Brussels: Google’s plan to block a popular web tracking tool called “cookies” is anti-competitive, a group of advertisers, publishers and tech companies said in a complaint to EU antitrust regulators.
The grievance could boost the European Commission’s investigation opened in June into Alphabet unit Google’s Privacy Sandbox which the company said could allow businesses to target clusters of consumers without identifying individuals.
Google said a year ago that it would ban some cookies in its Chrome browser to increase user privacy and offer the Privacy Sandbox as an alternative.
The Movement for an Open Web (MOW) said the proposal would give Google the power to decide what data can be shared on the web and with whom.
“Google says they’re strengthening ‘privacy’ for end users but they’re not, what they’re really proposing is a creepy data mining party,” MOW lawyer Tim Cowen said in a statement.
The Commission confirmed receipt of the complaint, saying it would assess it under the standard procedures. In June, it kicked off an investigation into Google’s online display advertising technology services.
Google has offered to settle the case in a bid to avoid a possible fine and a disruptive prolonged probe, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters last week.
Google declined to comment on the MOW complaint and referred to its previous statement released when it offered concessions to the UK competition watchdog, which described the Privacy Sandbox as an open initiative to provide strong privacy for users while also supporting publishers.
The US Justice Department is also examining the issue, people familiar with the matter have told Reuters.
The group’s complaint to the UK regulator prompted its investigation which subsequently led Google to offer concessions.
Good SEO and content strategy can help ecommerce store owners be less reliant on paid traffic.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a buzz word over the last few years. Many areas of online business have been implementing solid SEO strategies for a while, but ecommerce is still slow to join the rest. Ecommerce stores have been trained to use paid methods, like Google Shopping Ads, Facebook Ads and other social media ads to get people to click through to their store. However, with the ever-increasing cost it takes to acquire new customers, ecommerce store owners should get on board with SEO and develop a solid content strategy for long-term growth and reduce their cost to acquire new potential customers.
The one-legged stool
As I mentioned earlier, the cost of bringing new customers to your ecommerce store is going to keep increasing. If your store is solely reliant on paid traffic, let’s say from Google Shopping, and Google decides you violated one of the many advertising policies, all your traffic dries up and you’re out of business. No traffic means no sales and no sales means you’re out of business by the end of the month.
Relying solely on paid traffic channels is like having a one-legged stool. It’s a lot more secure for the health and longevity of your business to have more legs under the stool, in case one leg gets taken away from you. SEO is one of those legs you need to apply. Not only is it free traffic, but as long as you provide valuable information for the readers, there’s no risk of being removed in the same way paid channels can shut you out.
The results of a well-executed SEO and content strategy take time. Often, an ecommerce store won’t see significant organic traffic for 6 to 12 months after publishing those first pieces of content. But if you keep implementing and producing solid, helpful content, the effects compound over time.
I got banned from Google and Facebook
I share all this from my own experience as an ecommerce store owner. I relied solely on Google and Facebook ads to get traffic and for some unknown reason back in early 2019 both platforms decided I had violated a policy. After that point, I couldn’t get back in their good books.
I went down the SEO rabbit hole out of desperation to get some traffic and started producing content that shoppers in the research phase would find helpful. I put out other content about the best products by category to help customers choose wisely, and when those pieces of content started ranking, I was getting more traffic than ever. To give you an idea of the timeline, I started publishing content in February 2019, and by June I was already getting traffic and sales. Over time, the traffic kept growing and I kept producing helpful content. In 2020, I generated over $2 million in sales from that organic strategy from only one ecommerce store.
If I hadn’t gotten started with SEO I’d be out of business today.
Get started before you need to
Don’t do what I did and wait for the wheels to fall off after one or more paid channels drop the ban hammer. Start by writing a couple of pieces of content to get started. You don’t need a five-year content strategy on day one.
For ideas on what to write, you can write a guide to your niche and what to look out for when choosing the right product. You can answer the most frequently asked questions you receive. When people type that question into the search engine and your post helps them out, you will be recognized over time as the go-to place for research and answers. Then people will grow to trust your store and will prefer to purchase from you.
