Today in Digital Marketing - A Whimsical, Pervasive Horniness

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, September 13th. Today, TikTok cries foul over attribution data. The Google Test One advertiser says cost her client thousands of dollars. Pinterest reveals a new slate of ad formats. And on the ad-free premium podcast, which you can learn more about by tapping Go Premium in the show notes, Google moves more AI in the front door and shoves enhanced cost per click

Starting point is 00:00:26 out the back. 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. TikTok says it's not getting enough credit for the work it's doing in your ad campaigns. The company this week said that last-click attribution models significantly under-report TikTok's role

Starting point is 00:01:09 because users are so enthralled by the video content, so immersed in the experience, that they're less likely to click. It's not that they don't search advertisers' brands out, it's just they do it later. And because of that, what you see in your campaign attribution reports aren't an accurate sense of the customer's journey to your product. Attribution, the process of

Starting point is 00:01:31 figuring out which marketing tactic led to a sale, it's always been a little tricky to nail down. Even back in the infomercial days, all they could say was, call and ask for operator 101. There was no operator 101, of course. The consumer saw ad number 101. If they called and repeated back a specific number, like a fake operator number, the brand could tell what ad led to that sale. Since then, attribution's gotten even more complicated. Take my own experience in buying a car last year. My wife uses a manual wheelchair, and so we need an SUV with an automated sliding driver's side passenger door and back seats that we can remove. There are not a lot of vehicles like that, so we're kind of limited.

Starting point is 00:02:16 TikTok one day served me an organic post of a guy reviewing a Kia Carnival. It seemed to have everything we wanted. So I flipped over to Google and searched for it. Then I went to Twitter and did a cursory search for people talking about it. I then went to Kia's website and checked out their accessibility page, which I'm pretty sure is why I started getting retargeted by Kia with ads on Facebook. Eventually, we walked into a dealership and bought one. So TikTok, Google, Twitter, website, Facebook, dealership, which platform gets credit for the sale?

Starting point is 00:02:54 TikTok because I saw it there first? Facebook because I saw it there just before the actual purchase? This is what people mean when they say multi-touch attribution. The consumer was driven by lots of touch points. But many attribution models only take into account the very last thing that the consumer touched prior to purchase. A simple model called last-click attribution. So you can see why TikTok's a bit pissed. It hired an outside research firm and found that when advertisers rely on last-click attribution, that undervalues TikTok conversions by 73%. It also says it found that 79% of purchases that are driven by TikTok are not captured through common attribution methods. Then how do you get more accurate reporting?

Starting point is 00:03:42 TikTok says you should be using both view-through and click-through attribution. Not only will you get what TikTok says is more accurate data, it'll also help your campaigns through the learning phase faster. They also say you should be using longer attribution windows and to stop making changes to your active campaigns before sufficient measurement time has elapsed. Quoting the company, quote, for example, if you have a 28-day click window, you may see that your performance improves with time as we capture more attributed events. Making changes to your campaign too often leads to performance fluctuations, unquote. Andrew Hutchinson over at socialmediatoday.com has some smart analysis up on this, quote, TikTok saying that based on the way people use the app, using traditional ad

Starting point is 00:04:26 measurement modeling won't be effective and you'll need to expand your tracking methods if you really want to understand how your TikTok campaigns are driving audience response, which is convenient for TikTok as it lessens the performance pressure on its ad products while also guiding brands to more expensive tracking tools, unquote. So if you're still using last click attribution on your TikTok campaigns, or for that matter, any platform where consumption patterns are similar, consider switching things around. We have a link to TikTok's full attribution rundown in today's newsletter,

Starting point is 00:05:01 which you can sign up to for free by going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or by tapping the link in the show notes. As you know, the major platforms are always testing things. Meta is checking how good its new AI generated audiences are. TikTok's trying out some new discovery algorithm code. Snapchat's tweaking some of its most popular filters. As part of that testing, of course, the platforms need real worldworld data. And that comes from brand accounts like yours and mine. Sometimes we're told we're in a test group, but usually we're not. Sometimes our results are better. Sometimes they're not. But it's pretty unusual for a test to go spectacularly wrong,

