Today in Digital Marketing - Two Years... and Counting... ☹️

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

A big change to Google Chrome may impact your ad campaigns Facebook’s changing its Ads UI again, and this time… it’s terrible And LinkedIn goes Live! Can you help spread the word? Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today AND/OR click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital 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. TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: Tod’s web site: http://TodMaffin.com Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin Instagram: http://instagram.com/todmaffin Facebook: http://facebook.com/tmaffin Mixer: https://mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy SOURCES: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/google-plans-to-drop-support-of-ad-tracking-technology/570451/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/linkedin-adds-live-streaming-for-company-pages-and-new-invite-to-follow-o/570458/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-organic-visibility-google-serps/341419/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-provider-28837.html https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagram-is-working-on-a-new-maps-sticker-for-instagram-stories/570433/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pinterest-overtakes-snapchat-in-popularity-among-us-users/343517/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Wednesday, January 15th, 2020. Happy National Hatch Day. Be protected. Be Zen. again, and this time it's terrible. And LinkedIn goes live. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Quick, what is the third largest social media platform in the United States? Here's a hint. It used to be Snapchat. The surprising answer, and I promise it is surprising, and it is not TikTok. That answer at the end of today's show. Google Today said it is preparing a change to its Chrome browser, a big change, one that will affect digital marketers, and not in a way that you are going to like. At some point in the coming two years, they will prevent advertisers and ad networks from connecting browser cookies to websites that they don't operate. In other words, the advertiser doesn't

operate. This so-called third-party cookie has been a critically important part of ad targeting. This change is all in the service of consumer privacy, says Google. This isn't a surprise to people who follow this space closely. Since last year, there have been rumblings that this was coming, but what's new is that two-year timeline. And there's more. Next month, Google will limit cross-site tracking by requiring a secure connection for access to those cookies. That could potentially be enough to block a whole lot of those trackers well before the two-year timeline. Shares of some online ad network companies like Criteo have dropped since the news came out. Remember, Chrome has a 70% market share on desktop computers and a 41% share on mobile devices.

This is a big deal for a lot of advertisers. But not all. The big ones, like Facebook and Amazon, have access to lots of first-person data, so they probably won't feel this nearly as hard as you and I. Still with Google here for a moment, they have launched a new service called Google My Business Provider. This will let other companies verify organizations that they work with. Sort of a way for others to add existing verified businesses to Google My Business. Here's how Google says it works. Google My Business requires businesses to verify themselves to be able to manage their online presence. Groups or organizations share business data with Google to generate verification codes on behalf of businesses.

My business providers will distribute these codes to the businesses, then will use the codes to quickly verify their listing on Google My Business. The code generated for a business is usable by that particular business only, unquote. I'm not 100% sure what problem this is trying to solve exactly. Most brands can do this for themselves fairly easily enough. But anyway, if you want to be one of those providers for some reason, contact your Google account manager. Facebook is either testing or rolling out a brand new ad campaign creation screen.

And let's hope that it is still in testing because it looks like a dog's breakfast. It takes over the whole screen. It's this kind of giant table where the rows are the optimizations you're used to, reach, traffic, conversions, and so on. And the top three, you know, the columns, are your overall goals. Build your brand, make connections, and so on. And the top three, you know, the columns are your overall goals, build your brand, make connections and drive sales. It honestly looks like they're trying to dumb this down so hard that it's just going to be meaningless soon. Oh, also, then there's this new pull down menu that also says campaign goal with things like fundraising, building customer relationships,

and introducing a product or service. It seems to me that Facebook just can't decide what to do with their self-service ads manager. Sometimes they set it up for advanced users, like the now-retired Power Editor, and then sometimes they're trying to make it for complete newbies. Good news if your brand's LinkedIn page is part of your job responsibility. They are now expanding their live product to company pages. Until now, LinkedIn Live was only available in the U.S. and for personal profiles, unless you were in a special testing group. Now it's open to all brands.

But it's not as easy as flipping the live switch. You will still need to manually request access as the page admin. Like Facebook, live videos get a lot more engagement. LinkedIn says users are 20 times more likely to share a live video than any other type of post. They're also adding the ability to invite your personal first-degree connections to follow your brand's company page. All right, time for the lightning round. Hootsuite was down this morning and down hard. Users couldn't even access the dashboard.

Seems to be fixed now. YouTube has now surpassed Wikipedia for the number one spot in organic Google search results. Antitrust case, anyone? Facebook ads expert Andrew Foxwell says there's a new bug in the ad platform around location target selection. So if you're not able to choose certain geographies when setting up an ad campaign today, it's only showing addresses. It's not just you. And it looks like Instagram is working on a new sticker that is basically an interactive map in case you're into stickers. Oh, and for the third largest social media platform in the United States, it is now Pinterest.

Yeah, Pinterest. eMarketer's latest numbers has Pinterest ending last year with about 82 million users. That's just an inch past Snapchat, which ended the year at 80 million users. In fact, eMarketer says Pinterest actually more than doubled their estimates for 2019. They'd expected to see about a 4% growth last year, but Pinterest had more than 9%. Analysts say this growth likely due to the site's appeal across all age groups, as opposed to Snapchat's mostly younger audience. Well, if you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to review this podcast. chat's mostly younger audience. check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency

are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.