Today in Digital Marketing - Search Slump

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is Carry the Fire. I'm your host, Lisa Laflamme. Carry the Fire, a podcast by the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation featuring inspiring personal stories about what happens when world-leading doctors, nurses, researchers, and their patients come together to ignite breakthroughs. Carry the Fire launches Monday, January 27th, wherever you get your podcasts. Do you have business insurance?

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Starting point is 00:00:56 It's Friday, February 21st. This week, TikTok's ad manager gets a big upgrade. Spotify's ad biz is tanking despite a profitable year, Google's throwing cash at you to try its ad product, and Meta tests a dislike button to bury the haters. I'm Steph Gunn, sitting in for Todd Maffin. All that ahead in our Friday wrap-up of the week in digital marketing. We start, as always, with the advertising news that broke this week. TikTok's video editor and ads manager has been updated and is now integrated with Symphony Creative Studio,

Starting point is 00:01:31 its AI video generation tool, giving advertisers access to its digital avatar feature. Brands can also access new features like narration with auto captions, one-click translations with voiceovers, and AI-generated soundtracks, along with editing tools. Spotify is thriving, except for its ad business. Despite hitting its first annual profit in 2024, ad revenue growth slowed in the second half of the year. In December, Spotify told several advertisers it struggled to find enough listeners to deliver ads during the busy holiday season. Advertisers say Spotify's ads don't reach enough listeners, particularly small businesses seeking sales-driven campaigns. New research shows that TikTok ads drive higher incremental sales, according to a study from TransUnion and TikTok's partnership.

Starting point is 00:02:24 This study found more than half of consumers who made a purchase after seeing TikTok ads to a study from TransUnion and TikTok's partnership. So, you know, take that as you will. This study found more than half of consumers who made a purchase after seeing TikTok ads were only exposed to TikTok, with little overlap from other channels. It's not a bribe. It's an offer, guys. Google is using thousands in credits and free ad space to push DemandGen, its automated media buying tool. DemandGen, which was launched last year, selects advertisers' top-performing video and image ads and serves them across YouTube, Shorts, Google Discover, and Gmail. Sources say the company has been aggressively promoting the format, offering some advertisers up to $20,000 in free ad credits to test it for two months. Google also announced new creative tools this

Starting point is 00:03:06 week to generate lifestyle imagery across PMAX to man-gen display and app campaigns. Advertisers can input prompts like middle-aged man chopping carrots and customize age, gender, race, and ethnicity. LinkedIn launched a new conversion API and updates to its revenue attribution report this week, letting marketers use their own first party and offline data to track campaigns over an extended look back window. And finally, in our look at the advertising news of the week, LinkedIn is pushing publishers in its pre-roll video ad program to post more on the platform, particularly event footage. The wire program lets publishers sell three to 15 second pre-roll ads on their editorial

Starting point is 00:03:46 videos. To the world of social media now, and we start with some meta platform updates. Instagram is testing a new dislike button on comments, letting users downvote remarks they don't like. There's no public count, but the platform says it may use this signal for comment ranking to push disliked comments lower in the feed. The app also now lets users schedule messages up to 29 days in advance and pin up to three important messages at the top of a chat for easy access. You can now also invite friends to group chats via QR codes, and there's a music sharing feature as well.

Starting point is 00:04:26 These updates started rolling out globally this week and should be live everywhere now. Meta recently sent out an alert asking some Facebook page managers to confirm their content isn't targeting kids under 13. Turns out, it was a bug. The company said it fixed the issue, noting it's testing notifications to enforce its terms of use, but these alerts were sent by mistake. Facebook is about to hit delete on old live streams. Now live broadcasts will be erased after 30 days, and users must download their broadcasts before they expire. All previously recorded videos older than 30 days will also be wiped. Threads is testing a feature that lets you hide the replies tab from your

Starting point is 00:05:05 profile with the option to still access it privately through your settings. A couple of other platform updates, Blue Sky has added new reply controls, letting you limit who can respond to your updates. By tapping the anybody can interact prompt, you can restrict your replies to filter out the noise or the haters. The platform also added profile search, letting you find mentions from a specific user. To search marketing now, and with the news of Google's search dominance slipping, advertisers are taking notes. Consumers are turning to TikTok, Amazon, and AI-powered search tools, and brands are rethinking their SEO and paid

