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Good morning, Marketers, and have you ever been “Instagram-influenced” to buy something?

Even when I know I’m being “influenced” or retargeted, sometimes the marketing is so good that I just have to cave and buy it. My most recent targeted buy was a fancy set of new pans that Instagram just knew I needed. 

I’ve seen ads for this brand for probably at least a year (good on ‘em for playing the long game), and I finally broke down this past weekend and did my pan research. It included Googling, competitor comparisons, clicking search ads and visiting multiple social media profiles. After chatting with a friend, who confirmed that my pans from college likely needed replacing, I finally converted.

It made me think of Google’s recent DDA announcement and the offline conversion importer they just launched (more on that below). Was the pan company able to attribute my journey to all the channels I participated in before I finally made a purchase? I assume not exactly. 

And that’s the thing with attribution. No matter how much we try, there’s always going to be something that may not get all the credit it deserves, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t contribute at least something toward the final conversion. 

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

The tl;dr: What happened in search this week? Here’s the DL…

• Google Ads announces machine learning-based data-driven attribution models in new privacy landscape. In the wake of losing data to FLoC, Google’s new DDA solution seems to offer more attribution options even for smaller accounts.
• Should robots.txt support a feature for no indexation? “I’d like to avoid adding more directives. I’m still not aware of common issues caused by this documented functionality,” said John Mueller.
• Microsoft Advertising’s new Credit card ads continue its streak of vertical-specific products. The new format is rolling out as an open beta to advertisers targeting customers in the U.S. and Canada.
• Ecommerce SEO guide: New documentation from Google. The new guide from Google gives e-commerce SEOs documentation they can take to clients and stakeholders to get their recommendations implemented.
• Best SMX rates expire this Saturday… book now and save! Don’t miss your opportunity to learn brand-safe, actionable tactics to overcome the critical search marketing obstacles you’re facing today — and prepare for what’s coming in 2022.

Google Ads launches new budget report

Google Ads is launching a new budget report to visualize monthly campaign spend behavior, the company announced Thursday.

What the budget report shows. The budget report shows daily spend, your campaign’s monthly spending limit (solid grey line), your monthly spend forecast (dotted blue line), cost to date (solid blue line) and any budget changes you’ve made during that particular month.

Why we care. This new report can help advertisers understand how editing their budget can impact the campaign’s spending limits, how past changes to average daily budget can affect performance and spend limits, and how much they’re projected to pay at the end of month. That information can then be used to improve their planning.

Read more here.

Yelp adds virtual restaurant attribute to help reduce customer confusion

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Yelp has rolled out a number of profile attributes for restaurants, ranging from vaccine-related notices to attributes for LGBTQ and Asian-owned businesses. Now, the platform is rolling out a Virtual Kitchens attribute (shown above) for ghost kitchens, virtual restaurants and virtual food courts to identify themselves to potential customers and cut down on confusion regarding the dining experiences they offer.

Why we care. In Q2 2021, business openings for food delivery services were up 166% above pre-pandemic levels, according to Yelp. While these takeout or delivery-only restaurants present customers with a potentially safer dining option, they may also disappoint customers that are looking to dine in. The Virtual Kitchens attribute may help frame expectations, and that may, in turn, result in better reviews and more business.

Read more here.

Google Ads launches Offline Conversion Importer (OCI) tool

“Importing your offline conversions makes this easy—you can measure what happens in the offline world after your ad results in a click or call to your business, and then use that data to find similar high-quality leads,” said Stephen Chang, Product Manager, Google Ads in an announcement this week.

To help advertisers with the offline conversion import process, Google Ads announced the launch of Offline Conversion Import (OCI) helper tool this week. Here’s how it works:

• Answer questions to confirm your account’s compatibility, tracking solutions, lead-to-sales journey, and the team who will help you with implementation.
• Once you’ve assigned team members for each role in the process, OCI helper will assist them at each step, providing detailed instructions and timely email notifications when it’s their turn to act.

Holiday shoppers are starting early this year according to Microsoft Advertising data

While Black Friday used to be the official kickoff of the holiday season, new survey data from Microsoft Advertising indicates that starting your retail strategy in late November is probably too late.

“Consumers are increasing research on products before purchase. Now, the research phase can be 30 days or more. So, while they may be shopping more, they’re taking longer than ever researching before they buy. That’s a good thing for advertisers who plan for it,” said Stephanie Worley, global brand marketer at Microsoft Advertising.

Other trends Microsoft predicts this year?

• Alternative payments and delivery methods will be in demand.
• Sustainability will be a trend.
• Advertising competition will be high.

Check out the blog for more tips on how to prep your retail strategy or download their holiday shopping report for more ways to get ready for the most wonderful time of the year.

