Kristen Scott, senior director of analytics at digital agency Whereoware, believes basic websites can get away with Google's automated migration to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) being a time-consuming and costly process, but most publishers should be wary.

This may be one marketer's expert opinion, but if there is one marketer who believes this, typically there are more who do. It’s estimated that 28.1 million websites use Google Analytics -- but as of mid-July, only 11 million websites made the migration to GA4.

With Google requiring the shift by July 1, many sites need to make the last-minute move if they want to maintain the quality of their analytics. 

To hear SimpleTexting tell it, consumers are more open to texts than they are to emails from brands.  

Of those polled for a new study by the company, only 6.8% of shoppers reply to an email within 1-2 minutes, whereas 31.8% do so for texts. And 20.9% will respond to an email within 5-10 minutes, versus 45% for texts. 

Moreover, the study found that “77% of consumers reply back to a text within 10 minutes vs. only 28% who reply back to an email within 10 minutes.”

That comparison is not quite fair — emails fulfill a different marketing function, and sometimes cannot be replied to. 

Similarly, the study notes that 45.7% of consumers check their email 1-5 times per day or less, compared to 26.4% who look at their texts. And 25.1% look at emails 6-10 times a day, whereas 32.1% scan their texts.  

Again, this is an unfair slam against email. Texts are constantly pinging on most phones — many are personal. Email does not hit with the same urgency — nor should it.  

But it’s partly a generational thing — 44% of millennials and Gen Z check their text messages more than 10 times per day.  

People are engaged with the following mobile activities throughout the day: 

• Texting —78% 
• Social Media — 66% 
• News & Entertainment — 50.9% 
• Email — 50.4% 
• Music & Podcasts — 50.1%
• Watching Videos — 44.6%
• Playing Games — 37.9% 
• Calling — 37.1%
• Mobile Shopping — 26% 
• Other — 5% 

Notably, email comes in fourth on this list of activities.

Meanwhile, 70.7% say they have opted in to receive texts from a business in the past year. But 53% want the capability to text a business back.

On the business side, 86% of owners have texted their customers within the past year, up from 55% last year. And 67% have increased their SMS budgets this year.  

Also, 71.2% report that their opt-in rates have increased. (We wonder what their opt-out rates are.)  

But here’s the key thing to keep in mind: 81% who use SMS have integrated with other marketing channels like Mailchimp, HubSpot and Salesforce. What’s more, 91% of those see higher conversion rates from integrated campaigns, the study shows. 

In other words, the channels work better together. 

Business owners and marketers use text marketing for these tasks: 

• Customer satisfaction surveys/review requests — 57%
• Appointment/reservation reminders — 50% 
• Billing collections — 30.5% 
• Customer service/text-for-info — 37.3% 
• New offerings/announcements — 33.8% 
• Shipment/order notifications —29.8% 
• Internal employee communication — 27% 
• Special offers/promotions/sales alerts — 25.8% 
• Sweepstakes/contests — 12.5% 
• Other — 1.5%

Why did they start SMS marketing? The reasons are: 

• Higher engagement levels from customers — 60.5%
• Higher open & click-thru rates than other channels — 53.5% 
• Most efficient channels for customer service or text support — 52.3%
• Quick and easy channel for two-way interactions with customers — 43%
• Quicker feedback from prospective customers — 38.5%
• Younger customers prefer texting over other forms of communication — 28.5%
• Other—0.8%

SimpleTexting surveyed 1,400 consumers, business owners, and digital marketers.

Salesforce has unveiled new generative AI (GAI) capabilities for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud during World Tour London: AI Day.

The new tool, Sales GPT, will embed generative AI in the flow of work, auto-generating customer emails, call summaries and account research, the company says. 

Sales GPT is powered by Einstein GPT, including the Einstein GPT Trust Layer, to help firms meet their enterprise data security and compliance. 

Salesforce says it is bringing trusted generative AI to every application in the flow of work for Sales and Service, Marketing, Commerce, Slack, Tableau, Flow, and Apex.

“When it comes to sales, AI is the new UI,” says Ketan Karkhanis, executive vice president and general manager, Sales Cloud, Salesforce. “The confluence of generative AI, data, and CRM will help every sales leader unleash growth and elevate sales productivity,” 

The new features include:

• Sales Emails — Sales GPT will auto-generate personalized and data-informed emails for every customer interaction
  
• Call Summaries — Sales reps will be relieved of manual note-taking with automatically transcribed and summarized calls and follow-up actions 
• Sales Assistant — This will summarize every step of the sales cycle, while updating the CRM 
  
• Service GPT will auto-generate service replies, automatically summarize customer interactions
• Service Replies to auto-generate personalized responses
• Work Summaries — This tool will create wrap-up summaries of service cases and customer engagements based on case data and customer history.
• Knowledge Articles — These will be auto-generated and updated based on the latest data from support interactions
• Mobile Work Briefings will prepare field service teams for appointments by summarizing critical information they need 

These tools are expected to be generally available in 2023: 

Salesforce serves such clients as SmileDirectClub and AAA-The Auto Club Group. 

