Today in Digital Marketing - The Future of Third-Party Cookies? Educated Guesses.

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Google announces its plan to replace the third-party cookie. That plan: Educated Guesses. Plus: Agorapulse’s new pricing pulls functionality out of its lowest-priced tier. Twitter’s calendar could come in handy for social media content managers. And did you just accidentally delete an Instagram post? Now, a way to bring it back from the dead.About the Podcast:Enjoying the Show? Rate/Review Us!Join Our Free Slack CommunityMore: Ads / Classifieds • Transcripts • Leave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchMore Info on the Stories Covered:Jeff Bezos Stepping Down as Amazon CEOGoogle’s Answer to Third-Party CookiesAgorapulse Pricing Goes UpTwitter Social Media Calendar Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, Google announces its plan to replace the third-party cookie. That plan? Educated guesses. Plus, Agorapulse's new pricing pulls functionality out of its lowest-priced tier. Twitter's calendar could come in handy for social media content managers. And did you just accidentally delete an Instagram post? Now, a way to bring it back from the dead. It's Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021. Happy National Indigenous Day, Colombia.

I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start with some breaking news. Jeff Bezos says after 27 years of leading the company, he is stepping down as Amazon's CEO. His replacement will be the current head of Amazon Web Services. Bezos says he'll transition to the role of executive chair later this year. Okay, well, you folks seem to like the quizzes.

So, here's a stumper for you. Are emojis a ranking factor in Google? In other words, when Google crawls web pages, is it capturing and indexing those emojis to use in Google? In other words, when Google crawls web pages, is it capturing and indexing those emojis to use in ranking? As usual, the answer at the end of today's show. About a year ago now, Google announced that it was planning to kill off support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, that bit of data that many of us digital marketers have relied on to improve our targeting ability and campaign profitability.

At the time, they didn't say what, if anything, they planned to replace it with. Now, we're starting to get some of those details. And the company says, we advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of conversions tracked that we currently do with cookie-based tracking. It'll be part of a new tech they're working on called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLOC, F-L-O-C, quoting MarketingDive.com. As opposed to third-party cookies, FLOC creates look-alike audiences that protects privacy by using machine learning algorithms to process web browsing behavior on individuals' devices. The way FLOC works is analogous to how many data providers

use third-party cookies in aggregating various data sources to build audiences. But with typical third-party data, marketers have direct insight into the sources that are being used to build those audiences. Google's 95% effectiveness statistic makes it clear that inefficiencies and waste are inherent in cohort-based advertising like Flock, drawbacks that may be necessary in the trade-off for privacy, unquote. You know, anytime I see the phrase machine learning, what they're really saying is estimated, or predicted, or forecasted based on modeling. It won't be as precise as getting all the real data from a cookie. This is partly why the second-party cookie space is gaining more traction. This gets

a little confusing, but as I understand it, this is basically when you partner with a company who is collecting their own first-party data. Google's flock should head to a small API testing group sometime later this summer and could be in place in about a year. Last month, we reported that social media platform Agora Pulse would be raising its prices soon. We didn't know the new pricing structure then, but we do now. They launched it today. First, they've simplified the tiers a little. The pro and premium plans map cost-wise to their previous medium and large plans,

although their previous extra large tier, which was $400 a month, is now listed as that dreaded custom contact us for details price, which usually means the price will scale to the size of your company. The big change, though, as far as I can see, is they've pulled a lot of functionality out of their entry-level plan. This used to be called Medium, and while it's still $79 a month, and you still get 10 profiles and 2 users, you can no longer add additional profiles or users. If you want more than 10 profiles, or more than 2 users, now you've got to pony up for the next tier. That's a big difference over their previous version of this price point

where you could add additional slots for an extra cost. Also gone from that tier, shared calendars. Previously, you could bolt that on too for an additional price. And the inbox assistant is gone at that tier as well. Some of that comes back if you're on their next tier up, which they now call premium, 25 profiles and 4 users. Here, you can add more profiles and users. The per profile price isn't changed, but the per user additional price has gone up from $25 a month per user to $30.

Thank goodness for National Popcorn Day. And National Hedgehog Appreciation Day and National Dad Joke Day. Thank goodness for all of these made up national celebrations because they make for easy fodder for those of us who are responsible for coming up with an endless supply of organic social media posts. In fact, some services will even create templates for you based on these days. Promo, the video app, usually has a dozen or so of these templates already made. Just slap your logo in, download, and post away. To help you map your content out for the next year, Twitter has published a list of these. Twitter's done this before, but in the past, it's been a downloadable calendar that you could add to your own calendar app.

I guess with COVID messing things up last year, they're changing everything up a little bit. But there are also a handful of regional-specific calendars as well, variations for Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, and more. There's a link to the calendar in this episode's notes. Which brings us to the lightning round. The world's most popular podcast app is getting a design refresh. Apple Podcasts will look a little different when version 14.5 of iOS is rolled out, which is great because it's got kind of a confusing interface right now.

Social media community managers might like this. Today, Instagram is adding a new Recently Deleted folder in the app, which will let you restore any feed posts that you've deleted. You've got 30 days to pull it out of there before they're gone for good. Sprout Social has put more granular access controls in place for shared calendar links. You can now specify exactly who has access to those calendar links and track who viewed them. If you've got their premium analytics add-on, you can also share links to some of their reports outside your organization. There's also a new integration with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. So now you'll be able to see CRM data from those platforms in the smart inbox.

Notion, the all-in-one database note-taking wiki service, has added a special URL to create a new page right away. If you're logged into your Notion account, you can now just type Notion.new in your browser's address bar to pull up a new document. Kind of like going to doc.new will create a new Google Doc. Nothing to do with digital marketing specifically, but I thought this was interesting. Apple is testing new iPhone software that will let you unlock your phone while wearing a mask. You just look at it and it will unlock. There is a catch. You need to own and be wearing an Apple Watch. And finally, I cannot stop putting the letter E in the word lightning. Damn it, I just did it again in this script.

Am I the only one who does this? Oh, and the answer to today's quiz. Are emojis a ranking factor? The answer, yes, they are. They weren't always because including things in the index that people aren't using is expensive to Google in terms of the team's time, in terms of server resources. But Google's search team noticed that people were using them more, so they decided, well, let's add them into the index. But first, we actually had to make the argument. Google search engineer Paul Haar.

That it was worth it to do because, again, big expense, lots of process in changing things. And the argument that we actually ended up making was people are searching for emoji greater than a million times a day, even though it doesn't work. And eventually that argument worked. So yes, emojis are now a ranking factor in Google. Congratulations to Brad Fonesca, Rosalind Armstrong, and Katie Henson, the winners of our listener survey contest. And by the way, I am building out a Twitter list of listeners of this podcast. So if you're listening right now and you want to be on that list, just tweet the hashtag today in digital.

That's all you need to tweet if you want. You can also comment on the show with that hashtag or give us some feedback. But if you just want to be added to the list, just tweet hashtag Today in Digital. Don't forget, my extended conversation with John Loomer about how the forthcoming iOS changes will affect digital marketing campaigns is available right now in our Slack community,

which is free to join. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in this episode's notes. You'll find the full interview in the exclusive content channel. And now here it is, your moment of digital marketing zen. Hello, everyone. I'm from your telephone company. We know that dial telephones are easy to use. However, mistakes in dialing do occur. These mistakes waste a lot of time and can cause someone else to be inconvenienced and probably irritated. I'd like to tell you about a few pointers to be followed in dialing. Always be sure that you have the right number. Write the number down. It saves time to keep the numbers in front of you while dialing.