GenAI takes over Google Search 🔍,“digital focus groups” are a trap, customers' UGC distrust 🤨, major Whatagraph update and other marketing topics!

Welcome to the February issue of Summarized, a marketing newsletter by Whatagraph, where we share our latest articles, case studies, top news from the digital marketing world, and platform updates each month.

Google gen-AI powers 84% Search queries and disrupts brand traffic

Since Google Search started using the Search Generative Experience in May 2023, the tech giant’s AI-powered search engine has disrupted large swathes of brand’s and publishers’ search traffic, as ADWEEK reports. According to Travis Tallent, VP of SEO at Brainlabs for well-performing brands most of their traffic results from organic search results. The implementation of SGE impacts oncoming site traffic and has dire consequences for the performance of the business behind that site.

SGE uses two formats - collapse and opt-in. Currently, SGE is available as an opt-in for people in the US, Japan, and India only. Collapse appears 16% of the time, as a click-expandable snapshot of the AI-generated result. In comparison, opt-in appears 68% of the time, presented through a banner of results and a prompt for a more conversational experience. It tracks over 1000 keywords across nine industries such as healthcare, e-commerce, and B2B technology. Already, 84% of results on Google Search will be powered by the SGE.

BrightEdge research reveals that SGE often prominently displays tangentially connected results. For example, a “Nike” search suggests the Nike vs StockX lawsuit news at the very front. According to BrightEdge’s CEO, Jim Yu, SGE will push brands’ resellers to the top of results, making management of brand searches much less straightforward than previously taken for granted in the case of organic search.

In one of their research cases, a B2B SaaS brand with capitalization exceeding $10 billion, Brainlabs exposed 70% of the brand’s keywords with “informational” user content to the SGE and, as a result, expect the site will lose 20% to 36% of traffic from the rollout of SGE. Michael Robbins, senior manager of paid search at Exversus Media, doubts that Google will launch SGE globally without providing advertisers with a path to optimize paid ads for those generative experiences.

As SGE pulls the most impactful content from the sites and combines it with other sources, brands are diversifying their media spend beyond Google Search, across TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit.

Is your brand ready for SGE?

AI helps brands learn about real consumers, but “digital focus groups” may be a trap - beware!

A growing number of brands are creating AI-generated customers for research purposes. This process is called many things, among them “digital copycats” and “digital twins”, where, for example, ChatGPT questions gen-AI-created consumers about a variety of products. AI permits brands to embody all characteristics of specific consumer groups and start interrogating them. Those digital twins of consumers, sometimes fashioned as “digital focus groups”, are thought to be the next frontier for testing new products and personalizing advertising.

In a recent article, Brian Sheehan, professor of advertising at Syracuse University , alerts marketers to the dangers of misinterpreting the meaning of generative AI for advertising and marketing, especially usage of AI in the simulation of “consumer gatherings”. He perceives intelligent managers to be following the hype down deceiving rabbit holes. In his opinion, managers are led to believe that AI is capable of providing them with human-equal feedback. In this, they delude themselves that a fundamentally quantitative function – no matter how elegantly it crunches the data – will provide them with qualitative insight. Emotional insights that create strong brand positionings can only be gleaned from human consumers. The most expensive and messy form of qualitative research – consumer ethnographies – often uncovers the deepest human truths.

AI is capable of easily aggregating past qualitative results, like past focus groups or live social media. Those, however, are either old information, or highly skewed inputs (e.g. Tweets). Many chatbots, like Microsoft’s Tay, or ChatGPT, when engaged in real and casual conversation, quickly started replying with aggressive and racist phrases. Garbage-in and garbage-out, the mass-scraped internet social media input neither accurately represents average customers, nor can it provide any emotional depth.

A secondary threat of misconception, according to Sheehan, is the advertising and marketing race to the top of the AI heap while unaware of the end game. While sophisticated AI provides a definite advantage and AI-driven brands do outperform the brands who go without, once every advertiser has access to AI and knows how to use it, the advantage will lay only in their ability to interpret the results and put correct strategies to action.

“Consumers do not think how they feel, they do not say what they think and they do not do what they say” – David Ogilvy

Customer confidence in user-generated content is very low

“Fake reviews undermine confidence in online content, dissuading shoppers and negatively impacting the online sales of brands and retailers. Validating the authenticity of product reviews improves the customer experience, giving shoppers peace of mind as they make informed purchasing decisions.”

