After Coronavirus Pandemic, Economic Downturn Awaits Ad Industry
Hello! At first, hope you all are safe, healthy, and isolated in these trying times.
Last week due to the rapid rise of coronavirus, all events and big announcements in the ad tech industry were cancelled and companies shifted to work remotely. However, there is an unexpected sting in the tail – the economy is slipping into recession.
Initially, the advertisers thought the impact of coronavirus would be short but now they are preparing for its effects to stay for months. With the economists warning that a global recession is underway, the global markets witnessed a sharp fall. On the other hand, the investors feared coronavirus would stunt the economic growth resulting in a market crash of 3000 points from the Dow Jones and the value of stocks falling steeply. The advertising executives think the coronavirus pandemic means normal business is on hold indefinitely.
According to a report from research firm eMarketer, a reduction in the growth of advertising is expected on a global scale due to COVID-19. The firm said the global ad spend is expected to be $691.7 billion, down from the earlier estimate of $712 billion. The total ad spending of China, the second-largest ad market is expected to reach $113. 7 billion, down from the previous estimate of $121.13 billion.
Many business events and pitches worth millions of dollars have been postponed until the coronavirus stabilizes. While it is early to predict the overall economic outcome due to coronavirus outbreak, however economists like IAB Europe’s Daniel Knapp warns a situation similar to the 2008 recession. However, that recession was driven by the issues in the financial system, currently, coronavirus is creating the collapse of the consumer demands across sectors weakening the economic activities around the world.
The impact of coronavirus pandemic on advertising has begun to sink in. As quoted by the DigiDay, David Indo, CEO of ID Comms said,
“We are facing unprecedented market conditions and many advertisers have sensibly focused on protecting key business and commercial requirements.”
He further added,
“A significant number of pitch plans are being paused and placed on hold until the situation clarifies. The result could be an avalanche of reviews through the second half of the year or perhaps a delay until the beginning of 2021.”
The biggest impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been a major disruption to supply chains. For instance, Apple witness a shortage of iPhone supply in China. As a result, it established Foxconn as a primary manufacturer. Currently, the production is shut down in China reducing the forecast in iPhone shipments in Q1 by as much as 10% according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo cited by MacRumors. Some advertisers like Adidas and AB InBev are pulling out dollars from China because of coronavirus overturning the ability to sell ads whereas others with streaming services are wary to take more ads as it might look that they are trying to gain more profit from people forced to stay at home.
Cancelled events and travel restrictions refer to fewer people travelling which means business metrics like return on advertising spend are in freefall for travel companies. According to Gareth Owen, MD of independent agency network TiPi Group, certain verticals like travel are trying to cut down on advertising and their travel clients aren’t bidding on the keywords that usually drive sales as a part of cuts to pay-to-click strategies that have also stopped display budgets.
Speaking to DigiDay, Christian Gladwell, Global CEO, M&C Saatchi Performance expanded on the point,
“The virus is bad news for performance marketing budgets if they are only employed at a low stage of the funnel that’s acquiring the media within a narrow cost per action range.”
The problems of the travel industry and event organizers are becoming a part of the ad industry as well. For example, influencers looking for collaboration on lucrative projects are suspended for two reasons – no travel or event is cancelled. Even though only a few travel and tourism campaigns and brand sponsorships have been cancelled by companies, but if the situation gets worst it can have serious repercussions on the influencer’s income
The outbreak has even halted the shooting of movies and series at various stages of production. This can cause monetary damage to the production houses and channels. Therefore, insurance is a big consideration for them as the outbreak comes under force majeure ‘clauses in the contract and is not covered in any policy. Alternatives, like repurposing old footage or investing in animation, is being considered as neither requires to shoot.
Google Gives A New Look For Attribution Reports in Google Ads
Google this month updated the attribution report in Google Ads. The name is also changed from Search Attribution to Attribution which means reporting is limited to Google ads universe. This new update streamlines the reporting. Google in its blog said,
“ The new experience can help you quickly understand how customers interact with your marketing throughout the purchase cycle, making it easy for you to take action in the areas that are driving results.”
