Today in Digital Marketing - How DTC Brands Are Handling the Cookiepocalypse

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, the new normal, how to compete in a world without data. Be protected. Be Zen. title tags. It's Wednesday, September 15th. Happy Independence Day, Costa Rica. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 468. We all knew it would be bad from the moment Apple announced they were going to ask each user of each app whether that app could track their online movement. We knew we'd lose a bunch of people. And we have. Recent numbers from Statista show 83% of users who saw that dialogue box opted out of tracking. It's been a few months now, and we're starting to see some analysis on how this has affected advertisers, in particular, the DTC brands. A great piece today in Marketing Dive details how a number of brands

Starting point is 00:01:26 are finding themselves affected and handling the changes. Quoting from the piece, Since Apple announced the details of the iOS 14.5 updates, Evan Maines' job as director of media buying at Adore Me has been a lot busier. According to data from Adore Me,

Starting point is 00:01:42 iOS's cost per thousand impressions following the update went up 19.5%, while Android's went up 17.4%. And though the anti-tracking measures seem to have affected iOS more, Android is still the pricier option. Having relied on platforms like Facebook and Instagram for a few years, Mainz realized that her team has had it relatively easy. Now she's working on building out her team, testing new channels like YouTube and Pinterest, trying new ad formats, and working with influencers. We're going back to the drawing board and re-evaluating everything she said.

Starting point is 00:02:19 I think that it's a new world and we're trying to figure out what works for us. Unquote. The full piece, definitely worth a read. It's at marketingdive.com. Look for the piece called, We're Going Back to the Drawing Board, DTC Brands Brace for More Anti-Tracking Headaches. To Reddit now, the company announcing some new updates to their ads platform. Those changes are, first, they now have a bid recommendation section that's meant to give you a little guidance on where to place your bids in order to reach your target audience.

Starting point is 00:02:51 As with these tools on other platforms, take these recommendations with a bit of a grain of salt. They're really more rough guides than precise predictive models. Second, improved bulk edit tool, which will let you update bids and budgets across multiple ad groups simultaneously. And three, they say they have doubled the speed of the dashboard's loading time. And socialmediatoday.com noticed at some point they quietly changed their long-standing positioning statement. It used to be the front page of the internet. It's now dive into anything. Reddit has been trying for the last couple of years to clean up its platform in terms of brand safety, removing many troublesome and offensive communities.

Starting point is 00:03:38 Facebook has pages, Pinterest has business profiles, and Twitter continues to work toward a special account categorization for businesses as well. It's called the professional profile. It's very similar to the way others work, a way to differentiate between the accounts of people and the accounts of brands. Once you flip your account over to the professional side, you get some new profile features like a call to action button and room for a product catalog. It's had been in testing for a while. Twitter this week announced it would be opening its doors a bit wider now to more businesses.

Starting point is 00:04:08 If you are in that wider test, you should get an email from Twitter inviting you to sign up. They're also expanding access to ticketed spaces. Those are monetized live audio rooms. Applications to get into that test open up this past June. They still have not fixed the lack of discovery for spaces, though. There's not really any way to find a listing of live spaces. It looks like they're working on that.

Starting point is 00:04:29 Some reverse engineering work shows they may be adding a button in the middle just for spaces. That's on their mobile app, of course. Incidentally, over at Clubhouse, where everyone got the idea for live audio rooms, today they announced they'd hired a veteran editor from National Public Radio to lead news publishing for the app. On his blog, Facebook ads veteran Andrew Foxwell today reports on some ad platform changes at Nextdoor, the local presence group site. Three new items there, quoting from his post at FoxwellDigital.com, quote, View-based conversions.

