Today in Digital Marketing - Social Media Killed the Newspaper Star

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

On today’s show: It happened folks. Social media overtakes print media in ad spending Facebook rolls out Messenger objectives in Stories Google updates its automatic ad placements And some nice reports to help your VIDEOS place higher in Google The Premium feed, with monthly deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital NOTE: Sometimes Patreon claims "The creator hasn't posted anything yet." Ignore this — seems to be a bug. Check with any other browser to see the episodes. Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. • Connect with Tod: [e-mail] or use this contact form. • More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Facebook • Web Site --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Tuesday, October 8th, 2019. Happy Independence Day, Croatia. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, it happened, folks. Social media overtakes print media in ad spending. Facebook rolls out messenger objectives in stories. Google updates its unfortunately named auto ad placements. And some really nice reports to help your videos place higher in Google.

Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Here's a milestone we all knew was coming, but still, it's a big deal. Social media advertising spend will overtake print media for the first time globally this year. Media agency Zenith crunched the numbers, and they say social spending will jump 20% this year. Wow. Meanwhile, spending on newspapers and magazines will continue to fall down 6% this year. And when you look at all media spending, that gives social media a 13% of the overall media spend pie. And that is the third biggest slice now, after television and paid search.

And how are those two doing? Paid search, no surprise, keeps climbing. Zenith predicts it'll grow 8% a year for the next couple of years. As for television, with smaller and smaller audience sizes, media spending there is on the decline. Facebook is rolling out a new call to action in stories, the send message

objective, and it'll work across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger ads. Until now, most of us have used the old swipe up to load a web page placement. Now we'll be able to use swipe up to send a message. And that swipe won't force the user to leave the app that they're in. The conversation will happen right in the source app. Warning, this could end up with you being on the receiving end of thousands of messages that say, sorry, I didn't mean to swipe up. So if you are going to run this kind of campaign at scale, maybe consider a messenger bot to handle the traffic. If you have ever looked at your ads reporting in Facebook and thought, wow, that video campaign we're running is killing it. Yeah, well, maybe it wasn't. Facebook has settled a claim with a group of advertisers who said the company massively overestimated the

amount of time users spent watching video ads. In their filing, the group said average viewership on some videos was jacked up by 900% over what the views actually were. Facebook will pay $40 million, and, let's all say it together, does not admit wrongdoing. If you got an email this morning from Google telling you about upgraded ad options for car brands and you deleted it, hold up. They didn't mean auto as in cars. They meant auto as in automatic. Google did a big update to its confusingly named auto ads. This is for publishers, mind you, not advertisers. In other words, this is for the people who run Google Ads on their site to get some revenue.

And it's pretty clever where before you had to put code exactly where you wanted your ads, like in the sidebar or in the footer. Now, auto ads, again, automatic ads, not automobile ads, will analyze your pages and find places to show ads based on your layout content and existing Google ads. You can also now preview how they look before they go live. You can specify the formats that Google places on your site and control the number of ads you would like to show on your pages. Okay, lightning round.

Instagram has updated its iPhone app to dark mode. It's actually made it to the front page of CNN.com today. Also, Instagram is changing the way the camera works in their app again. The new UI looks simpler, but man, these camera screens are always so different from app to app now. If you use a lot of video on your site, Google has some new search console reports for you. There's a video enhancement report to optimize Google's search engine and performance numbers to see how you stack up in said engine. And finally, my apologies if there are any acoustical weird things happening in this episode.

I upgraded to Catalina yesterday, which forced me to kiss goodbye to my trusty 32-bit Audition CS 5.5. So I am learning logic. Because no, Adobe, the future is not me paying you $100 a month for the rest of my natural life. And that is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by engageq.com. If you're listening to this on the web and haven't yet subscribed, you will find direct one-click links for your podcast app at bit.ly slash today in digital.

I'm Todd Maffin. Follow me on Twitter at T-O-D-M-A-F-F-I-N.com. And I'll see you tomorrow.