Today in Digital Marketing - 181: Google Shuts Down Two Digital Marketing Services

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Instagram gets closer to building a TikTok clone in its main mobile app. YouTube makes creating videos a bit easier. Facebook will gladly host your paid online course for, you know, a 30% cut. And five Google things today, including the closure of two services that digital marketers use. It's Thursday, June 25th. Happy Statehood Day, Croatia and Slovenia. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Instagram is bringing its Reels app to more countries, France and Germany to be precise.

Starting point is 00:00:35 What is Reels, you ask? Well, it lets you make 15-second video clips with music, has some editing tools, and then you can share those clips. Sound familiar? Yeah, it's basically a TikTok clone. Until now, they've only been testing it in Brazil. What I think is interesting is news that they're planning to integrate those clips into the main Instagram app. At least that's what they're testing now, similar to how they took Snapchat's idea and integrated those short videos into Instagram Stories. This new version apparently

Starting point is 00:01:04 lets users see these reels inside the main Instagram app by using a button at the bottom. They are now showing up in the Explore tab as well. All that to say, if you are not producing vertical videos for your brand's marketing efforts, you may soon be on the wrong side of marketing history. TikTok yesterday launched a new global platform for marketers called TikTok for Business and plans to be, I suppose, sort of like Facebook's business manager, a single dashboard where all your accounts and assets live. They also showed off a new ad format based on augmented reality, something they call Brand Scan. This lets you create AR-based ads for a richer, immersive experience.

Starting point is 00:01:48 And they're also testing Creator Marketplace still. That launched in a kind of closed beta last year. It's basically an influencer marketing platform that will help connect brands with popular TikTokers. Of course, one can only assume they'll take a cut of whatever deal you ink with your influencer of choice. Facebook has started rolling out paid online events. These are webinars and presentations and classes where you can charge attendees money to view it, and that payment takes place directly within Facebook's site. We've known since late April that they've been working on it, so it's

Starting point is 00:02:21 nice to see it out in the wild so soon. You will need to do some busy work to get it all working, like telling it to your business's bank account information so they can send you the payment revenue. Well, not all the revenue. You will get 70% of it. The rest goes to Facebook, if someone bought that that way, or to Apple or Google if someone bought it through mobile devices. And if you are in a region that takes taxes on online broadcast, you will pay taxes on top of that before that 30% cut. But still, if you do performances or

Starting point is 00:02:50 paid training, it might be a good option to look into. Vice Media Group is asking brands and agencies to stop blocking ads on their stories about the Black Lives Matter movement. As you probably know, when you run digital ads on other sites, you can provide the ad platform with a block list, and your ads won't show up when words in that list are present on the page. And it works well if you want to stay away from porn or smoking or drug use. But Vice and other publishers are noticing that new keywords are popping up lately, like George Floyd, protest, Minneapolis, and even the phrase black people.

Starting point is 00:03:29 This isn't the first time Vice has called out digital marketers for this practice. Last year, they asked advertisers to rethink their brand safety practices after discovering words like Muslim, transgender, refugee, and interracial had been added to block lists. YouTube is testing a new way for creators to record multiple clips directly in the YouTube mobile app and upload them as one video. If you're in this experiment, you'll see an option to create a video in the mobile upload flow, tap or hold the record button to record your first clip, then tap again or release the button to stop recording that clip. Repeat these steps until

Starting point is 00:04:09 you are done capturing footage up to a maximum length of 15 seconds. If you'd like to upload a longer video, you'll still be able to do that by uploading from your phone gallery instead of recording through the app. They are starting these experiments on mobile, both Android and iOS, with a small group of people while they gather feedback. Still ahead, Google shuts down not one, We'll see you next time. a lifetime team account to Crello. Did you win? Find out when Today in Digital Marketing continues. This episode is sponsored by Swanson Health. They've been in business for more than 50 years now. From quality vitamins to cruelty-free beauty items to eco-friendly home products, Swanson Health can help you keep healthy, all backed by strict quality standards that provide Okay. And listeners of this podcast can get 20% off any order using the code TODAY20 at checkout.