Quote of the Day

“What everybody tells you: Get buy-in for your marketing strategies! What nobody tells you: HOW? FREAKING HOW? I thought the formula was: business case + action plan + ability. If you had those 3, you could do big things. But if you’re working somewhere that requires you work with other humans, all my old strategy does is turn you into the marketing version of Rick Sanchez: an erratic genius that’s just as likely to burn down the building as they are to double revenue,” wrote Brendan Hufford on LinkedIn. So how should you get buy-in? Check out the recommendations from a VP here.

The post What do new pans have to do with attribution?; Friday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google Analytics 4 introduced a new take on the go-to analytics platform for many marketers. Reimagined from the ground up, with a new interface and tweaked primary metrics, GA4 also requires a different setup process to get tracking tags in place.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) provides an easy, templated route to install GA4 on your site as well as create custom events. In this article, I’ll walk through getting GA4 tracking in place via GTM, as well as cover some basic customization options.

How to set up the main GA4 code

The gtag.js tag is the basic tracking code you need to place on your site. Once you fire this for all pages, you’ll start recording all the default data that GA4 tracks for website visitors.

GTM makes setting up this tag as simple as a few clicks and pasting in an account ID. 

Note: If you already have a Universal Analytics tag (analytics.js) firing on your site, you should leave it in place! You can run GA4 alongside Universal Analytics, and you should keep any former Universal Analytics properties active to preserve historical data. GA4 will only record data moving forward from the point in time when you set it up.

Step 1: To start setting up your GA4 tag, navigate to your desired account and container within GTM and select “Add a new tag.”

Step 2: Now, click within “Tag Configuration” to see the options for various types of tags. Select Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration.

Step 3: You’ll see a field to enter your Measurement ID. Find your Measurement ID in your account, and paste it here.

Step 4: Click within the “Triggering” box to choose where you want the tag to fire on your site. In most cases, you’ll likely want GA4 to fire on all pages. However, depending on your setup, you may want to exclude certain pages, such as private login sections.

Step 5: Save your tag, and publish your GTM container to push it live. You should now see GA4 firing on your site. To double-check that you’re actually tracking sessions, check the Realtime section of Google Analytics. You should see your own visit reflected here soon after hitting the site.

Now that you have the basic gtag.js tag in place, you can then move to set up some additional customization, such as adding events. 

Setting up event tracking for GA4 in Google Tag Manager

One of the major improvements that came with GA4 was built-in event tracking. Directly within the Google Analytics interface, you can enable Enhanced Measurement to fire events for actions that previously required manually created events, such as scroll activity, outbound clicks, file downloads, and video views.

However, note that there are still limitations to these events compared to more advanced tracking options you can set up through GTM. For instance, the now-built-in scroll tracking option simply triggers a “scroll” event once the user reaches the bottom of the page (measured at the 90% point). By default, you won’t be able to track when the user starts to scroll to earlier points of the page.

The beauty of GTM lies in the ability to easily fire events for a vast array of actions that users could take on the site. We’ll use scroll tracking as an example event setup here, but note that you can use the GA4 Event tag to create events for any triggers that are available in GTM.

Step 1: To start, create a new tag with a Tag Type of “Google Analytics: GA4 Event.” Choose your GA4 ID under “Configuration Tag.” 

Step 2: Next, enter the Event Name that you’d like to appear within the Google Analytics interface. In this case, we’re using “scroll” to align with the existing “scroll” event that GA4 tracks.

Step 3: Click on the Event Parameters section to expand it. Here, we can add a custom parameter to send further details about the event to Google Analytics. In this case, we’ll send through percentage values for when people scroll to specific points on a page.

Step 4: We’ll use “scroll_depth” for the Parameter Name. Next, the value will be {{Scroll Depth Threshold}}, a variable within GTM that will pull in the scroll percentages as people interact with the page and data is sent back in.

Step 5: We’ll need to create a trigger to determine the values we want to track. Click in the bottom Triggers section to start a new trigger, and select Scroll Depth Trigger. 

You can then choose vertical or horizontal scroll depth and select between tracking based on percentages or pixel depth. With the variety of screen sizes people may be browsing from, the percentage option is likely your best bet here. Add the numbers for the scroll points you want to track, separated by commas.

Step 6: Finally, save the trigger, save your tag, and publish it live. You should now see more detailed scroll data populate when you look at the Events section in Analytics.

You can use the same basic model presented above to fire additional events into Google Analytics. Use the event name that you’d like to populate into Google Analytics, and use parameters to populate additional details. 

Setting up GA4 and GTM is easier than you think

If you haven’t yet set up a GA4 property for your site, you should get one in place sooner than later to begin accruing data. GTM helps to make the setup process more seamless for marketers. Go ahead and create your GA4 property, add the tag via GTM, and start experimenting with event setup!

The post How to set up Google Analytics 4 using Google Tag Manager appeared first on Search Engine Land.