Mackerel Media’s Search and Digital Marketing Roundup – July 2024
Things are heating up this month, especially in the realm of AI and generative search. One of the major headlines is that OpenAI have announced their long-awaited SearchGPT. Unlike traditional search engines, SearchGPT will be AI-powered and work like a conversation, directly responding to your questions and pulling in up-to-date information from the internet, complete with links to all relevant sources. Users will also be able to ask follow-up questions for greater clarity.
Google Gets VIP Pass from Reddit
It has been reported that Reddit has prohibited all search engines, except Google, from crawling and indexing their website. The recent change to their robots.txt file means that Reddit results have completely dropped out of Bing’s search index. Reddit has released a statement that this is not related to their recent $60 million licensing deal with Google, and is related to agreements about search engines scraping their content for their own AI data-sets. As users have been increasingly adding ‘Reddit’ to their searches to find first hand experiences and personal opinions, this change ensures that Google will benefit from the subsequent increase in traffic.
On the subject of AI, Google has introduced new reporting and generative AI tools to their Ad services, specifically for Performance Max campaigns. These new updates include AI-powered image editing, which allows users to create, remove and replace objects within their product images. This will make it easier for advertisers to optimise and personalise their ads. They have also added new asset-level conversion reports, making it easier for advertisers to access conversion metrics for individual assets within their Performance Max campaigns, and help determine which assets drive conversions.
Progressive Privacy Preferences
In an unexpected turn of events, Google has decided to reverse its plans to phase out third-party cookies from Chrome. Instead, they will now implement a new Chrome experience that will let users make informed choices about their privacy settings. Chrome users will now be able to set their own privacy preferences, which will apply across their web browsing activities. This new decision will have implications for the online advertising industry, especially for agencies and advertisers who have been preparing for a cookie-less future. Who hasn’t seen “Please explain your approach to the phasing out of third-party cookies” in an RFP over the last few years?
Google Becomes a Multilingual Genius
Google has also announced that they have increased their translated search results from 13 to 21 languages. This means that many websites will now be able to reach a global audience. Google will translate the title link and snippet of a search result for results which are not in the users native language. This new expansion means that websites will hopefully now see an increase in search visibility, traffic and potential increase in overall engagement with their brand.