Along with the overview report, attribution reports in Google Ads include top paths, path metrics, assisted conversions, and model comparison.
The revamped overview report helps advertisers to visualize the customers’ path to conversion. You can note the percentage of customer conversions after multiple clicks on your ads. Device analysis shows customer conversion from more than one device.
Charles Huyi, Product Manager, Google Ads in the announcement said,
“Every business is different, so reports cover a range of insights – from the most common sequences of ad interactions leading up to a conversion, to how much credit is assigned to each interaction along the way,”
Image Credit: Google Ads
The model comparison report helps advertisers to compare cost per conversion and return on ad spend for different attribution models such as last click, rule-based and data-driven attribution.
Google Ads offers several attribution models like the last click, first click, linear, time decay, position-based and data-driven.
Image Credit: Google Ads
The streamlined reports make it easy to navigate but you may not find the same things as in the old reports. In order to access attribution reports in Google ads, click on the Tools icon in the upper right, under Measurement, select Attribution.
IAS Issues Threat Alert Regarding The Latest Digital Ad fraud Scheme
The industry’s key weapon against ad fraud has been compromised, allowing fraudsters to pilfer media spend. Ad. txt files were ideally launched three years ago by the IAB’s Tech Lab to help the ad industry combat ad fraud but instead has become a conduit for it.
It is an initiative to improve transparency in programmatic advertising. The tool was introduced by IAB for publishers and distributors to list all companies that are authorized to sell ads. Essentially, it will also show when an advertiser buys ads directly from the publishers or authorized ad tech vendors and also highlight those sites that do not use an ads.txt file.
However, in reality, since the ad.txt tool launched, fraudsters have exploited the opportunity where the buyers do not check the lists with bots that generate fake browser data and create fabricated URLs in order to steal advertiser’s media spend. 404bot is the perfect example of this type of fraud.
This botnet involves a practice called domain spoofing, where the fraudster impersonates the publisher’s webpage. However, the 404bot holds no inventory. Domain spoofing allows slipping nonexisting URL into approved domain lists. To avoid any detection, the fake URL is a combination of two existing URLs.
Image Credit: Campaign India
Now spoof domains are receiving ad calls, the challenge is to deceive the audience to ‘ watch’ the video ads. For this, 404 takes advantage of a Bunitu Trojan. The Trojan infects internet users with malware that allows fraudsters to connect to their devices. Once connected, the fraudster can use the infected ID to generate ad calls that appear from legitimate sources. The whole process of buying ads from the seller and inventory appears to be legitimate while there is nothing in reality.
Integral Ad Science(IAS) has uncovered the bot scheme that has affected many high and low publishers which have one thing in common: large ads txt list and has stolen at least US$15 million of advertiser’s money- a number that continues to grow.
The fraud scheme is similar to 3ve and Hyphbot, the main signature of the 404bot is extensive domain-spoofing, where URL is fabricated at browser level which means the data from the browsers is fake. 404bot has been building networks gradually over the years ensuring that they are not easily detectable to the human eye.
Botnet’s Origin:
The IAS Threat Lab first spotted a rise in domain spoofing activity in 2018. Evgeny Shmelkov, head of the IAS Threat Lab said,
“We detect bots and protect our customers from their effects every day. The 404bot has been active since 2018 and its unchecked growth now warrants industry action.”
In September 2018, the botnet activity increased and remained high till the start of November 2018, when it abruptly dropped. However, around the same time another botnet, 3ve was taken down by cybersecurity and ad verification firm White Ops. IAS assumed both events were related, but the timing of 3ve takedown didn’t match with the drop in activity of the botnet it was monitoring. After 5 months of low activity, 404bot traffic increased again in mid-April, 2019 and then dropped in September 2019.
Image Credit: Campaign India
In its white paper, IAS explains,
“We can only hypothesise the true reason for this subsequent drop in activity of the botnet, but based on/ previous observation, we know that 404bot activity could spike again at any time.”
Conservative estimates suggest that 404bot’s activity between April 2019 to September 2019 affected over 600 million ads. It has affected over 1.5 billion video ads across the U.K, the U.S.A, Canada, and Australia. Assuming video ads price in a single-digit dollar, an average individual fraudster makes at least $15 million a year.