– Andy Chakravarty, VP of Research at IDC Retail Insights

A large part of the consumer audience is concerned about unreliable or fake UGC, according to a Bazaarvoice study. Bazaarvoice is a platform for full-funnel authentic UGC and social commerce solutions. Their survey covered more than 8000 global shoppers and more than 400 brands worldwide. 

The survey results indicate fake UGC weighs on consumers’ minds and that the shoppers expect the brands to take action so that they can feel confident while shopping online. Three-quarters of consumers are concerned about fake reviews, and two-thirds about fake images, videos, Q&A, and social media content. Two-thirds of consumers consider solving issues with fraudulent content online to be the responsibility of the brands’s website, and half point to the responsibility of the governmental bodies, while a third to 3rd-party experts. 

Almost all brands think they are handling the issues of content authenticity in e-commerce. 94% of brands and retailers rate the importance of those efforts as “high”, while the majority (76%) are confident in their current strategies and tools. However, the survey shows that it’s two-thirds to half of the customers do extra work to verify the legitimacy of online stores by using trusted shopping platforms, researching brands online, checking for secure site indicators (e.g. padlock symbols), reading customer reviews, and gathering their friends’ and family’s recommendations.

Third-party verification is indicated as a good path towards gaining consumer trust, as 70% responded they would trust such a solution, while only 47% would trust the site to verify UGC itself. Consumers would also be happy with a 3rd-party trust indicator (lock, checkmark, symbol) showing the UGC as externally verified. Three-quarters of brands are interested in incorporating such trust signals with their shoppers’ ratings, reviews, photos, and videos.

“This study underscores the absolute necessity of user-generated content (UGC) being authentic,” said Zarina Lam Stanford, CMO at Bazaarvoice . “Brands and retailers need to ensure that their customers trust the content they consume online. If shoppers can’t trust UGC, it loses all of its value, and companies will lose out on sales.”

Has your brand or have your customers already implemented such trust indicator measures?

What's happening at Whatagraph?

• If you're with us for some time, you're probably aware of our major January announcement about Whatagraph becoming a one-stop marketing data platform, allowing you to connect, organize, visualize and share all your data in one place. Here's a video where our CEO, Justas Malinauskas explains what drove the change and how it can make every marketer's life easier. Enjoy!
• On the 24th of January, we also held a webinar on the marketing data process, sharing how leading marketing agencies have increased client retention and growth by improving their marketing data management. In case you missed it, there is a recording available on our LinkedIn page.
• From other platform updates, you will now see a new button that enables tabs in your report-building environment to simplify and speed up navigation in longer reports or to create multi-page dashboards. The tabs work in the same way as in other popular software tools like Google Sheets. This update enables you to:- Create any amount of tabs.- Name them based on your case.- Move them to change the order.- Move widgets from one tab to another using three dots for widget actions.- The same structure will apply if you share a link, so your readers will be able to switch between tabs in the live report.

But that's not all! One of the biggest updates is coming to Whatagraph on February 20th🔥

On February 20th, we are adding new advanced features to organize your marketing data: unify, blend, aggregate, group, create new custom metrics and dimensions, and more.

Organizing and managing your data in Whatagraph will be easy and intuitive - without code or technical knowledge.

What is it for?

Whatagraph becomes very versatile. You can do so much more now with data coming from Marketing APIs.

The new "Organize" environment allows you to: 

• Group campaigns or countries together and aggregate totals. 
• Categorize landing pages instead of showing long lists of links. 
• Create custom cross-channel calculations available in all reports, for instance, the total cost per click across multiple channels. 
• Blend data from multiple channels into a new blended source that is instantly available for visualization.

And it’s only a couple of examples. You can explore more use cases here. 

What does it mean for you?

Getting to Insights faster, improved clients or stakeholders engagement, and reports and dashboards that are easier to read and analyze.

When can you try it?

• New features will be available for 30 days for all Whatagraph users starting February 20th. 
• After the trial period, pre-made metric and dimension templates in Organize will be available for all users.
• Custom data organization (new custom metrics and dimensions, data blends, custom calculations, etc.) outside of pre-made templates will be available on the new Advanced and Custom plans. 

We are excited to see how your marketing data workflow improves! Stay tuned for more updates and news on this soon.

That's all for this month! If you enjoyed this issue, please follow us on LinkedIn and stay subscribed to the Summarized to receive more updates in the future.

The Whatagraph Team