Today in Digital Marketing - 192: Google Can Predict Your Sales (Also: 💋 the 🐟)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Google can predict your future sales, or so it says. Is the Facebook ads boycott working? YouTube gives a big boost to brands who do live streams. And a couple of interesting new entrants in the augmented reality marketing space. It's Monday, July 13th, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Google says it can predict the future, and it's going to apply those predictions to your sales and your web traffic. They are rolling out an update to Google Analytics that will analyze

Starting point is 00:00:35 your data and, based on past trends, forecast what kind of traffic you can expect to see in the short-term future. And not just traffic, but actual sales, too. Quoting the company, As I was reading this, I thought, you know, that's nice. it is that recently active users will not visit your app or site in the next seven days. As I was reading this, I thought, you know, that's nice, but you know what would be really cool is being able to pull those forecasts over into Google Ads and create audiences of specific people who are likely to buy. Well, guess what? Back to Google.

Starting point is 00:01:23 Analytics will suggest new predictive audiences that you can create in the audience builder. For example, using purchase probability, we will suggest the audience likely 7-day churning users, which includes active users who are not likely to visit your site or app in the next 7 days. In the past, if you wanted to reach people most likely to purchase, you'd probably build an audience of people who had added products to their shopping carts but didn't purchase. However, with this approach, you might miss reaching people who never selected an item but are likely to purchase in the future. Predictive audiences automatically determine which customer actions on your app or site might lead to a purchase,

Starting point is 00:02:14 helping you find more people who are likely to convert at scale. Did the Facebook ads boycott work? Sources tell Bloomberg News that Facebook is giving serious thought to banning political ads in time for the American federal election in November. Reports say they have not yet made up their minds, but they're considering it as a way to help combat misleading information related to the election. This month, some advertisers are boycotting ads on Facebook and its platforms as a protest against letting U.S. President Donald Trump's incendiary posts stay online. While brands like Adidas and REI and even Unilever are participating, few of Facebook's top advertisers are in the boycott. One of the things that nobody can do on Facebook, boycott or not, is promote a live event.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Sure, you can run ads saying you're doing a live event, but you can't actually apply a promoted post budget or a campaign budget to an active and currently live broadcast. Nor, for some reason that has never made sense to me, can you promote that coming soon post where people click to indicate they want to be reminded when the live stream starts. Well, Facebook isn't going to do it. Google apparently will. The company announcing you can now run YouTube live stream content in display ads. Sort of. What people will see

Starting point is 00:03:41 when you do this to a live broadcast is a 15 second preview of the broadcast, which then ends after 15 seconds and prompts people with a button that says continue watching on YouTube, which then takes them to your live stream video. So it's really two videos, right? The preview video and the actual live stream. You are able to promote the preview and then hope that they will click over to the live stream. As far as I can tell, there's still no way to directly apply a budget to the actual live broadcast. Two bits of AR news for you.

Starting point is 00:04:19 That's augmented reality. We'll start with the granddaddy use of AR, applying makeup virtually. YouTube has added this in, maybe one of the last platforms to bring this. Their implementation is pretty clever though, leveraging the fact that they have zillions of makeup tutorial creators, their AI will automatically and virtually apply lipstick to the viewer in sync with when the YouTube creator does. So when the creator starts putting a specific color and brand of lipstick on for real, the viewer sees their own face with that color and brand virtually

Starting point is 00:04:51 applied. It's actually quite clever and linked to a lipstick product catalog could probably be quite powerful in terms of impulse sales. And Nike has a cool AR thing going on in Japan. It's a coloring book, a real one, like with paper and all, and inside is a blank drawing of a sneaker. When you color the paper shoe and point your camera at the book, a 3D virtual model appears hovering over the page with your colors applied. Once you're done, you can save it to a growing catalog of other people's coloring. One thing you can't appear to do? Order that shoe with your color scheme. I guess that would be a logistical nightmare.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Although, that said, you can do that very thing with Xbox controllers. I did this myself, as a gift for my wife. Yes, I got my wife an Xbox controller as a gift. Shut up. You can go to Xbox site and customize everything, from the top color, to the bumpers, to the buttons buttons, the triggers, even want material to wrap the back in and a custom engraving. You design it all online and they ship it to you. Maybe one day we'll see truly customized sneakers in our future. For now, this is a pretty cool tease.

Starting point is 00:06:02 A couple of items in the It's Not Just You file today. Around midday today, Snapchat said it was aware for some of its users their app was broken. Judging from the tweets I saw, it seems to be a problem with the camera. It's just showing up as a black screen for people. So if that's happening to you, it's not just you. And Sprout Social's mobile app has a pretty big bug right now. You can't tap the send button when you're trying to send a reply to a post or review or a tweet. I mean, you can tap it, but nothing happens.

Starting point is 00:06:31 It's not clear to me how big a problem this is in terms of how many customers are experiencing this. We are certainly experiencing it here at our agency. They say they are aware of the issue and plan to fix it in their next mobile app update. They do not have an ETA, but recommend enabling auto updates on your smartphone so the app updates as soon as it's released. And finally, Pinterest updated its recommendation algorithm today. Basically, it tries to add more varied content into the mix, even if its regular algo recommends that you don't see certain types of content. For instance, if you never click on videos, that regular algo probably won't show you

Starting point is 00:07:11 many videos, creating a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. This new algo, which they call controllable distribution, actually sort of rides on top of the existing one and gets applied after the main algorithm. It's a little complicated, but there is a link in this episode's description if you'd like to learn more. Well, it's Orange Man's Day in the Canadian province of Newfoundland today. It commemorates the Battle of the Boyne, which took place in 1690 in Ireland. Newfoundland, where the four seasons are almost winter, winter, still winter, and construction. I'm Todd Maffin. Okay, bye. Talk to you on the morrow then.

Today in Digital Marketing - 192: Google Can Predict Your Sales (Also: 💋 the 🐟)

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