Starting point is 00:05:19 That's on swanson.com and use TODAY20 at checkout. swanson.com and use TODAY20 at checkout. swanson.com Okay, five things about Google today. They are shutting down CallJoy. CallJoy was an automated phone system for small businesses that answered calls, filtered sales calls, you know, spam calls basically, and provided basic business information like your hours. It cost $39 a month. One of the really nice things about it, though, other than the call analytics,

Starting point is 00:05:48 was it offered call transcripts, too. And last November, it even got a big upgrade aimed at attracting larger-sized companies. But now it's closing. Quoting searchengineland.com, it's possible that Google got some interesting and useful insights from CallJoy and that it served its intended purpose. But that's less likely than the probability that there simply wasn't enough adoption or revenue for Google to continue justifying the service. Based on this experience, Google could conclude that SaaS products are too difficult to sell to small and medium-sized

Starting point is 00:06:20 businesses. It might become reluctant to roll out such offerings in the future, although it has had great success with G Suite, unquote. Calljoy will close in under a month on July 22nd. It only launched a little over a year ago. And speaking of marketing tools, they're closing. They announced today they will be discontinuing the Google Partners Acceleration Program at the end of this month. This was a rewards-based program, so if you have any reward points, you should spend them now before those points expire on August 25th. But Google partners like agencies and large brands fear not. They say they will be inviting you to join something called Google Partners Rewards in the coming months. Google says it'll give you,

Starting point is 00:07:03 quote, new insights, a way to grow your business and upskill your team, unquote. Apparently, each quarter you are going to get a list of goals to complete. And if you do them, you get points kind of like the old system. And quoting Google again, your hard work will also be rewarded with a range of exciting new prizes, along with some of your old favorites from the Google Partners store, unquote. So like, who knows? Like, honest to God, Google, who knows? Maybe this is more of a rebranding. Like, it's not clear to me why they're closing it and expiring points if they're just going

Starting point is 00:07:38 to open up a new program where you earn points for the same kind of thing. Then again, this kind of seemingly random sunsetting is one of the things that Google is known for. They are expanding business messages in Maps and Search. If you're not aware, Google has a built-in messaging system in its Google My Business platform. This lets people find your business on Maps or in Search, click the message button, and send one to your business. And where do those messages go, you might be asking? To the Google My Business mobile app, which you have installed, of course, right? Right?

Starting point is 00:08:14 The change seems to be more of a rollout of additional features like smart replies, unique welcome messages, and taking a page from Facebook's book that looks like they will soon let you put the Google My Business message button on your brand's website. If you fail to reply to a message within 24 hours, Google says it will just disable that message button on your profile. There is an API for this, so you could use a third-party tool as well. Amplify.ai is one of those that works with this messaging product. I don't think the main social media platforms support GMB messaging yet, but if this becomes a thing, they probably all will soon.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Four. A small item, but an important one for some brands. They have added four new fields that you can apply to your Google My Business profile. They are online care, online appointment, online estimates, or online classes. These show up as a little highlighted box if you provide services that fall into that category. I think they're still testing this a little, to be honest,

Starting point is 00:09:13 because when I turned on online appointments for our business's profile and it asked for a URL where online appointments happen, that's fine for us. We have a consistent URL with our platform. But if you do online appointments with Zooms or Google Meets where the URL changes all the time, it might be a little tricky. Anyway, in the end, it didn't seem to matter because even when I did put that URL into the field, Google didn't seem to display it anywhere.

Starting point is 00:09:35 So maybe a couple of bugs still to be worked out there. They have updated a bunch of tools on their ads platform and they are Test My Site, which is an updated version of the dashboard that gives you speed and performance recommendations, product feeds in app campaigns, and deferred deep linking. The latter will open a specific product page in your brand's mobile app when someone taps a button or a link elsewhere. The feeds part will also let you automatically present your most popular items as ads throughout Google's network.

Starting point is 00:10:06 Also, the expansion of their deep linking. So this was originally only available, this deep linking, on the main placements. Now deep linking works from YouTube, Hotel, Gmail, and Discovery campaigns. And a new report that will show where consumers are landing and converting from ad campaigns. All nice changes to be sure. And big congratulations to Kyle Petzinger, who won the contest for a lifetime access to Crello.com. Favorite thing about messaging Kyle today was looking at his name on Twitter,

Starting point is 00:10:38 which was Kyle in these uncertain times, Petzinger. I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Congratulations, Kyle. Special thanks to Swanson Vitamins. Try them today with 20% off by using the code TODAY20 at swanson.com. The ad that follows, even though it's written in the first person,

Starting point is 00:10:55 is not about me, but from another individual, just so that's clear. Theme music by Mark Blevis, ad sales by Podcorn. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. What goes perfectly with incredible digital marketing? An energetic, data-driven, people-focused customer service leader.

Starting point is 00:11:14 I'm a seasoned and excited customer service leader looking for my next dream gig. I'm based in Northern California and willing to travel anywhere in the U.S. And hasn't this pandemic taught us that where we are might be less important than ever? If your company is searching for a customer service leader, or if you'd just like to chat about the fun world of customer service and customer experience with someone that is interested in digital marketing, visit customerservice.fun and send a message.

Today in Digital Marketing - 181: Google Shuts Down Two Digital Marketing Services

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