Today in Digital Marketing - Goodbye, “Cost Per Click.”

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Reels are getting an upgrade, Meet Zuckerberg's new second-in-command, Google announces a new automatic update for advertisers, does Twitter's new algorithm give brands an advantage, and Amazon's new invitation-only ordering option. It's Thursday, June 2nd. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And a brief programming note before we get started. My neighbor has decided that now is the perfect time to start using his leaf blower.

Starting point is 00:00:29 So if you hear weird noises, you will know what it is. But we start with Mark Zuckerberg's continued attack on TikTok. Today, Meta announced several new features for Reels on both Facebook and Instagram. Some new tools for Instagram's version of Reels includes a bump up to 90 seconds in length. It used to be 60 seconds there. Some templates, which will let you create Reels using the same structure as the one that you just watched.

Starting point is 00:00:54 It's kind of cool. You'll also be able to import your own audio, like a commentary or a background sound from any video at least five seconds long that is stored on your phone's camera roll. Instagram will also add stories, stickers like polls, quiz, emoji slider stickers to Reels and so on to drive engagement. Over on Facebook's version of Reels, they have something they're calling Clip to Reels, which will let you create clips from published long-form videos and then

Starting point is 00:01:22 edit them into a Reel through Creator Studio, while a new feature for video game creators enables you to cut live clips down to a vertical-friendly 60-second format with dual views. Also, Sound Sync, similar to syncing features on other platforms, the update will let you automatically sync video clips to songs. And finally, you can now edit, publish, and schedule reels from your browser on desktop using Meta's Creative Studio. Or Creator Hub. Business Suite. Creator Suite.

Starting point is 00:01:53 Creator Studio. Is it Business Suite? Creative Suite. Creative Hub. Or Creator Studio. Nobody knows. Yesterday, we reported that Mark Zuckerberg's longtime lieutenant, Sheryl Sandberg, is leaving the company.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Now we know her replacement. Javier Olivan has actually been at Meta since 2007. Dan McCormick is with the venture capital firm Not Boring. He spoke with me earlier today. So not much of a shorter stint than Sheryl Sandberg. He joined as originally the head of international growth for Facebook, presumably at a time actually serving under Chamath on what was kind of one of the earliest great growth teams for tech companies back in kind of the early Facebook days. Over the last 15 years, he's held a variety of different growth roles within Meta, most recently serving as chief growth officer responsible for the four main Meta apps,

Starting point is 00:02:52 Instagram, Facebook Blue, WhatsApp, and Messenger. So he's already had a really important role. But what I think this promotion does is consolidate a lot of the power that he has within those apps with the operations and business side of Meta. And I think it is reflective of Meta's wanting to refocus their investments and their resources on making sure that revenue continues to grow over the rates that we've seen over the past couple of years, but has started to slow in the face of Apple's ATT policy, TikTok's kind of rampant growth, both from a engagement and revenue perspective, and just the general kind of churning of the original customer base that Meta had seen over the last couple of years. You mentioned in a sort of a tweet thread yesterday that you thought that

Starting point is 00:03:42 people who are digital marketers and advertisers on the Meta platform should take particular note of this promotion. And you thought it was actually good news. Where do you think his priorities are going to be in the ad platform space? I think his priorities are going to be in three places. So one is reigniting revenue growth within Meta. Meta grew revenue 7% year over year in this most recent quarter. That's much lower than the growth rates we're accustomed to seeing out of Meta. I think they do that in three ways. The first one is figuring out ways to circumvent Apple's AT&T privacy tracking policies. And the way they do that is by throwing a ton of AI and data science resources at the problem.

Starting point is 00:04:26 While I don't think targeting will ever be what it was kind of in the heyday of Facebook advertising, I do think this is a challenge that they can overcome with the right amount of investment and resources. And I think Javier is known for being super metric, super data driven, and he is going to figure this out. The second is taking on TikTok. Reels is the fastest-growing piece of Meta's business, and they see that within TikTok, who is less affected by Apple's AT&T policies,

Starting point is 00:04:56 the targeting concerns are less impactful. So they're going to be looking to take down TikTok both from an engagement perspective but also from a monetization perspective. The third thing is commerce. So how can they tighten the funnel from ad impression to conversion? Right now, there's about five to six steps that a user on Instagram is taking to go from ad all the way to conversion on a Shopify website, let's say. And if they can just tighten that with either shops or a tighter integration within their partners, I think that is going to improve their efficiency or improve marketers efficiencies that they're seeing on the platform. Dan McCormack is with the venture capital firm named Not Boring.

