- The Thread
- Posts
- 🍿 Google's search secrets, leaked!
🍿 Google's search secrets, leaked!
Plus: YouTube has games now. Will you press play?
Gupta Media
May 30, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Today’s Social Media advertising rates are springing back to life:
↘️ YOUTUBE: $3.85 CPM | ↗️ META: $8.40 CPM | ↘️ TIKTOK: $2.69 CPM
In this week’s edition:
🫰Snapchat’s ad-platform overhaul
YouTube has games now. But will you press play? 🎮
⏰ What’s the best time to post on social media?
But first…
🍿 Leaked: Google’s Secret Sauce?
The Pentagon Papers. Wikileaks. The NSA files. Think about the biggest classified leaks in history — and now add to them every SEO expert’s wildest dream. This week, two blogs unearthed thousands of pages detailing Google’s most closely-guarded secret: The ingredients that Google takes into account in ranking web pages for its search engine algorithm. There are entire industries devoted to decoding the most minute crumbs of evidence to extrapolate a faint outline of what Google might prioritize in search. And in one fell swoop, the internet just . . . gave away the master list. The whole thing. The big enchilada. For free.
Or did it? Nothing in the documentation indicates which ingredients are weighted, or by how much. At best, it’s a shopping list—not a recipe. Some SEO experts say it’s a big nothingburger. Google itself is saying very little.
Who leaked it? Well . . . that’s not entirely clear yet, but it appears that Google may have “accidentally published [API documents] publicly to a code repository for the client library.” Whoopsie.
What’s the takeaway? All these years, Google may not have been entirely truthful in describing what goes into Google search. Many, many hypotheses and suspicions have been proven correct.
By the numbers:
20: Every time you make a change to a page, Google evidently takes a snapshot. But for search ranking, it’s only looking at the last 20 changes.
2500: The number of pages of internal Google documents that were made public this week.
14,104: According to Search Engine Land, that’s the number of attributes in Google’s search API documentation.
Past that, you’ll need a degree in engineering, a decoder ring for SEO lingo, and probably a little machine learning to figure out what all this means. Suffice to say: This is all anyone in SEO will be talking about for weeks, maybe months. You can start with this massive Reddit thread.
The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media
🫰Snapchat: Last week, Snapchat announced a slew of improvements to its ad platform and products, a result of having “almost completely rebuilt significant areas of our ad stack.” Our four key takeaways:
Snapchat is testing a new value optimization offering, which will let advertisers bid on the value of purchases driven, not just the quantity of purchases.
The platform is unveiling a new way to bid on click-through conversions within seven days and no view-through conversion, which it’s calling its “7/0 delivery optimization.” Snapchat claims that in tests, 7/0 returns increased click-through conversion volume, lower costs-per-purchase, and higher ROAS.
They've launched a new Landing Page View optimization goal.
They’re rolling out enhanced Augmented Reality ad options, including a new "State-level First Story" (target specific regions) and an all-day Lens Carousel takeover.
🎮 YouTube launched its new “Playables” in-app games in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, with over 75 basic mobile games now available in the app.
Gaming content on YouTube generated over 4 billion hours of watch time in 2022, but will that be enough to boost engagement with actual games in the app? Netflix’s move into mobile games has only seen around 1% of the app’s user base engaging with its game offerings, while Meta’s addition of lightweight games on Messenger and Facebook failed to resonate. LinkedIn has also recently added logic puzzles in-app, though we don’t have any data on usage as yet.
🛍️ Amazon: A few weeks ago we noted that Amazon rolled out a new DSP campaign type called Performance+, their automation solution for driving off-Amazon conversions, a la ASC+ or PMax. Performance update, according to Amazon: most Performance+ campaigns have achieved 30-90% lower CPAs compared to standard Amazon DSP ad buys with the same goals and formats.
🕰️ TikTok: For web conversion campaigns, TikTok is replacing Smart Performance Campaigns (SPC) — its end-to-end automation campaign solution — with Web All-In-One (WAIO). WAIO will roll out beginning today (May 30) and SPC will be removed by June 30.
🐘 The Elephant In the Room: Our weekly office poll!
Among the eternal questions confronting social media managers, one of the most-asked has to be: When should I post that? Sure, you’re glued to your analytics dashboards, and you’ve got your own answers. But what do the experts say? Sprout Social’s annual survey of 2 billion engagements is out, with an official — and useless, but fun to ponder — answer: The Best Times To Post On Social Media.
But then they went and gave us five answers. We need a clear winner. And that’s why we turn to you, our dear readers.
What do you think: These may be the best times to post to social media, but more importantly, what’s your favorite? Let us know below, we’ll share the results next week.
What's the best time to post on social media? |
Last week’s results: Should the courts break up LiveNation and Ticketmaster?
It’s a tie!
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes, those ticketing fees are too high!
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 No, it won't make a difference.
🏆 Pick of the Week: Optimizing at scale on Google
Did you know that Google has a capability called Ad Variations that allows you to test different offers, types of messaging, asset orders and more? Using ad variations over standard Google Ads experiments makes setup easier and gives you the ability to test across multiple campaigns. Go to Campaigns > Experiments, and select Ad Variations to set them up.