There are literally thousands of blog topics that you can produce to get more traffic, but the important thing is to get started. Over time, you will learn some more advanced content strategies that you can apply to create a better ranking chance. If you can implement some semblance of a content plan into your ecommerce store and stick to it, you’ll look back in a year and wonder why you paid so much for visitors in the first place.
You can use hidden search modifiers to find better results a lot faster.
You likely use Google multiple times a day, from searching for restaurants nearby, to looking up answers to everyday questions. And usually, Google is pretty good at giving you what you want, even if you didn’t type in the right phrase. But when it comes to using Google for research purposes, especially for work, there’s probably some room for improvement…and that’s where a few hidden tricks can help you out.
Use Quotation marks when you can
Looking for something specific, like an author’s name, a long phrase, lyrics, or an idiom? Sometimes Google will show you results that match with a couple of words, but not the entire phrase. Use quotation marks around the phrase to force Google to only show results matching that phrase.
For example: iPad Air “4th generation”
Use dashes to exclude misleading words
Sometimes a particular word messes up your search results. If you don’t want results for a particular word, you can literally subtract it out by using a dash.
For example: canyon -grand
Use Google’s tabs for the best search tool
It’s easy to forget, but Google is a lot more than just text search. There’s Google Images, Maps, and Google Books. Use the tabs at the top to switch between these modes.
Use a tilde to include common synonyms
Looking to expand your search results? Use a tilde symbol before a word to find results related to the term.
For example: coding ~class (That way, you’ll also see results for coding colleges, classes, courses, and so on.)
Search for the particular file type you’re looking for
This is especially useful when you’re looking for documents online: Type in the search phrase, and then just add “filetype:pdf” at the end to look for PDFs. You can also find PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and Excel sheets using this format.
For example: climate change report filetype:ppt
Find citations that link to a certain page
This is an obscure tip, but it can help you find pages that link to a specific page. If you’re looking for citations for a college essay, for example, just use the “link:(insert link here) format to find the links.
For example: link:lifehacker.com
Use an asterisk for words you can’t remember
Sometimes you’re looking for lyrics to a song and you can’t remember a couple of words. This is where an asterisk comes in. Google treats this as a wildcard or a blank, and it’ll give you search results considering the gaps in your knowledge.
For example: strawberry * forever
Find related websites to what you’re searching for
This is a search trick everyone should know about: Let’s say you found a website you liked and want to find more websites like it—you can just ask Google to do the hard work for you using the “related:(site address)” search term.
For example: related:boardgamegeek.com
Do site-specific searches directly from Google
Usually, the search feature in websites isn’t great. But because Google indexes web content anyway, you can use Google to search through websites reliably. Use the “site:(website link)” term the next time you want to search a site.
For example: site:lifehacker.com
Find results from two specific places
Looking to find results from two terms? For example, maybe you’re looking for TV shows from Netflix or Amazon Prime. You can do that using the pipe symbol (that vertical bar), with basically tells Google to choose between this “or” that.
For example: Netflix | Prime
Search within a number range
When you’re using Google for online research, narrowing down results in a particular timeframe can help. You can use two dots to search between a range of two numbers.
Google’s latest Search improvement is a “new system of generating titles for web pages” that better describes what a result is about.
One of the primary ways people determine which search results might be relevant to their query is by reviewing the titles of listed web pages. That’s why Google Search works hard to provide the best titles for documents in our results…
Google wants the main part of a search result — in between the domain/URL and summary — to be “more readable and accessible.” Introduced last week, the company says testing has shown that this new system is “preferred by searchers.”
The previous approach saw page titles possibly change based on the search query entered by users. This new system produces “titles that work better for documents overall.” As such, different page names will “generally” no longer occur.
Another aspect of this updated page title system sees Google place emphasis on text that “humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page.” Other page text and “text within links that point at pages” might also be factored.
We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page, content that site owners often place within <H1> tags, within other header tags, or which is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments.
When Search encounters an “extremely long title,” Google will just use the “most relevant portion” and truncate the “more useful parts.” The company might also show site names alongside page titles when helpful.