Starting point is 00:05:40 They also publish a popular Substack newsletter under the same name, which you can find at notboring.co. And they have a podcast that focuses on tech strategy and finance, also called Not Boring. Incidentally, Meta today announced a reorganization of its AI efforts that seems to move AI out of research silos and integrate it more with product teams. Soon, Google shopping advertisers will notice a new automatic update in Merchant Center. Later this month, Google will roll out a change to the condition attribute for shopping ads. A condition attribute tells potential shoppers about the condition of the product. There are currently three attributes, new, used, and refurbished. Quoting Google, beginning June 26th, all accounts will be automatically opted in to use automatic item updates for condition. If you choose to not use the feature, you can opt out in Merchant Center

Starting point is 00:06:37 through the automatic improvement setting under item updates. Google warned, however, that if you opt out, your products may be disapproved if they use an incorrect condition value. If you're a retailer, it's probably a good idea to monitor your Merchant Center feed when the change happens to make sure your products have been updated correctly. Just a day after the news that Twitter is shifting focus away from spaces, newsletters, and communities. Today, the platform said, JK, JK, we are actually testing an update to Twitter communities. In this test, the timeline in Twitter communities is algorithm-driven, similar to the platform's

Starting point is 00:07:16 timeline. The algorithmic feed will be called For You, hello TikTok, while the chronological feed will be Latest. As with the home feed, Twitter noted that feed will be latest. As with the home feed, Twitter noted that users will be able to switch between these two options and whatever option you select for a community will become the default. What this means for marketers is that as content in communities can now be pushed up by engagement, presumably engagement is what's driving the algo, brands will have an advantage if they want their content to be seen by more people because they could try to spark that engagement, something that wasn't really possible if it was simply a reverse chronological feed.

Starting point is 00:07:52 The company says it will be testing this option with communities on iOS, Android, and the web. Twitter also appears to be working on a feature called Search Subscribe, which lets users opt in to subscribe to search results. So basically, kind of like Google Alerts for Twitter, which could be a handy tool for marketers that want to receive notifications about who is tweeting topics related to your brand or even your competition. 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

Starting point is 00:08:26 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.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. Amazon says it is taking on

Starting point is 00:09:20 scalpers and bots with a new ordering system. The e-commerce giant is launching a new invitation-only ordering system that aims to help legitimate shoppers get their hands on in-demand products. According to Amazon, the option is designed to help prevent inventory shortages and price gouging caused by robot traffic for high-demand items with limited quantities. Amazon will offer the new program, starting with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X game consoles sold and fulfilled by Amazon in the U.S. Customers will be able to request an invitation to purchase high-demand items from the product detail page at no additional cost. Any customer with an Amazon account is eligible to request an invitation.

Starting point is 00:10:01 In order to verify an account's authenticity, Amazon checks things like the account creation date, account purchases, and so on. Not a bad idea for brands that want to ensure their popular products are going to customers instead of to third-party marketplace sellers that will gouge the price. Amazon told TechCrunch today that it plans on extending the system to other products and countries. Apple is trying to change the PPC community to a PPT community. Apple search advertisers will soon see a new campaign pricing type, CPT, or cost per tap.

Starting point is 00:10:44 It is mostly a language change, though, of course, it's calculated like every other CPC metric, dividing your total spend by the number of taps your ad received. And if you're thinking, wait a minute, Apple search, did they announce that search engine? No, we're talking in this case, Apple search ads are on their app store. Yeah, so similar to manual CPC ads, you choose a maximum amount you're willing to pay each time someone clicks or taps and you're charged based on what your nearest competitor is willing to pay for a tap on their ad. The current CPM model, of course, charges your account for every thousand impressions your ad receives. With CPT pricing, you will only pay when a customer taps your ad. According to an email sent to advertisers, for now, CPM will continue to be offered, and soon advertisers will be able to start booking CPT campaigns. These campaigns will remain on hold and CPM campaigns will continue to run until the transition to CPT is complete.

