Today in Digital Marketing - Go Home, Google. You're Drunk.

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, why being promoted to the C-suite may not be your best career move. Reddit adds a new placement, but will the community rise up against it? How to change the content indexed in a search engine instantly? And the industry reacts to Google's continued march toward fully automated ad campaigns. It's Friday, September 3rd, 2021. Happy National Flag Day, Australia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 461. Instagram is a wildly popular site for us digital marketers.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Facebook Corp has given us placements in the feed, in between stories, in IGTV, in search. And indeed, when you poke around, it's clear that it's a popular platform. More than a billion people use it regularly. And it's also true that big celebrities rely on it to get their message out. But how popular is the most popular? The Friday Quiz. What type of brand is the most popular account on Instagram? The answer later in the episode. So you applied for that CMO job and didn't get it.

Starting point is 00:01:49 You went to Debbie, who I think we can all agree hasn't looked at marketing tech since fax machines were a thing. Anyway, forget Debbie, because it turns out you probably didn't want that job anyway. Some new research from Boathouse and GLG finds that while most CEOs believe their CMOs can influence key decisions at the boardroom table, less than a third actually trust their CMO to grow the business. The study polled more than 150 CEOs of the largest companies in the U.S. across 13 industries. Quoting MediaPost, more than 70% of CEOs believe their CMO would save themselves before taking a bullet for the team. More than half of survey respondents believe the CMO is more committed to themselves and personal gains versus the CEO and board. Only 34% of CEOs have

Starting point is 00:02:39 great confidence in their CMOs and only 32% trust them overall. More than half of CEOs, 58%, believe a key issue with CMOs' short tenure is their lack of general business communication skills and use of too much marketing jargon, unquote. The report also noted that none of the leading organizations in our industry, such as the American Marketing Association, have studied the CMO tenure problem, and there is nothing on conference agendas addressing the topic. Reddit continues to build its ad platform out, this week launching a new placement option for us advertisers,

Starting point is 00:03:19 the Conversation Placement. This lets brands advertise right within the post comment threads. It shows up below the original post and above the first comment. You can also get a prominent CTA button in that placement. The company says their testing of this involved more than 600 partners, and those partners saw an average 9% boost in click-through rate and 23% lower cost per click, though those numbers include both this new conversion placement and the main feed units. Quoting socialmediatoday.com,

Starting point is 00:03:48 The bigger question is how Reddit users will respond and will it be a welcome and effective placement for brands? Some Redditors will no doubt be unhappy about seeing ads in the comment streams, but most are now open to ads given the broader placement options across the web and the general understanding that this is a requirement to fund the services they use, unquote. Reddit's conversation placement option is available to all advertisers starting today. When you think about SEO, most people think first of Google, of course. Few think of Microsoft's Bing, which is kind of a shame

Starting point is 00:04:25 because Bing is the default search engine on Windows and powers a bunch of smaller but growing search engines like the privacy-aware DuckDuckGo. Microsoft has continued to improve Bing and now their latest announcement will be welcome news to anyone responsible for the backend of a website. They've launched the Bing Content Submission API.

Starting point is 00:04:43 This is a tool that lets you notify Bing in real time when changes are made to a web page. And Bing does say real time. When you ping the API with a page address apparently it will register and index the new content. To be clear, this is different than the URL Submission API which you would use to point Bing to a new page. This, on the other hand, tells Bing to re-index the content

Starting point is 00:05:05 on a page it already knows about. It's available now in their webmaster tools. Earlier this week, Google Ads confirmed they'll be dropping ETAs, expanded text ads, after next June. They want us all to move to RSAs, responsive search ads, which in Google's world doesn't mean responsive like a website's design, but rather dynamic content where different fields of your ad, like body copy, headline, and description, will move around at the random and drunken whim of some machine learning code. SearchEngineJournal.com today has some industry reaction to the news. Most people they spoke to said they expected this change, and you really have to be quite out of touch to not see that the digital marketing industry is moving quickly toward more automation and AI making campaign decisions. That kind of automation works better at scale, though, and not as much for campaigns where small budgets provide a small amount of data for the AI to do its work. Plus, as the owner of one agency said,

