter anymore if AI is just, if Gemini, in Google's case, is just going to give us answers.

I mean, I found it interesting that a couple of days ago at Google I.O., I believe they announced that they'll be coming out with this revolutionary new search engine product called Google Web Search. And it's literally just it's just the web results from like that you expected back 15 years ago when it wasn't. And I prefer it. No YouTube videos, no knowledge panels, no shopping carousels. It's just the web results. You know, we talk a lot about advertising and PMAX, but SEO is still a critical component, right, of getting people to your website. Is this practice, is SEO doomed? Like, are any of us going to get any organic traffic anymore from Google? I don't think it's doomed.

Who wants to go first? I think doomed is a heavy word, but I do think it's changing. I don't think it's going back to what we traditionally know SEO to be. I think technical SEO, such as, you know, is your website mobile friendly? Are you using the right, you know, terms on your website? I think that's always going to become relevant. I think what's going to change, and these are some of the conversations that I'm seeing around, you know, AI summation tools that are coming up, even when searching in Google Ads, I think they're rolling it out in the US right now where you search for something and you see an AI summary before you actually see the results. So I think where SEO is going to change is the question now becomes, how do I get my content injected into that summary? And I think it's up to the big platforms like Google, like Meta,

like TikTok to make sure that we have some sort of sourcing there. We're accrediting, you know, the platforms and the websites that this content is coming from. And I think in that change, it's going to be really interesting to see what some of those best practices are going to look like. You know, if you look at your content right now, what would that look like if a piece of that was put into, you know, an AI summary of someone searching for that question, right? So search almost becoming more like a conversation. I'm not just searching for the word, I'm typing in a sentence, expecting an elaborate answer to come back. So I think in that sense, SEO is going to change from what we've traditionally known it

to be. My issue is that like, you can't trust AI. Like I know that I'm, you know, I'm not trying to fight a battle here, but I'm just like, I don't use AI to try to retrieve information because it just makes crap up. And like, I've used Page, ChatGPT, I use Gemini, Advanced. It messes up very simple things. Like example to prepare for today today i gave it the transcript of our um tailgate we did last year and it called me jill scott why i don't know but it just couldn't i was like what did jill scott said like and that was maybe me asking it facts it gets facts wrong all the time and so why would i ask ai to tell me something and then I have to go double check by Googling, right, that it's actually accurate? Like, I just don't.

Oh, I can't see myself doing that. But I know that makes me sound curmudgeon-y. Get off my lawn. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things I love about perplexity is that it gives you the sources, right? So you can still have that experience of going to the actual page where the content was derived from. The thing about SEO, and it's kind of the,

are we talking SEO? Are we talking local search? And I know there's some concentric circles around that. So many businesses, you know, they, in terms of, because they don't have it tagged properly and they can't see the difference, a third of their organic search comes from their Google business profile.

And that's not going away. And when you think about, is it going to change? Well, actually, again, if you were on Jill's journey through Google support articles, you would probably learn it already has changed. The latest update update they were very clear they're like just build great content but don't try and game the system like don't try and don't try and seo your pages just build great content we'll do the rest and um and that's not a new thing like that's been a few years uh the the thing that will be a little different or the thing that i think

you know continues to problematize the entire conversation is it because the the unspoken conclusion of that thought of is seo dead is the do i need a website right like it's and and the challenge there is the answer is yes because because you don't have anywhere else. So unless you also have an app to collect first party data, and if you don't have first party data, you can't advertise in a cookie list world. So there's a real, yeah, cart problem there that, um, I don't think, you know, everyone is fully wrapped their heads around at Google at Microsoft and they, they need,

I hope I'm hopeful that Google is somewhat mindful of that, that there's like, we, you know, to run the search, we need the content to build the AI to blah, blah, blah.

Like there's, otherwise you're just using AI to build content for AI. And that's probably not going to end well, like that probably doesn't end well. And Sarah points here on LinkedIn. No, just Sarah's been commenting here on LinkedIn that the things that help you from an SEO perspective, at least SEOs know today, also help you from a PPC perspective. We're all Googlers. We can attest to the fact that the ads engine, the organic engine are separate and paying for one doesn't impact the other, but just the thing they have in common is your website. And so I think

that's something else that's become more and more and more and more important over time and will continue to do so is in order for whether it's automated search results or automated ads to work well, Google has to understand your website to understand who would be a good customer for it. And so I think that's something that's not going away and actually just becoming more important. Right. You're going to need that final landing page URL to be able to create the campaign to run the ad. And so then at least in, you know, Google's, if Google was a person and had opinions, it isn't a person that doesn't have opinions, which is the thing that I used to remind clients of all the time. Google doesn't have opinions.