SmileDirectClub’s partnership with Salesforce and use of Einstein GPT has been “integral in our ability to drive efficiencies across the entire customer lifecycle, from lead acquisition to customer care,” says Nathan Dawson, senior director of global technology, SmileDirectClub 

Dawson adds: “Salesforce's generative AI capabilities have enabled us to provide more personalized customer interactions, streamline service workflows using AI-generated insights, and maintain a holistic, 360-degree view of every customer.”

“We're accelerating our digital transformation with Salesforce and AI Cloud as one of the partners that will help us implement AI across our entire business, including DevOps, support, sales and underwriting,” says Shohreh Abedi, executive vice president, chief operations technology officer, and member experience, AAA–The Auto Club Group.

It’s never too early to prepare for the holiday season, especially with so many changes occurring in supply chains, the economy, and technology. This month we surveyed 490 moms from across the US on their intended shopping behaviors. A few of their answers might surprise even the most seasoned marketing professional.

With 74% of moms surveyed concerned about the economy, 15% say they have already started shopping for the holidays. They are picking up items that they see on sale now and holding them until December. In fact, 85% of moms say they will be searching for deals this holiday season. This is a great year to bundle products, offer buy-one-get-one deals or exclusive styles. 

Thirty-one percent of moms will begin their holiday shopping in August, followed by 35% starting in September. Only 5% will wait until December to begin spending for the holiday season.

Ninety-four percent of Moms intend to shop from a mobile device, making it necessary for brands to have easy-to-use applications and mobile ecommerce. Two-thirds of all holiday shopping is predicted to be done online this season, according to the moms surveyed.

Reviews are the most overlooked marketing tactic for most brands. Moms use reviews in their decision-making process, with 71% admitting that they will read reviews prior to purchasing a product. While marketers should never pay for positive reviews, many forget to ask their best customers to leave a review. It only takes one poor review to make your ratings plummet, so it’s important to always have one tactic for encouraging happy customers to share their experiences.

Another overlooked marketing tactic is gift guides. Brands clamor to influencers to post about their products during holiday season, but they often orget to ask the same influencers to be included in their Gift Guides. Forty-six percent of Moms say they consult gift guides for ideas before shopping. Influencers often publish their Gift Guides in September and October and are always eagerly looking for products to showcase. Best of all, they promote their Gift Guides on their social, on Pinterest and they are often picked up by content aggregators online, giving you expanded reach for your products.

Finally, 40% of moms intend to purchase experiences over products. For marketer,  this means that some product benefits might have to be tweaked in order to capture moms’ dollars. For instance, a board game company might want to change their message from “hours of fun for the family” to “create a family game night that brings the whole family together.” The latter hits Mom’s desire to have her entire family together. 

Now is a great time to rethink your approach to holiday marketing.. A creative marketing plan for 2023 that starts in August rather than November will get you to your goals in December.

There are a lot of opinions out there when it comes to mobile marketing challenges and solutions. This week, Mobile Insider asked Todd Rose, senior vice president of business development and GM, identity and addressability at multinational mobile advertising tech company InMobi, to share some of his thoughts.

Mobile Insider: What’s the most pressing need for marketers using mobile today?

Rose: I think the most important problem to solve for now in mobile is the same as with marketing in general: how to measure advertising effectiveness.

To use mobile effectively, you need to clearly define your desired end results, then work backward to determine what targeting solutions can be used to achieve those. It should be all about measurement and attribution.  

MI:  Given your title, you must have some pretty strong opinions about addressability. Given that addressability is the key to targeting, and ultimately to performance, how can marketers sort through the multiple potential options for tackling this challenge as cookies are phased out?  

Rose: There isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all solution for marketers in this new world. There are going to be different solutions, requiring a portfolio approach. We should use one-to-one targeting where it's available, and cohort-based solutions and contextual solutions in other scenarios.

Brands and marketers are going to have to take a “test and learn” approach to see what works best to achieve their ROAS goals for different campaigns and scenarios.  

In the end, it’s less about the tech stacks and data stacks and more about use cases. You back those use cases into the business and technical requirements, and then build out the solutions for that.   

