Have you ever seen Google ads that weren’t properly labelled as ads? MSNBC journalist Rachel Maddow recently did, and took to Twitter last week to call out Google for allegedly attempting to hide its ads within regular search results.
Maddow claimed that when she performed a search in Google, search results would jump down the page when clicked on, triggering an unwanted ad that opened in a new window.
After Maddow called out the search engine on Twitter, Google issued a response in the form of a short video, explaining that ads are always labeled as such, and how they appear in Search.
“Our new 2-minute video explains how ads are always labeled plus the basics of how they appear (and often don’t appear for most searches) in Google Search.”
Sullivan also suggested that Maddow’s experience could have been caused by Malware on her computer.
“We’ll probably look at doing a blog post or a fresh help page from this to better help people understand how to identify if there’s malware that might be impacting their results,” he said.
Maddow has yet to respond to Google’s explanation.
Nicole is a wordsmith wizard, passionate about the written word and an avid storyteller who uses creatively crafted prose to help bring your brand’s story to the next level. A former journalist with writing credits in both local and national news publications and a few newspaper awards under her belt, Nicole now enjoys telling your stories and finding new and creative ways to create valuable content that resonates with audiences in the digital landscape.
Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads have been updated with three new features, Google announced earlier this week. Among the additions are New customer acquisition goals, new Performance Max insights reports, and a one-click upgrade tool for Smart Shopping. Let’s dig right in and see how these features can help drive your business!
New Customer Acquisition Goals
You can now use your data to help Google identify (and target) new customers with PMax campaigns. This feature should help you identify who’s a new sure, who’s an old one, which will definitely help with the strategy. There are a few options available:
Customer Match Lists – When first-party data is uploaded (name, email, phone, country, postal code), Google gives a match rate that shows how many of your customers have a matching Google account that can be used for targeting. Much cooler than third-party cookies, eh?
Conversion Tags – using them might help the new feature cut out people that aren’t new
Google’s Autodetection Method – Besides the previously seen Google detected purchase conversion tracking in Smart Shopping, Performance Max also has new machine learning models that predict whether a user is a new customer or an existing customer.
Performance Max Insights Reports
Photo source: support.google.com
If you’re looking for more information on campaign performance, you will be pleased with this new feature. There are two new additions to the insights page:
Asset Audience Insights – this will tell you how text, images and videos ‘resonate with specific customer segments’. That means you will be able to see what your customers engage more with, with what content. Using those insights, you can customize your marketing strategy!
Diagnostic Insights – these insights will show you all the issues that might prevent your ads from showing. It will also give you some suggestions on how to fix it.
One-click Upgrade Tool For Smart Shopping
This will begin rolling out soon, Google said, and Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will no longer exist. You’ll get notified when the tool becomes available and after you upgrade it, a new Performance Max campaign will be generated and keep the information from previous campaigns.
Here’s how to upgrade:
Why Is This Important?
You already know that tracking everything is the key to success. Well, one of the keys. These additional insights will not only help you keep track of your customers’ engagement and preferences, but will help you develop and customize your marketing strategy. Like it or not, Performance Max is alive and kicking and adapting to it sounds like the smartest choice.
For the first time in the last 20 years, Google wasn’t the most popular web address in a year – the title now belongs to TikTok.
The social video app owned by ByteDance has been a key digital platform for a while now. Gaining popularity during the pandemic, TikTok is now an opinion-maker of its kind and a go-to solution for targeting the younger generation, Gen Z.
According to Cloudfare, TikTok gained (and remained) number one in the global ranking on August 10, 2021. Before that, it was a back and forth battle with Google, but since then, the video app has mostly taken the lead.
Even though Google managed to come first again a few times, it didn’t win for the holidays. On Black Friday, TikTok rose again – a key fact for e-commerce businesses that rely on Google during the holidays shopping spree.
In comparison, TikTok was number seven in ranking after Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and Amazon in 2020.
The app now has more than 1 billion monthly active users and doubled down on privacy, ad measurement and commerce, so it isn’t surprising that brands and marketers are getting more comfortable with advertising on it. The fact that the number of consumers exposed to ads nearly doubled, going to 37% this year, also helps.
After managing to surpass the potential ban in the U.S last year, TikTok continued attracting users and gaining more downloads. It became the first non-Facebook mobile app to surpass 3 billion downloads.
While staying in touch with its users and adapting to changes such as the return of longer videos, TikTok might have the potential to become a leader in the advertisement in the future.
The Year’s Winners By Cloudfare
Top 10 — Most popular domains (late) 2021
TikTok.com
Google.com
Facebook.com
Microsoft.com
Apple.com
Amazon.com
Netflix.com
YouTube.com
Twitter.com
WhatsApp.com
Top 10 — Most popular social media domains (late) 2021
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