Today in Digital Marketing - Anyone Can Shake a Tambourine

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

How to improve your e-commerce store's conversion rate... Has Meta solved the Apple privacy problem? 3D ads may be coming to Instagram. Is Twitter about to make TweetDeck paid-only? And TV ad buying will never be the same.Go Premium! No ads, more stories, audio chapters, and extended weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumGet each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links) — b.link/pod-newsletterADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia(TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin- Twitch: https://twitch.tv/todmaffin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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. Today, how to improve your e-commerce store's conversion rate.

Has Meta finally solved the Apple privacy problem? 3D ads may be coming to Instagram. Is Twitter about to make TweetDeck paid only? And TV ad buying will never be the same. It's Friday, March 25th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Today's episode is sponsored by Vendasta.com. Build your agency with the tools you need and the hassles you don't. Visit Vendasta.com slash superhero to book a demo and learn more.

And we start today with some reporting from the New York Times, which this morning is saying a multinational deal has been reached that had threatened the presence of major digital ad platforms in Europe. The issue was over a previous agreement between the U.S. and the European Union, an agreement that Europe recently struck down when a court found that the pact didn't shield Europeans well enough from American surveillance programs. At issue is this. As a response to the September 11th attacks, the U.S. passed the Patriot Act, which gave the government unprecedented powers in being able to take pretty much whatever data they wanted on people from the major platforms. Quoting the Times, businesses that send European Union data to American servers have pushed hard for the governments to reach a new deal.

Since the last pact was struck down more than 18 months ago, regulators in European countries have said that companies cannot use certain web services like Google Analytics and MailChimp because doing so could violate the privacy rights of Europeans. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said earlier this year it might shut down its services in Europe if the governments didn't resolve their differences, unquote. And while, yes, like a toddler, Meta cries wolf a lot and threatens to take its toys and go home, but this threat was also echoed by other platforms who said they'd pretty much have no choice. The deal is not final yet, but it sounds like they're putting the finishing touches on it. Back in 2009, a longtime engineer at Google was looking at their search results page and thought to herself, that shade of blue that we use for links, it seems a little, I don't know, off? And so she tested a couple of different shades and a couple more.

Eventually, Google tested 41 different shades of blue to determine which one people were most likely to click. And in case you're curious, people will click links more if the blue leans a little bit over into purple compared to blues that have a tiny tinge of green. You might laugh at this seemingly tiny change, but that small tweak had enormous consequences. little bit over into purple compared to blues that have a tiny tinge of green. You might laugh at this seemingly tiny change, but that small tweak had enormous consequences. Indeed, people started clicking on more links, and that included links on ads. Google says switching to a slightly different shade of blue earned the company an extra $200 million a year in revenue. That engineer, by the way, was Marissa Meyer, who went on to be Google's VP of Search and later CEO of Yahoo. A-B testing, of course, is a staple in a marketer's toolkit,

especially those who sell things. For good marketers, increasing the conversion rate, even by fractions of a percentage point, is an obsession that can pay off in spades. But how do you do it? What mistakes should you avoid? And where is the middle ground between providing your customers a rich brand experience and pushing them to buy? For answers, I recently spoke with Sean Brandt from Audit, which provides advice to e-commerce merchants on their product pages and websites. I asked him if he could only change three things

on an e-commerce's website's homepage, what would they be? The first thing is when you land on the page, probably the most common thing that we're constantly pushing to customers is when the customer scrolls past that first section, do they understand what you do? And you'd be surprised how many submissions and customers we get where you go to that first snippet of the homepage where you're introducing yourself to the customer and they don't tell them they use marketing jargon or they're very vague. Um, and you really just don't leave understanding what you, what the product does and what makes it unique. It sounds silly that it should be in that top part because there's obviously a whole homepage that you can do that in but so many customers make that first impression and either

leave or scroll so it really is critical to be telling them and in a really simple way exactly what you do right off the hop i think the second thing is um you know reviews have kind of become reviews and social proof in general have kind of become that, that word of mouth trust factor, right? So it's kind of become the same as a friend or your mom saying, Hey, make sure you try this. This is great. Like it worked for me. Reviews are that, right? So when you come to a site and you see a brand with no reviews or no one else talking about it, it becomes really hard to build instant trust for a brand and build that kind of rapport with a consumer. So a lot of what we're working with brands on is how do we build that even if

you don't have reviews? So maybe it's as simple as saying, hey, okay, you don't have reviews. Let's reach out to some of your Instagram followers and get some opinions from them. And let's start building our own reviews or pulling in, you know, reaching out to customers more personally and saying, hey, we'd love some feedback, like really helping them figure out unique ways to build social proof into their homepage, even if they are a new brand that doesn't necessarily have a ton of that. It's interesting because I discount the reviews on a product or a homepage if it's clear that they've been cherry picked.

