Today in Digital Marketing - Is Meta Monkeying With Your Attribution Windows?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 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.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot 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. It is Tuesday, October 24th. Today, media buyers concerned that Meta seems to be randomly changing their attribution settings. Also, are brands giving up on X? New research suggests it's worse than you think. Instagram is testing a special feed for local businesses and freelancers are becoming a much bigger part of marketing teams than ever before. I'm Todd Mathen. That's Ahead, Today in Digital Marketing. We start today with the continued problems with Meta's ads platform.

Starting point is 00:01:32 Many marketers over the weekend reported images being dropped from ads, which we covered yesterday. An issue that, as far as I can tell, still hasn't been addressed or even acknowledged by Meta. Today, we learned of another issue plaguing media buyers, some reporting their attribution settings were changed by Meta's systems without any warning or notification. And worse, some say they can't change it back. Attribution windows are timeframes

Starting point is 00:01:58 that help advertisers figure out which ads led to people buying their products or taking some other action. Some people use a tight window, like within one day of someone viewing an ad. Others, a longer window, like within seven days of someone clicking an ad. This setting is critical to reporting, and many marketers try to align that window across all their marketing work. Changing it suddenly can really mess with understanding how well a campaign is performing. We've reached out to Meta to see if they have any ideas of what's going on, and we'll

Starting point is 00:02:27 update if we hear back. Either way, these big bugs, along with lowered performance many media buyers are reporting, spell bad news going into Black Friday and the Q4 buying season. More signs pointing to a slow collapse of the social platform formerly known as Twitter. We've seen data showing it's historically big advertisers staying away. But that's advertising. What about just general activity like organic posts? The marketing news site Digiday.com has tracked brand and retailer use of Twitter for the past three years.

Starting point is 00:03:03 Their 2023 data just came out. Julia Tabiz is the managing editor. She joins me now from her office in Baltimore. Hello, Julia. Hi. So how bad is it? Are brands giving up on Twitter as a marketing platform? You know, honestly, it's worse than I expected. I'm not going to lie to you. What we found this year is that only about a third of brands are posting on X. That's a huge drop. Last year, 73% said that they were posting on then Twitter, which is a huge, huge drop. In addition to that, nearly three quarters of brands and retailers are saying that they are not investing at all

Starting point is 00:03:40 in creating original content for X. Last year, 24% weren't investing anything. So nearly three quarters were over three quarters were investing at least a little bit. So that's a complete flip flop between this year and last year, which I personally found quite surprising. That's pretty dramatic. With all the, you know, this tumultuous year that this platform has gone through, brands and retailers are feeling like it's just not brand appropriate for them anymore. 44% of brand and retailers told us this year that X isn't appropriate at all, or it's not very appropriate for their brands. Last year, only 10% said that. Certainly the velocity of the exodus has surprised

Starting point is 00:04:26 me. You know, one of the best examples of the best descriptions that I've heard someone say of X is that Twitter is gone. There is no more Twitter. It doesn't exist. What there is now is a brand new app, a brand new platform called X, which is not really a micro posting platform. It is an everything app that Elon Musk sees. And it also kind of happens to have this social component as well. And when marketers look at it from that way, as in the micro blogging site, Twitter doesn't exist anymore. You know, and I think your data also sort of implies this as well is that perhaps marketers need to look at this as well, what would you do with this everything app that is in its infancy? Right. And, you know, the answer is that they don't really know. And in a social media landscape that is just so broad now, you know, people don't really

Starting point is 00:05:14 have the time to figure out sometimes they, you know, are more likely to go to those social media platforms where they know that they're going to get their return on investment when it comes to marketing. And I think that for brands and retailers especially, that's true. Julia Tabiz is the managing editor at Digiday.com, a great resource for marketers, one which we rely on daily. She joined me from her office in Baltimore. 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 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.

Starting point is 00:06:00 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

Starting point is 00:06:37 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Well, after Elon Musk bought Twitter, many new platforms spun up. Blue Sky, Post.News, Threads, Spoutable, and Pebble, which was founded by a former Twitter executive. That one had a lot of hype behind it, not just for its solid connections to Silicon Valley, but also the speed at which it got launched. Perhaps though, moving fast broke too many things. Today, Pebble announced it would be shutting down, effective November 1st. Pebble was fairly full-featured. It had a verification system. It had DMs. What it didn't have was users. Only 3,000 daily active users on average, and that number dropped to only 1,000 after it rebranded from its original launch name of T2. The CEO said one factor which likely kneecapped its growth was they never launched a mobile app, losing out on discovery in the app stores. If you had an account on Pebble,

Starting point is 00:07:37 you can export your content as a zip file. You have until the end of the month. Some potential good news for local businesses. Instagram appears to be testing a new geographically focused feed called Nearby. The new feed was found in the app's code posted on social media this afternoon. It shows up along the stories shelf at the top of the app. There's not much known more beyond that, but presumably the idea is to surface stories from brands the top of the app. There's not much known more beyond that, but presumably the idea is to surface stories from brands and retailers near the user. It is not clear if it'll be restricted to showing businesses

Starting point is 00:08:12 or if you'll be able to also see stories from regular people in your block. The Chinese version of TikTok called Douyin has a feed like this, and TikTok has also been seen testing a nearby feed. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, which could be where TikTok is looking to go next with its in-app commerce push. In-stream commerce has been the key revenue driver for Doyen, but thus far, Western users haven't shown the same level of interest in buying products in the app. But maybe if it could get people, say, ordering food, that could be a key step toward facilitating transactions, in that if it can get people spending on one element, that makes it a lot easier to expand on that process with even more shopping options.

Starting point is 00:08:54 Instagram has not commented in the marketing space. That's the main conclusion of a study of marketing executives, more than half of which now say they have more freelancers on their teams than ever. The study was paid for by Fiverr, which is a freelancer marketplace, so take that as you will. They say a clash between employees wanting to work from home and employers wanting them in the office is what's really behind this spike. And layoffs, mostly in marketing management, has helped shift more toward freelancing. One other interesting data point affecting this? Sex. Well, one product of sex anyway. The birth rate in the U.S. has been in decline for decades, meaning fewer people entering the workforce. Quoting from Martech.org, despite this,

Starting point is 00:09:53 many large corporations are now trying to force employees who've been working from home to return to the office. Nearly all marketing leaders surveyed have return to office policies in place. Eighty five percent of them believe in the return to office policy they're enforcing. And 62% say employee response to the policy has been positive. But nearly two thirds of marketing professionals have looked at freelance opportunities because of their employers return to office policy, unquote. My wife and I are having a dispute over our cat for more than a year now. My wife, who also works at home, she works in the public health sector.

Starting point is 00:10:38 She's got on the window. Have you seen these things? They're like little cat shelves. You attach it to the window and then the cat jumps up and sits beside her looking out the window. Well, yesterday I set up a table beside my desk and put a cozy little cat bed on it and coaxed our cat onto it. And now it's a fight. Now it's a battle for the ages. Who does the cat love more? Me or the wife? And I will say that I am a cat person. My wife is a dog person. We have one of each. So I'm kind of hoping the cat realizes that I'm on team feline. We'll see.

Starting point is 00:11:10 I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. 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 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,

Starting point is 00:11:31 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 dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - Is Meta Monkeying With Your Attribution Windows?

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