Google Ads
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Google tightens UK policy on financial ads after watchdog pressure over scams
The U.K.’s more expansive, post-Brexit role in digital regulation continues to be felt today via a policy change by Google, which has announced that it will, in the near future, only run ads for financial products and services when the advertiser in question has been verified by the financial watchdog, the FCA.
The Google Ads Financial Products and Services policy will be updated from August 30, per Google, which specifies that it will start enforcing the new policy from September 6 — meaning that purveyors of online financial scams who’ve been relying on its ad network to net their next victim still have more than two months to harvest unsuspecting clicks before the party is over (well, in the U.K., anyway).
Google’s decision to allow only regulator-authorized financial entities to run ads for financial products and services follows warnings from the Financial Conduct Authority that it may take legal action if Google continued to accept unscreened financial ads, as the Guardian reported earlier.
The FCA told a parliamentary committee this month that it’s able to contemplate taking such action as a result of no longer being bound by European Union rules on financial adverts, which do not extend to online platforms, per the newspaper’s report.
Until gaining the power to go after Google itself, the FCA appears to have been trying to combat the scourge of online financial fraud by paying Google large amounts of U.K. taxpayer money to fight scams with anti-scam warnings.
According to the Register, the FCA paid Google more than £600,000 (~$830,000) in 2020 and 2021 to run “anti-scam” ads — with the regulator essentially engaged in a bidding war with scammers to pour enough money into Google’s coffers so that regulator warnings about financial scams might appear higher than the scams themselves.
The full-facepalm situation was presumably highly lucrative for Google. But the threat of legal action appears to have triggered a policy rethink.
Writing in its blog post, Ronan Harris, a VP and MD for Google UK and Ireland, said: “Financial services advertisers will be required to demonstrate that they are authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority or qualify for one of the limited exemptions described in the UK Financial Services verification page.”
“This new update builds on significant work in partnership with the FCA over the last 18 months to help tackle this issue,” he added. “Today’s announcement reflects significant progress in delivering a safer experience for users, publishers and advertisers. While we understand that this policy update will impact a range of advertisers in the financial services space, our utmost priority is to keep users safe on our platforms — particularly in an area so disproportionately targeted by fraudsters.”
The company’s blog also claims that it has pledged $5 million in advertising credits to support financial fraud public awareness campaigns in the U.K. So not $5 million in actual money then.
Per the Register, Google did offer to refund the FCA’s anti-scam ad spend — but, again, with advertising credits.
The U.K. parliament’s Treasury Committee was keen to know whether the tech giant would be refunding the spend in cash. But the FCA’s director of enforcement and market insight, Mark Steward, was unable to confirm what it would do, according to the Register’s report of the committee hearing.
We’ve reached out to the FCA for comment on Google’s policy change, and with questions about the refund situation, and will update this report with any response.
In recent years the financial watchdog has also been concerned about financial scam ads running on social media platforms.
Back in 2018, legal action by a well-known U.K. consumer advice personality, Martin Lewis — who filed a defamation suit against Facebook — led the social media giant to add a “report scam ad” button in the market as of July 2019.
However research by consumer group, Which?, earlier this year, suggested that neither Facebook nor Google had entirely purged financial scam ads — even when they’d been reported.
Per the BBC, Which?’s survey found that Google had failed to remove around a third (34%) of the scam adverts reported to it versus Facebook failing to remove well over a fifth (26%).
It’s almost like the incentives for online ad giants to act against lucrative online scam ads simply aren’t pressing enough.
More recently, Lewis has been pushing for scam ads to be included in the scope of the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill.
The sweeping piece of digital regulation aims to tackle a plethora of so-called “online harms” by focusing on regulating user generated content. However, Lewis makes the point that a scammer merely needs to pay an ad platform to promote their fraudulent content for it to escape the scope of the planned rules, telling the “Good Morning Britain” TV program today that the situation is “ludicrous” and “needs to change.”
It’s certainly a confusing carve-out, as we reported at the time the bill was presented. Nor is it the only confusing component of the planned legislation. However on the financial fraud point the government may believe the FCA has the necessary powers to tackle the problem.
We’ve contacted the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport for comment.
Update: A government spokesperson said:
We have brought user-generated fraud into the scope of our new online laws to increase people’s protection from the devastating impact of scams. The move is just one part of our plan to tackle fraud in all its forms. We continue to pursue fraudsters and close down the vulnerabilities they exploit, are helping people spot and report scams, and we will shortly be considering whether tougher regulation on online advertising is also needed.
The government also noted that the Home Office is developing a Fraud Action Plan, which is slated to be published after the 2021 spending review; and pointed to the Online Advertising Programme that it said will consider the extent to which the current regulatory regime is equipped to tackle the challenges posed by the rapid technological developments seen in online advertising — including via a consultation and review of online advertising it plans to launch later this year.