Drawbacks of Ads.Text files
The 404bot capitalizes on unaudited ads.text files and its vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, ads.txt files continue to be longer and become an easier place for fraudsters to hide. The longer the ads.txt list, the harder to audit for unauthorized sellers. According to IAS, the only link between all publishers that were impersonated by the bot was that they all had long lists of ad tech vendors in their ad.txts files. Evgeny Shmelkov said,
“This discovery left us wondering if publishers were not properly vetting resellers, or if they were simply using Ads.txt on their websites as a formality. The former, if true, defeats the core purpose of Ads.txt’s existence.”
“We are learning from this bot that it is crucial to continuously audit and update Ads.txt files.”
The IAS threat lab detects bots regularly and to reduce unnecessary panic, it refrains to divulge details from every discovery. However, due to no sign of 404bot shutting down, IAS is sharing details to help other players in the ad-tech ecosystem to clean up the inventory. They are closely working with publishers and IAB Tech Lab to improve the ads.txt model to limit frauds like 404bot.
Meanwhile, Dan Larden, managing partner of product and partnerships at programmatic agency Infectious Media said, companies buying and selling media aren’t set up properly to audit any trade. He further added,
“Programmatic advertisers need to be pushing ad tech vendors for more log-level data so that they can see where the wastage is on the media that’s being bought.”
In The Absence of Third-party Cookies, Publishers Wants to Strengthen Relation with Advertisers
With the death of third-party data, publishers are in the prime position as holders of the first-party data on consumers, and they are hoping to have a strong relationship with advertisers. The big revolution in the digital world without third party cookies and the trackers within internet browsers that builds all of the digital advertising – was on top priority for all the attendees at the IAB three – day Annual Leadership Meeting in California.
In a panel discussion, Stephanie Layser, vice-president of advertising technology and operations at News Corp said, “A privacy-first identifier is really important and needed in our industry as a whole.” He further added that without this, the ‘cat-and-mouse’ game will continue, eventually not able to identify the users at all.
No third-party cookies mean there will be an ecosystem of walled gardens. Facebook and Google, publishers will start having their own end-to-end platforms and safeguard consumers’ data within their walled gardens. Publishers may concentrate on the first-party data obtained from their sites to build identifiers and exist within their closed ecosystems. Undoubtedly, publisher first-party data can become the dominant currency of the digital ad market.
Scott Messer, senior vice-president of media at Leaf Group said .“You store your information in and use their identifiers, but you don’t get the user identity back. He further added, “And that’s actually a sustainable model, minus the leaking.”
However, Facebook and Google, especially the latter can take advantage of identifiers that Chrome runs through its browser and so publishers need to give more insights than the basic audience data. Publishers need to present quality and privacy-compliant benefits of consented data to buyers for getting attention. Messer further said that the key to publishers gaining control is bringing people insight than pushing more audience or data.
For rebuilding digital advertising in the absence of third-party cookies, publishers need to act to make sure they have the systems, strategies, and processes in place – like organize their identity graphs, build consistent systems or definitions of audience segment to put insight to use. Also, it is essential for them to successfully integrate their direct customer relationship with advertisers’ data and campaign objectives.
The Vice President of Meredith, Chip Schenck said publishers and advertisers should work together to build products that go beyond financial objectives and advertisers learn more about end-users.
“Partnership is what do you have and what don’t you have, how can I fill the gaps that you have, and what are the things I need that you could help me with, beyond financial remuneration,” said Schenck on redefining partnership,
The absence of third party cookies can tighten the bond between the advertiser and publisher giving way to open exchanges. It acts as a catalyst to publishers who need to ensure that technology tools and business models are in place to be at the top of the ad ecosystem.
Facebook Will Shutter Activities For Mobile Web and In-Stream
Facebook on April 11, 2020, will shut down the Audience Network and no longer fill any requests to web and in-stream placements. Now, mobile marketers will face problems who administered ad campaigns through Audience Network. As per their blog post, Facebook will record data in its server for six months after April 11, granting access to active accounts.