However, our main advice on that page to site owners remains the same. Focus on creating great HTML title tags. Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used, more than 80% of the time.
But the technology has drawn criticism from the AI community
Google wants your search queries to look less like a Jeopardy! answer and more like a chat with your friend—filled with the kind of slang and shorthand only a human would understand.
To get there, the tech giant is enlisting a powerful AI tool you all might remember: a large language model, specifically one called MUM (multitask unified model).
Large language models, which are trained on datasets as large as one trillion words, help computers process and produce human-like language.
But, but, but: The tech has drawn criticism from parts of the AI community. In the past year, Google fired both co-leads of its AI ethics team after a dispute over their research on the dangers of large language models.
One of experts’ top concerns? Models trained via internet data will naturally learn biases—then can easily replicate those patterns and multiply the resulting harms.
Case study
Google hasn’t yet announced a timeline for when it’ll incorporate MUM into live search, but it’s already experimenting with one-off projects.
Then vs. now: In 2020, Google team members spent hundreds of hours compiling the different ways people could refer to Covid in order to accurately route pandemic queries. This year, they wanted to do the same thing for queries about the Covid vaccine—so they used MUM to “generate over 800 names for 17 different vaccines in 50 different languages” within seconds, Pandu Nayak, Google’s VP of search, told Popular Science.
Big picture: Google announced MUM at its developer conference in May alongside other language model initiatives, and now it seems to be doubling down on how important the tech is to its future business model. More sophisticated searches and answers will likely lead to more valuable targeted ads, which could mean big changes for the ad pricing model, reports the FT.—HF
“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.
Today, Google is synonymous with the web — but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.
An emerging roster of competitors thinks it can offer you a better deal. Their search engines vow not to track you or even show ads if you’re willing to shell out a couple of bucks. Can they save us from Google’s invasive and monopolistic rule, or are they doomed to fizzle out after fighting fruitlessly against an unstoppable behemoth?
The rise of private search engines
Josep Pujol, the chief of search at Brave browser, calls Google the web’s “toll-booth” where “producers of information have to abide by certain rules or directly pay to be reachable.”
Brave Browser
Google may appear simply as one cog in the larger internet machine, but it has more sway than you’d think. For most people, it’s the main avenue through which they access information online, and if something can’t be found via Google, it practically doesn’t exist. Therefore, having only one (or two) ways to access the web is very problematic, Pujol adds.
The startup behind Brave browser, which now hosts about 34 million users, rolled out its search engine a few weeks ago. Unlike Google, it doesn’t profile users and claims it won’t use any “secret methods or algorithms to bias results.”
Brave is indexing the web’s trenches from scratch, which means it ultimately won’t rely on aggregators like Bing and attempts to be everything Google is not. It’s private, offers you more control over how anonymous you want to be while searching, and most importantly, it doesn’t have a vested interest in showing you ads.
Would you pay for a private search engine?
While Brave plans to offer both ad-supported and ad-free premium subscriptions, Neeva, a new private search engine from a pair of ex-Googlers, believes as soon as advertisements enter the picture, the focus shifts away from the user and to figuring out how to “squeeze an additional dollar out of another click” for advertisers.
Without Neeva versus with NeevaNeeva
Neeva’s CEO and co-founder, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously spearheaded Google’s crown jewel (its $115 billion advertising arm) for over a decade, says, in a way, people are already paying for search engines like Google — by letting them siphon up their personal data, settling for a “bad user experience with wall-to-wall ads, and substandard content.”
Neeva, therefore, has an upfront $5 monthly fee, and in exchange, it gets you a private, ad-free search engine that can also surface your information from third-party apps like Gmail, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office 365.
Although Neeva could potentially shape up to be a compelling, ad-free alternative for those who can afford it, experts say its success and the underlying pay-for-privacy model, in general, present a difficult socioeconomic problem.
“If it’s necessary to pay for privacy,” Dr. Shomir Wilson, the director of the Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State, said to Digital Trends, “then it becomes a luxury that not everyone can afford.”
