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28.2.17
RIP Dmoz: The Open Directory Project is closing
DMOZ — The Open Directory Project that uses human editors to organize web sites — is closing. It marks the end of a time when humans, rather than machines, tried to organize the web. The announcement came via a notice that’s now showing on the home page of the DMOZ site, saying it...
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Be a Better Writer: 5 Lessons I Learned From Yoga Teacher Training
Last fall, I began a 200-hour certification program to become a yoga teacher. I wanted to learn more about the philosophy of yoga, strengthen my public speaking and leadership skills, and teach one or two nights a week after finishing my day at work as a content and social specialist at Portent.
During the training, we learned the Sanskrit (the ancient language of Hinduism) word “svadhyaya,” which roughly translates to self-study. To embrace svadhyaya means that we must contemplate and examine ourselves in order to grow. Learning about this concept not only made me examine my personal life but my work life as well. Simply put: I wanted to know how I could be a better writer. Luckily, there were many lessons I learned during my training that were also applicable to creating better content.
If you’re currently a writer or even a digital marketer who occasionally writes, here is a list of 5 of the most memorable lessons I learned during my training that will help you strengthen your writing skills:
Beginner’s Mindset Leads to More Creativity and Openness
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” -Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Being a beginner is challenging because there is so much that you don’t know. But it can also be rewarding because the possibilities are endless. When you’re a beginner, your knowledge doesn’t serve as a roadblock. It’s about the practice and the process, not about seeking absolute perfection.
The first time I created a yoga sequence, the possibilities were endless. I didn’t have to worry about repeating what I had already done a million times. I felt completely open to create whatever I wanted. It was okay that it was messy and imperfect because I was new and that was to be expected. With that expectation, I found a certain amount of freedom.
Even if you’ve been practicing the craft of writing for decades, you need to try your best not to have self-judgment when you write. Too much self-judgment can stop you from ever putting pen to paper or being open to new ideas. And with proper attention and editing, ideas that seem strange or idiotic at first can turn into strong pieces of writing.
What if you’ve written about the same topic many times? Or the new client you’re working with is very similar to one who you worked with a year ago? Bringing your expertise and prior knowledge to your work is imperative, but it’s also important to remain open to what might be different about the work in front of you. Be curious. Dig a little deeper. Continue to push yourself past the realm of what you think you know. In the end, you’ll strengthen your writing skills and your knowledge base.
Don’t Wait Until You Know Everything to Give it a Shot
This lesson goes hand in hand with being a beginner. If I waited until I knew everything before I allowed myself to teach yoga, I would never teach. This same ideology applies to writing. Being okay with not knowing everything leads to curiosity and curiosity leads to taking a more deliberate approach to your work.
One of the best ways that we can apply this to our job as writers is to test the copy that we create. Testing is synonymous with learning. Testing is admitting that you don’t know the answer yet and that you’re okay with that. It could also mean that you’re pretty sure you know that what you’ve written will work. Testing can verify whether or not you’re right.
Let’s say that you’re working on a website that sells yoga pants. You want to push people through the funnel faster, but you’re not sure how to write the call-to-action copy. An excellent way to determine what does and doesn’t work is to A/B test your copy over an allocated period of time. Here’s an example from Lululemon. Currently, the CTA copy on their website says “Must-Have Bottoms.” But if the conversion rate wasn’t high enough, Lululemon might try changing the wording on the CTA to find out if a different phase elicits more clicks.
Cultivating Your Voice and Tone is Essential
In yoga, the most powerful tool you have is your voice. Through your voice, you give cues and adjustments so that your students don’t injure themselves. And it’s through the tone of your voice that you show your authenticity and set the mood of the class.
When you write for the web, it’s important to know your voice and tone beforehand. Defining your voice and tone helps you articulate your value and define who you are. Whether you’re writing copy for your newsletter or social media platforms – when your content reads well and people trust the person who is speaking to them, they will move through the sales funnel with greater ease.