The exact rationale behind this move is unknown but sources said the decision is a response to recent changes made by the browser companies to turn off cookies in the mobile web environment, plus protecting brand safety along with limitations on data sharing.
Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity said,
“There’s not just a dotted line between Chrome’s third-party cookie ban and this – it’s a direct result of the movements by Safari and now Google.”
However, a Facebook spokesperson said,
“We’ve made this decision based on where we see growing demand from our partners, which is in other formats across mobile apps.”
In 2014, Facebook launched its Audience Network offering advertisers to extend its Facebook ad campaign to third-party apps. In 2016, it expanded its network to mobile websites which include big names like Tik-Tok, Tinder, and Pandora to name a few.
The financial impact of the shutdown is still unclear on Facebook advertising revenue but based on estimates, the mobile web arm represents a tiny part of Facebook’s overall $70.7 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that ended on 31st Dec 2019.
According to the Audience Network by Facebook website, it paid more than $1.5 billion to publishers and developers in 2018. A marketer called the closing of the Audience Network web arm a fair move and further said,
“The web part is the riskiest — brand safety, ad fraud, viewability concerns and also space where Google and others are so dominant.”
In 2015’s fourth quarter, the Audience Network had a $1b revenue run rate in ad spend when it was just catering to mobile apps and Facebook hasn’t provided any updated number since then. The revenue split between the Audience Network’s web and app arms is unclear but sources suggest apps segment contributed a higher proportion.
On Facebook’s full-year 2019’s earnings call, Facebook CFO Dave Wehner said,
“We are seeing headwinds in terms of targeting and measurement, but as I noted, the majority that impact lies in front of us.” He pointed to three main factors causing headwinds: global privacy regulations, Facebook’s own privacy settings such as the’ Off-Facebook activity tool’ and “product changes and future plans” announced by operating systems and browsers such as Apple and Google, which will limit Facebook ability to use signals received on third-party sites.
Facebook, four years ago shut Live Rail, a video ad exchange business it had acquired for $400 million to $500 million just two years prior, citing ad fraud and viewability issues. That same year, Facebook’s pullback in ad tech includes the closure of FBX, a desktop ad exchange built in-house. Later that year, Facebook started to shut down its Atlas ad-buying platform it had purchased from Microsoft in 2013. In early 2019, Facebook stops Audience Network’s connected TV service.
It is a fair bet for Facebook to get out of open programmatic and prefer owned-and-operated apps, where it can have a 100 percent margin for any ads sold compared to selling ads on other properties where it would have to enter into a revenue-sharing contract. Facebook properties are growing steadily and its app portfolio has been a front-runner in social networking and messaging. In Q4, users and revenue grew while ad prices remained stable showing people are spending more time with Facebook apps. By having a software development kit for gaming, dating, and music apps, Facebook can share its performance-advertiser demand with the titles where users spend most of their spare time on their mobile.
The open real-time bidding environment is under scrutiny from regulators in Europe where U.K’s data protection authority has called on ad tech companies to clean their act or face penalties under the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. Therefore from a regulatory point of view, it makes sense for Facebook to limit its exposure to data leakage and Consent management issues as Audience Network might extend beyond its walled garden.
As of now, Facebook will continue to work with app publishers and remove mobile web publishers from Audience Network because growth is with apps, and so, a Facebook spokesperson said “focusing our resources there moving forward.”
7 Tips That Saves A Fortune On Your Pay Per Click Budget
On average, Google Ads advertisers receive $2 revenue on every $1 spent. This means an advertiser can expect to make double the money invested on this platform but there is no guarantee. It is compelling but intimidating as well.
Essentially, it is gambling. It is looking for your investment to pay off than making zero dollar profit. It is common to believe that you need higher investment for higher returns.
But the truth is:
You don’t need a big budget to generate sales. A low budget PPC campaign will also lead to effective results. Here is how you can do it.