Not a level playing field
Neeva and Brave aren’t the first ones to challenge Google, however, and there’s a good reason why it’s been nearly impossible for competitors like Bing to even put a dent in its monopoly. Google controls over 90% of the search engine market, and going up against its swathes of resources has been an uphill battle for newcomers offering alternatives. It has accomplished that by practically starving its opponents of any room to grow.
Google pays platform owners such as Apple, Mozilla, and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the most popular operating systems and browsers, including Macs, iPhones, Android phones, and Google Chrome. And there’s little chance users of these platforms will go out of their way to switch search engines, let alone be even aware of choices.
“We build durable habits around search engines,” Dr. Wilson said. “Once a search engine is familiar and useful, going back to the one we like can be kind of reflexive.”
But as awareness for privacy-first products soars among people and Big Tech faces its greatest antitrust battle, Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications at DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has been up at arms with Google since 2008, is hopeful that the tides are turning.
DuckDuckGo has witnessed unprecedented growth over the past year, and its active users have doubled from 50 million to 100 million. It’s also now the second most used search engine on phones in several countries, including the United States. In addition to a search engine, DuckDuckGo offers tools to protect your identity from third-party trackers and other malicious online practices.
Fighting for a future without Google defaults
Cooper Quintin, a senior security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees breaking Google’s default power is key for competitors to thrive, but it would take “strong action on behalf of the government to actually enforce such antitrust laws.”
Luckily for Neeva, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and rest, the Justice Department — along with eleven state Attorneys General — has sued Google on those exact grounds.
“Google’s control of search access points,” the antitrust lawsuit says, “means that new search models are denied the tools to become true rivals: Effective paths to market and access, at scale, to consumers, advertisers, or data.”
If history is any indication, the odds are against Google. Last year, the search engine giant lost a similar suit in Europe and now allows Android users to pick their default search engine at startup instead of making that choice for them.
Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits may be, Google’s rivals have a long way ahead of them before they even have a chance at threatening its search engine monopoly, and they realize that.
In the meantime, though, Pujol says Brave is focusing on what it can do, which is building an alternative. “We are crazy or bold enough to try because we know there’s a demand out there.”
“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.
Today, Google is synonymous with the web — but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.
An emerging roster of competitors thinks it can offer you a better deal. Their search engines vow not to track you or even show ads if you’re willing to shell out a couple of bucks. Can they save us from Google’s invasive and monopolistic rule, or are they doomed to fizzle out after fighting fruitlessly against an unstoppable behemoth?
The rise of private search engines
Josep Pujol, the chief of search at Brave browser, calls Google the web’s “toll-booth” where “producers of information have to abide by certain rules or directly pay to be reachable.”
Brave Browser
Google may appear simply as one cog in the larger internet machine, but it has more sway than you’d think. For most people, it’s the main avenue through which they access information online, and if something can’t be found via Google, it practically doesn’t exist. Therefore, having only one (or two) ways to access the web is very problematic, Pujol adds.
The startup behind Brave browser, which now hosts about 34 million users, rolled out its search engine a few weeks ago. Unlike Google, it doesn’t profile users and claims it won’t use any “secret methods or algorithms to bias results.”
Brave is indexing the web’s trenches from scratch, which means it ultimately won’t rely on aggregators like Bing and attempts to be everything Google is not. It’s private, offers you more control over how anonymous you want to be while searching, and most importantly, it doesn’t have a vested interest in showing you ads.
Would you pay for a private search engine?
While Brave plans to offer both ad-supported and ad-free premium subscriptions, Neeva, a new private search engine from a pair of ex-Googlers, believes as soon as advertisements enter the picture, the focus shifts away from the user and to figuring out how to “squeeze an additional dollar out of another click” for advertisers.
Without Neeva versus with NeevaNeeva
Neeva’s CEO and co-founder, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously spearheaded Google’s crown jewel (its $115 billion advertising arm) for over a decade, says, in a way, people are already paying for search engines like Google — by letting them siphon up their personal data, settling for a “bad user experience with wall-to-wall ads, and substandard content.”
Neeva, therefore, has an upfront $5 monthly fee, and in exchange, it gets you a private, ad-free search engine that can also surface your information from third-party apps like Gmail, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office 365.
