Happy Friday, Digital Darlings,
From a glitch exposing ad data to being ruled a monopolist by the Department of Justice, Google’s having a rough week. But will these L’s actually impact them in any significant way? Or has their dominance made them too big to fail? Only time will tell, but I’m here to decode all the details for you in the meantime.
A Google Ads glitch broke the UI and exposed advertisers’ data
The issue began Thursday evening, so if you’re an SEMer, it probably harshed your Friday mellow. The following tools were down: the Report Editor, Dashboards, and Saved Reports in the Google Ads web interface; plus the Products, Product Groups, and Listing Groups pages across the web interface, API, and Google Ads Editor. So yeah, that was quite the blocker for anyone trying to analyze or optimize their Google Shopping campaigns.
The issue wasn’t fully resolved until yesterday, so if Google Ads wasn’t working as expected for you this week, that’s why. The craziest part is that some advertisers were seeing other advertisers’ data in their Google Merchant Center accounts. According to AdExchanger, “Google Merchant Center (GMC), Google’s hub for commerce advertising and analytics, has been accidentally cross-pollinating data – including unencrypted customer and product info – between accounts on the platform going back at least two weeks.” Two weeks?!?! That’s, like, so not cool.
Upon further inspection, the glitch seemed to be mixing up data between accounts operated by multi-client agencies and consultancies that had multiple accounts under the same MCC. So maybe it wasn’t as big of a data privacy issue as we initially thought, but still… yikes. It also turns out that some accounts were serving ads for products from other accounts. If that happened to you, Google should be reaching out to you and offering credits for wasted spend ASAP. In other dramatic Google news…
Google is ruled a monopolist
The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google in late 2020, accusing them of having a monopoly over the search services market, and on Monday, they were finally found guilty. According to my boss, “The core issue was Google's exclusive distribution agreements with device manufacturers and browser developers to secure its position as the default search engine on most devices and platforms.” The court said that these exclusive agreements enabled Google to dominate a substantial share of the market and charge “supracompetitive” prices for search text ads. But you work in digital marketing, so you probably already knew that.
Google has already announced its plans to appeal the ruling through a heavily PR-spun post on X, so we’ll have to wait for that to play out. But if you’re curious about the potential impact this ruling could have on your advertising program, you can find more details here. In my last bit of Google news…
Smart Campaigns will automatically become PMax Campaigns
This is just another step toward AI-powered, black-box campaign management. While PMax does have a lot of perks, advertisers are a bit irked that they’re forced to make the switch. The transition is happening gradually, so some advertisers still have access to Smart Campaigns while others do not. You should get an email like this from Google when you lose access to Smart Campaigns. There’s not much we advertisers can do other than optimize our PMax campaigns to the extent of our abilities and… try to embrace change, I guess. Now for some SEO news…
Google Search Console launched recommendations
This experimental new feature isn’t available to everyone yet, but it sounds pretty handy. It provides actionable insights and recommendations to improve your site’s Google Search rankings. Tips can help with indexing, crawling, serving, and more. If you don’t have access to it yet, you can see a screenshot of what they’re testing here. In other SEO news…
Turns out AI is not disrupting search or impacting Google
There’s been lots of talk about how the likes of ChatGPT could be the end of Google, but so far, that’s simply not the case. New research comparing traffic to Google vs. traffic to the major AI/LLM search players made it pretty clear that AI isn’t even making a dent in Google’s traffic or volume of searches. So G isn’t going anywhere, but we do still need to optimize for GEO so that our sites can appear in its AI Overviews. Now for some Reddit tea…
Reddit to Microsoft: show me the money if you want my content
A few weeks ago, Bing was blocked from crawling Reddit following Reddit’s exclusive licensing agreement with Google. In a recent interview with The Verge, Reddit’s CEO doubled down, saying Microsoft better pay up if they want to scrape Reddit’s data.
“Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used,” Huffman said during the interview. Know your worth, king!!
I absolutely understand why Reddit wants these companies to establish a licensing agreement before crawling their site, but I do think it’s unfortunate that only Google is willing to do it. Reddit is starting to seem like the future of search, and the exclusive agreement gives Google even more of an advantage over other engines like Bing, further powering that pesky monopoly we talked about earlier. Now for a bit of news on streaming ads…
Amazon is challenging Netflix with cheaper ad slots
Looks like Amazon is winning the battle for streaming ad dollars. They handled the rollout of their ad-supported tier differently than competitors, and it worked. While Netflix, Disney+, and the like introduced their cheaper, ad-supported tiers as options users could opt into, Amazon made their ad-supported tier the default. Users were automatically converted to the ad tier but had the option to pay more for premium, so tons of users didn’t take action and remained on the ad tier. Therefore, Amazon has lots of ad inventory to sell at prices lower than Netflix. The affordability combined with the ability to target users based on Amazon Prime shopping data has made Prime Video a highly profitable channel for advertisers. So if you aren’t running Amazon Sponsored TV ads yet, it’s time to start. And in my last bit of news…
Got questions? Ask the PPC Doctors!
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And I’ll leave you with that, digital darlings. As Google veers us into uncharted waters with anti-trust lawsuits abound, I’ll be your compass, steering you toward revenue no matter how much the industry changes. Until next week, stay sassy and savvy.
You know you love me.
