Digital Digest
Marketing Intelligence Weekly
Weekly updates on the digital marketing news you need to know, including data reform, AI, cookie deprecation and platform updates.
Platforms
REMINDER: Google Analytics data will be deleted July 1
- Google Analytics historical data will be deleted come July 1.
- Ensure you have downloaded your historical data before then or it will be gone forever.
- Make sure you download your historical data correctly or you will lose it.
- Read more.
AI in digital
Platforms
Meta features Google and Bing search results in AI assistant
- Meta has incorporated Google and Bing search results into its AI assistant.
- Meta users can now search Google and Bing via the AI assistant without leaving the platform.
- SEO strategies need to adapt to include AI assistants as well as search engines.
- Read more.
AI in digital
Platforms
New AI tools for Demand Gen campaigns
- Google has announced new generative AI capabilities for Demand Gen campaigns in Google Ads.
- Advertisers can provide text prompts to generate high-quality unique AI visuals for ads.
- The aim is to help visual storytelling across Google’s platforms including YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Discover and Gmail.
- “Advertisers need to diversify their creative strategy with multi-format ads to keep audiences engaged and deliver results. With generative image tools, you can now test new creative concepts more efficiently – whether it’s experimenting with new types of images or simply building your creatives from scratch.”
- Read more.
AI in digital
Data privacy
Platforms
Brave announces AI search engine
- Brave has announced its AI search engine, Answer with AI.
- Brave’s AI search engine still shows links and does not automatically answer commercial and transactional queries with AI.
- Brave’s AI is powered by its own search index of crawled sites.
- Read more.
AI in digital
Platforms
Google says AI won’t replace search
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently spoke about how AI is reshaping search.
- AI enhances search; it doesn’t replace it. “The thing that excites me about AI is it’s the same underlying piece of technology for the first time in our history we have one leveraged piece of technology which can improve search, can improve YouTube, can improve Waymo and we put it all as cloud to our customers outside and so I feel good about that.”
- The relevance of websites and SEO isn’t diminishing. In the interview he talks about search not having been 10 blue links for a long time.
- Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) ensures a diverse, accurate search experience. He said that even with Search Generative Experience, they still want to point users to websites.
- Watch the interview from the 1 hour 17 minute mark.
AI in digital
Vids, Google’s next big productivity tool
- Google's new Vids app can create collaborative shareable videos for things people do at work.
- The app makes making videos as easy as making slides - no video production is required. Users line up assets inside the app and edit it all into a finished video. They can choose to do all of this themselves or ask Google's Gemini AI to build storyboards, write scripts, read the scripts aloud using text-to-speech, and create images to use in the video.
- People with access to the video can add comments, leave notes, and make edits.
- Vids will launch in public beta within the next few months.
- Read more.
Cookies
Data privacy
Platforms
Google improves INP for sites using consent management platforms
- Google has announced it’s improving its Interaction to Next Paint metric when a site is using certain consent management platforms.
- This improvement will yield faster load times when cookies are accepted by the user.
- “The team at Google have been working with a number of Consent Management Platforms, including OneTrust, Complianz and Axeptio, to improve Interaction To Next Paint (INP) by yielding more often—particularly when cookies are accepted.”
- Read more.
Platforms
Google Merchant Center updates product data specifications
- Each year Google updates its Google Merchant Center product specifications in an aim to boost the quality of product information for paid and organic Shopping listings.
- There are new product data specification attributes for AI-generated content in Shopping ads and free listings.
- There are new minimum price attributes and new free shipping threshold attributes which are effective immediately.
- Read more.
Cookies
Data privacy
Platforms
Reminder: Prepare for 3P cookie restrictions
- To facilitate testing, Chrome has restricted third-party cookies by default for 1% of Chrome Stable clients and 20% of Canary, Dev and Beta clients.
- During this testing period, it is important for sites and services to start preparing for third-party cookie restrictions, including moving to more private alternatives.
- Subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, Chrome will ramp up third-party cookie restrictions to 100% of users from H2 2024.
- Join us this week at our cookie deprecation webinar to learn how to prepare.
Platforms
Google changes definition of Top Ads
- Top and Absolute Top Ads may start serving below organic placements for some queries. This is based on Google's best guess on what will serve user intent best.
- The new definition: “When people search on Google, text ads can appear at different positions relative to organic search results. Top ads are adjacent to the top organic search results. Top ads are generally above the top organic results, although top ads may show below the top organic search results on certain queries. Placement of top ads is dynamic and may change based on the user’s search.”
- This definition update is a clear signaling of what we have already known for a while: Google will not force paid placements when organic is what will provide the better user experience.
- Prominence is a newish metric that looks at how often the ad serves in the top as well as expected CTR. It essentially looks at what are the odds a user is going to see the ad.
- Read more
Help desk
Platforms
Google gives advice for those affected by HCU
- Google said the Helpful Content Update is NOT a sitewide signal which complicates identifying pages that don't need fixing. It used to be a sitewide signal but now it’s on a page-level (in addition to it not being a single signal).
- A drop in ranking doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s something wrong that needs fixing, instead it is often related to relevance and Google showing other content that seems more relevant higher in the SERPs.
- What you can do: Identify the pages that are receiving less traffic and focus on self-assessing those pages together with the Helpful Content FAQ documentation and the HCU Self-Assessment page as guides.
- Read more
Platforms
Conversions in GA4 are now “key events”
- Conversions in Google Analytics are now called ‘key events’ to better align with Google Ads terminology.
- These key events when shared with Google Ads will be considered conversions.
- Any event you collect can become a key event. To measure a key event, create or identify an event that measures the action and then mark the event as a key event.
- Read more