Although Neeva could potentially shape up to be a compelling, ad-free alternative for those who can afford it, experts say its success and the underlying pay-for-privacy model, in general, present a difficult socioeconomic problem.
“If it’s necessary to pay for privacy,” Dr. Shomir Wilson, the director of the Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State, said to Digital Trends, “then it becomes a luxury that not everyone can afford.”
Not a level playing field
Neeva and Brave aren’t the first ones to challenge Google, however, and there’s a good reason why it’s been nearly impossible for competitors like Bing to even put a dent in its monopoly. Google controls over 90% of the search engine market, and going up against its swathes of resources has been an uphill battle for newcomers offering alternatives. It has accomplished that by practically starving its opponents of any room to grow.
Google pays platform owners such as Apple, Mozilla, and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the most popular operating systems and browsers, including Macs, iPhones, Android phones, and Google Chrome. And there’s little chance users of these platforms will go out of their way to switch search engines, let alone be even aware of choices.
“We build durable habits around search engines,” Dr. Wilson said. “Once a search engine is familiar and useful, going back to the one we like can be kind of reflexive.”
But as awareness for privacy-first products soars among people and Big Tech faces its greatest antitrust battle, Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications at DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has been up at arms with Google since 2008, is hopeful that the tides are turning.
DuckDuckGo has witnessed unprecedented growth over the past year, and its active users have doubled from 50 million to 100 million. It’s also now the second most used search engine on phones in several countries, including the United States. In addition to a search engine, DuckDuckGo offers tools to protect your identity from third-party trackers and other malicious online practices.
Fighting for a future without Google defaults
Cooper Quintin, a senior security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees breaking Google’s default power is key for competitors to thrive, but it would take “strong action on behalf of the government to actually enforce such antitrust laws.”
Luckily for Neeva, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and rest, the Justice Department — along with eleven state Attorneys General — has sued Google on those exact grounds.
“Google’s control of search access points,” the antitrust lawsuit says, “means that new search models are denied the tools to become true rivals: Effective paths to market and access, at scale, to consumers, advertisers, or data.”
If history is any indication, the odds are against Google. Last year, the search engine giant lost a similar suit in Europe and now allows Android users to pick their default search engine at startup instead of making that choice for them.
Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits may be, Google’s rivals have a long way ahead of them before they even have a chance at threatening its search engine monopoly, and they realize that.
In the meantime, though, Pujol says Brave is focusing on what it can do, which is building an alternative. “We are crazy or bold enough to try because we know there’s a demand out there.”
Google engineers and staff on its ads and Chrome teams have a new monthly meeting on their calendars — with digital publishers.
Representatives from around 20 publishers, many from large Comscore 50 media properties, have convened monthly since March with Google ads and Chrome execs and engineers to conduct focused conversations about technologies Google is developing as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative.
In general, though some publishers have shown interest in testing Google’s emerging tech, many of them have believed the platform’s timeline for development and implementation of it has been “too aggressive,” said Rob Beeler, the de facto leader of the fledgling publisher collective and founder of Beeler.Tech, who helps publishers navigate the complex world of ad tech.
“It’s been clear in these meetings that publishers have had a lot of things to answer before they were on board with any of these solutions,” he told Digiday.
Publishers have in many ways been left out of Google’s efforts to redesign how digital ads work without third-party cookies. This is despite the fact that they produce and distribute the content that comprises the open web, which Google and others say they aim to preserve when the great shift away from today’s tracking technologies goes into effect. Now, the regular meetings between a small group of top-tier publishing execs and Googlers are intended to give publishers a louder voice in the discussion.
Neither Google nor Beeler would name publishers involved and two group participants Digiday spoke with for this story asked not to be named. Google and the publisher participants have made a point of keeping the meetings hush-hush, in part because none wants to alienate smaller publishers who might feel left out of a process that already has most of them feeling sidelined. Beeler said participants of the new group were selected because they are “in a position to have some influence as things get rolled out.” He also said meetings with a larger group of people might become too unwieldy to be productive.
