Today in Digital Marketing - Our Bad, Comrade 🇨🇳

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, the numbers are in and agencies are sticking with meta, for now. Plus, a tiny bit of light leaks through on Performance Max ads. Google finally brings GA4 into Search Console Insights. Three steps to fix bad conversion on your podcast ads. And TikTok's big, embarrassing mea culpa. It's Tuesday, July 6th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. A new survey of marketing agency executives published today by Digiday Research shows that while Instagram has lost some brand trust and Facebook some organic content,

Starting point is 00:00:40 agencies are still clinging to hope that these platforms will come through for their clients. However, of those who find Instagram valuable for building their clients' brands, that number fell from 87% last year to just 75% this year. Facebook actually ticked up in that metric, though barely to 79%. For now, that's enough to put it at the top of the pack in terms of confidence in brand building. But even with that light vote of confidence, organic posting on Facebook continued to decline. Of the 100 or so agencies that were polled, last year, 86% said they posted on Facebook for their clients. This year, that's down to 81% of Instagram a chance to squeak past and secure the top spot with 84% of agencies reporting that they're posting organically there for their clients.

Starting point is 00:01:32 So why Instagram? And why now? Quoting Digiday, one potential answer is that Instagram has emerged as the most valuable platform for driving revenue for agencies' clients. Of the 51 agency execs who told Digiday they post on social media on behalf of their clients, 65% said Instagram is valuable or extremely valuable to driving revenue. Meanwhile, Facebook and YouTube rounded out the top three among survey respondents at 62% and 58% respectively. What platforms audiences, especially young ones, actually engage with can depend on who you ask, and bringing the role of creators into the conversation can take it in a whole different direction. But when it comes to whether Instagram or Facebook ends up on top among agency execs representing their clients, it is clear that parent company Meta maintains its stronghold among social media platforms.

Starting point is 00:02:28 All right, a whack of news for you media buying types out there. We start with Meta's platform. You may not have ever used them or even known they were a thing. They were known as callouts, little bits of information you could throw under your Facebook or Instagram ad, like a link to your store location. Now, a helpful upgrade has arrived. First, they've simplified the name, renaming them to Meta Advantage Plus Callout Link Placement Toolset Parameter Options. Nah, I'm just kidding, they're called Info Labels now, and they actually look pretty cool. You can use labels that pull

Starting point is 00:03:03 information from all sorts of places, like your hours, how many Instagram followers you have, your messenger response time, and so on. What's not there, though, is any reporting ability on which labels perform better. Also, lest you think this means you can pick and choose the specific info labels you want to appear, no, Meta's drunken infatuation with AI bots making campaign decisions continues. You can, in theory, turn on as many as you like, but then the ad platform will decide on its own which of those will show on your ad based on potential performance lift. So in a way, since you can't directly control which ones will, in fact, consistently appear, you might consider this a way to opt out of labels you

Starting point is 00:03:45 specifically do not want, like your store's price range. In theory, unchecking that box should, and this is meta we're talking about here, so emphasis on should, prevent that label from being auto-applied. Either way, though, solid update. Microsoft today announced two updates to their shopping campaigns. First, automatic item updates. This will crawl your site to gather price and availability data for product offers that you upload through the Merchant Center. You might wonder why they'd even have to do this since you provided that data through the feed. But there's often mismatches of this data. The feed might not be as updated as frequently at your end or something.

Starting point is 00:04:27 So if there's a discrepancy between your feed and your site, this should catch it and update your product info. If you'd rather not have them do this, you can opt out in the Merchant Center UI by navigating to the Automatic Updates tab under Settings. And second, automated coupons. These are special offer tags that appear at the bottom of your product ad. And like the previous bot, these will come from crawling your site and looking for matching promotions there. They say they'll check back

Starting point is 00:04:56 every 12 hours to make sure that tag isn't there when your sale isn't on. Incidentally, these will only apply to store-wide promotions and not to individual products. And there were a few other announcements around their Clarity product, more UET tags coming. A reminder that your old-school text ads are being replaced by dynamic ads, much like Google is doing, and an expansion of shopping campaigns to seven Asia-Pacific countries. You can read their full blog post at about.ads.microsoft.com slash blog. A couple of important Google updates also dropped today, including the slow return of data on Performance Max campaigns. That campaign type is mostly a hands-off AI-driven product that's