But the websites are core to their ecosystem, to their ethos. There needs to be an open web. This does need to exist, whether it's done through a search generative experience or otherwise. So, you know, you do mention Matthew that, that in the past, and this has been, they've been saying this for literally year, probably more than a decade now, um, this whole concept inside the SEO community of Google saying, don't try to game it. We'll just create the best content you can, which is theoretically accurate. I think it's, I've always thought it was disingenuous because there simply are things you can do

beyond the idea of just make great content because you can make great content and that's fantastic, but you can also make great content and attach a schema to it and put in proper headers and put some internal links on your website. You wouldn't think to do that in the whole concept of just create great comments. So, you know, is it not true that some of this advice that Google gives out is a little disingenuous?

Well, I think, you know, Todd, you're not wrong. But I also think that that latest, you know, and it was only updated a couple of years ago, their latest, you know, in the developer section, the SEO guidelines also say all of those things like that. In addition to creating great content, you must have schema text and you must do, there are other things that they highlight or have come out more recently through some of the, the SEO community that they're saying are out now less important, which I think are really fundamental shifts in SEO that people were not aware of. And that was the whole like, actually, maybe we don't care about backlinks, like, like maybe links aren't as important as they used to be. And that's a pretty profound

change. One of the things that I will say surprised me recently was in the exercise of creating my own podcast was the, like Google swallowed that hole, like that the, if, you know, by syndicating and being on those sites, suddenly like the, you know, my name, the name of my podcast was just like, this is number one, number two, number three, number four spot for certain queries related to me as a person. And so, you know, it's, it's kind of the, a larger question around the, what did they actually mean when they said create great content? Did they mean build a great website or did they mean create multiple types of other types of great content? Like get that video version of it up on YouTube and elsewhere did

create audio content. Like it's, it's kind of a weird exercise and that's where I say it's, it's a strange splitting hairs exercise between what is SEO and what is just, what is local and then what is, you know, what, what does Google just figure out on their own,

which they're probably using AI for Todd. They're probably briefly. Yeah. It also brings me back to this point that I think people don't realize when you haven't worked at Google. I mean, Matt said it earlier, like Google's not a person,

but like when a Google executive talks to search engine land or search engine or something like those people don't use the products. They've been giving the product up and up and up and up and up and up. And so like recently there was this whole ad strength debacle and Ginny Marvin ads liaison wrote an amazing article for search engine journal, clearing it all up. But like,

that was not on her roadmap. She ended up having to clear up this mess. And this is, I have no insider information. This was just me observing with my ex Google arise, but like some executive made some comment that of course, ad strength impacts your ad's abilities to show.

And it sent the whole industry into a tizzy about, oh my gosh, our ads aren't going to show. We thought it's not an input and blah, blah, blah. And then they had to try out Ginny, who's lovely, to correct this misconception. And so I think that's something else people keep in mind when Google says something. Like, who

is saying something, you know? Who is really saying it? If you're using your title, that does not mean they know what they're talking about. Like they've never opened the interface before. We are about 10 minutes away from ending. And so I want to just recap a couple of quick answers from you both before I let you go. And then we'll talk a bit about what you're doing now, how people can follow you. And Jill and I have another session tomorrow And then we'll talk a bit about what you're doing now, how people can follow you. And Jill and I have another session tomorrow,

which we'll talk about as well. But let me ask you this, Solange, maybe you can address this one first in our round robin here. You know, costs are continuing to be sort of fairly unstable in terms of CPMs, in terms of CPAs, CPCs, and so on. The volatility is still there quite a bit.

Can you give me your prediction for the year ahead? CPMs, CPAs, are we going to be up more this time next year, lower more, and by how much? Oh, you're giving me the scary question. This one was not in your briefing package. No, but you know what? It's a tough one to answer. My honest answer would be, I don't know. What I think is going to happen is that, you know, based also on the conversations that we're seeing playing out in, you know, the legal arena there, it looks like prices have been steadily increasing, might continue to increase. But I want to underline that by saying, let's look at the return on that investment, right? Because if your prices go up, but your return is also going up, then hopefully it's not cutting

into you too much. And this is a conversation. It's a tough conversation that I was having three months ago with some of my advertisers, right? And it's, we have to zoom out from looking at it like a cost and we have to get really practical about looking at it as an investment. How do I get as much back from that? And I know that's kind of like the googly answer to give. I don't know will prices go up, but I do think that we have resources and tools to make sure that if it does, our investment will hopefully, or our return on that investment will also go up. That felt like it came straight out of

Sales Mastery. Oh my gosh. I'm still unlearning. Get back to us in a year, Solange. Matthew, Jill, what do you think in terms of costs? You know, it's... Get back to us in a year, Solange. Matthew, Joe, what do you think in terms of costs? You know, it's, so the short answer is up. I think the short answer is that always it has to go up, right?