7 Tips to get optimize your PPC campaign
1. Optimize Ad Copy to Increase CTR
One of the best ways to save money on Google Adwords is by writing a better ad copy. A poor ad copy will not bring you desired returns while a better ad copy will appeal to your audience, increase your click-through rate (CTR), and Quality Score. The quality of ad text is a major contributor to build your Quality score. The quality score has a direct link to the success of your PPC campaign and therefore, it makes sense to invest time to optimize your ad copy.
2. Set your daily maximum budget
Before starting with the campaign creation and actual investment, project your result in advance to keep realistic goals.
A low budget is not a cash cow but a relative term.
For instance, enter your maximum of the low-budget spend for a single day. If you can spend $150 per month, which implies $5 per day.
Image Credit: AdEspresso
The next step is to comprehend the common data-based averages to get an idea about the cost per click and whether it aligns with your budget.
Image Credit: AdEspresso
In Q1 of 2018, the average CPC’s were $2.76 and CTR was 4.23% on Google ads
3. Use Ad Extensions
The second money-saving tip is to use ad extensions that improve your CTR. It allows the audience to take direct action from the searches whether you want them to call your business, download your app, know your offers, locate you on maps, or visit your webpage. Extensions make your ad more competitive and encourage users to know more about your business.
Image Credit: Neil Patel
4.Geolocation:
The most overlooked but critical feature in AdWords. For example, a dentist in Boston doesn’t want the ad to appear in searches of dentists in Los Angeles.
In the campaign settings, advertisers can easily target a specific country, state, DMA, city, and even zip code. Radius targeting is also possible around specific addresses to get even more granular.
Image Credit: Wordstream
Geolocation settings are also important for businesses selling goods and services from a physical location to set optimal working hours of their operations.
5. Try out single keywords to target:
When you are on low budget campaigns on PPC, you cannot bid on multiple keywords to get results. It will narrow the spread of the result, need longer set up, unique landing pages raising your time, effort and cost. If you have a budget of $5 a day, it is futile to bid on ten keywords costing that amount for a single click.
Use a ‘single, specific, good’ keyword. You shouldn’t be targeting head terms like helicopter skiing. Someone searching ‘Helicopter skiing’ has no idea what they want – they will click on your PPC ad, browse and then leave.
The keynote is to be as specific as possible with the keyword. The more specific is your keyword or long-tail keywords, cheaper is the cost and better is the click-through rates and in return the quality score.
To calculate the effectiveness of your keyword bidding strategy, try this
Keyword searches x CTR = Estimated traffic
So what kind of keyword you should find?
Use the keyword research tool to unlock all keyword possibilities including new keyword niches and less common keywords that have the potential to drive traffic and conversions.
This tool gives you valuable data like bidding estimates for top bids and top spot bids considering the competition.
Image Credit: AdEspresso
For instance, Look for a medium volume with less competition keyword and search the results that match the intent. (Intent means what the searcher expects to achieve with the search.)
The search is “Best CRM” which means the searcher is looking for the rankings of CRM’s and not the CRM product that is claiming to be the best.
Image Credit: Ad Espresso
6. Call-only campaigns:
Call only ads are ideal for advertisers trying to generate phone calls from their PPC campaigns. Some businesses with smaller budgets have challenges with landing pages. Visitors might abandon their shopping cart or download or anything if directed to a landing page at any stage of the conversion process with the risk that they may not complete the activity. Therefore, call-only campaigns enable users to call you directly by clicking on the ad. Furthermore, the finest part of these ads is that they appear only on those mobile devices that are capable of making calls. Hence, you will not squander money on unsuitable devices.
Don’t miss the opportunity on prospective customers by directing to landing pages which may never complete.
Image Credit: Wordstream
7.Ad Scheduling
Ad Scheduling is essential to control your budget, especially if funds are tight. Similar to geolocation settings, dayparting or ad scheduling help you maximize your business visibility at a certain time when your customers are online.
Image Credit: Wordstream
For instance, if your store is open between 8.am to 5.00 p.m, Monday to Friday, set your ads to display during the working hours to drive the traffic. However, if you sell online, you are always open then you can set your ads when the customer traffic is at peak to avoid any negative ROI.
Ad scheduling in collaboration with geolocation, you can exercise strong control over where and when your ads are to be shown to the users while being careful not to hamper your efforts with excess control.
