Google to Show Searchers Why They Got Certain Results

Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• Google to Show Searchers Why They Got Certain Results
• Snapchat Had Its Best Quarter in Four Years
• Twitter Posts Encouraging Results
• Instagram Expands Insights Data to 60 Days
• TikTok's Spark Ads Sponsorship Tool

Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

Google to Show Searchers Why They Got Certain Results

One of the nice additions Facebook did a few years back was to have a way for people to find out why an ad was in their feed. The "Why Am I Seeing This Ad" would reveal some rough targeting parameters and, for us digital marketers, sometimes a glimpse into how our competitors were putting their campaigns together — were they using custom audiences? Was this more broadly targeted?

And occasionally, you can spot mistakes those advertisers made. I recently got served an ad for a company that makes a projected light:

When I tapped on "Why Am I Seeing This Ad," it revealed that one of their interests targeting was Lights — but not projected lights, rather Lights the Canadian musician:

I guess this company just clicked on every Lights that popped up in the Suggested list.

Many of us have thought — wouldn't it be great if we had this feature for Google search results.

Your dream may be answered.

This week, Google started rolling out a new About This Result overlay that will disclose why Google is ranking that page for a given search. Like Facebook's version, this is high-level data only.

Some of that data includes which keyword triggered the result or if Google substituted a synonym, whether an image on the page triggered it, and things like the impact of language and country on the results.

Google will also give searchers tips on how to get better results, like negative matching or changing your location.

Snapchat Had Its Best Quarter in Four Years

In all the attention around TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and more, you could be forgiven for thinking Snapchat's just slowly withering away.

But they continue to keep growing and growing. This week, their Q2 reported both revenue and daily active users grew at the highest rates in the last four years. Snapchat now has 293 million daily actives — that's up 23% since last year.

It was looking tricky a while back. After Instagram copied Stories and Kylie Jenner tweeted that she didn't use Snapchat any more:

That caused a $1.2 billion valuation drop. But they closed out the last quarter with nearly a billion dollars in revenue.

How? Well, partly they took a page from Instagram's strategy book and cloned TikTok. Snapchat calls their version Spotlight. And they're still considered the leader in both AR effects for organic content and for e-commerce.

Do not count them out.

Twitter Posts Encouraging Results

Twitter, too, released its Q2 earnings results this week — and also was good news: steady increases in both users and revenue. This after Twitter's board nearly threw co-founder Jack Dorsey out, complaining about a lack of innovation and growth.

That seems to be turning around now. Twitter's Monetizable Daily Active Users is now 206 million, that's an increase of 11% year-over-year. Pretty much all that growth has come from outside the U.S.

Most analysts are still in a wait-and-hold attitude, and are carefully watching the company's interactions with India, which has both a whole lot of people and a whole lot of regulatory issues, to be generous.

Twitter's definitely in the middle of a huge change — introducing new monetization features, a live audio product, a newsletter subscription product, and they even said they'd be retiring Fleets next month (that's their take on Stories).

In terms of revenue, Twitter was up a whopping 74% compared to the previous Q2. Almost all of that comes from advertising. Let's not forget, of course, Q2 this year looks a whole lot different economically that last Q2, which was in the heat of the pandemic.

You know what else was up? Cost per engagement numbers — up 42% year-over-year.

Instagram Expands Insights Data to 60 Days

Good news, data nerds — Instagram's in-app analytics will now have double the time limit for insights.

Currently, the app shows 30 days of data. They say they're stretching that to 60 days, and soon will have it up to 90 days later in the summer.

To be fair, true data nerds aren't really using Instagram's in-app analytics — you're using a third-party tool, or some middleware like Supermetrics. But still, for fast glances or to quickly answer a question in a meeting, this is good for us.

As part of the upgrade, they've also added a new calendar tool within Insights to let you pick your time frame — and reports say soon you'll be able to pick your own start and end dates.

We can only assume they'll duplicate this over on Creator Studio, which they've been trying to make a single hub for content stuff. Right now, it's only 30 days there too.

This started rolling out this week, and should get to you soon.

TikTok's Spark Ads Sponsorship Tool

To TikTok now, and the company this week launching a new tool to let advertisers sponsor trending organic content. They call them Spark Ads.

This will let brand marketers search for TikTok videos that are performing well, and put a budget behind it. Yes, basically boosted posts. They've been testing this pretty widely for the last few months, and are now releasing it more widely.

If you try this and it's asking you to buy coins, like buying hammers in Candy Crush, that's a different thing. You can also promote your own content that way, which is terribly confusing. This one costs 702 coins? What is that in real money? Well, you can buy 660 coins $13.99 in Canada, so maybe that's about $15 bucks?

But Spark Ads are in the actual ads manager. The process is you'll need to grab a code from the video you want to sponsor (or get the creator to give you that code), then input that code into Ads Manager to be able to select it.

LinkedIn launched a similar option last May, using real money.

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com