Display Ads News

Eras come and eras go, and the era of advertising directly on Gmail via Display campaigns has now come to a close, with a new announcement from Google.

So, Search Engine Land has an interesting find: the Google Display network will now allow you to take out ads via Google Web Stories. Let's step back: whoa, what are Google Web Stories? In short, it's Google's answer to Snapchat and Instagram Stories: short images, meant to be shared, that are only available on a web interface. Google first called them AMP Stories but has rebranded them Google Web Stories more lately. They appear on the Discover feed, image results, and standard search results. So there are a bunch of pieces of good news about these. Let's look at them.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover, on the tip from a friend, that Google has silently created a new Google Ads / Adwords help page about an apparently-secretly-launched feature, to view local competitive and search terms. So let's dive into this and see what we can learn from it.

Stop the presses--okay, maybe not quite--Google is introducing Audio-only ads for Youtube. The reason is that Youtube figured out that 85% of people watching Youtube videos aren't watching; they're just being listened to in the background for the audio. Playlists or podcast-like videos that you listen to while doing something else.

I was setting up Google Analytics for a new campaign, and it automatically forced me to use the new version of Google Analytics, GA4. Okay, such are the times. The interface changed a bit which just meant that some options were hidden under some others, but they were all there. Until... I had to set up the filters for the new Google Analytics property. And there was no filter option!