Final Words
It is not the budget that determines the success of your PPC campaigns but strategy. Google Ad words have many features to offer and you can gain impressive results on a tight budget.
It is sensible to start small and expand your reach with a limited budget once you comprehend which strategy works best for you. Spend time in your PPC account to identify the problematic areas and correct them. This will save you from any financial damage and give insight on the outcome of your strategy.
Relevant keywords, well-designed PPC strategy, and a good understanding of your target audience can aid the potential of your campaign even with a tight budget.
BackLite Media Launches Measurement Platform Utilising ‘Big Data’ in the UAE.
BackLite Media, a specialist out-of-home (OOH) outdoor advertising company has partnered with IQ Data to launch BackLite Intelligence, the MENA region’s highly innovative OOH advertising platform to utilize ‘‘big data’ on a local scale.
The finest technology, deployed across BackLite’s whole OOH network, will add exemplary value to advertisers across Dubai and Abu Dhabi with an avant-garde audience measurement data, centered around behavioral data linked to the millions of people who see BackLite’s signs daily.
With the new system ‘BackLite Intelligence’, advertisers will get an advantage to understand who is viewing their content clearly, giving them the insight to find better ways to target the right demographics. It will help in measuring people whereabouts and show the advertisers and brands the right consumer profile to target for their future campaigns.
BackLite Intelligence will leverage over 1.2 billion mobile phone location signals per month within UAE, and map them across their outdoor network, to give advertisers tailored, detailed and inclusive data relating to each campaign. The data includes the viewership of each location by the day and night, key shopping behavior and in-depth demographic information.
Aligned with the smart city vision of the UAE’s leadership, the new technology adopted by BackLite Intelligence will rightly integrate with the outdoor advertising which at present BackLite Media is installing at Sheikh Zayed Road, creating a smooth, fulfilling and enriched advertising experience for all.
The privacy of the audience is safe, while the new system is useful to the advertisers. No personal information like emails or contact number is passed to BackLite Intelligence or its partners. The information collected is GDPR compliant and data collected via a software development kit (SDK) which collects location signals that are installed across many apps.
Bill Fordyce, CEO of BackLite Media, said,
“As the premier OOH media company in the UAE, we are committed to improving accountability and transparency and addressing long-held concerns on audience measurement. The launch of BackLite Intelligence with our partner IQ Data represents a significant milestone for the advertising industry in the region and underscores our commitment to providing the best-in-class technology and solutions to drive the greatest value for our advertisers. By linking this technology with our new digital signs on Sheikh Zayed Road, due to be installed ahead of Expo 2020, we believe the solutions provided by BackLite Intelligence will be a game-changer for our clients, enabling them to gather deeper insights that provide increased clarity for sales and marketing strategies and hard data to fuel better business decision-making.”
Dimitri Metaxas, Co-Founder & CEO of IQ data, said,
“Our partnership with BackLite marks the MENA region’s first-ever Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising measurement platform to utilize Big Data at scale. To ensure its ongoing success, we’ve leveraged over 1.2 billion mobile location signals generated per month within the UAE and mapped them across the entire BackLite OOH network in order to bring new levels of audience measurement and transparency into their products offering. We are excited to be working with an industry leader in BackLite who not only share our enthusiasm for innovation but also a commitment to improve OOH accountability to regional advertisers.”
Google Turning off Third-Party cookies From Chrome
The digital giant is confident to sustain the ad-supported world while turning the cookies archaic.
The company today announced its plans to phase out third parties cookies within two years from its popular Chrome browser. The move comes as digital advertising is seeing drastic changes in how ads are bought and sold. Other popular browsers like Apple’s Safari with 56% market share already have implemented similar measures to safeguard users’ details. This move doesn’t come as a surprise since Google’s announcement around privacy in Chrome, including ‘Privacy Sandbox’.
StatCounter data states that Google Chrome has a 69 percent market share on desktop and 40 percent on mobile. This aggressive timeline put the company on a track that will surely affect all facets of the ad industry.
