Today in Digital Marketing - Reddit and Snapchat sitting in a tree — C-O-P-Y-I-N-G

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Tuesday, October 15th, 2019. Happy Handwashing Day, India. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, some really nice new Google Ad formats just in time for the holidays. Pinterest's new Feed Customization feature may spell increased engagement for brands. Spotify has a great idea that taps into their API to make T-shirts? And Reddit and Snapchat sitting in a tree. C-O-P-Y-I-N-G.

Starting point is 00:00:27 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Listen up if you run Google Ads for your brand or clients. They are adding two new ways to reach targets. First, affinity audiences. This is similar to, but perhaps a little bit wider than, interest targeting on Facebook. Quoting Google here, let's say you sell camping gear. To reach avid campers,

Starting point is 00:00:51 you compare an affinity audience like outdoor enthusiast with generic camping keywords. By adding this additional audience layer, you can reach people who are not only searching for camping products, but are also passionate about the great outdoors, unquote. We use this here at my agency, EngageQ, on Facebook all the time. We call that additional layer a restrictor. And yeah, it works really well. Google says Volkswagen got a 250% conversion rate lift using it.

Starting point is 00:01:15 And they're also adding new seasonal event segments for in-market audiences on Search and YouTube, again quoting Google. For example, Toyota used the Black Friday and Christmas segments to focus on shoppers actively looking for their next car. By using these segments, the brand saw a 67% increase in conversion rate and a 34% reduction in cost per conversion. You will be able to use these new targeting options once they roll out in the ads backend in the next week or two. Pinterest is giving its users more control over what they see on their homepage. It's called the Home Feed Tuner and reveals the boards, topics, accounts, and recent activity that are the factors

Starting point is 00:01:56 in what people see in their feed. So what does this mean for you, digital marketing friend? Quoting Marketing Land, giving users more control over content recommendations could lead to higher engagement for brands on the platform. If users are able to adjust the signals that impact their home feed recommendations, Pinterest's algorithm will more accurately surface content

Starting point is 00:02:17 users want to see. A better user experience could also result in more time spent on the platform and more branded and promoted content saved to boards. Amazon is poised to rake it in this holiday and not just on product sales. eMarketer this morning said revenue from their search ads will jump 65% by 2021. That's a problem for Google, which eMarketer says will slip in search market share by a couple of points in the same period. In fact, they say Amazon is the only company who will grow their share of the search market.

Starting point is 00:02:51 They are already ahead of Microsoft's Bing. Really cool idea from Spotify. They are letting people buy personalized T-shirts based on the songs they like. Now, it's not songs from their entire catalog. It's only from one group, the band Bring Me the Horizon, and only from their album called Ammo. Quoting MobileMarketer.com, after visiting the album's microsite and agreeing to share their Spotify data with Sony,

Starting point is 00:03:16 fans are asked to choose six tracks from the album. The site uses information from music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to analyze the characteristics of the songs, such as loudness and energy, and to create a customized T-shirt design for purchase. Fans who don't have a Spotify account can manually select songs to create a shirt. And personally, I'd love to see more of this kind of data-based product personalization,

Starting point is 00:03:40 although my Spotify playlist is pretty much all 80s Euro trash and musicals, so God knows what abomination my t-shirt would look like. Warning, if you rely on SMS to get messages from customers who were on your Google brand page, Google is shutting the SMS service off exactly one month from today. After November 15th, you simply will not get SMS notifications anymore. Instead, they say download their Google My Business app as they will be pushing notifications through that. The app also lets you do things like update your business hours, add photos to

Starting point is 00:04:14 your listening, create posts, which I don't think anybody does, and of course, reply to reviews. Interesting partnership between Reddit and Snapchat. In the next Reddit app update, users will be able to share Reddit content directly on Snapchat. It'll create a little Snap story with a little sticker that has the Reddit logo and details on the original post, and a link back to that original post. I get what's in it for Reddit here, but what is in this for Snapchat? They've now created a new story type that literally takes people away from their platform. I mean, did Reddit pay for this? But this is really more of a copy than an invention. TikTok has a direct one tap icon that lets people create an Instagram story.

Starting point is 00:05:00 This will roll out first on iOS, and Android is coming later. Okay, lightning round. Google is the latest platform to jump on the augmented reality bandwagon with a new ads product called AR Beauty Try-On, where users can virtually try on makeup. It's only going to work with YouTube Masthead and TrueView video discovery ads at launch. Google confirmed that watermarks on images should not negatively affect ranking of those images in its index in case you do a lot of photographic stuff. It looks like LinkedIn is testing mass actions on your LinkedIn in-mail inbox, which would let you do a select all and then delete. Frankly, this is the best news I've heard all month. And a couple of platform updates. Agora Pulse has added metric insights on Facebook ad posts. Just so you know, it only syncs once a day. And over on Sprout Social, you can now see replies sent from your team members more easily.

Starting point is 00:05:56 There's also an updated notifications tray coming. We don't yet have it at our agency, so perhaps it's still rolling out. And just a side note, tomorrow marks the one-month anniversary of this podcast. I only started a month ago. My personal one-month goal for this was 50 average downloads per episode. I figured if it got 50, I'd consider it worth continuing. Well, Friday's episode crossed past 50. In fact, it just crossed 1,000 downloads. So to celebrate, I am making a premium episode entirely free.

Starting point is 00:06:26 It is a conversation I had with Mitch Joel about the future of digital agencies. Mitch started Twistimage, sold it to WPP, and is now president of Mirum, a digital agency with more than 3,000 employees. If you run, manage, or work at a digital agency, you really do owe it to yourself to listen to this interview. You can listen to this episode for free on the premium episode site. You will find a link in the description of this episode and at todayindigital.com. That is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by engageq.com.

Starting point is 00:06:58 If you'd like to comment on anything you have heard, just tweet with the hashtag TIDM. I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Reddit and Snapchat sitting in a tree — C-O-P-Y-I-N-G

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