“We are committed to open dialogue with publishers of all sizes as they develop strategies for the transition to a more privacy-centric web,” said a Google spokesperson. “We take every opportunity to engage with publishers and to listen, share information and solicit feedback on how we can build for a better future.”
A more accessible forum than the wonky W3C
Many industry players criticize Google for wielding too much power in the transition away from third-party cookies and development of new tech intended to replace them in a more privacy-preserving way. The aspects of that work that Google has made public have happened inside the W3C, or Worldwide Web Consortium. The international web standards body serves as host for engineers from companies including Google, Facebook and other ad tech firms hashing out complex elements of Privacy Sandbox tech development through jargon-laden web forums.
Although some bigger publishers such as The New York Times and Hearst have dispatched staff to W3C meetings and forums, many publishers find the environment an impenetrable labyrinth, keeping them away despite handwringing over how the tech developed by W3C participants will affect their businesses.
“The W3C is very technical,” said a participant of the recently-formed publisher group who represents smaller media outlets and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Rather than circumventing the W3C process, insiders said Google’s recent monthly meetings with publishers (which, of course, take place on Google Meet) are intended to provide a more accessible setting for publishing execs to learn about what’s in development, voice concerns and perhaps eventually acclimate to the idea of having their own representatives play more active roles in Privacy Sandbox efforts at the W3C.
Google itself has lamented a lack of engagement from publishers in its Privacy Sandbox development. Chetna Bindra, Google’s group product manager in user privacy and trust in its Ads division, told this reporter for The Drum in November 2020 the company was “hoping for more participation” from publishers “as we come up with a workable solution for everyone that is privacy-forward.”
What’s on the agenda — and what isn’t
Thus far, meetings have entailed discussions of technologies such as FLoC — Google’s recently-tested but evolving cookieless ad targeting method and how it might affect publishers, for instance in relation to creating inventory packages. First-party sets — which would affect how domains owned by the same publisher are defined in context of data collection and use via web browsers like Google Chrome — were a topic on the agenda at the July meeting. But the first half-hour was devoted to discussion of Google’s morphing timeline for rollout of Privacy Sandbox tech.
“A lot of these conversations are just like level-setting,” said the unnamed smaller publisher representative.
Beeler, who also helps run a similar recently-formed group of EU-based publishers meeting with Google to discuss the same sorts of issues, said he and other publisher reps help determine the meeting agendas.
Still, some topics that could have significant impacts for publishers continue to be relegated to engineer-centric spaces. For instance, participants in the new meetups said changes to FLoC which Google is mulling and were recently presented at an engineering research event have yet to make the publisher meeting agenda.
“It always amazes me how these things get reported in random tweets, blog posts or non-endemic conferences like an engineering research event,” said another exec participating in the new publisher meetings with Google who asked not to be named.
Correction: This story originally incorrectly reported that Chetna Bindra leads Google’s product development for third-party cookie replacement in its Chrome browser division.
The search giant has delayed the rollout of FLoC, its controversial replacement for third-party cookies, until 2023.
Google is in an interesting position when it comes to making the internet respect your privacy. It controls the world’s largest advertising platform, the most used search engine, and the most popular web browser. Together, that means Google has more influence over how your data is gathered and tracked online than any other company.
It’s significant then that over the past few years, Google has joined the effort to eliminate the worst offender when it comes to tracking, third-party cookies. Those are the little pieces of code websites use to track your activity across other sites and apps.
Cookies, in and of themselves, aren’t necessarily bad. They serve valuable purposes like keeping you logged in to sites you use regularly. It’s just that they are also used for purposes they were never intended for, like tracking everything you do online.
In 2020, Google announced that Chrome would block third-party cookies by default–something almost every other browser already does. Since that time, Google has been trying to figure out an alternative that will still allow advertisers to target users without invading their privacy.
Google’s solution, known as FLoC, analyses web activity in Chrome and assigns the user to a cohort. Advertisers can then target ads at those groups as opposed to individual users. Google argues that the method is privacy-protecting since individual users can’t be identified. In theory, that sounds great, right?
Except, basically, no one else thinks it’s a good idea. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, calls it a “terrible idea.” Advertisers aren’t fans either. Amazon has said it will block FLoC from working on any of its sites.