MI:  How do clean rooms fit into this picture?

Rose: Pundits often talk about clean rooms as part of the toolkit for addressing the impending addressability crisis, without necessarily articulating how and why.

Clean rooms are an incomplete solution. They’re great for allowing brands to match their first-party data with publisher and third-party data in a privacy-friendly way, and so enabling more widespread use of first-party data. In that regard, they are a solution for data privacy and security.  

But clean rooms need a common denominator on which to match two or more datasets. They need record identifiers. If you don't have a critical mass of consented user identifiers on which to match data because of OS- and legislative-driven measures, a clean room in and of itself won't solve addressability.  

Clean rooms can't magically create first-party data and user identifiers or enhance match rates for non-consented users. To do that, you need synthetic IDs built on probabilistic signals, or alternative identifiers tied to personal IDs, like hashed emails.

The former can be built on signals present in the ecosystem today, while the latter rely on publishers and advertisers alike modifying their user experience flows to orchestrate a fair exchange of value — whether access to content, rewards, or other incentives — for more access to user identity data. 

Mobile data broker Kochava is urging a federal judge to keep the Federal Trade Commission's new privacy complaint sealed from the public, arguing that it contains “misleading” and “false” allegations.

The FTC's amended complaint, filed earlier this month, “includes misleading allegations, that intentionally conflate separate and distinct services offered ... to make impossible conclusory assertions about them and to weave a false narrative that Kochava’s data and/or conduct is responsible for the disclosure of private information,” the company writes in papers filed Wednesday with U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho.

Kochava adds that the new complaint “includes known false allegations,” including that Kochava “currently tracks identifiable persons to 'sensitive locations.'”

Kochava denies doing so, and says it has “implemented significant technical safeguards” to prevent third parties from tracking identifiable people to sensitive locations.

The company also reiterates that it currently deploys “privacy block” that removes known health services locations from its marketplace.

Kochava rolled out that feature last August, shortly before the FTC filed suit.

The FTC previously argued that even if Kochava's “privacy block” limits some location disclosures, an injunction against the company would still be warranted.

“Kochava continues to assert that its conduct is not illegal and has made no assurances that it will stop its misconduct in the future,” the FTC said in papers filed last year.

Kochava says in its most recent filing that it plans to ask Winmill to sanction the FTC for filing the amended complaint, unless the agency withdraws the document.

An FTC spokesperson declined to comment.

The new filing marks the latest turn in the FTC's lawsuit against Kochava, brought last August. The FTC alleged in its initial complaint that Kochava sells the kind of precise geolocation data that could expose sensitive information, such as whether people visited doctors' offices or religious institutions. (Kochava had sued the FTC earlier that month, in an attempt to preempt the FTC's complaint; Kochava's suit was dismissed with prejudice in May.)

The FTC claimed Kochava's alleged sale of the information was unfair, arguing that disclosing location data could cause result in stigma, discrimination or other injuries to consumers. The agency also said sharing location data was such an extreme privacy violation that it should be considered harmful in itself.

Among other allegations, the FTC said Kochava sells “timestamped latitude and longitude coordinates showing the location of mobile devices,” as well as mobile advertising IDs -- unique, 32-character identifiers that persist, unless consumers proactively reset them.

The agency added that even though the mobile advertising identifiers are pseudonymous, they can reveal people's actual identities. For instance, the FTC wrote, the location of a smartphone at night could correspond to the user's street address.

Kochava countered in court filings that the data it sells isn't “personally identifiable.”

The company argued that a mobile advertising identifier, even when combined with geolocation coordinates, “does not readily permit an ordinary person to identify a particular individual.”

In May, U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill in Idaho threw out the claims, ruling that the FTC's allegations, even if proven true, wouldn't show that Kochava created a “significant risk” of harm to consumers.

Winmill said in his ruling that the FTC didn't allege that any consumers were harmed by Kochava, and that the alleged privacy violation wasn't in itself a “substantial injury.”

He also said any “private information” stemming from Kochava's data would come from unreliable inferences.

“Geolocation data showing that a device visited an oncology clinic twice in one week could reveal that the device user suffers from cancer,” he wrote. “Or it may instead reveal that the person has a friend or family member who suffers from cancer.”

Winmill also said that information that can be inferred from location data “is generally accessible through other, lawful means.”

“A third party may also discover a person’s home address by reviewing publicly accessible property records,” he wrote.

His ruling allowed the FTC to amend its complaint and bring it again.

