Today in Digital Marketing - 166: A Glimmer of Digital Hope

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Digital advertising's post-COVID future looks better than expected. YouTube is helping creators drive merch sales. Google Ads is testing a tool that might save you a lot of headaches. And chances are you've fallen for at least one of these ad tech myths. It's Thursday, June 4th. Happy National Cheese Day. I'm McKenna Hadley-Burke from EngageQ Digital, filling in this week for Todd Maffin. And here's what you missed today

Starting point is 00:00:51 in digital marketing. 2019 was a great year for digital advertising in Europe. According to IAB Europe, digital advertising grew just over 12%, driven by outstream video, mobile, and social spend. But then came COVID. Despite concerns that COVID would take a serious chunk out of digital advertising, IAB Europe's chief economist, Dr. Daniel Knapp, predicts that digital will be doing better than most advertising media, with only a 5.5% decline, compared to an over 21%

Starting point is 00:01:27 decline in other media. Of course, these reports are Europe-specific, so we'll have to wait to find out what's in store for digital marketing elsewhere in the world. But it does provide some hope that the digital advertising space may come out the other side of COVID relatively unscathed. YouTube has added a couple features to support creator merchandise sales and provide them with more in-depth channel performance stats. YouTube has added an integrated channel performance chart in Creator Studio where creators can see their views, current watch times, subscriber count, and estimated revenue. Social Media Today describes it as, quote, sort of like a mini Google Analytics display within YouTube, making it easier to get a quick

Starting point is 00:02:11 overview of how your channel is performing, with helpful summary indicators on each tab to highlight trends, unquote. The other new feature YouTube is bringing to creators are live merch alerts. If someone purchases merch from the creator's integrated Teespring store during a live stream, YouTube will add an alert in the comments section with a link to the product so other viewers can check it out too. Social Media Today explains why this is a sensible move for the platform. Quote, given the increases in live stream monetization, it makes sense for YouTube to add in more options to help streamers generate more revenue. And it'll be interesting to see if this feature is extended potentially with more e-commerce links and options for creators in the future, unquote. If your YouTube account is not

Starting point is 00:02:55 yet eligible for monetization, you might want to start the process now. Apparently, it's prototype releasing season because Google Ads just launched their own test. According to Search Engine Journal, Google Ads has announced a beta for a tool that will help you find and diagnose Google Ads issues faster. The explanations tool would do a lot of the Google Ads troubleshooting for you. So you don't spend all that time digging around for the cause behind a decline in conversions, impressions, or click volume. According to Google Ads announcement, Explanations is currently only available for search campaigns using manual bidding or enhanced CPC. So you won't see Explanations for Search Plus, Display, Video, Shopping setups, dynamic search ads, or campaigns with auto bidding.

Starting point is 00:03:48 Inside Google Ads, explanations will highlight significant percentage changes in blue, so they're easy to spot, and when clicked on, you'll be given the option to view the explanations panel, where you can access a list of possible reasons for the fluctuation. While you can start testing out the tool in your account now, Google Ads does plan on continuing to expand explanations in the coming months. If you've fallen for an ad tech myth, you wouldn't be alone. Most digital marketers probably have. In a recent Forbes article, Dr. Augustine Fu lays out three common ad tech myths. First is the myth of the

Starting point is 00:04:25 long tail. Dr. Fu explains that although marketers may have believed they could sell ads by targeting people visiting sites in the long tail of digital media, in reality, quote, this allowed clever fraudsters to build out a massive long tail of fake sites, drive massive amounts of traffic using bots, and sell massive numbers of ad impressions to believing marketers, unquote. Next is the myth of behavior targeting. Dr. Fu argues while it's tempting to think marketers can discern who they're targeting through the sites they visit and the products they purchase, a lot of activity online doesn't say enough about the person to make your next targeted ad a likely sell. Plus, don't forget about bots. They love to skew data. Dr. Fu's

Starting point is 00:05:06 main point is, quote, most of the behavioral targeting data is derived, approximated, dirty, wrong, or outright faked, unquote. Finally, there's the myth of hyper-targeting. Dr. Fu says less is not more when it comes to targeting parameters. Quote, whenever you hear the words at-scale audiences found using more than five parameters run away as fast as possible. Quote, That's it for today. You can find more information and links to the articles we mentioned in our show notes. I'm McKenna Hadley-Burke. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 166: A Glimmer of Digital Hope

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