When communicating, your tone varies depending on who you’re talking to, what you’re talking about, and the messages you’re trying to convey. Just as in conversation, your written tone and voice (or your brand’s) should have a distinct personality, style, or point of view. That voice should take on different tones depending on the situation and the audience to whom you’re addressing. If you haven’t already, develop a company-wide voice and tone guide to keep your communications on-brand and on-message. If you already have a voice and tone guide, look back on it to refresh your knowledge and check to see if it’s still in line with your brand, especially if it’s been a long time since the guide was written.
Don’t Make Assumptions
During my yoga training, we read “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz, which offers a simple, but powerful code of conduct to transform our lives. I’ve read this book a few times before, but the third agreement, “Don’t make assumptions” stuck out to me in a way that it hadn’t before. Ruiz says:
“We have the tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth. We could swear they are real. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking…”
When you’re writing content, it’s incredibly important not to make assumptions. If you assume that you’re providing the information that users want and need, you’re missing out on an opportunity to provide them with what they’re actually seeking. You might be well-versed in your brand or product you’re selling, but at the end of the day, your customers know their needs better than anyone else. And although you might truly believe that you’re not making assumptions about what they need, you won’t know unless you ask them.
The Best Teachers Are Also the Best Students
The best yoga teachers I’ve practiced with keep their sequences, themes, and music fresh. Their secret? They are perpetual students and share what they learn on a daily basis with their students. This is also true when you’re a writer. If you want to strengthen your writing skills, read as much as possible. Reading other writers’ work can give you new ideas around subject matter and languaging. And the best part is that you can read about subjects other than writing to get better at your craft. Reading fiction and non-fiction of any subject can help strengthen your writing. If you do want to read about writing (so meta!) I recommend Nicole Fenton, Ann Handley, and the Gather Content blog.
Remain curious, learn from those around you, and ask a friend or coworker to edit. Different people will give you different types of edits, which will strengthen your work. If somehow everyone is too busy to edit your work, our CEO Ian Lurie offers his advice on self-editing and using apps.
Even if not all of these lessons resonate with you, I hope that you take away one or two insights. My hope is that this post will spark creativity and help you think differently about your work the next time you sit down to write.
The post Be a Better Writer: 5 Lessons I Learned From Yoga Teacher Training appeared first on Portent.
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Intro to Agile Marketing: Work faster and smarter by changing how you work
Are you struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing customer needs and market demands? Are you slowed down by organizational silos, hierarchies and processes?
It may be time to get agile. More than 90 percent of marketers who have adopted agile marketing say it has improved their speed to market for ideas, products and campaigns.
Join agile marketing expert Andrea Fryrear, and Workfront Creative Director David Lesué, as they explore what it means to be an agile marketer and provide practical tips on how your organization can make the transition.
Register today for “Intro to Agile Marketing: Work faster and smarter by changing how you work,” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by Workfront.
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A better way to build martech software
In this ebook, Indusa explores a better way to build martech. Martech companies are their own unique creatures. While they do need to build software like any other SaaS or product company, martech firms also need to navigate the startup world (read: short runways, little to no room for failure, and...
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SearchCap: Google site closed, penalty recovery & shopping ads
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google site closed, penalty recovery & shopping ads appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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YouTube debuts TV subscription service, at $35 a month for 6 accounts
Every day people spend almost as much time watching YouTube as TV. And now they can watch TV on YouTube.
On Tuesday YouTube debuted a cable TV-style subscription service so that people can pay to stream live and recorded shows from the four broadcast TV networks, and roughly three dozen cable networks through a new YouTube TV mobile app.
Called YouTube TV, the service will cost $35 a month for six accounts and will become available “in the next few months,” said YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who announced YouTube TV during an event at the company’s YouTube Space LA studio in Los Angeles.
YouTube TV will carry 40 total TV networks, including Bravo, E!, ESPN, Fox News, FX, MSNBC, National Geographic Channel and USA Network. People will also have the option of paying an extra fee for Showtime and Fox Soccer Plus. And YouTube is bundling in the original shows it has produced exclusively for its existing YouTube Red subscription service.