Starting point is 00:05:44 so wrong that it costs the brand real money. Lots of it. That's what one advertiser says happened when Google opted them into expanded targeting. Melissa Mackey, director of paid search at Compound Growth Marketing, posted on social media, quote, client's ads started showing in expanded targeting despite being opted out of that setting, unquote. Expanded targeting is a setting which gives Google permission to reach people outside of your defined audience. If it thinks there's a good chance those people will convert. Most platforms have this enabled by default these days, but in Google's case, you can disable it. Melissa said she contacted Google Ads support. They apologized, told her it was a bug and that

Starting point is 00:06:20 they'd refund her. Then it happened again. Her client's ads were opted back into expanded targeting, even though she had again toggled that off. But this time, when she reached out to support, she says they told her, quote, from time to time, the Google Ads team runs incremental experiments on campaigns to test the impact of a proposed change. Team confirmed that for this issue, we might not provide any credit or refund, unquote. Melissa continued, quote, these tests cost our client literally thousands of dollars, and we're just supposed to absorb that so Google can experiment, unquote. Google's ad liaison Ginny Marvin replied, saying she would look into it. There's nothing to say this is any kind of widespread issue, but it is yet another important reminder that the days of set it and forget it are long gone.

Starting point is 00:07:15 Check your ad campaigns daily, and if you're not already using them, set up some alerts to let you know if something starts going sideways. Pinterest today announced a slate of updated ad formats and tools for advertisers and agencies. First, they are extending Premier Spotlight from search to the home feed to help advertisers reach users from the moment they open Pinterest. Premier Spotlight is a premium placement that provides some degree of exclusivity. It is now available in the following countries, the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Mexico. They are also adding Showcase Ads, a new interactive ad format that lets users preview

Starting point is 00:07:56 and explore a brand's content by swiping through branded images. Brands can create interactive experiences within the format. And Quiz Ads, where brands can include up to three questions per quiz to increase engagement and show consumers more personalized content, ideally helping them move deeper into decisions and toward a purchase. Showcase ads and quiz ads are now available in most of those other countries I mentioned earlier, with more coming later in the year. Pinterest also announced improvements to its Business Manager. Like other platforms' business managers, this is where you manage employees, partners, accounts, and so on.

Starting point is 00:08:31 They are adding some new data dashboards, some new audience sharing features. Business Manager will be available in all countries with Pinterest ads later this fall. Today, they also shared a first look at Creative Studio. This is sold as a way to let brands quickly generate lifestyle imagery for product pins. You'll add your pin link, select the prompts that match your need, and Creative Studio will then generate a selection of custom background images. Creative Studio will be available for testing with some U.S. advertisers later this year. If you are interested in being one of those, the company says to reach out to your Pinterest ad rep. Finally, Pinterest is expanding its integration

Starting point is 00:09:10 ecosystem with two new integrations for Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce to all monetized markets. These allow merchants to manage their Pinterest product catalogs and set up directly within the applications they already use for Salesforce or Adobe. 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. One of the new apps competing for the hole left by Twitter reached an important milestone yesterday.

Starting point is 00:10:00 Blue Sky reported 1 million users. That is, of course, a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to Twitter, which has about 350 million monthly actives right now and is expected to drop about 5% by next year. Still, it's a number that at least gives Blue Sky a kind of out-of-the-bush league status. You might recall we previously reported that Blue Sky had passed a million app downloads. Blue Sky is scaling very slowly, and so far, that's been done by invite codes given to its existing users. There were a lot of people who downloaded it, only to find they lacked the code to actually create an account.

Starting point is 00:10:36 Threads, that's Meta's competitor to X, sort of did the opposite. They opened the floodgate on day one. Within five days, 100 million people had signed up. Many of them poked around and left, with daily engagement dropping dramatically in the following weeks. One thing Threads has going for it is brand friendliness. Brands trust meta, as much as you can trust any of the platforms. Once Threads starts running ads, it'll just be a placement in the ads manager we're all familiar with. We know more or less what kind of ads they remove, what policies they have, and their reps will, we assume, also help with threads issues. But Blue Sky is its own unique