You know, like I don't mind seeing things that are automatically inserted from TripAdvisor or something, because I know that there's a sense of editorial control or something like that, you know, whereas the ones where, you know, often products will say, will have reviews that say, I love this product, and then the review name is Dave, you know. I had a great time, Sarah, where it's, you know, you can't tell whether it's whether it's real or whether it's a constant design problem of trying to make sure that one, that they're actually real reviews, right? We would never recommend making up reviews, but two, that the user sees that and feels comfortable with it. So I think Amazon is like the baseline king of this, of trying to make sure that they're proven. And I think that comes down to publishing

what app that they were collected through, allowing users to access the database of them, rather than just saying, hey, here's a static image of it, right? Anyone can Photoshop a review in, but it's a lot harder to say, hey, these were collected through Juniper or Yotpo, go to that app and read them all. And so there's different layers and levels to, I guess, making sure that they feel more trustworthy. I think that the higher that number climbs, right, of the total reviews, the less likely it is that they called their, you know, their Rolodex or their family to write a bunch of reviews. So it's kind of finding that balance. And it's not easy, especially for brands just starting out.

Our full conversation was about a half an hour long. It covered topics like what the big broad shifts have been in how direct-to-consumer brands sell products, the most common conversion rate optimization mistakes that brands make, how to do any CRO when you're using something like Shopify where you don't have a lot of granular control over the design, the surprising effect on sales caused by Apple shifting the search bar on mobile Safari to the bottom, and a lot more, that interview is coming exclusively

to the premium podcast feed tomorrow. The premium feed is just like this version, but more. More stories, weekend editions like this, better audio quality, earlier release times, story links in the show notes, and more. Tap the link in the episode notes to check it out or go to todayindigital.com slash premium feed. Incidentally, Sean's company Audit is not spelled the way you think it is. Their website is oddit.co and they offer what they

call a free quick win, which is a brief top line report of changes they think you should make to your own shopping site. Again, their website is oddit.co. Has Meta finally figured out its way around Apple's privacy changes? A new report by attribution platform AppsFlyer has found that Meta has returned as having the most mobile ad volume overtaking TikTok in the top spot. This was an analysis done in the last six months of 2021. In other words, their first report where Apple's changes were fully in effect. This appears to show that Meta getting ahead of Apple's changes with its own new attribution and event prioritization has paid off for the company.

AppsFlyer says Meta's quality signals were also highest across in-app engagement for non-gaming apps and in-app purchases for both gaming and non-gaming. And interestingly, as noted by Marketing Dive, quote, although effects were more substantial to iOS apps, the privacy focus changes also posed an impact to Android for mobile media companies, as 25% of total budgets shifted from iOS to Android from the first half of 2020 to that timeframe in 2021. Speaking of meta ads, the company has a new partnership with a 3D

e-commerce technology company that may soon bring 3D ads to your ads manager. The way it works is you'd upload your brand's existing 3D design files, and this new tech will convert that file to Facebook and Instagram standards. They can then be published from the tool directly to your product catalog on Meta's platform. This is all going through Meta's new Augmented Reality API, which we should note is in alpha, meaning it is a very, very early and limited release, and probably quite buggy too, at least for now. There comes a time in every established digital agency owner's business journey when growth hits a slump.