Using YouTube TV, people will be able to watch live TV, check out an on-demand library of past seasons and record shows to watch later. There is no limit to how many shows people can record simultaneously, and setting a recording from YouTube’s mobile app won’t use the phone’s data, said YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan.
YouTube TV isn’t so different from YouTube proper. A home feed will list shows and categories that people might want to check out, like the videos YouTube features in its main app’s feed. People will be able to search for shows by title and keywords like the name of a sports team or a content category. YouTube TV will also work with Google’s Chromecast so that people can stream a live or recorded show from their phone to their TV.
This isn’t YouTube’s first subscription service. In October 2015 YouTube rolled out YouTube Red that has people pay $9.99 a month to watch all YouTube videos without ads, gain access to some exclusive original shows and download videos to watch offline. And a year before that, it introduced YouTube Music Key, a precursor to YouTube Red focused on YouTube’s music-related videos.
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Marketing Day: Martech data, avoiding fake news on GDN & YouTube’s latest milestone
Here's our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.
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Daily Search Forum Recap: February 28, 2017
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...
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Sharing is caring: Click share and post-holiday shopping success
Click share is a key way to gauge the success of your Shopping campaigns. The metric shows you the percentage of total possible clicks you are receiving with your Shopping ads. If you aren’t reviewing this metric on a regular basis, 2017 is officially the time to start the habit.
Incorporate click share into your daily optimizations
Click share can be an incredibly useful metric because it delivers the type of insight that you’re used to receiving from average position in your Search campaigns. Shopping ads can take a lot of different forms, which means that we can’t calculate an average position in the same way as we can for Search ads. Enter click share for Shopping.
By regularly reviewing this metric on your product group tab, you can see how well you’re doing at driving traffic to your site for high-value shoppers. You should use it in concert with impression share.
Impression share tells you how you’re doing at getting your items in front of shoppers looking for your products, while click share tells you how effective you are in winning those shoppers that see your products. A 100 percent impression share, while great, might not reveal anything about your true potential. Here’s one of my favorite sayings from business school:
30 percent of 40 percent is greater than 10 percent of 100 percent.
It’s possible to underperform even with a 100 percent impression share because it doesn’t reflect whether those shoppers chose to visit your site. That’s why click share is such a crucial metric to monitor. And once you’ve started to monitor it, what can you do with it? Why, increase it.
How to increase your click share
There are a few ways to do this. It’s a similar process to Search ads. Exactly like you work to improve your average position, you can take steps to increase your click share for Shopping ads:
1. Increase your bids
An increased bid is often the most effective way to be more competitive in the auction. Review your click share by individual product groups. If there are certain product groups that you want to drive more clicks, look at your bids and increase them where it makes sense.
It’s always a tricky balance between volume and return to maximize profitability. Increasing bids to grow your click share will increase volume — just make sure never to bid beyond the point of profitability. Check out the Bid Simulator to see your potential.
2. Increase the quality and relevance of your ads (which means ‘product data’ in this case)
Your product data is what we use to create your Shopping ad. Take a look through your search terms and see if your product title and description text aligns with the most common user searches. Put the most important details first in your product title, like size, color or brand. Increasing the relevance of your ads can help your ads get better placements and more clicks.
It’s also crucial to use high-quality images for your products. With higher screen resolutions in current smartphones, a high-quality image can be the difference when showing up alongside other competing ads.
3. Opt into the different enhancements for your ads
There are a couple of ways to make your ads even more appealing on the results page. For example, Merchant Promotions allows you to distribute your online promotions with your Shopping ads, including discounts, free gifts and “buy more save more” promotions. You can even add different codes for people to redeem. Product ratings can build trust right on the results page while qualifying customers as they click to your site.
You can use each of these three methods to create better ads that have a better shot at driving interested customers to a purchase.