The FTC did so earlier this month, but filed the new document under seal. One week later, the FTC asked Winmill to make it available to the public on the grounds that Kochava hadn't yet requested sealing any specific passages, and that most of the allegations concern information Kochava has already made public.

“For example,” the agency wrote, “Paragraph 51 excerpts from a document that Kochava designated 'proprietary' or 'highly confidential,' yet Kochava brags about its data identifying consumers based on ethnicity in its own online marketing material,” the FTC asserted. “Kochava cannot assert that information that is already public should remain under seal.”

Kochava is now opposing that motion.

“There is no public interest served by access to the irrelevant, misleading, and outright false allegations, made with knowledge of their untruth, in amended complaint,” Kochava argues. “To the contrary, allowing these assertions into the public record could very well result in the public believing something about Kochava that is not true, particularly since the allegations are made by the government which gives the information an unwarranted appearance of inherent credibility.”

John Davisson, director of litigation at the advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, expressed doubt that Kochava's attempt to prevent the public from learning of the FTC's allegations will succeed.

“Ordinarily if defendants object to characterizations in a complaint, they have the opportunity to rebut that in a motion to dismiss, or an answer,” he says.

“It would be very disappointing if the court granted this sealing motion, and I would be very surprised,” he tells MediaPost.

Google is disputing the accuracy of new research that indicates that Google has been violating its own standards for placing ads on third-party websites about 80% of the time.

The research in question, by brand analysis firm Adalytics, based on data from more than 1,100 brands and billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023, gained attention through a Wall Street Journal report this week.

In addition to displaying ads on YouTube, Google’s proprietary cost-per-view, choice-based TrueView platform serves video ads to millions of apps, and across the web to sites in the Google Video Partner (GVP) program. Advertisers buying the skippable, in-stream TrueView ad format are supposed to pay only "for actual views of their ads, rather than impressions," per Google's own description. Google’s policies state that TrueView ads must be skippable (after five seconds, a prompt should ask viewers if they want to skip the rest of the ad) and audible, and that video ad plays must be initiated by viewer action, not passive user scrolling.

But Adalytics' report asserts that "for years, significant quantities of TrueView skippable in-stream ads, purchased by many different brands and media agencies, appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps in which the consumer experience did not meet Google’s stated quality standards. For example, many TrueView in-stream ads were served muted and auto-playing as out-stream video or as obscured video players on independent sites. Often, there was little to no organic video media content between ads, the video units simply played ads only." 

One example cited by the Adalytics report: 90% of the budget for one Fortune 500 brand's in-stream, skippable TrueView campaign, costing tens of thousands of dollars, ended up going to GVP mobile apps and websites, and only 10% to YouTube channels.

Large TrueView campaigns can cost upwards of $75,000, according to the report. 

Running on "small, muted, out-stream, auto-playing or interstitial video ad units running on independent websites and mobile apps" may have cost media buyers "up to billions of digital ad dollars," Adalytics asserts. 

According to WSJ's coverage, Samsung, Disney+ and Johnson & Johnson, as well as government entities including the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Army and Medicare, are among the advertisers that have been affected.

“Google must fix this and fully refund clients for any fraud and impressions that failed to meet Google’s own policies,” Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at ad agency UM Worldwide, told WSJ. 

Some ad buyers have asked for refunds, according to statements provided to the Journal, although Google is said not to have issued any makegoods on challenged TrueView buys as yet. 

In response to the assertions, Google told WSJ that the research “makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn’t reflect how we keep advertisers safe,” and that it adheres to strict policies for ad placements on third-party sites, regularly removing ads from partner sites that violate their policies.

Google also said that it will take any appropriate actions once they have been given the opportunity to review the full report.

Note: This article has been updated. Following posting, Google sent press a link to a blog in which the company says it seeks to "set the record straight about the options available to advertisers and the investments we make in ensuring brands can reach high-quality audiences across this [GVP] partner network."

Among other points, Google asserts that the "overwhelming majority" of video ad campaigns (TrueView is not specifically mentioned) run on YouTube, but video advertisers "can also run ads on GVP, a separate network of third-party sites, to reach additional audiences, if it helps them meet their business objectives." Adding GVP sites can be effective in increasing a campaign's targeted reach, Google says.

Google also says that advertisers "can clearly see that their ads may run on third-party sites via GVP during the campaign setup," that they have the option to opt out at any time, and that they can also decide where their content may appear. 

In addition, Google asserts that 90% of ad inventory across the GVP network is viewable, and that in addition to enforcing strict policies for GVP publisher sites through internal practices, Google partners with independent third-party verification companies including DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Moat.