Googles Update to Personalized advertising policies - new targeting restrictions

[Jeff Kershner]

Starting October 19th 2020 Google will updates its Personalized advertising policies to introduce new targeting restrictions. No longer will you/agencies be able to target audiences based on gender, age, parental status, marital status OR zip code.

How will this effect you dealers Paid Search Campaigns?

 

[ChrisR]

I suppose, if I stretch, I can understand the rationale, it will only work to eliminate the effectiveness of campaigns.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

I suppose, if I stretch, I can understand the rationale, it will only work to eliminate the effectiveness of campaigns.

And potentially cause you to spend more money.

 

[Ryan Everson]

Yeah, we've been watching this since they announced it 2 months ago but there still haven't been many details on how Google will implement it, especially when related to zip code targeting. Will they use a 15-mile minimum radius like Facebook?

See my initial thoughts below:

 

[jon.berna]

Since the policy came out on 8/18 we have investigated the roll out and technical details. We have worked around the clock the last 2 days and this morning are confident our solution will work. Details coming out soon.

*hint it involves some fancy math and is based on lat longs.

In the next 59 days, every ad account in auto has to be rebuilt from the ground up. As the vast majority of campaigns run are managed manually, each digital marketing provider is trying to figure out (or should be) on how they are going to start over from zero and not have massive drops in performance.

Why will performance go down?

• Distraction. Because so much time is going to be spent on rebuilding the targeting not on improvements this will create a chilling effect on all new campaigns
• CPC will likely go up. This is because the vast majority of advertisers will default to big dumb radius-based search. This means their targeting will be broader and less defined as previously setup. This creates more local competition, which in turn increase cost per click.
• Re-optimization. Each campaign will have to be closely monitored after the advertisers replace the zip targeting, since this is in effect doing replacement hip surgery on an 80-year-old patient, the post change optimization will have to be handled with precision.
• Manual management. Agencies changing over 100s of accounts are simply unprepared for this type of operational change event. If they aren’t using an orchestration layer with automation this will define nearly all of the work they do for the next 3-6 months.

Why did they do this? 2 reasons that we can see

• For one it’s great PR right before an election when data privacy is universally something everyone is concerned about. Google can leverage this change later on should legislation show up that threatens them.
• The other, well we see the byproduct of these changes increasing dealership’s cost per click as the ad targeting will be less precise and the local competition will go up as lazy advertisers place a big radius around your store and call it a day. This will happen quite a bit unfortunately.

So what’s next?

The only other disruptive event on this scale is the adoption of mobile, which occurred over nearly a decade versus 60 days. That created more pressure on website providers I would argue than advertisers. The time to ensure you have the right partner is right now.

 

[ChrisR]

And potentially cause you to spend more money.

Or, look at it like billboards, and fall away from that option.

 

[Matthew Davis]

I spent 7 years in the world of ad tech. The rationale - many companies would use those demographic targeting features to charge higher/lower rates, or offer different products based upon race, income, etc. to discriminate. There were reports every few months of new charges against companies clearly violating anti-discrimination law, thus the changes.

The grey area - as long you're not advertising for car loans, do you fall under these restrictions?

 

[jon.berna]

I spent 7 years in the world of ad tech. The rationale - many companies would use those demographic targeting features to charge higher/lower rates, or offer different products based upon race, income, etc. to discriminate. There were reports every few months of new charges against companies clearly violating anti-discrimination law, thus the changes.

The grey area - as long you're not advertising for car loans, do you fall under these restrictions?

Car dealerships are considered indirect lending sales orgs so yes, the ad copy itself is irrelevant in our analysis

 

[jon.berna]

We had a little fun with this one:

 

[Auto_NC]

I'm guessing if you really wanted to maintain some zip code targeting, you could setup your radii and then setup zip code exclusions.