Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Ashleigh.
1. Google moves the Partner program goalposts
At the end of last week Google announced changes to the requirements for becoming a Google Ads Partner, doubling the total spend requirement across all managed accounts to $20,000 in 90 days but also the certification and performance requirements.
Under the new requirements 50% of a company’s employees have to be certified from the Google Ads Skillshop and the performance requirements are now based upon Google’s optimisation score.
Obviously this has enraged SEMs with a lot of them taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations:
Yeah, we saw that too. If that's the case we're just gonna ignore those and lose our badge! Most of the automated suggestions are crap.
— Gil Gildner (@gilgildner) February 13, 2020
Partner Program is dead, has been for a while. Clients don't care because everyone has it and now they're just focusing on revenue generation and making Partners join the fun.
Recommendations tab is often terrible and just automated crap that doesn't consider the client.
— Brett Dixon (@BrettDixon) February 13, 2020
We have to agree, this is a revenue booster if ever we’ve seen one.
— Force Nine (@forceninemedia) February 13, 2020
In response to its critics, Google has made changes to the performance requirement this week:
From:
“Meet the performance requirement by using Google Ads effectively to set up and optimally run campaigns to maximize outcome. Access your ‘Recommendations’ tab to see the actions you can take to improve your performance. Note: We evaluate the optimization score without dismissed recommendations for the company performance requirement.”
To:
“Meet the performance requirement by using Google Ads effectively to set up and optimally run campaigns to maximize outcome. Partners are not required to adopt all recommendations or achieve a 100% optimization score for the new Google Partners badge requirements. The threshold for the new Google Partners badge requirement is 70%. We introduced optimization score to help customers understand if their campaigns are set to achieve high performance and to offer actionable recommendations for improvement. We’ve found that advertisers who increased their account-level optimization score by 10 points saw a 10% increase in conversions, on average.¹ Access your ‘Recommendations’ tab to see the actions you can take to improve your performance. Note: We evaluate the optimization score without dismissed recommendations for the company performance requirement.”
2. Caroline’s Law
Unless you have been hibernating this week, you will have heard the tragic news that Love Island and Xtra Factor presenter, Caroline Flack, took her own life and that one of the things being blamed is social media.
Following the news, there have been many tributes paid online from her celebrity friends and a petition started for ‘Caroline’s Law’ (aka Flack’s Law), which has already had 100,000s of signatures. This law would “make it a criminal offence, not dissimilar to Corporate Manslaughter, for the British Media to knowingly and relentlessly bully a person, whether they be in the public eye or not, up to the point that they take their own life.”
There has also been a lot of chatter about social media use, with people fighting for tighter regulations that would remove anonymity and force users up to provide ID and a photo before signing up. This would go further than what Will talked about in last week’s My Five regarding Ofcom and propose to “set out steps that should be taken to tackle cyberbullying”.
Needless to say loads of people have been speaking out about the news and the PM has said: “The industry must continue their efforts to go further. We expect them to have robust processes in place for removing content breaching their acceptable use policies.”
Also Labour MP Jo Stevens said this about click bait stories:
“Because these stories that are written online, every time someone clicks on a story to read about it, salacious gossip stories about celebrities and personalities, we are feeding that monster because it is creating revenue for the websites.”
Another message to come out of the tragedy is #BeKind.
3. Bring your £20 notes to life using Snapchat AR
This week saw the release of new £20 bank notes with a surprise hidden within. They feature a self-portrait, and famous painting by artist, JMW Turner.
But that’s not all as the Bank of England has collaborated with social media platform, Snapchat, to allow its users to see more within the note and bring it to life using their smartphone’s camera and augmented reality.
Simply open your Snapchat app, hover your camera over the Snapcode on the note, and given you have the correct Snapchat lens, which can be found online or using the app’s search function, the note will come to life.
4. Larry Tesler, the man who created the Ctrl C and Ctrl V commands, has died
Anyone who uses a computer on a regular basis will have used Ctrl X/C, Ctrl V to cut/copy and paste, and this week the man that invented the command passed away at the age of 74.
Lawrence (aka Larry) Tesler spent most of his career working as Computer Scientist at Xerox and they tweeted the following this week:
The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler. Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away Monday, so please join us in celebrating him. Photo credit: Yahoo CC-By-2.0 https://t.co/MXijSIMgoA pic.twitter.com/kXfLFuOlon
— Xerox (@Xerox) February 19, 2020
Tesler spent his career spreading his knowledge and in an interview with the BBC back in 2012 said:
“There’s almost a rite of passage – after you’ve made some money, you don’t just retire, you spend your time funding other companies.
“There’s a very strong element of excitement, of being able to share what you’ve learned with the next generation.”
And many more generations to come will continue to use the cut/copy and paste commands for many, many years to come.
5. #LoveYourPetDay
As there has been lots of sad news in my My Five this week, let’s end on a happy note and celebrate love your pet day.
Enjoy!
