Today in Digital Marketing - 84% of Listeners Prefer This Podcast to That Other One

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

The sales boost you could get by telling your customers how to write their reviews. Instagram tweaks its algorithm to favour smaller accounts. Why does Apple hate advertisers so much? And collateral damage: The video app that might go down with the TikTok ship.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereGO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Tuesday, April 30th. Today, the sales boost you could get by telling your customers how to write their reviews. Instagram tweaks its algorithm to favor smaller accounts. Why does Apple hate advertisers so much? And Collateral Damage, the video app that might go down with the TikTok ship. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance,

your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. In the world of online shopping, it's not just any review that catches the eye. It's the ones that put one product up against another that truly sway consumer decisions. This from some new research that highlights how comparative reviews not only drive more sales, but can also fix the damage of negative feedback. Researchers analyzed 58,000 reviews of 60 phone models and found with positive comparisons, that is to say someone says in their review, phone A is better than phone B, those boost sales by 26.5%. And negative comparisons are almost 47% less harmful

than regular negative reviews. The researchers speculate that comparative reviews are more convincing because they make the reviewer seem more knowledgeable. They soften negative points by comparing them to worse alternatives, whereas regular negative reviews focus on product flaws, which can scare off potential buyers. Despite this, though, reviews where consumers pit one product against another are relatively rare in the wild. The study found only 10% of online reviews feature comparisons. E-commerce platforms like Amazon and Alibaba and Best Buy, they will show comparisons on their product pages, but don't actually encourage writing comparative reviews. So worth testing in that text above the

review field, perhaps encourage customers to draw comparisons in their reviews, asking specific questions about how your product fares against another. That research is published in the Journal of Interactive Marketing. It's called The Effects of Comparative Reviews on Product Sales. Instagram is introducing several changes to its ranking system to give smaller, original creators more visibility across the platform. The goal is to level the playing field and reduce the dominance of large accounts and reposted content. The change has come after months of criticism from creators who felt the algorithm was hurting their reach. Besides giving more distribution to smaller accounts, the change will also replace reposts

with original content in recommendations and will remove accounts that simply aggregate content from the recommendations panel. Instagram will also add labels to reposted content, linking users to the original creator. The label will be visible to followers of the account reposting the content, and for now, can be removed by the original creator or account reposting it. First, they took away ad tracking data. Now, Apple might want to take away ads entirely. Reports this week say Apple's plans for their next operating system will let users hide specific sections of websites like ads. This isn't wild speculation either. This functionality is showing up in the latest Safari test builds.

It lets users basically erase unwanted content and remember these preferences for future visits. Users would also have the option to restore the original view of the page. This presumably would operate similar to the boost and zap feature found in the new Arc web browser. From what people with early access to the betas are saying, this would look similar to popular ad blockers like OneBlocker and uBlockOrigin, which use cosmetic filters to manage web page content. While this might enhance user experience by reducing clutter, maybe even speeding up loading times, it's likely to draw criticism from advertisers and publishers who rely heavily on ad revenue. In addition to these browser-specific enhancements, Apple seems to be integrating AI more deeply across its product line. The forthcoming M4 chip and iPhone 16 are expected to boast AI processing capabilities

that take place directly on the device. Microsoft's AI Assistant Co-Pilot is now fully available for all advertisers in the company's ads platform. This comes about a month after they let more people into the beta test. This AI includes recommendations for assets like images and copy, text-to-image generation, of course, and a chatbot to get answers and synthesize information. As for that chatbot, one screenshot we've seen shows that this could actually live up to the hype. For instance, you can ask the bot

to give you a breakdown of ad performance within a specific date range, and it'll just go get you that data rather than you trying to track down the report section, turn on the right columns, set the date range, and so on. That bot, though, is still in testing and is not part of the larger rollout announced today.

Google has made some updates to its Performance Max campaigns. They include a new customer value mode to help the purchase optimization find high-value customers. New customer acquisition goals are now in Search Ads 360 campaigns. A beta test of a new campaign objective focusing on customer retention. Contact your Google rep if you want to be in that. Some better age and gender options are under audience insights. You can now exclude specific IP addresses account wide. So that would help making sure you're not spending money on people at your company. And a kind of split test feature that replaces your final URL with a more relevant landing page from your website. This one is also in beta.

Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. A new law aimed at forcing TikTok to sell its U.S. assets or face a ban has put its sister app, CapCut, in jeopardy. CapCut is a popular video editing tool. It's probably the most feature-rich editor that's free for most functions and takes inspiration from the big players like Final Cut Pro. The Washington Post reports today that multiple lawmakers have confirmed that CapCut would be subject to the same divest or ban

requirement as TikTok. Creators quoted in the piece warned that a ban on CapCut would be subject to the same divest or ban requirement as TikTok. Creators quoted in the piece warned that a ban on CapCut would stifle self-expression for many brands and young people who rely on the app to create and edit short-form videos. CapCut's impact on social media has been likened to the impact of the electric guitar on music in the 20th century. Its pre-formatted video templates frequently trend across other platforms. Creators say that recreating the same effects in other editing platforms could take hours, and that CapCut's tools have become synonymous with online videos. So some creators are starting to look for alternative solutions

in case CapCut 2 gets smacked by the banhammer. But many say reverting to previous tools would feel like a step back. And finally, if you logged into Instagram over the weekend, you may have noticed a sudden drop in your brand's following count. Don't worry, you didn't get cancelled. You didn't get hacked. You were one of a number of accounts that were the victim of a nasty bug, which Instagram says has now been resolved. Whatever followers you lost

should be back now. So we crossed about 6,000 people per day now in terms of our audience. Most of those on the newsletter, a bunch of you, of course, here on the podcast. That means that we are going to be increasing our ad rates. Our ad rates are pegged to about $20 CPM, which is, I think you will agree, pretty competitive for this kind of specialized audience. Anyway, we'll be doing that in the coming days. So if you're interested in snatching up some ad space, either here on the podcast or in our newsletter. Check out our ad site. You can find it at todayindigital.com slash ads or tap the link at the top of the show notes.

Some ad placements are as cheap as $10. For now, I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.