Going beyond click share
Click share is super-important, and hopefully, now you have taken that to heart. It’s not the only way to take advantage of whatever search volume you’re seeing, though.
Some holiday-friendly strategies still work in non-holiday months. Strategic, time-specific campaigns let you make more specific decisions about your bidding and budgeting. Custom labels can be great for product groups that have peak seasons. If you label them, the stuff that’s currently in season (or that’s about to be in season) can get the attention it deserves. And remember to keep an eye on product status insights to keep items approved.
Conclusion
Click and impression share are liable to change over time based on user search behavior and auction dynamics. Be sure that you aren’t losing click share to your competitors by checking in regularly.
Make click share a part of your regimen for Shopping optimizations. By combining this metric with the insights you’re already getting from impression share, you can understand both how you’re doing in the auction and how you’re doing on the results page itself.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Matt Lawson is the Director of Performance Ads Marketing for Google, responsible for a broad portfolio of ads products including search, shopping, display, and analytics.
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5 ways you can improve your new business’s visibility on Google Maps
New businesses need all the help they can get to attract customers, generate revenue and establish themselves to compete with existing companies. And for brick-and-mortar storefronts, being found on Google Maps is key to driving traffic to the business.
Due to the economic explosion in the Plano and Frisco suburbs of Dallas, opening of new local stores is rampant. New commercial developments are being built and filled with shops within a matter of months. This growth also provides the ability to make some interesting Google Map search observations, as comparisons can be made between stores with similar attributes.
I’ll take a look at new restaurants located in the map area below. It’s a less-than-one-mile stretch of a busy road running north to south. The east side of Preston Road is substantially built out and has many established businesses and restaurants that have been there for several years. The west side of Preston Road is very new — all five restaurants there opened between summer and fall of 2016, with one more slated to open this spring.
As you can see, there is a marked difference in Google Map search results for the established restaurants (on the right) compared to the new restaurants (on the left — yep, you can’t see them except for one red dot).
Yet one of those new restaurants is consistently listed in Google Map results for the search term “restaurants” while the other four are not.
Below, I compare the online presence of these businesses to figure out why one shows up in results when the others don’t, and I provide five tips on how you can put your brick-and-mortar business on the map even being the new kid on the block.
[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Why martech data should drive ad tech
It’s not a shock to say that chief marketing officers today are likely spending significant time on tech solutions management — often taking them away from their core marketing focus.
A big portion of a CMO’s role today is to drive the marriage of martech and ad tech into a unified stack that provides a 360° view of their consumer. This more complete consumer view is what powers a CMO’s efforts to develop and deploy rich, integrated marketing programs designed to engage and nurture customer relationships, as well as drive consumer acquisition and advocacy. But the processes of integrating martech and ad tech can be all-consuming, especially because platforms that comprise the technology stack do not always speak harmoniously to one another.
To avoid drowning in the complexities of marrying platforms, I suggest an iterative approach to integration that focuses on data and its complete journey through the martech and adtech platforms. In an ideal world, data is the engine that gives marketers the 360° consumer view. It enables a marketer to identify and enhance all the trigger points in their relationship with consumers, powers their ability to build macro- and micro- consumer target profiles and provides them specific direction for media placement, messaging and media types.
By focusing on how data flows through the stack and impacts marketing programs, a CMO gets a much clearer path forward for their integration efforts.
[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Chuck Moran is responsible for leading RhythmOne's creative products team to find unique opportunities in a dynamic, digital marketplace. With over 20 years of digital marketing experience, Chuck has developed a broad understanding of the connected consumer and how brands can engage them through technology-driven, creative solutions and programmatic buying.
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Totango rolls out first chatbot for customer success
Customer success platform Totango is the latest vendor to offer a bot as a conversational interface to data.
This week, the San Mateo, California-based company released Zoe, a text-based chat bot for the collaborative work environment Slack or for email. Other environments are on the drawing board.
