Equal Parts Predictable and Sad

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In This Issue:

🔍 Google apologizes for confusion around migration of UA configurations

📢 X collaborates with Google for programmatic ad sales

🛠️ Google AdSense introduces real-time site verification and meta tag method

🎥 YouTube unveils insights on user-generated clips from uploads

 🤖 Pebble (formerly T2) launches AI-generated post suggestions

Google’s GA4 Auto-Configure is Confusing Some Account Managers

A recent update to Google Ads has thrown a number of advertisers for a bit of a loop — and today, the company apologized for the confusion.

What happened was that the platform started migrating configurations from the old Universal Analytics system to the new Google Analytics 4 system.

This had been communicated — Google says it sent emails out to account managers — but it seems that the move still surprised a lot of people.

If you don’t want Google to auto-configure your GA4 property, here’s how to set that up:

1. Click on ‘Admin’ in your account.

2. Select your Universal Analytics property.

3. In the “Property” column, click GA4 Setup Assistant.

4. Click on “Disconnect” next to your “Connected property”.

5. Go to your GA4 property and delete it.

Also, if you’re curious to know if this happened in your account, you can go to the “Change History” section. If you were affected, you’ll see “System (Migration)” in the “Changed by” column.

Remember that this is a pretty simple move-over, so if you have more specific setups or more complicated workflows, it’s definitely worth double-checking your GA4 to make sure things are working the way you want.

X Taps Google for Programmatic Ads

You will soon be able to buy programmatic ads on X through Google’s Ad Manager — making it simpler for media buyers to consolidate their work.

Google confirmed the deal with media earlier today with a more cautious sounding statement than they usually do.

Normally, announcements like this come with overly excited statements attributed to VPs about how thrilled they are to welcome so-and-so to their growing list of partners blah blah blah.

This time, it was the head of ads policy communications at Google who spoke to Marketing Brew saying:

Google’s obviously aware of X’s latest moves, and those of its owner, which have made some advertisers flee the platform. Elon Musk confirmed this past summer that ad revenue was down 50%.

This is part of a recent change from X’s previous Twitter-era practice of working directly with advertisers, and not using a third-party platform.

Earlier this year, X signed a deal with ad-tech platform InMobi.

X’s CEO last week announced she was bringing in some new blood to the management ranks — people she’d worked with before at NBC/Universal — hiring a new head of content, talent, and brand sales, a new global agency leader, and a new revenue operation lead.

Earlier today, Elon Musk said the company was planning a less expensive tier of its Premium program. So far, fewer than 1/3rd of 1% of X users have signed up for the paid blue checkmark.

AdSense Updates for Site Verification

Google AdSense has upgraded its site verification methods with a few changes aimed at making it easier to verify your site ownership and check your ads.txt status.

Here’s what’s new:

• When you add a new site in AdSense, Google will now verify your site ownership in real-time.

• They’ve added a new verification method, letting you use use a meta tag in your HTML instead of the AdSense code snippet.

• They’ve added a "last crawled" date and time to the Ads.txt section so you can see when AdSense last checked that file.

• They’ve also added a new Check for updates button, so you can ask AdSense to recheck your ads.txt file.

These updates were rolled out on Friday.

Meet Pebble: Another Twitter Competitor

T2 has a new name.

The web site sprung up in the weeks after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter — T2 meaning the second Twitter. It was started by a former Twitter product manager.

Today, it rebranded to Pebble.

And — in a move that’s equal parts predictable and sad – it now lets users ask generative AI to write posts from scratch for them. It’ll even brainstorm what topic to write about.

That’s different from the current social media AI, like LinkedIn’s post writer or Meta’s ad writer, in that those tools need you to at least give it a topic of your own thinking or some starter text to grab onto.

But no, in this case, bots can write posts without any prompting — and bots can also reply in one of three user-selectable tones: joking, supportive, or disagreement.

Users do have the option to review the suggested text and edit it before it goes out, of course, and Pebble’s CEO says most do, but it still seems like another disheartening step away from authenticity.

Pebble had been only open to people who had invitations from current users, but now anyone with an account on X can sign up.

Also, Google actually owns pebble.com so this site has chosen pebble.is as its domain.

The company recently closed $1.4 million in funding and has four employees. It plans to monetize through ads and subscription products.

From a marketing perspective, I’d put this one on your lowest priority list — Wired says the site only has about 15,000 registered users. For now, most brands looking for a home from X seem to have kicked the tires on Threads, and a few have protected their usernames on Mastodon or Bluesky. But there has been no clear winner in the race to replace Twitter.

YouTube

A small addition to YouTube analytics is rolling out this week — you’ll now be able to see how many clips have been made based on your videos — and, perhaps more importantly, how many views those clips have gotten.

This is, of course, an important addition given how popular the remixing trend made popular by TikTok is — and how much potential it has to amplify your brand message.

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