Today in Digital Marketing - All The Cool Kids Want Stories

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, it's all coming back, digital media spend showing signs of returning to normal, Instagram's Stories sees a huge increase in advertiser interest, a big rebranding in the digital experience space, and why is Google emailing people asking them to verify sites that they have no connection to? It's Wednesday, January 27th, 2021. Happy Spirituality Day, Serbia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:30 Numbers keep looking up in our little digital marketing world. New research from Merkle this week said online media spend is returning to normal after a tumultuous 2020. Quoting Business Wire, trends are emerging that indicate a steady return to pre-pandemic levels.

Starting point is 00:00:47 Google's yearly ad spend growth rose 12% in Q4 as cost-per-click growth climbed for the first time since Q1 of 2020. Facebook's spending growth was steady as CPMs rose 10% during the holiday quarter, the first gain since Q1 of 2020. Bricks and mortar retailers and travel-related businesses that bore the brunt of the pandemic signal recovery, though store visits and ad spending for travel were still lower at the end of 2020 than in the prior year. Instagram experienced similar growth, with its Stories format gaining share to make up 33% of ad spend among participating advertisers. But while spending on Instagram ads jumped 30% in Q4 from a year earlier, the growth rate was slower than seen in Q3. Pinterest's share of social media ad spending was 14%, besting Snapchat and Twitter at 12%, and suggesting its newer ad formats

Starting point is 00:01:46 and recent features drew appeal from marketers. The digital experience platform EpiServer today said it is rebranding as Optimizely. You might know Optimizely already. That's one of the brands EpiServer acquired recently. It also bought IDEO, an analytics and personalization platform. Insight Software, a commerce platform in the manufacturing and distribution space, also one of their purchases. And today the company launched an optimization as a service,

Starting point is 00:02:18 service for enhanced campaign targeting and testing. Not a lot of stories out there today, for whatever reason. There are some bugs to report on, though. Google is sending out some really weird emails today. Actually, over the last few days now, asking people to verify their sites in Search Console, which normally would be fine, but the problem is these emails are going to people who are not the site owner, so they have no way to verify those sites. And also, the domains are wrong in the email too.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Google is aware and looking into it. Hootsuite is seeing an issue where messages scheduled for publishing are not going live even though they're marked as sent in the planner. If this is affecting you, for the time being, you should be able to publish these messages directly using the post now option. They are working on a fix. And a bug.

Starting point is 00:03:08 From this podcast to report, yesterday, 214 of you received an episode with pre-roll and mid-roll ads, something I have said that you would not get. The issue is with our hosting platform. After you upload each podcast episode, it asks you to mark where the mid-rolls should insert. But this is where we actually delete the mid-roll and pre-roll slots. But while you're on that screen and before you've made any changes to the ad slots, Red Circle publishes the RSS feed.

Starting point is 00:03:36 So the quick podcast apps, and it always seems to be the Overcast app, they grab the feed and download the episode. There was a workaround where we'd upload and set the publish time a few minutes ahead, but even that workaround appears to have stopped working. So my apologies if you are hearing ads at the start and the middle. I promise we are working on getting that fixed. Well, we are up past 1,600 downloads per episode now, and I wanted to get a better handle on the kinds of stories that you would like us to cover more of. So we have set up, yes, here it comes, our first listener survey for that very purpose. And we will be picking three people at random who complete it and give them a $50 gift card for Amazon.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Now listen, you are a digital marketer. You probably know that most people who are listening to this right now will never fill that survey out. So your odds of that $50 gift card is actually pretty good. There's a link in today's episode notes to take you there. Or just go to todayindigital.com slash survey. Again, either swipe over right now, tap the link in the notes, or go to todayindigital.com slash survey. You have until the end of the weekend to be entered in the draw. Short episode today, so that's it. Except for this, your moment

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Today in Digital Marketing - All The Cool Kids Want Stories

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