CEO and co-founder Guy Nirpaz told me that this is the first bot designed for a customer success platform. It joins a growing number of marketing and business intelligence firms that are employing bots and intelligent agents to make the data more accessible, including business analytics provider Sisense’s Amazon Alexa skill and chatbots, or marketing analytics firm Datorama’s employment of Alexa.
Totango’s clients — including Autodesk, Zoom and Taboola — use its platform to track customer acquisition, retention and expansion across web, mobile web and apps.
It displays data from a variety of sources, including Zendesk trouble tickets, user billings and profiles, customer relationship management systems, and marketing and sales tools. The platform can also post alerts when customers might be indicating unhappiness, and it can be used to conduct an email campaign.
Pre-Zoe, Nirpaz said, the platform was available as a desktop or mobile app. Anyone in a subscribing business could login, but the dashboard’s presentation of data was designed for specialists.
He added that Zoe is an attempt to “democratize the data,” with no specialization required to obtain data. Totango built its own natural language processing engine, intent engine, and backend, creating a bot that has two main job duties.
One role is to provide data through what is currently a limited menu of text-based conversational requests.
For instance, a user can request general info like “show me Q1 revenue,” “tell me about company X,” or “show me renewals.” Nirpaz said more commands are rolling out. Here’s a sample screen:
In the Slack version, there are also a few visual buttons that, when clicked, can bring up such data as key info, usage or trends.
In the other role, Zoe can act as a kind of project manager. That’s when a user recognizes an issue that needs a team to resolve, and creates an “impact request” through Zoe.
She will invite the requested team members, and, once the team has decided on its goals, she can track deliverables, assign tasks and monitor the timeline. Here’s Zoe in that role:
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Need to contact Google My Business support? Use Twitter!
It’s the end of the month, and that means it’s time for another edition of Greg’s Soapbox! Except this time, it’s not so much me standing on the soapbox and ranting; I’m more standing near it and politely providing helpful advice.
Almost two years ago, I wrote a post here about using Google phone support if you had issues with Google My Business (yes, I’m not linking to the post on purpose). Depending on your particular keyword phrase when you search, that post usually ranks anywhere from #2 to #5 for any variation of “Google My Business support” — and it’s always the highest-ranking non-Google result.
The problem is, while phone support supposedly still exists, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get to anymore. And, since it’s the highest ranking non-Google answer, a ton of messages come through every month from people who are pointing out that the method in the post doesn’t work anymore.
I wanted to write this month’s post and update everyone on the best way to get support for any problems you might be having with your Google My Business listing.
We all know that Google My Business can be frustrating. All too often, the person with access leaves a company and doesn’t share that access. It’s incredibly difficult to get access to an account once it’s lost.
You might need to update your address, or phone number, or uploaded photos. You’ll definitely need to reply to reviews. Without easily accessible phone support, it doesn’t appear that there are any alternative options.
In reality, there’s a much better support option that most people don’t know about: Twitter support! Simply shoot a quick tweet over to @GoogleMyBiz, and their support team will jump on your request and help you out.
When the service first rolled out, responses were incredibly quick. Now that more people know about it, you might have to wait up to 30 minutes for a response, but once you get a response, they’re amazingly fast at resolving your situation. They’ll ask you to send a Direct Message with full details of your situation, and in almost every situation, the issue will be resolved shortly thereafter.
Big shoutout to Jared, who’s an absolute beast. I know there are other people on the team, but somehow he’s been the one to help with every request I’ve made in the last six months or so.
It’s all US-based, Google employee-staffed support. They won’t follow any sort of script; they’ll simply ask for more details, then they’ll jump in and get you sorted out. If you haven’t used it yet, you need to try it — it’s amazing.
[This article was originally published on Search Engine Land.]
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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Brand safety: Avoiding fake & hyperpartisan news on the Google Display Network
What does online brand safety mean in the age of hyperpartisan, sensationalized and fake news content?
