Today in Digital Marketing - First, We Kill All the Chatbots.
Episode Date: May 30, 2023A change to Meta's offline conversions API isn't as scary as they make it sound. Ten straight months of ad spend declines — but is an end in sight? Also, good news for marketers who use What...sApp. New insights for Microsoft’s ad pixel. And important Google data is now nearly three days behind. .🔘 Follow us on social media🎙️ Subscribe free to our other podcast "Behind the Ad".Increase Your Amazon Sales with Micro-InfluencersHow sending free products to Micro-Influencers has helped brands 5X revenue in 2 months. Get started with Stack Influence and join companies like Unilever, Magic Spoon, Momofuku. and more.✅ MORE INFO and JOIN FREE NOW.Use GPT4 to Comment with 1 Click on LinkedIn ProspectsJoin 15,000+ LinkedIn power users and supercharge your social selling with Engage AI! Imagine effortlessly writing insightful comments that break the ice and build relationships with prospects. With Engage AI as your comment writing assistant, you'll save precious time while achieving conversions with every added touchpoint. Transform your LinkedIn conversations into powerful conversion tools today.✅ GET STARTED FREE NOW.✨ GO PREMIUM! ✨ ✓ Ad-free episodes ✓ Story links in show notes ✓ Deep-dive weekend editions ✓ Better audio quality ✓ Live event replays ✓ Audio chapters ✓ Earlier release time ✓ Exclusive marketing discounts ✓ and more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumfeed.💵 Send us a tip🤝 Join our Slack: todayindigital.com/slack📰 Get the Newsletter: Click Here (daily or weekly)📰 Get The Top Story each day on LinkedIn. ✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form🎙️ Be a Guest on Our Show: Fill in this form📈 Reach Marketers: Book Ad🗞️ Classified Ads: Book Now🙂 Share: Tweet About Us • Rate and Review.ABOUT THIS PODCASTToday 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. Associate Producer: Steph Gunn. Ad Coordination: RedCircle. Production Coordinator: Sarah Guild. Theme Composer: Mark Blevis. Music rights: Source Audio.🎒UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Google Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and Courses .Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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It is Tuesday, May 30th. Today, a change to Meta's offline conversions API isn't as scary as they make it sound.
Ten straight months of ad spend declines, but is an end in sight?
Also good news for marketers who use WhatsApp, new insights for Microsoft's AdPixel, and important Google data is now nearly three days behind.
I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing.
One of the first things I did when ChatGPT came out was,
and you did it too, so shut up,
was to ask it who I was.
Who is Todd Maffin?
I got most of it right.
Been in the digital marketing space for almost 25 years.
Used to be a national radio host and producer.
But then it started going off the rails. Been in the digital marketing space for almost 25 years. Used to be a national radio host and producer.
But then it started going off the rails.
Todd Maffin is an internationally recognized wine sommelier, it said, which is not true.
And in fact, it's kind of funny considering that I'm in recovery and spent months in residential treatment 15 years ago, mostly for a wine addiction?
I think we all know by now that chat GPT just straight up lies sometimes.
They're hallucinations.
That's why while it might be a great tool for brainstorming or coming up with different copy variations, it's not something you'd want to trust for things like brand monitoring
or market research.
Or would you?
An interesting think piece up today on Insider
Intelligence asks, maybe we should. Quoting the piece, when it comes to assessing brand strength,
these so-called hallucinations can be a tool for evaluating what brand associations really are.
And those same hallucinations can be fed back into chatPT to generate customer profiles, marketing copy, and even new products.
For example, marketers can get AI to hallucinate any brand as a Dungeons and Dragons character
sheet, determining its strengths, weaknesses, and core features. What might seem like a silly
experiment can help advertisers in tangible ways, unquote. One interesting example cited
was when a researcher asked ChatGPT
to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in Coca-Cola's voice.
The piece also suggests that these hallucinations
might have a role in product generation
with a prompt like this, quote,
imagine that you are a product ideas generator machine
that contains three sliders that go from zero to 10, Quote, zero being the least cool for a given slide or setting i want you to describe a product that
meets these attributes chat gpt could then churn out products descriptions and messaging
for consumers of various ages genders and hipness levels unquote or they might just
tell you you should change your business to become a wine sommelier brand
well it's usually meta monday on mondays. Of course, this is the second
Monday in a row where we had it off because of a holiday. So it is Meta Tuesday. Usually Andrew
Foxwell joins me. However, Andrew is on holidays. And so in his stead, Shane Cicero, who is the VP
of operations for Foxwell Digital, is with me. Hello, Shane. Hi, how are you doing? I'm good.