That explains why last week, Google said it will delay the rollout of FLoC, and the blocking of third-party cookies, until 2023.
Look, there’s no question that Google, should it decide to, could make the internet respect your privacy. It could simply turn off third-party cookies in Chrome–just flip a switch and make them go away for good.
The cynical take is that Google is dragging this out because it’s addicted to your data and wants to protect its business. The truth, however, is that’s only partially true. In fact, I think you can make the case the truth is actually worse. Google doesn’t even need that data.
While Google could technically make the internet respect your privacy, the problem is that doing so would give it an enormous advantage over every other advertising network and platform. Google collects massive amounts of first-party data on its users, meaning that it is far less dependent on third-party tracking.
Besides, Google’s most profitable advertising platform is search. Google doesn’t have to do any third-party tracking to know what you search for since you literally type what you’re looking for into its website. All it has to do is show you ads at the top of the search engine results page.
Blocking third-party tracking altogether would certainly affect Google’s business, but would have a far greater impact on the rest of the digital advertising industry. As a result, Google is in an almost impossible situation, but not for the reason it might seem.
Eliminating third-party cookies seems like the best possible outcome for Google because it would force advertisers to become even more dependent on Google. In the long run, it would give Google even more control over digital advertising, which you might think would be a good thing for the company.
Except, considering the antitrust pressure Google is facing, the last thing it wants to do is anything that makes it look like the company is becoming more dominant. Google can’t cut off the rest of the industry–not because it’s being charitable, but because to do so would put its entire business at risk.
If you think Google is facing scrutiny now, imagine what would happen if it became even more dominant. It’s hard to see a scenario where it wouldn’t be broken apart by regulators, which might be better for your privacy but would definitely be bad for Google. Once again, when faced with a decision between protecting user privacy and protecting its own business, Google has chosen the latter.
This week: the page experience update is here, a new privacy-first search engine is here, and a new Search Console feature is here.
Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.
Google Page Experience Now Rolling Out
Here we go!
We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. Some of us have been dreading this day.
And now it’s here.
Google started rolling out the page experience update this week.
But it’s happening slowly. You might not notice how it impacts your site until August.
It’s not likely that the change will impact your site much, if at all, though. Google previously claimed that the new signals have a minor effect on where sites land in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Here’s how it’s all going down:
Google started using page experience metrics to determine eligibility for top stories.
Soon, you’ll see the AMP badge go away.
Google continues to test the page experience badge but offers no report on when it will formally roll out.
Also: keep in mind that a core update recently rolled out. So if your keywords are already doing the Google Dance, that could be the reason. It might have nothing to do with the page experience update.
Meet Brave: A New Privacy-First Search Engine
Looking for a search engine that respects your privacy? Check out Brave.
Brave isn’t just the name of the search engine. It’s also the name of the company that makes that search engine.
And it’s the name of the browser, too.
As it stands now, Brave doesn’t show ads. The company says it might run ads one day in the future, but not in a way that violates users’ privacy.
“Brave Search does not track you, your searches, or your clicks; it’s impossible for Brave to disclose any information about you to anyone,” the company said in a statement. “Any future ads we may support will be anonymized (like all other Brave ads), and will not influence ranking. In the future, we will also offer paid ad-free search.”
Another Brave feature that publishers will love: the founders promise not to use content from the web without sending traffic to the website hosting the content.
As you may know, Google screen-scrapes content from websites and posts it on google.com. That gives people the ability to get their questions answered without even visiting the site with the answers.
Brave says it won’t do that.
The new software is still in preview mode.
Now All Google Merchants Can Accept Payment With Shopify
Good news if you’re a Google Merchant user: you can now accept payments via Shopify.
Even if you’re not a Shopify user.
More good news: you can use Shopify for checkout if you’re a Facebook or Instagram merchant as well.
The new solution is called Shop Pay. It’s a one-click checkout process offered by Shopify.
Here’s the announcement from the company: ”Each day, more than 1.8 billion people log on to Facebook and a billion shopping sessions take place across Google. By bringing Shop Pay to all merchants regardless of the commerce platform they use, we’re making an industry-leading checkout more accessible to independent brands at a time when finding and converting customers has never been more important.”