You have a reputation, clients, a team. You're successful, people trust you, and you want to leverage that trust to expand your operations and boost your bottom line. To find and leverage that growth catalyst, more and more agencies are turning to Vendasta, the end-to-end digital platform trusted by over 60,000 local experts. Thank you. management and e-commerce products. Plus, Vendasta offers powerful reporting tools to measure your client's digital performance, as well as white-labeled marketing services to help your agency keep costs down. Learn more by booking a demo at vendasta.com slash superhero today. Vendasta.com slash superhero. Let's hope this isn't true. A programmer poking around Twitter's code says she's found proof that the company plans

to take its popular TweetDeck program and make it only available through its paid Twitter Blue service. TweetDeck started out as an independent app that actually supported LinkedIn and Facebook too. Twitter bought it 11 years ago for 40 million bucks, ripped everything other than Twitter out of it. But it's free, for now. Doesn't contain any tweet ads, and has that familiar columns UI that some people like. TweetDeck also recently got a UI refresh, which currently people can choose to switch to and from.

I've tried it. I hated it. It's possible this signals that Twitter's subscription service will start rolling out to more countries. After all, it's currently only available in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And if they do move it to Twitter Blue, and Blue is still only available in those four countries, that would lock millions of users out of the tool entirely. When contacted by media, a spokesperson for Twitter says they don't have anything to share about this right now. Well, the glory days of television advertising is over. TV ad spending reached its height before the pandemic and will never reach that level again. That according to new data from Insider Intelligence.

Their forecast says this year, spending on TV ads will fall below 20% of total ad spending. This would represent the first time it's been that low. And why? Obviously, on-demand content and all the various streaming options. COVID lockdowns did bounce the numbers around a little and even made it a little confusing as to what was happening with spending trends. Last year, ad spending in that sector actually grew by about 6%. But when you look at that number in context, you realize that followed a 12% drop in 2020. Also apparently contributing to the small bump in 2021, more live sports back on traditional TV. Insider says it expects within four years, TV ad spending will make up just 14% of all ad budgets.

This year, spending on connected TV, as platforms like Hulu, will grow by 33%, and social video platforms like TikTok by 45%. It's been a bad week for Yoast, the popular SEO plugin used on many WordPress sites. Earlier this week, the developers acknowledged their tool was creating duplicate sitemaps, something that might confuse the search engines. So they put out an update and included some new features, the introduction of structured data timestamps so you could use the blockchain to track copyright. And everything sort of went to hell.

Some users reported the updated plugin caused fatal errors on the site, forcing the site admins to roll back to a previous version. Yoast says it has fixed the problem with the new update. Also, Yoast is not currently compatible with PHP 8 or higher. They say they are working on that too. A nice addition to Google's work platform for freelancers and service-based businesses, Google Calendar is adding a customer-facing appointment scheduling tool. This will let people schedule time on your calendar. Currently, a lot of third-party tools do this, like Calendly, and they integrate with Google Calendar via an API. This, of course, is a more direct way to do that.

The booking page looks a lot like those third-party tools. You will set up time windows in your calendar by adding what Google calls appointment slots. If your domain is on the regular release cycle for Google's work product, it will be rolling out starting April 6th. It will take about three days to get around to everyone. Those of you on rapid release will have already started getting it, and those people may take up to 15 days before they start seeing it. It will work on all Google Workspace plans except Essentials, Business Starter, Frontline,

or Legacy G Suite basic and business customers. Well, my nephew in Montreal called my bluff finally. I found out he's into painting miniatures, which I am trying desperately to get into as kind of a non-Xbox hobby. I mean, really, at this point, I'll take any non-Xbox hobby. So I've been trying to paint miniatures. Turns out he's into it.

And so now we have a date set up to maybe, I think, co-stream on Twitch or something like that on the weekend and paint together. Meanwhile, my wife and our niece, that's my nephew's sister, are going to be playing Sea of Thieves on Xbox. So we are still desperately trying to hold on to the cool aunt and uncle moniker that we have so far been given. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamik First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio.

Ad coordination by Red Circle. And, you know, I worry about our theme composer, Mark Blevis. He told me last night when he called up that shrink in Beverly Hills, you know the one, Dr. Everything Will Be Alright, instead of asking how much of his time is left, he asked him how much of his mind, baby. I'm Todd Mappin. Have a restful weekend.

I'll see you on Monday. Anyone can shake a tambourine Anyone can make the people scream Anyone can shake a tambourine Anyone can make the people scream Anyone can fake it till they get the chance to make it Yes, and anyone can shake a tambourine Anyone can take the people high Anyone can set the roof on fire Anyone can flip it up and take the chance to rip it up

And anyone can shake a tambourine. Okay, let's go. Okay, let's go. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.