Today in Digital Marketing - Scrooge Comes Early for Small Merchants

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, new ways to manage your Google conversions. Why the supply chain issues are going to hit the smaller players the hardest. Pinterest joins the live shopping trend. How well do you know your customers? Less well than you think. And the case of the blue checkmark that wasn't. It's Monday, November 1st, 2021. Happy World Vegan Day. I'm Todd Mathen from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 495. We start with some new ways to track your sales, this time coming from Google,

Starting point is 00:00:58 which today announced three new features to manage your conversions. First, conversion goals. This is a new way that will optimize toward your objectives at the account or campaign level. Quoting Google, As you create new campaigns, you'll be able to tell Google Ads which specific business goal your campaign should optimize for. For example, let's say you're an online clothing retailer. Going forward, you can set a purchase as your account default goal so that all your campaigns can optimize for that outcome. Within this purchase goal, you'll also be able to define which specific conversion actions, such as completed sales, should be used for bidding. You'll start to see your conversion actions grouped by these new conversion goals when you create new campaigns over the next few weeks.

Starting point is 00:01:42 Your existing conversion optimization and bidding settings will not be changed. This means no action needs to be taken on your part, unquote. So I might be missing something here, but is there any reason why we would all want an entire account locked to a single objective? I must be missing something. Anyway, second, tag assistant support, a tool that will help you confirm that your conversion tags are working as intended. This will help you diagnose any issues with your conversion actions and alert you if there's an error, such as unverified conversion actions, inactive tags, or no recent conversions.

Starting point is 00:02:19 They've also added a little pop-up panel inside Ads Manager called Explanations, which will give you insights into large changes in your Google Ads account performance. There's a link to today's announcement with all the details in today's premium newsletter, which you can get a 14-day free trial for at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. A piece today in Retail Dive suggests

Starting point is 00:02:44 small businesses may have an advantage with this year's supply chain issue, but they cannot avoid holiday shipping headaches. Several factors will make the shipping season even tougher for small businesses. While big businesses bulk up on seasonal workers in order to meet demand, small businesses often do the job themselves or with the shoestring staff. Additionally, Amazon and other national retailers have changed expectations about how quickly an item will be delivered to a buyer, expectations that small sellers often cannot meet.

Starting point is 00:03:14 Once a product is shipped, it is nearly impossible to control what happens next or when a customer can really expect their package. During the peak season of 2021, UPS expects demand to exceed capacity by about 5 million pieces per day. To keep up with rising demand, companies like UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service have instituted peak shipping surcharges, which will cut into the bottom line for small businesses. The Retail Dive piece is pretty comprehensive, and if these are issues that are keeping you up at night, you can find it at retaildive.com

Starting point is 00:03:48 in the post called It's a Ho-Ho Horrible Shopping Season for Small Businesses Too. How well do you know your customers? According to a new survey, you may not know your customers as well as you think you do. In order to better understand the direct-to-consumer customer perspective and the retailer's view of that perspective, Scalefast and Retail Dive surveyed 203 retailers and 284 shoppers.

Starting point is 00:04:17 Here is what the survey found, quoting Retail Dive. Retailers believe their websites are easier to buy from than brand websites and have a 15% point advantage in their product assortment. Customers, however, say brand websites are superior in providing a deeper assortment of products. Both retailers and customers are bullish on emerging experiences and specialty stores. Retailers say they'll be offering flash sales, 39% of them say that, and resales of pre-owned goods, 33%. 44% of consumers say they'll be looking for flash sales, and 22% say they'll be looking for new or limited product drops. Most retailers, 9 out of 10 in fact, offer emerging experiences several times a year, unquote. The survey points

Starting point is 00:05:03 out opportunities in which brands can fill the needs of today's DTC customers. First, direct relationships are the key to meeting new expectations of DTC customers. Quoting Olivier Schott, the founder at Scalefast, that direct relationship creates a feedback loop informing future product development, marketing voice, and inventory planning. Owning your customer data is critical to making smart, data-driven decisions. And as regulation and privacy policies tighten, brands are losing access to purchase data, making it all the more important to own customer information outright. Unquote. Number two, in terms of opportunities, recognize the value and benefits of pre-sales.