So I'm hoping you can help me
because I must have misread this.
I saw an announcement from Meta last week
that said the offline conversions API,
and that's the backend pipeline
that takes data from a retailer's pointed system,
pointed sales system,
and puts it into their backend.
The offline conversions API
will no longer support offline events.
What is happening?
Isn't that the whole point of an offline conversions API?
What am I missing?
Yeah, you're 100% accurate that, yes, that's what the offline conversion API is supposed
to be doing.
What I think we're seeing here is, like I just previously said, consolidation, right? So I think what
Meta is doing here is they have full capability with the conversion API in and of itself. And so
they're not seeing the value of having a separate API for the offline events. So they're merging
that into the conversion API as we go forward. I think what if we're reading between the lines
here as well is that, you know, post iOS 14, you know, one of the kind of hacks out there was to
kind of use the offline conversion API to kind of bring your website conversions in back into
the platform. And while it didn't help optimize campaigns, it was at least
helping advertisers for a period of time, be able to see what ad sets and campaigns were actually
converting, because it was bringing that website data over that technically goes against, you know,
these guidelines that have, you know, privacy and whatnot that Apple implemented here
with the iOS opt out. So I think if we're reading between the lines here, the conversion API and
merging offline conversions API into that is going to probably break that down. So you can
no longer do that. And to be fair, this doesn't really affect most marketers directly. Is that right? Like, I would think that the API for the majority of small and medium sized businesses, they're accessing this API indirectly through a third party tool. Am I right there? Or does it being a very direct impact. I think where it is going to be an impact is if somebody has been kind of using it in the way I just previously mentioned, or it could certainly affect or at least have some additional work to be updated and reconnected for those who maybe are a local retailer and know and understand that, you know, meta ads are actually driving
foot traffic and they're using that offline conversion to actually attribute that information.
This is where we say goodbye to those of you on the free podcast. But for those of you on
the premium feed, our chat continues. Let's start with the bad news. The ad market's yearlong
declined of spend is still happening.
March was the ninth straight month that ad spending was down,
falling 8.4% according to numbers by Tenuity.
But in April, the year-over-year decline was only 1.4%,
a much better number.
Still down, but, you know, better.
In fact, April's decline was the smallest since last September.
Some analysts think this might forecast numbers going back into the black soon, but, you know, better. In fact, April's decline was the smallest since last September. Some
analysts think this might forecast numbers going back into the black soon, especially as we get
closer to the summer season. Quoting Insider Intelligence, context is everything. Since the
second half of 2022, ad spend has contracted considerably as the pandemic boom cooled.
Social media companies posted significantly lower ad revenues,
long-time advertisers slashed marketing teams and budgets, and interest rates forced companies to
hold their wallets close. The end of third-party cookies, privacy crackdowns, and TikTok's
controversies all pose additional challenges that advertisers are struggling to handle.
One of the most irritating parts of using WhatsApp as a digital marketer is that when you first booted up the app, it insisted on you logging in with a
phone number. That's fine if you're just a single person using the app, but if you're a brand or an
agency, you might not want to assign your specific phone number to a brand account. Instead, you'd use a username, but that
hasn't been possible until now. The username feature in WhatsApp has been spotted in a beta
release and will let you select one for your account. This is, of course, great news for
brands and agencies and will make logging in and managing a company account much simpler
without playing the whose phone number did we use for this again game?
Also, eagle-eyed beta testers
spotted a new screen sharing ability,
which will let you broadcast
whatever's on your phone's screen
to people in a WhatsApp call.
They also appear to be working
on a status archive setting
that will let you archive your statuses after 24 hours
and then reshare them later if you want.
So far, that appears to only be working
for business accounts.
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Some nice new data coming soon from Microsoft's ad platform. Starting July 3rd,
they'll be launching UET Insights. That's essentially deeper analytics on your existing UET tags.
These tags, sometimes we call these pixels, ride along with a user session and help with things like conversion tracking, remarketing, and automated bidding strategies.
Among the new data points to expect, a session breakdown by country and device, quick backs, those are customers who stay on your website for just a few seconds, and time spent on your website.
You don't need to do any coding for this.
Microsoft says existing tags will automatically be updated on the back end,
and all new tags created in the future will be automatically enabled with UET Insights.