Starting point is 00:05:06 The Nextdoor pixel was new last time you likely heard us talk about it. Now it's more robust and includes a one-day view in its standard attribution window. Seven-day click, one-day view. This allows it to align with the standard attribution window from other platforms you're used to advertising on. Second, more robust audience reach metrics. While the core demographic audience on Nextdoor has always been a huge pro for me, audience size has always been somewhat of a worry for me and my clients. This new tool helps ensure that advertisers are reaching an audience size that makes sense for their budget. And three, custom audience uploads are set to launch in late Q3 and early Q4. This will allow advertisers to ensure they are reaching a pure prospecting audience

Starting point is 00:05:47 if they opt in to exclude a custom audience of past purchasers. It will also allow advertisers to push promo or holiday messaging to top purchasers using an inclusion list, unquote. Andrew says if you're interested in advertising on Nextdoor, the first step is to join the wait list at business.nextdoor.com slash enterprise

Starting point is 00:06:06 slash NAC. That's Neighborhood Ad Center. And if you drop Andrew's name during your onboarding call, again, his name is Andrew Foxwell, you will get $300 in ad credits. 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 00:06:46 Be protected. Be Zen. On Pinterest, big bold colorful images. On TikTok, informal fun content. And when some community managers have studied what works best on Facebook, they determined this. If they didn't go negative in tone, their content wouldn't be seen. This from a piece in the Wall Street Journal today, in which it published leaked internal Facebook reports, showing that the big 2018 decision to boost what Zuckerberg called meaningful social interactions actually had, quote, unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content such as politics and news, unquote. Indeed, one European political party made a deliberate change to go from 50% positive tone and 50% negative tone to 80% negative in order to capitalize on Facebook's apparent bias toward the negative sentiment. The journal reported that was one of

Starting point is 00:07:54 many parties to make the change. Facebook's response? Their engineering VP told the journal, quote, like any optimization, there's going to be some ways it gets exploited or taken advantage of, unquote. Another story by the Journal this week dove into different internal documents there. These were about the effects of Instagram surfing on young people. The paper said one slide from a confidential Facebook briefing read simply, quote, we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls, unquote. This was a subset apparently of teens who had already reported body image concerns. Another internal report found 40% of UK and US teens reported feeling unattractive when using Instagram,

Starting point is 00:08:37 and that of those teens who said they had suicidal thoughts, 6% of Americans and 13% of British teens said those impulses could be tracked back to the app. A while back, Instagram gave people the option to hide their like counts, something teens reported as sometimes causing them anxiety. The head of Instagram admitted to the media this past May it didn't really work. Quote, it didn't actually change nearly as much about how people felt or how much they used

Starting point is 00:09:07 the experience as we thought it would. To YouTube now, which is bringing more reporting to its mobile app. Numbers that used to only be available within its desktop-based

Starting point is 00:09:21 YouTube studio. Among the additions, revenue, so creators can check in using their phone to see how much money their videos are making. Also, some viewer acquisition data has been put on mobile as well. And I thought this was interesting. In the past, if your video was taken down by YouTube's enforcement bots and you think it shouldn't have been, you can now appeal by video. The company says they'll accept short videos from

Starting point is 00:09:44 creators explaining why they think the video should be put back up. This has actually been you can now appeal by video. The company says they'll accept short videos from creators explaining why they think the video should be put back up. This has actually been in beta for a while. It's now expanding to other languages as long as they turn on English subtitles. And finally, you may recall we've been following changes Google made to its search algorithm recently that more aggressively altered how title tags were shown in the search results.

Starting point is 00:10:08 SCRoundtable.com today reports those changes appear to have been dialed back a bit. Quote, Google may have begun to roll out some of those changes based on the feedback it has received. Some folks in the community who are tracking the titles closely are saying they are seeing some changes, some positive, unquote. The piece points to a handful of tweets with people anecdotally sharing that previous butcherings of their title tags appear to have been reverted and are looking more normal again. Shannon Van Tanner D. Thompson, our new annual members of the Premium Newsletter who joined Thank you all for renewing your monthly memberships this month and the hundred or so others

Starting point is 00:11:05 as well. The Premium Newsletter is a big email every day covering all the stories you hear in the podcast and more with related links, videos, images, even exclusive content. You can try it out for a week on us. Just go to todayindigital.com

Starting point is 00:11:21 slash newsletter or tap the link in our episode notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. On a day like today and you fly Ready or not Coming in like a hit and run

Today in Digital Marketing - How DTC Brands Are Handling the Cookiepocalypse

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