With programmatic targeting and retargeting, brands can find themselves cozied up to content that may not match up with their values and messaging. That’s not new, but the proliferation of sites aimed at attracting clicks by appealing to humans’ basest need to have their viewpoints validated adds another layer of complexity for brands buying ads on open ad exchanges and ad networks like the Google Display Network.
Well over 1,000 advertisers have reportedly pulled out of Breitbart, and yet that site is part of the Google Display Network. So are hundreds of other hyperpartisan political sites — both left-wing and right-wing, with content that ranges from flirting with untruths to outright lies — on which brands might be surprised to find their ads appearing (more on that below). Here we are looking at websites only, but ads can also appear alongside YouTube and apps should also be considered.
“Fake news” definitions can vary widely, from misinformation to conspiracy theories, to hoaxes to blatantly false reports. Google’s take as it pertains to the GDN is different still. Google has no publisher policy against sites running false news stories, as long as they aren’t misrepresenting who they are or the intention of the content — i.e., sites can’t impersonate a news outlet, and news headlines can’t link to diet pill promotions. We’ve written about what exactly the policy covers and doesn’t in our companion piece, “Google isn’t actually tackling ‘fake news’ content on its ad network.”
This can be awkward. Here are some examples:
Smartfood “You deserve delight” ads appearing next to NSFW headlines.
Planned Parenthood “Give Now” ads showing up on a far right-wing website that hasn’t even bothered to fully update its “Sample Page” template.
Bergdorf Goodman and Alliance for Healthcare Security ads on shock-pundit AnnCoulter’s site.
How does this happen?
There are several ways ads can show up on sites in the Display Network. First, these placements could be intentional — with the sites chosen specifically as “managed” placements on the Display Network by the advertisers. That’s not likely the case here, but it’s possible.
The other scenarios rely on automation. Google has added more targeting controls to AdWords, and even more in DoubleClick, for the Display Network from the original contextual targeting with keywords (e.g., ads for health insurance plans can appear alongside articles about the ACA). Other targeting options include demographics, interest and affinity audiences, topics, and of course, retargeting to customers and/or past site visitors.
Targeting options on the Google Display Network in AdWords
The ads in the examples above were not served as the result of retargeting campaigns. The Bergdorf Goodman ad shown above could be the result of interest targeting, which can include in-market (like “Women’s Apparel”) or affinity audience targeting (like “Fashionistas”) based on my previous browsing behaviors, including visits to other high-end retail sites. Google’s interest targeting is built on a mix of third-party data and browsing behavior on pages, apps, channels, videos and content on YouTube and the Google Display Network sites.
Topic targeting isn’t as simple as targeting websites that cover specific topics such as Right-Wing and Left-Wing Politics, which are both options. Topic targeting occurs at the time an impression becomes available and is based on the content on the page, not the overall political vantage, for example, of the site overall. That means advertisers targeting Right-Wing Politics can find their ads shown on sites that skew left-wing if the content includes keywords that signal a right-wing context, and vice versa. For that reason, the topics that are listed with websites in the Display Planner will not necessarily correlate to the types of content ads can display against with topic targeting.
Retargeting may be the trickiest decision for brands to weigh when considering where their ads should appear. Here are several examples of retargeted ads for retail brands appearing on far-left- and far-right-wing sites. These ads happen to be for retail brands, but Marketing Land also saw examples from CPG, telecommunications, automotive and financial services advertisers, among other verticals, while reporting this story.
Retargeted ads from Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, Nordstrom and Gap
The ad company you keep
Often, it may not be the content but the content recommendation ads and ads from other networks on a lot of the sites that are more unsettling to brands. Many of these sites are absolutely safe to visit, others less so.
Pop-ups, fake virus alerts and other low-quality ad content proliferate on many of the sites, particularly those that appear to exist solely to generate ad revenue. TheTrumpMedia.com example below is one of dozens of sites seen with large portions of real estate taken up with content recommendation blocks throughout its pages. That site also has no contact information available on the site. RedStateWatcher.com has 21 ad trackers on it, according to Ghostery, but the links to its Privacy Policy and Contact Us pages in the footer aren’t clickable. Others, like EagleRising.com, regale visitors with not one but two pop-ups before loading the Contact Us page, which has no contact information, just a submission form.