Starting point is 00:11:34 Then on the transition date, CPT campaigns will start running. CPM campaigns will go on hold. And that's really all the information we have as Apple did not release a date for launching CPT campaigns. Sometimes one of the tasks of a marketing person at a company is to propose partnerships between their brand and another. This offers the opportunity of joint advertising campaigns like Coca-Cola and McDonald's, or cause-based alliances like Target and UNICEF, or even bundling products together like the streaming deals that include joint Hulu and Spotify subscriptions. But finding those partners isn't always easy,

Starting point is 00:12:16 and determining whether your customers would be thrilled with an alliance or offended by it, of course, should be top of mind. What if there were a measure of brand partnership potential, a score that would tell you which other organizations would make for great alliances? That's what Pankuri Malhotra set out to invent. She and her co-author have published a paper in the Journal of Marketing called Leveraging Co-Follership Patterns on Social Media to Identify Brand Alliance Opportun opportunities. I spoke with her earlier this week. We found these like clusters of brands in these networks. So we are finding clusters of brands like Tesla connected to technology brand. We were finding brands like Nike connected to NFL

Starting point is 00:12:56 and NBA. I mean, based on what people were like, based on how people were engaging with them. Yeah, connected how? What do you mean? Like this was grouping hashtags together? How did you link these companies with topics? Followership activity. So if I am following Tesla and Budweiser together, there will be a link between the two. I see. Yeah. And what we did was we looked into like the entire brand audience of all these brands.

Starting point is 00:13:24 So like Google, they have like 20 million followers. NFL, they have like 25 million followers. So what we did was we looked into these common followership pattern. So it's not just one person who's co-following these two brands together. These are like millions of folks. So there was this range in the co-interest patterns between certain groups of brands. And I think that range was very, very interesting to us because in some way it was telling us that, hey, there's a potential brand alliance opportunity that the managers may not be aware of. I see. So the practical application of this is a way to identify potential partnerships between brands based on them having similar Twitter followings.

Starting point is 00:14:06 Do I have that right? Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So that's the objective. The full interview is coming in the weeks ahead exclusively to the Premium Podcast, which you can sign up to by tapping the link in the show notes or just go to todayindigital.com slash premium feed.

Starting point is 00:14:22 Also on its way, a new scientific study finds that profanity in product and service reviews left by customers can actually help your brand. And this weekend, a deep dive into Twitter's ad platform. I speak with a senior engineer there, and we walk through each and every ad product they sell and get the dirt on how much they cost. Again, these weekend editions are only on the premium podcast feed. That feed also contains this daily show, but with no ads and a whole bunch more. Again, tap the link in the show notes for more on that. A few small items to report before I leave you for the day. Yesterday, WordPress announced that its popular Jetpack plugin

Starting point is 00:15:02 is now available as six individual plugins. Users can choose which features they want without having to install the whole suite of products. Four of the new products are free. Jetpack Protect, Boost, Social, and CRM, while Jetpack Backup and Jetpack Search require a paid plan. Second, Canadian

Starting point is 00:15:19 privacy regulators have concluded that the popular restaurant Tim Horton's mobile app violated privacy laws in the collection of vast amounts of personal location data. According to the information, the app was tracking and recording users' movements every few minutes of every day. And while the app asked for permission to access a mobile device's geolocation data, the Ontario Principals' Council stated that it, quote, misled many users to believe it The OPC reports that the app used location data to determine where users lived, where they worked, if they were traveling. It also generated an event every time users entered or left a Tim Hortons competitor

Starting point is 00:16:11 or a major sports venue or their home or workplace. And finally, here is another reminder for Google advertisers that expanded text ads are getting killed off at the end of this month. Google will no longer allow users to create or edit expanded text ads as of June 30th. Starting July 1st, responsive search ads will be the only ad type available for search campaigns. Yes, I said lieutenant. That's how we say lieutenant here in Canada. Tomorrow on the show, the perfect landing page.

Starting point is 00:16:55 Each and every element from the form to the headline to what color the button should be. See you tomorrow. Live it up. Live it up. Live it up. Live it up. Live it up. Live it up. Live it up. Live it up.

Starting point is 00:17:10 You've got to. You've got to live it up.

Today in Digital Marketing - Goodbye, “Cost Per Click.”

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