3 MINUTES BULLSHIT WITH GEORGE #37: Black Box around Google UAC with Benjamin Burgess

Episode #37 of 3 MINUTES BULLSHIT WITH GEORGE featured Benjamin Burgess, Senior Growth Manager at Life360. We discussed Black Box around Google UAC.

You can listen to the full episode here:

In this episode of 3 MINUTES BULLSHIT WITH GEORGE, George Natsvlishvili is joined by Benjamin Burgess, Senior Growth Manager at Life360. Life360 is a family location safety app.

Benjamin shares his experience as a Mobile Growth Expert regarding the Black Box during Google UAC usage.

Check out all the other episodes of 3 MINUTES BULLSHIT WITH GEORGE on our website or on Youtube channel.

Connect with Benjamin and Life360 here:

Timestamps:

00:00 Dance

00:15 Benjamin’s Introduction

00:45 Black Box around Google UAC

02:42 Bloopers

Transcript & Key takeaways from the episode:

The black box of Google Universal App Campaigns is the lack of transparency.
Some marketers find the campaigns convenient for updating creatives and acquiring installs with minimal effort. However, there's frustration as these campaigns remove control from marketers and rely heavily on Google's algorithms.
Attempts to utilize third-party in-app events are redirected towards Firebase integration by Google, emphasizing their dominance.
Another issue is the lack of communication between Google and Apple, leading to challenges in data accessibility and reliance on the campaigns. This communication gap makes it difficult to obtain valuable data for optimization purposes.
It's challenging to obtain and rely on data from both Google and Apple, with Google often suggesting spending more money to gather more data, which is frustrating.

George: The question is about the Black Box around the Google Universal App Campaigns.

Benjamin: Yeah, so this is has been a pain point. For some marketers, it's really nice. It's really nice to just basically like update your creatives, choose app campaigns and just like give it some money and hope it brings in some installs.

The BS around it is like it's just, yeah, it takes all the effort away from the marketers themselves. Like it takes our ability out of the equation, you know, there are things that are coming out that there they're looking to help us with. But in reality, we're just in this we're in this like limbo of like, well, here's my money Google go get me some installs.

So I've taken advantage and try to like to utilize in-app events and when I go get app events with like MMP, so third party in-app events, and I run them at Google's like “oh, that's great, but we want you to do via Firebase now. We really want you to do via Firebase. With Firebase would be much better”. And I get it, but it's just Google trying to get more Google involved with stuff.

The other thing that just drives me nuts, that's BS is Google's inability to talk with Apple. I have an App Tracking Transparency(ATT) prompt with my app, but we have a very high opt-in rate, but I get zero data back from Apple and it's just we can't do anything. So basically, we're just like investing into nothingness right now, hoping that we're getting something out of it I mean there's data you can trace and Google tries to say “We can make it work this way”, but it's just BS. The fact that they won't work together and talk together drives me nuts.

George: Got it. So the main black box is that they don't communicate to each other and it's impossible to get the data from them, yes?

Benjamin: Yeah, it's impossible to get the data, it's impossible to rely on it and it's also impossible like optimize and then Google just says “Well you need to spend more money so that we can get more data so we can understand it, you know, what's going on”. It's like, okay. Yeah...

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