Content recommendation blocks are used heavily on many of these sites, including full-screen pop-ups from Spoutable.
Some mobile experiences include pop-up ads and content recommendation ads that display between an article title and body.
One of the worst examples of ad loading I saw was on a site called LeftLiberal.com. The page below had 75 ad trackers on it. There is a Google-served banner at the top, a block of sponsored links from Content.ad, a virus alert ad in the bottom right, and a video ad served by Epom in the bottom left that is covering up another Google-served responsive text ad. This site was also one of the many using popups Dingit.tv.
I should also offer a consumer warning here: some sites I visited while reporting this story automatically opened a new browser tab with phony virus protection alerts designed to be hard to close out of or had sketchy virus warning ads appear in the bottom right corner of the page. The worst of these scenarios opened up a new browser tab automatically with a “safety alert” that claimed my Facebook login, credit card number, email account login and photos had been compromised and that I needed to call support. (Do not
call or click on these kinds of ads.) Several sites also triggered background pop-up video ads.
A site called Prntly.com that dubs itself “America’s Top News Site” took nearly 30 seconds to load and had 66 ad trackers on the home page alone.
Marketing Land found and reported to Google several examples of apparent violations of the Misrepresentative content policy, and we have asked questions about violations of the Valuable content policy that covers ad-to-editorial content ratios. We have also asked about whether certain examples violate Google’s AdSense hate speech policy that prohibits content that advocates against an individual, group or organization. We will update here when we hear back.
Does environment matter?
Somehow, in the age or programmatic ad buying, context seems to have taken a back seat to audience reach for many brands. When aiming to reach certain audiences or retargeting, does it matter if a brand’s ads show on content it wouldn’t otherwise target if that’s where their site visitors and customers are going?
Different brands will have different answers to questions about context and environment. When brands set impression and audience quotas, they and their media buyers may be reluctant to cut of significant sources of reach.
But in this new landscape, marketers running campaigns on ad networks like the GDN need to be asking these questions for themselves, because Google won’t do it for them.
How to opt out
Many companies will have no problem with their ads appearing next to hyperpartisan content or on sites with fake news. And some may want to explicitly target audiences reading this type of content.
For AdWords users that want to opt out, there is no Site Category exclusion option for political content, but there are other options — none quite perfect.
Placement exclusions are the primary way Google suggests addressing opt-outs. Advertisers can exclude individual sites and even individual pages on which they don’t want their ads to appear. This can be hard to manage when there are new sites coming into the GDN on a regular basis, and in many cases, advertisers won’t know to exclude a site until after their ads run and the sites show up in site placement reports. Another thing to note in terms of brand safety is that AdSense publishers have the option of making themselves anonymous to advertisers. These sites show up as anonymous.google in advertisers’ placement reports. It is possible to exclude all anonymous.google sites, though this can be a blunt instrument that excludes brand-appropriate sites and even converting sites.
Topics exclusions are also a blunt tool. There are several granular options under Topics, including Right-Wing and Left-Wing Politics, but as discussed above, this targets content not sites. Excluding Left-Wing Politics could mean ads won’t show next to right-wing content.
Topics exclusions can also cut off access to content that isn’t necessarily extreme, too. Similarly, interest exclusions can paint too broad a brush in many cases.
Advertisers can also add contextual exclusions by adding negative keywords to their display campaigns.
I’ve compiled a Google Sheet of some sites included in the right-wing and/or left-wing politics topics in Display Planner (reminder these topics don’t align to Topics targeting in campaigns and the list is always subject to change). There is a mix of mainstream, left-wing and right-wing sites. It’s meant to give advertisers a sense of the political content inventory in which their ads might appear on when running GDN campaigns.
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