Today in Digital Marketing - Hi Again. Maybe You Haven’t Received My Email?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, it's not just Facebook that's going to suffer from Apple's looming change to ad tracking. Yet another huge acquisition in the podcast space, this time by an unlikely buyer. How well did the user-generated TikTok musical do? And if Shopify is in second place for the biggest e-commerce platform with only 3% market share, who's number one? And how do they have 40% market share? It's Tuesday, January 5th, 2021. Happy National Bird Day. Who's number one? And how do they have 40% market share? It's Tuesday, January 5th, 2021. Happy National Bird Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:38 We're getting some more analysis now on the effect of Apple's forthcoming changes, changes that Facebook claims will decimate the effectiveness of its audience network. Well, it won't just be Facebook. According to new research from MKM Partners, that group says Snapchat, too, is at high risk of being affected. To back up a little, Apple will soon be adding a pop-up box on its devices when you open apps that collect data on that app's users. The box will offer to disable ad tracking, and most industry folks believe the general public will get spooked and say, yeah, disable tracking, please. That sounds awful. And no tracking means, well, no tracking, no ability for usparty data access, and relative revenue contribution from various types of ads, Facebook and Snapchat are likely to see the biggest impact from users opting out via these new prompts. MKM says that Twitter and Pinterest will also see impacts, though to a lesser degree, with Google and Amazon at the bottom tier of exposure among the big tech players. MKM also notes that many other ad providers outside of the large players will also see reduced effectiveness as a result of the change. According to CNBC, Bank of America

Starting point is 00:01:57 analysts have also predicted that Facebook and Snapchat will be hurt the most, potentially seeing a 3-5% revenue headwind as a result of the update. How will this change your approach to Facebook advertising? It's impossible to say until we see how many people opt out. But the debate alone will likely see more businesses shift to first-party data tracking approaches in order to negate any reduction in ad targeting capacity as a result of the new warnings. This is a huge story in our space, of course, so I will keep letting you know about any new developments. So far, Apple has not given an exact date for this to kick in other than to say sometime this year.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Another day, another big acquisition in the podcast space. The podcast app Breaker has been bought by, no, not Amazon, not Spotify, but Twitter. And as Twitter is fond to do when it acquires things, it will be shutting the app down in just 10 days. I don't think many people are quite clear about where Twitter's head is around this. I'm sure I'm definitely I'm not sure where it is. They've never really signaled an interest in podcasts before, and their forays into audio, as reported here, have been, well, a little weird. They're currently testing something called Spaces,

Starting point is 00:03:11 which is a kind of invitation-only audio conversation room, but haven't ever really signaled an interest in podcasts, per se, and it's still possible they're not really interested in podcasts at all. This wasn't Aquahire, after all. They wanted the people, not the app. And those people, in a blog post, said they'll be helping Twitter build, quote, beyond the scope of traditional podcasts, unquote. Whatever that means.

Starting point is 00:03:37 The Breaker app will be shutting down a week from Friday. Speaking of podcasts, you know, as a digital marketer, that an important part of the whole sales cycle is up sales. There are plugins for e-commerce sites. There are separate apps. There are entire platforms dedicated to upsells. For podcasts, that upsell is usually for merch, t-shirts, mouse pads, that kind of thing. You might be surprised to know that podcast merch is turning out to be a huge business. The podcast network Stitcher, for instance, has a job called head of merchandising. And that person, Marissa Morales, told the Wall Street Journal this week that their

Starting point is 00:04:15 merch sales are doubling every year. Quoting the journal, this fervent merchandise market has no parallel in traditional media. Newspapers and periodicals still sweeten subscription deals with giveaways. Many of us have New Yorker tote bags languishing in our closets. But podcast merchandise operates as a standalone phenomenon that sees listeners plop down 30 bucks just for a t-shirt or 60 for a hoodie. As Ms. Morales said, merch appeals because it makes a listener's connection to a podcast tangible. Unquote. So, guess I'll be making some new mouse pads soon.

Starting point is 00:04:54 Over the past holiday, TikTok hosted an interesting experiment of sorts in the marketing of a performance. The show was called Ratatouille the TikTok Musical. You may have even seen people talking about it on tiktok for the last couple of weeks it's been a pretty popular topic on there and you might think wait wait ratatouille like the disney show that's not a musical and you would be right what these performers did was create their own songs for it and then outsourced pretty much the entire show using hundreds of short videos sent in by fans. And they added some Broadway performers, actual stage directors, and released it on New Year's Day.

Starting point is 00:05:31 They sold tickets to it, and in just four days, the show generated over a million dollars, all proceeds going to the Actors Fund that helps support performers and professionals in the performing arts. Quick, what is the top e-commerce platform? Shopify? Magento? BigCommerce? No, no, and no. Turns out the top platform is WordPress. Well, sort of. A WordPress plugin called WooCommerce,

Starting point is 00:06:03 which is a pretty full-featured e-commerce platform in its own right. WooCommerce exists on just shy of 5% of websites in the world. Not 5% of WordPress sites, all sites. Yes, one out of 20 sites on the internet are running WooCommerce. It is the single most popular WordPress plugin on the internet. WordPress itself is huge, of course, and getting bigger. New data released this week from W3Techs shows WordPress is now running nearly 40% of all websites in 2021. Last year, that share was 35%. And when you only look at sites that use a content management system, WordPress's market share is 64%. By comparison, Shopify is second for CMS share, but has only a 3% market share. And one small item to wrap up.

Starting point is 00:07:03 Insights from Google My Business are missing data again. This is your data on how much web traffic and calls you got from Google Maps. It is December 27th and December 28th that is missing. So do you guys ever get these emails? They're like from some kind of a, and I'm sure there are a million platforms that do this. It's that terrible email sequencing thing where first you get an email. It's spam spam of course it's from some provider saying oh we do writing or we can give you backlinks right and then you ignore it because it's spam and you don't care and then you get another one the next day

Starting point is 00:07:34 from the person saying i hope you've had a chance to read my email and then two days later i know you're really busy but i mean this whole sequencing thing drives me up the wall today i figured out a way to combat it kind of I've been using for the last couple of years an email plugin called Mixmax, and it has that functionality in it. It's called sequencing. I don't use it, of course, for, you know, lead generation because that's a shitty way to make leads. But I thought today, you know, since it can generate sequences of never-ending emails every day, I wonder what would happen if I turned one of these sequences on on someone who has sent me one of these things.

Starting point is 00:08:15 Well, Operation Stick It Back to Them has started. I have 38 messages lined up, one every day, that will just keep going the next time one of these jackasses send me a stupid email sequencing. I like them apples. All right, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. Outro Music

Today in Digital Marketing - Hi Again. Maybe You Haven’t Received My Email?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.