Powered by WPeMatico
What startup names are most effective?
Adam Zelcer founded the advertising company Adboy.com.
Entrepreneurs take a long journey when naming their brainchild, comparable to a parent naming their own flesh and blood.
There are many reasons behind naming – one untalked-of and probably the most important. This is, how to choose a name that gets you more business.
Technology changes how we do business. So, when developing a business name, putting some thought into how people are going to find you and what you want them to do after they find you could go a long way.
Ignoring this could do just the opposite and result in being harder to find, getting less return from your advertising and having your competitors capitalize off your brand.
Businesses have been using things like alphabetical order, call to action, keywords and more to shape business names for optimized discovery, recall and responsiveness since the phone book.
When looking for a business, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these two business name optimizations frequently used in the past for discovery:
1. Optimizing for discovery in phone books
Pre-internet, a listing in the phone book was key to getting your business discovered – but how did businesses get to the top of the list in their category? Piece of cake. Free listings in the white pages were categorized by business type and ordered alphabetically. Many companies ended their name with a describing word of their category and started it with something like “AAA” “AA”, “AA1” and “A AAA” to be one of the first listings in their category. You will still find thousands of these business names in different locations by typing “AAA” into yellowpages.com.
2. And a similar strategy was used for search-engine discovery
Prior to 2012, search engine algorithms gave weight in their rankings to sites that included keywords in their domain, otherwise known as exact-match domains. So, Google was more likely to rank “accountantsmelbourne-dot-com” higher than “abc-partners-dot-com” if a user searched for “Accountants Melbourne” because the keywords matched the search with similar words in its domain.
Over time, domain names and business names alike grew longer. Many were purposefully packed with every major keyword applicable to their niche.
Powered by WPeMatico
How to see another company’s growth tactics and try them yourself
Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com.
More posts by this contributor
Every company’s online acquisition strategy is out in the open. If you know where to look.
This post shows you exactly where to look, and how to reverse engineer their growth tactics.
Why is this important? Competitive analysis de-risks your own growth experiments: You find the best growth ideas to adopt and the worst ones to avoid.
First, a warning: Your goal is not to repurpose another company’s hard work. That makes you a thief. Your goal is to identify other companies who face the same growth challenges as you, then to study their approaches for solutions to draw from.
As I walk through uncovering a competitor’s tactics, keep in mind which competitors are worth looking at: For instance, you should rarely over-analyze early-stage companies. They’re unlikely to be methodical at growth.
Meaning, if you blindly copy their site and their ads, it’s possible you’ll be copying tactics that are not actually responsible for their growth. Their success may instead be from network effects or other hidden factors.
Instead, it’s safest to get inspiration from companies who’ve sustained high growth rates for a long time, and who face the same growth challenges as you. They’re likely to have sophisticated growth operations worth studying deeply. Examples include:
- Airbnb
- Amazon
- Uber
If these aren’t your direct competitors, don’t worry. You don’t need to audit a direct competitor’s tactics to get incredibly valuable insights.
You can look past direct competitors.
You’ll gain useful insights from auditing the user acquisition funnel of any company who has a similar audience and business model.
Examples of audiences:
- Wealthy consumers
- Enterprise businesses
- Middle-class adults who use Chrome
- Dog owners
- And so on
Audiences matter because their behaviors and needs differ wildly. Each requires its own growth strategy. You want to audit a company whose audiences is similar to yours.
You also want to ensure the company shares your business model. Examples include:
- A high-touch sales process with multiple phone calls
- A consumer ecommerce site with easy checkout
- A self-serve SaaS signup with a freemium plan
- A pay-to-play mobile game
- And so on
Each model may necessitate different ads, landing pages, automated emails, and sales collateral.
The process
Never implement another company’s tactics blindly.
There’s an effective process for growth analysis, and it looks like this:
- Source potential growth ideas.
- Prioritize them.
- A/B test them.
- Measure if an A/B variant significantly outperformed its baseline and whether the cost of implementing the winner would be worthwhile.
- Only then should you implement it.
An example
Here’s a brief example before we dive into tactics.
Let’s pretend we’re a SaaS company offering consumer banking tools, and that we’re struggling to get users to onboard our app. Our hypothesis is that visitors are bouncing because they don’t trust us with their sensitive information.
Our first step is to define both our audience and our business model:
- Audience: Tech-savvy, adult consumers.
Business model: SaaS freemium funnel.
Our next step is to look for companies who share those two aspects. (We can find them on Crunchbase.)
Once we have a few in hand, we look for how they handle customers’ sensitive information throughout their funnel. Specifically, we audit their:
- Ads
- Content marketing / SEO
- Landing pages
- A/B tests
- Signup flow
- Automated (“drip”) emails
It’s time to learn how we audit all that. I’ll share how our marketer training program teaches marketers to do this on the job.
Tactic #1: How to see a company’s A/B tests
Powered by WPeMatico