📰 Growth Daily - Monday, Mar 13

Monday's news, tips, & tools you need to know

Author

Nicole Tabak
March 13, 2023

😌 Google Ads Simplifies Audience Creation

📰 TL;DR - Google Ads introduced a new feature providing direct access to the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) audience builder. To use the new feature, users must link their Google Ads account to their Analytics property and follow the instructions to create a connection. The new feature will be available in the coming months and will allow users to create and apply GA4 audiences to Google Ads campaigns without leaving the Ads platform.

💡 Insight - We love simplicity over here and this feature will hugely simplify the audience building process in Google Ads. Not to mention having consistency across platforms will help pull better Analytics reports and may lead to more accurate, insightful findings. Work smarter, not harder.

😬 Users Distrust Discord’s New AI Features

📰 TL;DR - Discord recently pitched itself as “your place for AI with friends” with 3 machine learning-driven tools: an OpenAI-linked version of its mascot Clyde, an AI AutoMod, and AI-generated Conversation Summaries.

The new Clyde can answer questions and have extended conversations with you and your friends, start threads in servers, and recommend playlists. AutoMod assists human server moderators, and will soon be linked with OpenAI to look for rule-violating messages and flag them with moderators. Conversation Summaries sweeps servers and bundles messages into topics for users to quickly catch up on or join.

The user concerns are heavily rooted in privacy concerns that Discord is sneakily recording and saving conversations on video, voice, or in channels for the purpose of training its AI. Discord claims that while the tools are linked to Open AI, “OpenAI may not use Discord user data to train its general models.”

💡 Insight - I think we’re going to continue to see a lot of this distrust as AI tools are integrated deeper across social networks. But that doesn’t mean that companies should stop leaning into AI innovations, quite the contrary. AI tools are often scary because people don’t fully understand it or the security isn’t well-communicated. We’ll all benefit if we assume positive intent and lead from a place of education.

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🔍 TikTok Enters The Search Ads Market

📰 TL;DR - TikTok is preparing to launch its own search ads platform, allowing advertisers to bid on specific keywords and phrases related to their products or services. Testers in last year’s beta rollout confirmed that advertisers could gather the search terms responsible for conversions and leverage those high click-through search terms as headlines for their best-performing TikToks as an extra benefit.

💡 Insight - The specifics of the program are still a little fuzzy, but this rollout would put TikTok in deeper competition with Microsoft and Google. Studies suggest that almost 40% of young people searching for a lunch spot would to go TikTok or Instagram rather than Google Maps or Search. Which means that while Google and Microsoft still lead the pack, TikTok may have a competitive advantage for a specific demographic of buyer – mainly Gen Z and millennials.

📵 Could WhatsApp Be Banned In The U.K.?

📰 TL;DR - WhatsApp has refused to comply with requirements in the U.K.’s latest online safety bill that attempts to outlaw end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption does ensure security for users and prevents anyone but the recipients of a communication from being able to decrypt it. But WhatsApp itself can’t read messages sent over its own server, meaning they can’t comply with law enforcement requests to hand over messages or actively monitor communications from suspect users. If WhatsApp refuses to comply with further government regulation measures, they may be forced to withdraw out of the U.K. entirely.

💡 Insight - According to Meta’s Head of WhatsApp, “98% of WhatsApp users are outside the U.K.” and don’t want WhatsApp to lower the product’s security. Which, when you put it that way, feels like a fair reason for WhatsApp to stick their heels in the ground. But with WhatsApp being one of the most popular apps in Europe, it also seems messy for the U.K. to get left behind here. That said, if your brand is utilizing WhatsApp in any way – communities, outbound marketing, sales, etc. – keep an eye on this story and protect your work. Anything could happen.

🏀 6 Tips For Joining March Madness Conversations on Twitter

📰 TL;DR - Twitter released a blog post outlining their top 6 insights & tips for brands wanting to get involved in March Madness conversations and trends. (Psssst… for those of you non-U.S. sports lovers, March Madness is an annual college basketball tournament.) Here’s the list:

  1. Brackets are one of the biggest topics of conversation every year

  2. Monitor trending hashtags for fan responses & spikes in conversations

  3. March Madness brings all the casual fans to the yard (over half of #MarchMadness tweeters in 2022 didn’t tweet about college basketball during the regular season 😱)

  4. 80% of #MarchMadness tweets in 2022 happened during gameplay

  5. Evolve campaign language to reflect the keywords and jargon real fans are using

  6. There’s been a +44% YoY growth in tweets around sports betting with March Madness as the activity has become legalized in more states

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