Starting point is 00:05:45 And three, use technologies to reduce the risks of creating an emerging experience. Again, quoting Schott, shoppers want to feel connected to a brand and will provide first-party data in exchange for a unique or more personalized experience. Just when Instagram says goodbye to IGTV, Pinterest says hello and is going one step further into live shopping. The social platform has announced Pinterest TV, a series of live, original and shoppable episodes featuring creators on Pinterest. Quoting the announcement, products will drop in a live shopping setting where pinners can take advantage of discounts from brands. Along with Pinterest TV, Pinterest is launching a virtual studio where Pinterest producers work directly with each creator to develop unique content, providing backstage AV support, and go live with engaging episodes. 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 00:07:25 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. We don't often cover security patches here since they happen a million times a day, but every once in a while comes one that's used a lot in our space, and that happened today. Reports say the popular WordPress marketing plugin OptinMonster has a huge security hole that lets hackers potentially take over an entire website. WordPress's security arm WordFence says the bug comes from a failure in how OptinMonster implemented the plugin. It's part of their code known as REST API. This is the part of the system that lets third-party plugins and themes manage and publish content. There is an update available

Starting point is 00:08:03 now, and you should go patch it if you're using OptinMonster. The version you should be updating to is 2.6.5. Google My Business will now let you hide the fact that you have seen a customer's message through a new read receipt setting in its messaging setup. With read receipts, you can show your customers who message you via Google Map or Search if you have read their message or not.

Starting point is 00:08:29 Quoting Google, Once you turn on chat, customers will find a chat button on your business profile and will be able to message you at any time. After a recipient opens a new message, the sender gets a read status under the message. This status appears for whoever sent the message in a conversation, either you or your customer, unquote. So if you'd like to change this, go to Google My Business, click Messages, then Settings. If you have multiple profiles, open the one you want to manage, of course, and turn on or off the setting called Read Receipts. Just when you think Facebook couldn't screw things up... Actually, no, use the music. Use the goofy music.

Starting point is 00:09:13 Here we go. Ah, that's better. Just when you think Facebook couldn't screw things up more comes word that moderators for the social platform have verified a page for entrepreneur Elon Musk. Except it wasn't Elon Musk at all. It was a fan page that basically repurposes his tweets. I guess that was enough for Facebook to slap the blue checkmark on the page, signaling that this totally is the real Elon, guys.

Starting point is 00:09:41 It's not like the page is being shady or anything. It speaks about Musk in the third person. Hell, it even reads, this is a fan page in the main about section. Also, there are only 10 posts on the entire page, the earliest one not even two weeks old. Also, except for reposts of a handful of tweets, the only other posts on the page was a photo of him and a notification that the page updated its profile picture. Also, this page used to be named Kizito Gavin, apparently for soccer player Gavin Kizito. Also, the URL for the page cuts off the end of the word official. It's facebook.com slash Elon Musk office, which, as the version noted today, doesn't seem very official.

Starting point is 00:10:27 Oh, also, the page is managed by people in Egypt. How do I know? The platform itself discloses this about every page in the page transparency section, which I assume Facebook itself has access to. At the time of this episode's production, the page was still up, still verified, though since the Verge article story this afternoon, it started posting that you send me $1,000 in Bitcoin and I'll send you $2,000 back scam

Starting point is 00:10:57 that took over Twitter briefly. Facebook's verification rules say to be verified, you must share government ID, like a driver's license or, or articles of incorporation. Unless, you know, you don't. 70 kids, that's how many we had at our door. I know this year because I counted. Last year, we completely underbought in terms of candy. I was not

Starting point is 00:11:26 going to make the same mistake this year. We overbought. We now have candy for months, my wife and I. But I time logged it too, so I know how many kids in which hour and roughly the age, at what point. I wanted to know at what point did the kids start getting older. It's around 7.30 in our neighborhood.

Starting point is 00:11:43 Everything was done by about 8.15 or so so it's nice having data isn't it yes i live streamed it on my tiktok account for a couple of hours i'd set up this big game show thing where lights flash and i had a spinny wheel and they could win more candy or or a prize there were actually some really good prizes if they land on that that one out of the 14 slots that was the big prize and then as I started getting crankier as the night went on, I took one of the spinny slots off and turned it into You Give Me Candy

Starting point is 00:12:10 if you land on this. I didn't make the little kids do it, but two of the older kids did, and I enjoyed two bags of popcorn as a result of that. All right, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow

Today in Digital Marketing - Scrooge Comes Early for Small Merchants

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