They're a business, they want to make money. By rate of inflation, or is this going to be like 50%? Probably more than rate of inflation, probably not 50%, right? The people would be up in arms if that happened. But the other reality, and we've all probably all seen this, is that, you know, I used to use this phrase a lot, that the difference between like kind of doing well and doing poorly in Google ads was really just understanding that it's probably more about execution and not about secret sauce. Like that it's probably just like trying to do the right things and doing them well and focusing on improving creative and doing just like following the instructions probably lends itself to better performance. And so, you know, the, the tricky thing is that it, for as much as

it might universally be up some number of, of percentage points, the, the reality is like there, you can have a cupcake shop in like Dartmouth, who's just crushing it with CPAs that they've never seen before. And then you can have a car dealership in Edmonton that's having the most expensive clicks they've ever experienced and all of their CPAs are too expensive. Like, so the kind of concentric circles on concentric circles on concentric circles of geography and the impact of those local costs based on competition

and then layer in the what ad products are they using? And then did they include their first party data or not create so much variability, it's hard to actually, you know, know. And that's why like in any room, like in any room of advertisers and marketers and folk from agencies, like there'll be one group of say everything is so expensive. And another is like, I've never seen better performance like in exactly the same room at the exact same time and often for the same category

or vertical of advertisers. So, you know, the guidance there is just like do the right things, just do the right things, do the things. Jill, the costs? Yeah, at CPCs,

I always predict, you know, increasing 10 to 20% a year. When I worked at Google and I was building forecasts, that's what I would use. I think that's still accurate. But CPA is dependent on the advertiser, to the points that both my former colleagues made earlier. And so whether your CPA goes up or not, yes, is a function of CPC. But of course, it's also a function of your conversion rate and that's along with creative which i said earlier is a place not enough practitioners focus you know the conversion rate of your website of your landing page that's up to you that's not up to

google um so you can absolutely i've worked with businesses where they you know will set up two different accounts to try to double serve right on the same queries and completely different cpcs for the exact same keywords in two accounts advertising in the right, on the same queries and completely different CPCs for the exact same keywords in two accounts advertising in the same place on the same thing. By the way, double serving is not allowed. Don't do that. But it can happen.

It comes down to your ads, your landing page. That's going to impact and your offer itself, right? You can have the most optimized landing page in the world. If your offer sucks, no one's going to buy it. So control what you can control. I'm glad you mentioned offer because, you know, it's something we actually haven't talked about yet so far. And we don't really have the time to, but, you know,

we talk about creative, but the offer is everything really, you know, when it comes down to the conversion at the bottom part of the funnel, you're absolutely right there. All right. So we are nine minutes away now from Google Marketing Live here on the, on the live show. I want to wrap up by having each of you just tell us what you're doing now, now that you are freed from the shackles of Google.

How can people follow you? And how can people reach you? I will go first. I'm doing this. Essentially, I host a marketing newsletter and podcast. It comes out every day, both the newsletter and the podcast. You can find it at todayindigital.com. And I also have an agency called EngageQ. Solange? Yeah, I run an agency called House by Solange, which is also my handle for everything social. House by Solange on Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, wherever you are, I'll probably be there too. We build marketing plans that save you time and make you money. It's as simple as that. And that's what I spend all day doing. And you're hired. I'll hire you. I'll go next. I interrupted. But yeah, so I'm Matthew Groudy, Groudon. You can find me in all of your regular socials, even the ones you don't

spend time in like blue sky. So'm so I'm all over the place. I'm fairly easy to find. Google has been generous to me organically that way. I run a newsletter, a newsletter that's called grouty.wtf, which is all about WTF is going on in automotive right now. So I send that out weekly for, for my folk in automotive.

I am teaching at Georgian college. So I'm usually doing a class semester. They're all digital marketing related. I also have a podcast called the change optimist podcast where I try to bring new ideas to people, interesting folk talking about interesting things. And, and now I'm doing some consulting. So I'm doing some consulting. Some of that is at the dealer and auto group level. Some of that is at the agency level. Some of that is at the OEM level. And so that's what keeps me busy and out of trouble most of the time. And I'm a Google Ads coach and teacher. So I coach business owners and marketers one-on-one to help them improve their skills and make more money from Google ads. And then I run two Google ads courses, my signature inside Google ads membership program, and then Google ads for beginners. If you're just getting started

and you can find me the underscore Google underscore pro on all the major social media places. All right. We have just a couple of minutes left. Last chance here. What's going to be the big thing that we're all going to be talking about one hour from now? Briefly, 10 seconds only. Solange? AI, of course. Matthew? I think it'll be a lot like last year, where we're probably going to be like, they talked a lot and said nothing. Jill? like last year where we're probably going to be like, they, they talked a lot and said nothing. Jill. Um, I agree with that,

but if I'm being optimistic, I'm going to say video, lots of video news, what I'm expecting. Thank you all very much. I think we found our, our subtitle for this show, which was,

they talked a lot and said nothing. All right. Don't forget our special premium members. Only show is tomorrow at two o'clock Eastern. You can be there. Ask questions of Jill, hang out with us, just become a premium member. You can do that by going to the show notes and clicking on go premium or just going to today in digital.com slash premium. I'm Todd Maffin.

Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.