Much Ado About Everything

This morning, Google unveiled its answer to ChatGPT — the AI that’s widely expected to change the very nature of search engines.

Google’s version is called BARD, and they plan to release it starting today. Except only a sort of version of it they call “light-weight”. Oh, and only to a handful of what they call “trusted testers.” No word on when it goes out publicly.

Screenshots show it looking a lot like Google results now, except that top position, which usually shows snippets quoting web content, is now the result from Bard.

Google’s competitor, Microsoft, has invested a billion dollars into the OpenAI research lab, which operates ChatGPT.

So what will this mean for marketers and media buyers?

To answer that question, this morning I chatted with our resident Google Ads whisperer Jyll Saskin Gales. Jyll spent six years at Google working with some of its biggest advertisers, and today runs a busy Google Ads training program.  

TOD: So you've been on the inside of Google. How panicked do you think Google is about this AI?

JYLL; I don't know that I would say Google is panicked, but Google has always been an AI-first, or they prefer to say "a ML-first" company for many, many years. So there was no doubt in my mind they were going to come out with something like ChatGPT, and especially after hearing earnings last week; we knew that this Bard launch was imminent.

TOD: They've been pushing so hard with their machine learning campaigns — I'm thinking specifically of Performance Nax and so on — and I wonder if the naysayers like me who have been whining about machine learning ruining marketing.... maybe it's turning around. Do you think this is going to have a net-positive overall impact on our work or net-negative?

JYLL: I would imagine it will feel negative at first, just as change always does. If there's one thing that's constant in PPC, in Google ads, in tech, it's change and change always feels uncomfortable first. 

As Google Ads practitioners, we've been dealing with a lot of change lately. You mentioned PMax, which is the big one. [But] lots more automation [is] being incorporated into the platform every quarter. With this bigger change to how Google search results work, it's a little too soon to tell how they will impact Google Ads, but it's going to change our jobs.

I think the onus is on us to just make sure we keep up and try to go with the flow and learn as best we can, rather than trying to hunker down and say 'No, I don't want this change.'

Impact on Organic Traffic

TOD: It's been years now since Google started this strategy that we all call zero-click, meaning that rather than the old days Google where you type in a search term and you have to click at once to get the result, Google's been trying to get closer to "zero-click" where through snippets and other technologies, it's trying to give you the answer at the top without you having to go to a website. And that did result in the loss of traffic to organic traffic that is to brands, to stores, and so on.

Isn't this going to be even worse if we're not even going to get the snippet where they found the webpage where the snippet is? If it's just going to give us the answer, is Google going to give any of us any organic traffic?

JYLL: We'll still get traffic, but in different ways. I feel like the disciplines of marketing are merging SEO and PPC are becoming more and more alike, and now I think content marketing and PPC are becoming more and more alike. There's someone on Twitter, Amanda Nat, who's a content marketer who talks about zero-click marketing from a content marketing perspective.

I think it really changes our role as marketers — perhaps shifts us more into a brand marketing world versus slowly being focused on a performance marketing world, which is a shift I know we all love, but really rethinking the way we add value for consumers and add unique value for consumers. Our role is not going away.

The role of brands in that journey for customers is not going away, but it's absolutely changing, and I'm excited to be along for that ride with the rest of the industry.

Can We Hack BARD for Better Placement?

TOD: I know you're not a Chat-GPT AI expert, but let me ask you this: When Google's search engine first came on the scene, we all tried to rip apart its innards and infer what we could out how it ranks stuff. Are we on the verge of a secondary industry of information marketers and trainers and scam artists who are trying to sell us information good or bad on how to hack ChatGPT or BARD, rather than SEO? Is there a future industry coming in how to position your content so that these AIs will respond with our brand's information?

JYLL: Absolutely. The start of that industry is already there. I've seen on Fiverr, you can hire someone to create Chat GPT prompts for you because one of the keys to success is wording your prompt in the exact right way to get what you want out of it. There's now a whole cottage industry of people who will do that for you. So absolutely, wherever there's innovation, there are good actors and bad actors and new opportunities.

Ads Privacy Hub

TOD: Google today also launched something called its Ads Privacy Hub, it only launched a couple of hours ago, you and I have only had a brief chance to kind poke around in it. Any early thoughts to what this is, if it's of any value to marketers?

JYLL: It is a value, but there's nothing new. It appears to be a new one-stop shop for marketers to learn all they need to know about measurement: Site-wide tagging, GA4, enhanced conversions, etc. This information and these tools have all been available in some cases for many years, but Google has decided to bring it all together into one sales narrative, as I would call, for advertisers. 

It's actually reminiscent of what Google did a few years ago with the Google for Retail website: bringing Google Merchant Center, shopping campaigns, free Google tools from Think with Google, everything retail-related from Google onto one site to help retailers. This feels like the privacy version that. 

So is it helpful? Sure. If you have a Google rep, are they going to be talking to you about this? Absolutely. But anything groundbreaking or new or changing? Not at this time. I'm sure that'll come soon.

Jyll's New "Google Ads for Beginners" Program

TOD: Lots of people use your Inside Google Ads training program to get a jumpstart into that area. You're launching a new program. Tell us about that.

JYLL: Yes, Inside Google Ads has been around for just over a year. We've had nearly 200 people join... One of the most common requests I get from members and from people on social media is to create a precursor — something that explains in clear and simple English how Google Ads works: What is a keyword? What is the auction? What is a display ad? So I decided to put together a new course called Google Ads for Beginners.

Rather than taking place inside the platform, it's more me teaching people what they need to know to get ready to run Google Ads for the first time. So preorder is open for that now. It'll be launching by the end of February, and your newsletter subscribers and podcast listeners can get $20 off when they use the code DIGITAL.

Again, Jyll's new program is called Google Ads for Beginners, and listeners of this podcast can get $20 off by going through our special link: https://b.link/gabeginners and using the code DIGITAL.