Justin Schuh, Google’s director for Chrome engineering said, “This is our strategy to re-architect the standards of the web, to make it privacy-preserving by default.” He further adds users are demanding privacy and the web ecosystem needs to evolve with greater demands. Google’s team is also working on preventing fingerprinting among other things.
Cookies were once the base of targeting users through programmatic advertising, but with the use of ad blockers and users clearing the cookies hindered the effectiveness. The ad industry then found a new way ‘fingerprinting’. This involved using the information of the user’s browser coupled with the user’s unique browser settings to build a unique profile of the user without using cookies. The unique settings are the plug-ins, IP address, fonts, and extensions installed by the users. This information is used to create a profile of the user, which is used to target them with ads through programmatic without using cookies.
Impact on the publishers and ad industry
Starting this February, Google will implement techniques to limit cross-site tracking by imposing its new SameSite rules and third party cookies can only be accessed with an HTTPS connection. In the next two years, Google plans to completely remove third party cookies from Chrome which marks a significant change for the advertising industry and publishers who highly depend on marketers to track users across the web. Google’s answer to this is “privacy sandbox” which would allow advertisers to show relevant ads and allows users to share as little information about themselves and their browsing history as possible.
Google in its blog says it is confident that Privacy Sandbox “can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete.” however, industry players suggest this will only enhance Google’s strong plans.
At present, Chrome’s competitors are taking radical steps to block third-party cookies. It remains to be seen how this will turn out in the future as a lot of ideas are still in pipeline. It will be interesting to how the industry will take the change given Google’s own role in advertising. Google needs to get this right to keep the web ecosystem healthy.
These two global giants leverage Coronavirus to boost sales- A notable case study in rapid response marketing.
The ongoing spread of new coronavirus strain ( 2019nCoV) has been declared a global emergency by WHO and some companies whose products can help to prevent the spread are reaching out to consumers using rapid response marketing.
The outbreak of a new coronavirus from China is making headlines worldwide. Procter & Gamble’s Clorox, which makes cleaning products made a landing page discussing 2019-nCoV on its site. The page provides basic information about the disease and links Clorox products which can be used to disinfect the surfaces on which the virus might live, as their products demonstrate effectiveness against similar viruses. Clorox page claims ” per the EPA Emerging Pathogen Policy, these products can be used against 2019-nCoV when used as directed.”
Similarly, competitor Reckitt Benckiser owned Lysol also has a page on the site giving information about 2019-nCoV and linking its cleaning products used to disinfect the surfaces to prevent the spread of the virus.
SEO Effect:
Clorox or Lysol, none are linked to these pages from prominent locations on their site homepages or promoting on social media. This shows that clearly the page was designed keeping SEO in mind.
However, it is not possible to estimate the returns Clorox or Lysol will generate from these targeted pages but already are ranking high for searches related to ‘coronavirus’ or ‘disinfect coronavirus’.
Clorox and Lysol practices are worth considering for brands looking to use rapid-response marketing from event-driven opportunities.
Simple and Straight
Pages on 2019-nCoV are simple and straightforward with minimum efforts. This allowed the companies to publish pages quickly so they could get indexed and start appearing in the SERPS.
Take advantage of Primary Domain
Clorox and Lysol published their pages on the primary domain taking advantage of the domain Using existing sites is favorable initially instead of building microsites in rapid-response marketing.
High Authority Links
It is worth noting that both companies strategically are including high authority links such as the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Technically, this improves the utility of the page for visitors and makes it easier for them to have access to all important information from a trusted source where chances of misinformation are high.
Risks
Rapid Response marketing involves high risks. For example, Clorox and Lysol run a risk of providing inaccurate information or accused of taking advantage of the intense and serious situations to sell their products which might explain why they are not active on social media to address coronavirus.
Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration(FDA) took over the hand Sanitizer company Purell regarding the health claims it made on its site and social media platforms. FDA does not allow hand sanitizer brands to make claims of prevention of disease and believed Purell was doing the same. Therefore, the parent company, GOJO had to take immediate action.
All health companies when selling products runs certain risks but companies using rapid-response marketing need to identify the associated risk beforehand and work them out.