According to reports, check out with Shop Pay is 70% faster than an average online checkout. It’s also got a 1.72x higher conversion rate.
The new tool also offers order tracking for consumers.
Shop Pay has already facilitated more than $20 billion in online payments.
Google Rolls out Search Console Insights
Want to know more about what kind of content resonates with your core audience? If so, then check out Google Search Console Insights.
As the name implies, it’s part of Google Search Console. If you head over to Search Console right now, you’ll likely see a banner at the top advertising the new Insights feature.
Click on the link in that banner and Search Console will take you to a new screen where you’ll see site activity for the past 28 days.
For starters, the tool will show you how many clicks you got from Google Search. It will also show you how much that number increased or decreased from the previous month.
Below that, you’ll see your most searched queries that brought people to your site. You’ll also see where those keywords land in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and how many clicks landed visitors to that page during the time period.
You also have the option to view most trending queries. That will show you queries “on the rise” on your website.
Google Updating Top Stories Carousel
It seems like the Top Stories carousel is in the news a lot lately. And here it is again.
This time, it’s because Google announced that it’s changing the carousel.
Here are the changes you can expect to see:
AMP no longer required for inclusion in Top Stories
AMP icon will go away
Google will eliminate swiping on the carousel
It’s not much of a carousel without swiping, but Google says it needs to eliminate that ability.
Why? Because Google can’t guarantee instant loading of pages since AMP is no longer required.
You can expect to see the changes roll out around the same time as the page experience update rolls out.
That is: now.
Google Explains the Difference Between Audience Expansion and Optimized Targeting
Google recently sent out an email to Google Ads users stating that some campaigns using audience expansion would get migrated to optimized targeting.
It left many strategists scratching their heads and wondering: “What’s the difference?”
Google is here to answer that question.
According to a spokesperson, audience expansion “limited campaigns from benefiting from Google’s auto-targeting systems by expanding only on the user-selected audiences.”
On the other hand: “Optimized targeting is a new paradigm for auto-targeting that can move beyond any selected criteria to optimize into the best performing audiences for a given ad group while meeting the campaign’s objective.”
Bottom line: you’re in better hands with optimized targeting.
Facebook Gets Into Podcast Integration
This past week, Facebook announced that you can connect your podcast’s RSS feed to a Facebook Page. Then, users can enjoy your podcasts without ever leaving the Facebook platform.
Further, all your new podcasts going forward will automagically get integrated into the Facebook feed.
Facebook says that users can listen to podcasts even when the app is running in the background. So they can do other things at the same time.
Additionally, Facebook will enable users to create and share short clips from podcasts on its platform. That’s a great way to give your podcasts more publicity.
Facebook is contacting some Page owners about the new feature right now. No word yet on when it fully rolls out.
Twitter Getting Closer to Emoji Reactions to Tweets
It looks like you’ll soon be able to respond to a tweet with an emoji.
All we know right now about the feature is brought to us by reverse-engineer extraordinaire Jane Manchun Wong.
And from what we can see, it looks like Twitter is implementing something similar to what’s on Facebook. Users will have a limited set of emojis they can use to give their reactions to tweets.
Current emoji reactions include: “Like,” “Cheer,” “Hmm,” “Sad,” and “Haha.”
Homework
Before you enjoy the start of summer, consider handling these to-do’s:
Windows 10
Support
Apply
Backgrounds
Android
Samsung Flight
Owner
News Articles
Accept Payments
If you’re a podcaster, think about how you can use the upcoming Facebook integration to promote your podcast.
Take a look at Search Console Insights. See what you can learn about the type of content that best works with your audience. Then, double-down on those subjects and keywords.
If you’re in the e-commerce space, think about how you can use Shop Pay to streamline the checkout process for your customers.
Take a look at Brave, the new search engine. It might one day become yet another option for online advertising.
Keep an eye on your keywords over the next couple of months. See where you’re losing ground and where you’re improving. Look for the common traits that seem to help your keywords move up in the SERPs and apply those principles to all your content.
