Happy Friday, Digital Darlings,
Sheeeeesh, what a week. Between last Friday’s outage on Windows PCs and Google’s about face on cookies, we’ve got a lot to cover today. Let’s kick it off with some tea about G…
Google is keeping cookies in Chrome
It’s been 4 whole years since Google first announced its plans to rid Chrome of cookies - a plan that has faced opposition from advertisers and regulators ever since. Now, they’re finally giving up. Rather than eliminating cookies, Google will present users with a prompt where they can decide to turn cookies on or off. Users can already block cookies in their Chrome settings, so this doesn’t sound like much of an improvement for user privacy… Regardless, I’m sure more and more people will continue to opt out of cookie-based tracking, so it’s still critical for advertisers to have a first-party tracking solution in place. In other Google news…
Billions of Google redirects will stop working soon
Google’s URL shortener service will shut down on August 25, 2025. We haven’t been able to create new redirects with the URL shortener since 2019, but according to Majestic, there are still 3.6 billion Google shortened URLs live on the interwebs. Starting in August 2024, any goo.gl links will display a warning page saying, ‘This link will no longer work in the near future.’ So if your website contains any links in ‘goo.gl’ format, you’ve got a year to update them to their full length versions before they start 404ing.
New Sitelinks interface and feature for PMAX campaigns
The new Google Ads UI displays Sitelinks in a numbered list, which I guess is a bit more user-friendly. The better update is that Google now offers ‘recommended’ Sitelinks, so it looks like their AI is going to crawl your site for the best opportunities and generate the Sitelinks for you. That’s convenient! The feature is super new, and I haven’t heard much about how it works, but it could save you some time, so it’s worth testing out. Now for some Bing news…
Google to test ads in AI overviews soon
On Google’s Tuesday night earnings call, SVP Philipp Schindler said, "Soon we'll actually start testing search and shopping ads in AI Overviews for users in the U.S." Ok, I’m interested! He went on to say that the ads will appear within the AI overview in a section labeled ‘sponsored’ and that the ad will have to be relevant to both the search query and the info in the overview in order to appear. You won’t have to create new ads for this, Google will use your existing Search and PMAX ads in this new placement. Meanwhile, at Microsoft HQ…
Bing is testing their own search generative experience
The new feature “combines the power of LLMs and SLMs with Bing’s search results to generate a more delightful and efficient UX layout.” This is Bing’s version of AI Overviews, and based on the screenshots in this article, I think I like their version better. It’s more experiential, with pictures and videos and clearly cited sources. They’re testing the experience on a small set of users right now, but I’m sure a version of it will be live for everyone soon, and it’s only a matter of time before these Bing AIOs start featuring ads, too. But it’s not all good news for Bing this week…
Bing is officially blocked from crawling Reddit
Anyone who’s been on the internet over the past six months knows that Reddit has been dominating the Google SERP ever since the two secured a licensing partnership in February. Google drives a ton of traffic to Reddit, and in exchange, Google gets to feature more authentic search results, which users prefer. The deal gives Google yet another advantage over Bing, so keep that in mind if you're advertising on Bing. There may be even fewer people turning to Bing for answers than before, but you won’t have to compete with Reddit for clicks and top-of-serp space.
How to avoid fallout from the CrowdStrike fiasco
You probably heard about how thousands of Windows computers stopped working on Friday, disrupting banks, airlines, TV, and pretty much any other industry that relies on computers, so… all of them? Yeah, it was bad. Long story short, an update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike broke the internet. The update has since been reverted, but it’s important that advertisers do their due diligence to avoid any negative impact. You may have seen a significant drop in traffic from ads on Friday, and you don’t want that outlier to skew your bidding algorithms. So be sure to exclude 7/19 from bidding calculations in your publisher or Marin bidding settings. And if you want to be alerted of any anomalies in performance the second they happen, check out Marin’s Anomaly Detector.
How to add promo offers to your Meta ads CTAs
Meta Ads' new ‘offers’ feature is currently in beta, so not all advertisers have access to it. But if you do, you should be able to find it in the ‘Ad Sources’ settings in Ads Manager, right below Sitelinks. You can add percentage discounts or dollar off offers that you’re ok with providing to those viewing your Meta Ads. The Meta UI says, “Adding offers will display discounts and promo codes along with your ad creative when we think they are likely to increase performance.” I can’t think of a scenario where offering a discount wouldn’t improve the performance of your ad, but ok… The takeaway is that sometimes these discounts will be displayed next to your CTAs, and sometimes they won’t. This sounds like a feature worth testing!
And that’s a wrap on this week’s digital drama, darlings. Make sure to log off and touch grass this weekend so you can return to the marketing world on Monday refreshed and ready for a new week of optimizations and analysis. We’ll talk again next week. Can’t wait <3
You know you love me.