Also, nice little touch, they say the data dashboard should show you insights in near real time,
and it's all actual data, no sampling or modeling.
Now, if for some reason you'd rather not have this automatic upgrade,
you can opt out on their website.
You'll need to provide either the UET tag IDs
for each specific tag you would like to opt out,
or the manager account ID
if you want to opt out of all UET tags within that manager account.
Something is up with the Google Search Console performance report.
SE Roundtable reports the data is delayed by more than 60 hours.
This is an important report for many marketers who have responsibility for SEO.
Sure, there are third-party tools that can get you part of the way there, but
it's usually better going right to the source. No word if what's actually delayed is the source
data itself, which would affect third-party tools also, or if it's just the generation
of the report from live data. Sometimes when these things happen, it's deliberate,
and the platform later announces they've slowed things down for one reason or another. That is not the case here.
This is a bug and Google is aware of it.
You'll know if you're affected by going to the search performance report
and you see a long time period after the last updated line.
Barry Schwartz from SE Roundtable says this has happened many, many times before
and that the search console always does catch up in the end.
And finally, earlier we mentioned the amusing hallucinations that generative text AI has been doing. We're certainly not the first to cover it. Hell, it's been one of the most commonly reported
stories of the new technology. But maybe Stephen Schwartz of the law firm Levadau, Levadau and Oberman didn't see any of those stories.
He was working for a client suing an airline.
Allegedly, a metal serving card hit the guy and it caused an injury or something.
The airline asked the judge to toss out the case.
But Mr. Schwartz fired back last week with a 10-page brief that cited more than a half dozen relevant presidents.
There was Martinez versus Delta Airlines, Zickerman versus Korea Airlines, and, of course,
I probably don't even need to remind you about this one, the infamous Varghese versus China Southern Airlines. It was an impressive document. You know where this is going, right? Yes, it turns
out none of these cases actually existed.
Mr. Schwartz, who by the way has practiced law for more than three decades,
used ChatGPT to write part of the document,
and ChatGPT did what ChatGPT does, make shit up.
Quoting the New York Times,
Schwartz threw himself on the mercy of the court Thursday,
saying in an affidavit that he'd
used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research quote a source that has revealed
itself to be unreliable unquote he said that he had never used chat gpt and therefore was unaware
of the possibility that its content could be false he had he told judge, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real.
It had said yes, unquote.
The judge has ordered a hearing for June 8th to discuss potential sanctions.
Dear friend, I need to rant for a little bit.
And the rant is about televisions.
You know, we used to have good things with televisions like, oh, I don't know, speakers.
You notice this in the last, God, like 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, maybe even.
There are no speakers anymore at the front of TVs.
I mean, I guess they want it to look nice.
They want it to be a big screen.
So instead of putting speakers there in the front,
they put them at the back.
I guess the idea being that it will just bounce off the back of the wall
and then come forward.
The problem with that theory, of course,
is that there's a giant TV in the way,
so the sound waves don't get there.
But the industry has a solution, friends.
And it's to buy more things.
In particular, a sound bar.
Which I finally did.
Because we had an old Onkyo amplifier that was like 20 years old.
And it was down to one speaker.
And the subwoofer was crappy.
And my wife hated it.
Mostly because there were wires everywhere.
It didn't do Bluetooth.
It didn't do anything.
So I bought yesterday a new sound bar. I hated it mostly because there were wires everywhere. It didn't do Bluetooth. It didn't do anything.
So I bought yesterday a new soundbar.
It's beautiful.
It does AirPlay, Bluetooth.
It sounds fantastic.
The only problem is it was like $1,200.
But it's worth it. And it's going to go on the TV that my wife uses to play Xbox.
Because honestly, the sound quality that was before was just offensive.
And she plays these big games.
Dragon Age Inquisition and Skyrim.
If you're a gamer, you'll know these are epic games with music and battles.
And it should sound glorious.
But it's always sound terrible.
So I got it all hooked up yesterday.
She went to play the game.
I was so excited.
And she spent two hours
on the inventory management screen
of Dragon Age Inquisition,
which has no music whatsoever.
In fact, no sound at all whatsoever.
Now, it's an important part of the game,
inventory management.
Don't get me wrong.
It's not like she was stuck there.
But, yeah, I was a little disappointed, let's say.
Don't forget the premium version of this podcast.
You can learn more about it by tapping the link in the show notes
or going to todayindigital.com slash premium.
See you tomorrow.
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