Starting point is 00:06:05 there are lots of times when an advertiser wants to tightly control its messaging, and this complicates things. Others said that in their accounts, ETAs perform as well or better than responsive search ads. Quoting the piece, other advertisers also noted the difference in delivery, with RSAs often getting more visibilities than ETAs in the same ad group, even when campaigns were set to rotate indefinitely. Advertisers shared concerns about the lack of control both in terms of control over the

Starting point is 00:06:34 ad copy, control over specific ad copy testing, and also control in a broader sense as it pertains to a greater trend with Google ads moving toward automation, unquote. One area in particular where this kind of mixing and matching of ad creative elements is troublesome is in regulated industries, where each line must be approved by a number of levels and departments and teams. How do you get approval for an ad when the ad platform might just swap stuff around? Worst of all, the reporting on RSAs is, well, lacking. You don't really get to see much on which combinations of elements did the best.

Starting point is 00:07:10 All you get is how many impressions they served. But Google says it's sticking to its guns. You will not be able to create or edit expanded text ad campaigns starting next June. 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.

Starting point is 00:07:46 Be protected. Be Zen. Twitter's on a bit of a bender these days. After years and years of not doing anything to their platform, the last couple of months have been packed with changes. Mostly welcome changes like being able to restrict replies to only people you follow or only people you mention. A word this week that they are also considering some other options. Those are, quoting Bloomberg, archive old tweets. This option would enable users to archive their old tweets after a certain period of time so they're no longer visible to others. Users would be able to manually set a time as to when the archive would kick in with

Starting point is 00:08:19 30, 60, and 90-day thresholds or hiding hiding tweets after a full year being tested as potential options. Also, remove individual accounts as followers. This has actually been spotted in testing, with Twitter working on an option that would enable users to remove specific profiles from their follower list without having to use the current block and unblock workaround. That could make it a less confrontational way to avoid certain users in the app. Remove yourself from a conversation, also spotted in testing last month. This option would enable users to untag themselves from any discussion and keep them from being mentioned again within that thread. This option was originally called Unmention Yourself, but Twitter says that the

Starting point is 00:08:59 updated wording better clarifies what the function is. And hiding tweets that you've liked. Likes have always been a little confusing for Twitter users, with some seeing them as a level of endorsement and others using them as a marker of things they want to read later or similar. By hiding your liked tweets, that would remove any confusion while also letting users feel more free in what they do on the platform without consideration of judgment for such. Unquote. All this is just in consideration or testing right now. No word on if any of them will make it to the final product. Though if Twitter history is any guide, these all should be part of the Twitter experience in the next year or so.

Starting point is 00:09:41 If you're on a free plan over at typeform.com, your account is going to be smacked down with the force of 1,000 greedy accountants. Currently, you get three forms and up to 100 responses per month on the free plan, but that plan is changing. Now you'll get unlimited forms, but you will be capped at a paltry 10 responses per month, which is just pretty much completely useless, of course. They're also taking ending screens away. They're also limiting the metrics you can see. They also will no longer email you when there's a form completion. 1,000 greedy accountants. Oh, and back to the Friday quiz. What type of brand is the most popular account on Instagram?

Starting point is 00:10:33 I bet you all got this wrong. It is a corporation. Which corporation? Instagram. The Instagram account is the top followed account on the platform, followed by, in order, Cristiano Ronaldo, a football player, Ariana Grande, a pop singer, Dwayne Johnson, a former wrestler and now movie star, and Kylie Jenner, a reality TV star. Your brand can sponsor the Friday Quiz for a whole month for less than $100. Visit todayindigital.com slash ads or tap the link in today's episode notes. So that's it. Long weekend coming up. I will not keep you any longer. Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital.

Starting point is 00:11:19 Production support and fact-checking by Sarah Guild. Theme composer Mark Levis is kicking in chairs and knocking down tables in a restaurant in a West End bar. Call the police, there's a madman around. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffitt. Have a restful long weekend, friends, and I will talk to you on Tuesday. Celebrating, getting ready for the weekend. Celebrating, getting ready for the weekend. Celebrating, getting ready for the weekend.

Starting point is 00:11:46 Celebrating, getting ready for the weekend.

Today in Digital Marketing - Go Home, Google. You're Drunk.

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