Starting point is 00:05:45 search strategies. Digiday has a great piece up today about how marketers are adapting to this shift. Agency execs say they are now prioritizing site optimization for AI-driven search results. Paid search budgets are also shifting. Some brands are moving ad dollars to social search on TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram. Some are testing Google's other products like Pmax and DemandGen. YouTube is another winner as some brands reduce spend on branded search ads in favor of video. And Google's John Mueller just crushed the dream of a shortcut for faster crawling. While you can speed it up for specific cases, he said there's no way to get Google to crawl your site faster 24-7.

Starting point is 00:06:28 To speed things up, he suggests focusing on, well, what they always say, high quality, unique content that provides value. what's changed in the marketing world, who has time to stress about website security? But security is important, what with bots pummeling your brand site by the hundreds every hour looking for a way in. Kinsta provides managed hosting for WordPress sites, offering lightning fast load times, top tier security, and human only customer support. And thanks to their unlimited free expert-led migrations, Kinsta ensures a smooth transition from other hosting providers so you won't experience any downtime. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself?

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Starting point is 00:07:51 major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. The world of e-commerce handsome moves this week. Amazon has pulled the plug on Inspire. Its TikTok-style shopping feed launched back in 2022 that never quite took off. Users accessed the feed through a lightbulb icon in the app's navigation tab, where they could scroll endlessly through product videos and images. Some content came from influencers earning commissions, while others were sourced from customer reviews. Google Merchant Center is now testing experimental

Starting point is 00:08:29 AI-generated summaries of your site's performance in search. These summaries highlight traffic growth, like increased clicks, and suggest improvements, like optimizing product titles. The feature is still in testing, so accuracy may vary. Microsoft Clarity has a new conversion map feature that lets you identify and edit areas on your page to understand their impact on purchases, helping you pinpoint sections that need improvement to drive more conversions. And we learned today that TikTok is expanding its e-commerce operations to Italy, Germany, and France, with plans to launch in Japan and Brazil this year. In particular, it's going to focus on live stream shopping. TikTok has tried live

Starting point is 00:09:11 shopping in the U.S. a couple of times now, leading to anemic results. Live shopping is now driving most of the revenue in TikTok's Chinese sister app. A couple of notes about Google Business Profile this week. Business Profile management pages went down, preventing access to the edit section within search. Trying to make changes resulted in a 500 error. It did seem to be a temporary bug, but there's no official update from Google yet. And if you're facing long wait times for Google Business Profile support, here's why. The support team is currently backlogged with requests, including suspended GMB reinstatements,

Starting point is 00:09:51 video verification delays, and technical support issues. The company says to expect delays as they work through the queue. And finally, a great read for your weekend from Digiday this week about how the word agency is falling out of favor. It breaks down how the rise of principal media buying is leading agencies to remove that term from client contracts. When agencies buy media directly, they take on the responsibility for costs, unlike traditional agencies that pass those costs on to clients. For example, agencies like Publicis use separate companies like Apex to handle these direct media purchases. This ensures the agency isn't acting

Starting point is 00:10:32 as an agent for the client, which is important for legal and transparency reasons. I'm channeling my inner bingo diva tonight. I'm going to play with some of my cousins for the first time. And the last time that I actually played bingo was at a drag queen brunch. So I feel like my expectations are wildly different from what they're going to be at an actual bingo hall. I did hear that they have unlimited fountain pop though. So, you know, if the bingo hall doesn't break my spirit, the sugar high might. Those were the top digital marketing stories over the last five days. You'd have gotten all of this news earlier if you were signed up to our email newsletter, which comes out every weekday at 5pm Eastern and is completely 100% free. You can sign up at todayindigital.com slash newsletter.

Starting point is 00:11:22 You can follow us on social media. We're on Blue Sky Mastodon, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more. Just go to todayindigital.com slash social or tap the link in the show notes. I'm Steph Gunn. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend. Let's hope I win big at bingo.

Today in Digital Marketing - Search Slump

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