Starting point is 00:05:41 been criticized for not having enough data on what's working or not working. Now, Google has added Diagnostic Insights. While this won't solve the black box problem, at least we'll be able to see if there are any delays or issues causing low engagement or disapproved ads. Specifically, it will cover status, billing, policies, conversion tracking, budget, strategy targets, and ad strength. You'll also be able to view recommendations via the progress bar. This is only on PMAX for now, but they say they'll be bringing it to other campaign types over the coming months. And Search Console Insights should now show Google Analytics 4 data. This is something they've been testing since last year and is obviously a big deal, as GA4 is the new and improved analytics

Starting point is 00:06:25 that Google wants everyone on. The old school UA, sometimes called UA3, is being turned off next year. So obviously this is important to get working. You may need to associate your GA4 data with insights. But if you go to your search console insights, there should be a little prompt to help you through it. I did it. It's not hard. It takes about 30 seconds. The number of times podcast listeners hear an ad campaign is soaring. That's the key finding from attribution measurement firm PodSites, which found that the average podcast ad frequency has doubled in the past year alone. In the last three months of 2021, podcast frequency averaged just under three. Three months later, that number was well past six.

Starting point is 00:07:11 Frequency, of course, the metric indicating how many times an average listener would be exposed to an ad. PodSite's data came from 3,000 podcasts from 870 brands. They claim this amounts to about a third of all podcast ad spend. And there's a bigger problem. This high frequency is thought to be one of the main reasons behind steadily declining conversions. In this case, conversion being a visit to the advertiser's

Starting point is 00:07:36 website. Last quarter, conversions were at a record low of 1.1%. In the same quarter the previous year, that number was over 1.7%, a 36% decrease. Pierre Bouvard is the Chief Insights Officer at Cumulus Media Westwood One. He wrote a fantastic breakdown of this study on the Westwood One blog today, and he joins me now. So, Pierre, how can marketers who want to run podcast ads fix this issue of reduced conversions? The good news is there's tons of reach available in podcasting, so it's not a hard fix. It's not very difficult. There's basically three recommendations. Number one is buy more than the obvious fit show.

Starting point is 00:08:23 So, in other words, you're a mental health app and you say, oh, we'll run in mental health podcasts or I'm a sports betting app and I'm just running sports shows. When you look at the Scarborough or the MRI data, it'll tell you there's purchasers spread out throughout the podcast ecosystem. And so don't go way beyond that obvious show or genre,

Starting point is 00:08:46 and you'll find a lot more category purchasers. All right. That was the first of your recommendations in the blog post. What were the other two? Sure. So when you're studying the data sets, which give you the qualitative, in other words, what people buy and where they shop, MRI and Scarborough give you two numbers, a reach number of purchasers and then an index. Can you go back and tell us what MRI and Scarborough are? Sure. So MRI is the most commonly used media planning platform. So if you're a media planner, you're using it to find purchasers across TV, radio, magazines, podcasts, etc. So it'll tell you for this certain product category like auto intenders, what podcasts should I be buying? And it'll give you a person's number,

Starting point is 00:09:35 like here's how many auto shoppers there are, but also an index. And we in the media business tend to get infatuated with indexes. And so we tend to gravitate to podcasts or genres that have a high index. But often the higher the index, the lower the audience. So you end up kind of chasing a high index and you get a very small audience. So our recommendation is follow the people, follow the customers, not the index, and add your reach that way. And then the third and final recommendation is just by further down the ranker. So Edison Research, which is one of the podcast audience measurement services, will tell you that two-thirds of all podcast listeners are found outside the top 10. So if you just keep buying the top shows,

Starting point is 00:10:26 you end up talking to the same people over and over. So take the same impressions and just go buy further down the ranker. Westwood One, of course, well-known by many people in the US who buy audio media in particular. Some people may not be aware of Westwood One. What do you folks do? We are the exclusive audio partner of the NFL, the NCAA. We have a lot of audio content on