Starting point is 00:11:13 space. Quoting TechCrunch, a foil to threads in almost every way, Blue Sky's own subculture quickly defined itself with surreal memes, dedicated shitposting, and a whimsical, Also notable, Blue Sky's founder is Jack Dorsey. Yes, the co-founder of Twitter. Blue Sky started, in fact, as a Twitter project that got spun off. And, unlike the current trend of independent federated social media platforms, like Mastodon is and Threads says it plans to be, Blue Sky, like Twitter, is a closed platform that has not embraced the wider Fediverse. You can follow us on Blue Sky or Threads. On Blue Sky, our username is at todayindigital.bsky.social. And on Threads, It's at today in digital marketing or follow me personally on either on blue sky. I'm at Todd Maffin dot B sky dot social and on threads. I'm at Todd Maffin. Social media links are in our show notes as well.

Starting point is 00:12:19 All right, Google, Amazon and Adobe have all unveiled new AI driven tools for marketers this week. So let's take it to the lightning round. Google up first launched creative guidance for YouTube, an AI tool integrated into the Google Ads platform. It evaluates your video ads, offering feedback based on Google best practices. It'll suggest improvements like optimal video duration, effective voiceovers and correct aspect ratios. On today's premium podcast. Jill Saskengales and I spoke in depth about that. Meanwhile, Amazon has some AI that can write product descriptions, titles, and product details now.

Starting point is 00:12:53 It's also a way to enhance existing descriptions. Amazon reminded marketers that AI can sometimes just make shit up, so still check what it writes. And Adobe's Firefly, after a half-year beta phase, is now available in Creative Cloud, Adobe Express, and Adobe Experience Cloud. Firefly's generative AI tools include Generative Fill in Photoshop. Pricing is, well, very Adobe-like. You will get a set number of credits per month, unless you're on Firefly or Express Premium, and then you'll only get two generations per day. But then those reset, unless they don't, in which case you'll be able to buy

Starting point is 00:13:28 additional subscription packs. And finally, Sprout Social this week released its annual report into the state of social media marketing, and it's mostly good news for marketers. 68% of people they polled said the main reason they follow a brand on social media is to stay up to date about that brand's offerings. 46% say they follow in the hopes it'll give them access to exclusive deals or promotions. 45% follow because they find the content posted by the brand to be entertaining. Paradoxically, consumers also say they want to see more authentic and non-promotional content Things like behind-the-scenes videos, interviews of people making the product, and day-in-the-life type content

Starting point is 00:14:11 When asked what a brand can do to be more memorable, more than half said respond to customers on social media How fast does this mean? Maybe not as fast as you'd think More people said they expected a response within the same day as said within one to two hours. In fact, when you add up the same day responses, 69% of consumers said they wanted that speed. But last year, when asked the same question, 77% expected a response within the same day. This year, Sprout Social also asked consumers how they feel about brands using AI and social media interactions. More than three quarters are either ambivalent or apprehensive

Starting point is 00:14:50 about it. A link to the full report is in today's email newsletter. Again, tap the link in the show notes if you want to get it. The survey polled more than 1,800 social media users and 900 marketers across the US and the UK. Full disclosure, our agency uses Sprout Social and our primary work is in social media engagement and moderation. Our median first reply time for responding to our clients' customers on social media is within four minutes. Yeah, I'm going to talk about Starfield again. So if you're sick of this, just go to your next podcast. So when it came out came out right you saw all the regular stuff that they were promoting and then they had this section where they're like hey you can build your own spacecraft you know you can add parts to

Starting point is 00:15:34 it and move things around and recolor them and i thought i'm not really i wouldn't be into that but i mean it's nice for those people that are that are into that thing. Six hours last night. That's when I spent six hours last night tinkering on my, it had nothing to do with the plot or anything. Just like, see the problem is that I need this, well I don't need,

Starting point is 00:15:55 I want this one cockpit that is by a company called Stroud in the game and I could just go to one of the ports that sells it but one of their employees, I got into a fight with one of their employees. I pissed one of them off. I had to go get something from him. I got a little impatient.

Starting point is 00:16:10 He didn't give it to me, so I shot him. Unbeknownst to me, he had bodyguards everywhere in that nightclub. And now not only are they after me, but as you can imagine, the whole the whole company hates me. So I can't find them to. Anyway, it's a problem. See you tomorrow

Today in Digital Marketing - A Whimsical, Pervasive Horniness

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