Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Is Deleting Its Analytics Tool [Not a Joke]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Facebook says it will close its analytics tool and nobody's sure why. Getty Images buys the popular free image site Unsplash. Digital ad sales will reach a new record milestone this year. And I'm sorry, Google, why are you sending people to our competitors again? It's Thursday, April 1st, 2021. Happy National Day, Cyprus. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And a brief note before we start.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Earlier today in this podcast feed, you got our lame attempt at an April Fool's joke. Rest assured, nothing in this episode will be a joke. Also, April 1st is always a little light on news, since I think most companies stay away from announcements during a day devoted to pranks. Remember Gmail's launch on April 1st? They spent weeks assuring people that their service was not a prank. So it's a little slow today in terms of news, but onward. Facebook made a surprise announcement last night. They will close their analytics tool on June 30th. Because, of course they will. I promise this is not an April

Starting point is 00:01:07 Fool's joke. This gives us digital marketers less than three months to export our data and find other solutions. Analytics is the platform that lets you build reporting funnels to see who makes it through each stage. You get user retention data, top reacted posts you can see, you can apply filters. This being Facebook, of course, they didn't say why they're doing this. I half expected them to somehow blame Tim Cook for it. They did offer some alternatives, none of which really replicate what we'll be losing here. They say you can use Facebook Business Suite, but A, that doesn't really have the same data, and B, isn't even available to everyone yet.

Starting point is 00:01:42 They also suggest Ads Manager or Events Manager. Again, neither of which contain the same information Analytics does. That's Facebook, everybody, the company that made $29 billion in profits last year, but can't seem to operate a website. Meanwhile, Pinterest today launched Business Access, a new tool to manage the people and partners who work on your Pinterest ad accounts, all from a single place. So now you'll be able to control user permissions across multiple ad accounts.

Starting point is 00:02:12 There is quick ad account permission sharing there and some additional controls over who has access to your ad accounts. So this can only be bad news, right? Unsplash, the royalty-free image site, has been bought by Getty Images. They say they'll continue to operate as a standalone brand, but now will be a division of Getty. They're apparently keeping all the staff. Unsplash began, actually, as a Tumblr blog with 10 images and now has more than 2 million photos. But, and here's where I'm a little nervous, the news release says, quote, Now we have access to the resources and experience of Getty Images to help accelerate our plans to create the world's most useful visual asset library, unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:59 Uh-oh. Pricing model change coming in 3, 2... There was a time, and not that long ago in the whole scheme of things, when the media spend line item marked digital was like 10% of total media spend. My, how things have changed. A new forecast from Magna says total spending on digital ad formats should reach two-thirds of total ad sales this year. Breaking down the numbers, spend as a whole is expected to grow 6% year-over-year during the first quarter, 15% year-over-year in the second, 6% in the third, and 2% year-over-year in the fourth. The strongest verticals are expected to be travel, automotive, drinks, and movies spending, though those only look much higher given the major budget cuts to those sectors last year. Magna also said ad revenues in the U.S. last year were basically flatlined.

Starting point is 00:03:54 There was only about a 1% increase. Unless, of course, you look at Facebook, Google, and Amazon as a group, that group grew ad revenues by 17% and reached a market share of 82% of the total digital ad space. Some people are reporting that Google is suggesting competitors when people search for a particular company. On Twitter, the owner of a marketing tool did a search for his brand name in Google search and in the box on the right, which Google calls a knowledge panel, it showed a section reading, top alternatives, and then a list of eight sites that compete with him. This could just be a test. Other people weren't able to replicate it.

Starting point is 00:04:37 A Google rep said, yeah, he thought it was a test too, but would mention it to their team on Monday. If it's a bug, though, it's even happening sometimes to Google itself. Another screenshot shared on Twitter shows a search for Google offering other search engine alternatives like Bing and DuckDuckGo. And two small items for you today. The social media app Sprout Social has added the ability to reply to IGTV comments now. They've also added IGTV video data in their profile performance, post performance, tag, and IG business profiles reports. And Twitter has finally added GIFs and emoji stickers

Starting point is 00:05:13 to their stories. Sorry, fleets. Oh, they're not even called emojis. Twitter calls them twemojis. I mean, please stop this nonsense. More interestingly, they say they'll be bringing live streaming to fleets in the near future. A lot of that technology will come from the Periscope app, which Twitter bought a while back and, as of today, has closed down. The co-founder of Periscope shared this short video on Twitter the moment when they submitted the original Periscope app to Apple's App Store.

Starting point is 00:05:45 Three, two, one, go. Okay, so now it's like, it's out? It's just... Ah, the presser bugger stopped! Well, my TikTok account hit 21,000 followers this morning. It seems my crappy little dad joke skits about Facebook

Starting point is 00:06:01 ads are killing it. I did another one a couple of days ago about Facebook's reaction when you asked them why they suddenly restarted and began spending a campaign that you paused. No, I'm not going to play it here. Don't look it up for yourself, lazy bastards. I'm on TikTok under the name Digital Marketing Secrets. And if you don't care for the low effort comedy attempts, I also do a daily 60 second summary of each day's podcast.

Starting point is 00:06:26 All right, talk to you tomorrow. Together

Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Is Deleting Its Analytics Tool [Not a Joke]

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