Starting point is 00:10:50 terrestrial over-the-air radio. We also have the Cumulus Podcast Network, which is a top 10 podcast network. We also have streaming. And what we try to do with our blog, which you noted, is address issues that folks in the audio ecosystem in general face. And this is one issue that PodSites, who's this attribution company, has really been sounding the alarm on. Pierre, fascinating insights. Thank you for joining me on such short notice today. Thank you for having me. You can read Pierre's piece at westwoodone.com slash blog. That's spelling out the number one,

Starting point is 00:11:24 O-N-E. Look for the article called Three Solutions to the Podcast Ad Frequency Problem. Remind the many, don't lecture the few. 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.

Starting point is 00:11:53 Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Amazon has started turning its store data into revenue. Stores, you say? Yes, Amazon has started turning its store data into revenue. Stores, you say? Yes, Amazon has stores, mostly small grocery stores that use cameras and smart carts to charge people for food when they walk out the door with the products. This new offering, which they call Store Analytics, will offer food brands insights about the performance of their products, promotions, and ad campaigns. Those insights, of course, will be aggregated and anonymized. So sadly, you won't get a list of the email addresses of people who bought your microwave

Starting point is 00:12:31 popcorn, but you will see how you rank in terms of consumer preference against your direct competitors. And if you're running in-store campaigns like digital signage, you'll see associated performance metrics in your ad campaign reports. Quoting Amazon, we do not share anything that can be linked back to any individual shopper, rather only offer totals, averages, and percentages about product promotion and ad campaign performance. For example, the percentage of how often their product was taken off the shelf and then purchased either during that store visit or later on Amazon.com, unquote.

Starting point is 00:13:05 If, with your consumer hat on, this still creeps you out, Amazon says you will be able to opt out, this service will contain data from Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores in the U.S. starting today. Hey, remember when everyone was like, holy crap, guys, TikTok's sending all its users' data to the commies. And TikTok was like, come on, we wouldn't do that. None of our data goes to China. So, funny story. Turns out, they have been sending user data to China after all. And the organization that revealed this lapse? TikTok itself. The company's head of public policy in the Americas

Starting point is 00:13:46 admitted in a blog post late yesterday that, yeah, some user data may have been transferred to China after all. Quoting him in that post, we have policies and procedures that limit internal access to user data by our employees wherever they're based, based on need. Like many global Thank you. That access is subject to a series of robust controls, safeguards like encryption for certain data, and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based leadership and security team, unquote. He's not wrong, of course. That's life in a distributed workforce for a global company. But the concession comes after TikTok several times insisted there was an impenetrable wall between the data centers and that no user data

Starting point is 00:14:45 from outside China would ever make it to China. Back when then-U.S. President Donald Trump was threatening to outright ban the app, TikTok executives said, for all intents and purposes, ByteDance was A, headquartered in the Cayman Islands, and B, nothing to see here, folks. Last week, a member of the American Communications Regulator tweeted, TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or memes. That's the sheep's clothing. At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool

Starting point is 00:15:18 that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data. So in November, my wife and I are going on a cruise out of the U.S. We're based in Canada. And I've been on the phone with so many insurance people in the last couple of days. All I want to know is if all these flight problems that we seem to be having right now extend into November, we fly through Pearson in Toronto, which is a mess right now, and Air Canada moves our flight and we miss our cruise. And we can't get on

Starting point is 00:15:50 the cruise again because it only has like one or two ports. Will you reimburse our cost of the cruise? Four hours and counting on the phone with all these various people. I have yet to get a straight answer. Is it that hard? Apparently it is. See you tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:16:06 Come fly away with me Fly away Fly away Oh But the concession comes after TikTok several times insisted there was an impenetrable Insisted there was an impenetrable

Starting point is 00:16:24 Insisted there was an impenetrable Insisted there was an impenetrable. Insisted there was an impenetrable. Insisted there was an impenetrable. Insisted there was an impenetrable. Fuck's sake.

Today in Digital Marketing - Our Bad, Comrade 🇨🇳

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