Today in Digital Marketing - LEAKED: TikTok’s Plans for E-Commerce

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

A new alliance between two huge marketing data providers…. Instagram engagement levels off…. Here we go with the hiding Likes again… and an easier way to update your Google business profile.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, a new alliance between two huge marketing data providers. Instagram engagement levels off. Here we go with hiding the likes again and an easier way to update your Google business profile. It's Wednesday, April 14th, 2021. Happy Cambodian New Year. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing and parents. We will be talking about AI making decisions for your ad campaigns, and I think you know what that means. Profanity ahead.

Big news for brands who want to sell things on TikTok. Business Insider got its hands on a leaked internal document showing TikTok is planning to launch a number of new e-commerce focused ad products. Here's what the internal pitch deck showed. One, collection ads. This is integrating your product catalog and linking them to branded videos. As you might expect, it looks pretty similar to YouTube's version of this. Two, dynamic product ads, which will automatically retarget users with products TikTok thinks will interest

them. Three, promo tiles. These are sales alerts that you can add to your in-feed ads, presumably letting you turn them on and off without having to change the actual video creative. That's kind of nice. And four, showcase tiles, which is more of an influencer play, letting creators put a link at the bottom of the video for products they're showing. Some of these are already live in the Chinese version of TikTok, which is super fun to say, Douyin. That app makes most of its revenue from the cut they take off in-app commerce. Ad revenue is actually a distant second. That said, TikTok's U.S. division reports its ads business has grown fivefold in the

last year alone. So with TikTok poised to become the next billion user platform, how do those ads perform anyway? The company recently commissioned Kantar to study that, and now we have that data. First, 72% of people used the word inspiring to describe the ads they saw on TikTok. That's the highest rank for that tone across competing platforms. Two, on average, ads on TikTok were considered to be 21% more trend-setting than on other platforms.

Let's not forget that some ad products, like the branded hashtag challenge, are specifically designed to set trends. Three, more than two-thirds of those polled said the ads they've seen got their focus and attention. That's 7% higher than other platforms. And finally, ads on TikTok had a 10% better ad receptivity on average compared to other platforms. Of course, this survey was paid for by TikTok, so, you know, grain of salt. They're not going to report any negatives that emerged, and there very well may be some. The survey polled more than 25,000 participants across 20 different countries between September of last year to January of this year.

A new data partnership may help brands understand which person in a household was exposed to a campaign and then went on to buy, rather than the more common data reported just by the household as a whole. Verizon Media has teamed up with Catalina for this, so now Catalina's sales data can be graphed to Verizon Media's identity database. This is actually the first demand-side platform to be integrated with a top consumer package good sales data provider.

A Verizon executive told media that it's been challenging for advertisers to connect media buys with in-store purchases since brands don't usually have both sides of that puzzle. And where does Catalina get its data from? Why, shopper loyalty cards, of course. More than 170 million of them. Quoting Streetfight Mag, ability to establish which person in a household was exposed to a campaign, leading to a deeper understanding of who the true high-value consumer is in every relationship. More bullshit from Google.

Oh, I'm sorry, I read that wrong. More AI making decisions for you. No, I take that back. More bullshit from Google. The company today announcing that it will begin applying its recommendations automatically to your ad campaigns. You've probably seen these recommendations in your ad platform before. Hey, you should probably increase your bid. Or, hey, you should expand your targeting to people you probably don't care about.

All snark aside, at least you have to opt in to have these automatically apply to your campaigns whenever Google's AI bot thinks they'll perform better. Also, to be fair, even if you do opt in, Google says their recommendations will never actually increase your budget. They'll also log what changes they've made in the history tab. Two months ago, we were the first to report on Microsoft's version of this, though their version is objectively worse, given that advertisers have to opt out if they don't want that. A couple of other small Google Ads stuff while we're here. First, they've launched a new Insights page within the Google Ads platform, and you can now edit information on your Google Business profile, like hours, category, and location, all directly on Google Search.

A few years ago, they added this to let you edit some things. Now you can edit more things like hours, category, products, photos, and location, all from Google search. If of course you're using search while logged in with the admin account of your Google My Business profile. To Instagram now, where a new study from Social Insider has found that engagement rates on Instagram have returned more or less to previous levels after a big spike last spring and summer. The study analyzed more than 100 million Instagram posts from about 63,000 businesses. The engagement rate per post, this is as measured by followers, by the way, for business accounts, when you look at all of 2020, averaged out at 2%.

Interestingly, during the middle of last year, videos ended up in the top spot for engagement. But late last year, the number one spot went back to carousels, which have traditionally been the top engaging format. Accounts with more than 10,000 followers, but fewer than 100,000 followers, recorded the highest average engagement on video posts. Premium Newsletter members today are getting a short video breaking down the full study. Speaking of Instagram, the company today announced it will start testing hiding like counts on users' posts again. Seems they do this every few months now, usually rolled out with a news release waxing eloquent about how much they care for their creators and bullying is bad

and we support our communities and blah, blah, blah. And then the test never goes anywhere except until a few months later when they do it all again. So here we are. They're doing it again with one important change. Rather than just hiding like counts, they're letting users decide if they want those counts hidden or not. Facebook, too, confirmed it's about to start testing the same thing on that platform.

Quoting TechCrunch, Originally, the idea with hiding like counts was about reducing the anxiety and embarrassment that surrounds posting content on the social network. That is, people would stress over whether their post would receive enough likes to be deemed popular. This problem was particularly difficult for Instagram's younger users who care much more about what their peers think, so much so that they would take down posts that didn't receive, quote, enough likes. But during tests, not everyone agreed the removal of likes was a change for the better. Some people said they still wanted to see like counts so they could track what was trending and popular.

The argument for keeping likes was more prevalent among the influencer community, where creators used the metric in order to communicate their value to partners like brands and advertisers. Here, lower engagement rates on those posts could translate to lower earnings for those creators. So, we're testing again. The test is global for a small handful of users. You can find out if your account is in that test group by looking in your settings for a new option to hide likes. You'll also be able to do it on a per post basis under the three dot menu. LinkedIn has added some unusual but long-awaited job titles to profiles.

Quoting the company, We've heard from our members, particularly women and mothers who have temporarily stopped working, that they need more ways to reflect career gaps on their profile due to parenting and other life responsibilities. To make it easier for moms and all parents, we're making some important changes to the profile. So a nice touch for users that want to cover gaps in their career timeline, which otherwise might have raised questions about what happened to those seemingly lost years. Also in the coming weeks, they'll be adding a new field specifically for employment gap types like parental leave, family care, or sabbatical so that people can better display their true professional journey.

Don't forget, you'll find a link to our perks program with exclusive discounts on marketing tools, training, and services at todayindigital.com slash perks. And if you'd like to extend an offer to our listeners, go to todayindigital.com slash promote. It's free to do that for now. Links to all of those are, of course, in our show notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

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