Today in Digital Marketing - What's a Little Data Loss Between Friends?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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. Today, we have an answer to what caused the nasty bug at Shopify.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Five reasons your email campaign sucks. How will the latest Twitter change affect your brand's engagement? A nice upgrade to ad buying on Reddit. And on the Premium Podcast, with no ads, more stories, and exclusive Deep Dive Weekend episodes. Tap the link in the show notes for more. Are the days of the marketing apprenticeship over? It's Monday, February 7th. I'm Todd Mathen.

Starting point is 00:01:31 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Attention Shopify site owners. If you noticed a drop in crawling on your site, you're not the only one. Last week, there were numerous reports that Shopify sites were showing massive declines in crawling activity from Google's Googlebot. Google search advocate John Mueller confirmed this morning that the issue did seem to be on their side. sites were showing massive declines in crawling activity from Google's Googlebot. Google search advocate John Mueller confirmed this morning that the issue did seem to be on their side. Quote, we looked into the sites that were mentioned, and for all of them, it was a temporary drop in how we calculate how much we can crawl. This happens from time to time and catches up after a few days, usually, unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:01 So the issue seems to have been resolved, and you should see crawling return to normal in the upcoming few days. However, you may want to consider adding a note to your Google Analytics documenting the potential crawling issue. It began on January 26th and continued until just this morning. After Meta's brutal fourth quarter earnings call last week, the company is pivoting to, drumroll please, short vertical videos. Yes, in an internal meeting last Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the historic $240 billion stock drop was caused by Meta's poor revenue forecast and that Facebook's short video product needs to be prioritized. This reporting came from Bloomberg. He said that TikTok posed an unprecedented level of competition for Meta,

Starting point is 00:02:53 and as a result, the company would be refocusing its efforts on Instagram Reels as a way out. He also joked in the meeting that his red eyes were not a sign that he was crying over the day's news, but that they were caused by a scratched cornea. Are you sabotaging your own growth when it comes to email campaigns? An interesting piece up today on entrepreneur.com goes over five email marketing habits you need to kick in order to reach your goals. Number one, inconsistency and lack of punctuality. The piece says if you want to build engagement, you need to stick to a schedule, even if it's just sending one email a month. Number two, neglecting welcome emails. Research indicates that welcome emails generate

Starting point is 00:03:41 four times more opens and five times more clicks than regular email campaigns. Number three, an outdated list. If you send emails to invalid addresses, you'll experience bounces and a bounce rate of more than 2% means you're not following best practices. Your emails could be ending up in people's junk folder. Validate your list at least four times a year to prevent this. It could also be worthwhile to invest in a verification service that filters out invalid emails. Number four, failing to take action with spam complainers. Abuse reports can jeopardize your deliverability unlike anything else. They are the result of people hitting the mark as spam button.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Remove these contacts immediately and don't email them again. By the way, these addresses can be detected by some email verifiers, which gives you a chance to remove them before they complain. And number five, insufficient testing. The piece recommends you always test your emails to make sure they have the best deliverability, make sure that emails render correctly on all devices, and consider testing where they land with popular providers like inbox or spam. Some bonus tips to keep in mind. Remove inactive subscribers every 90 days. Put an end to corporate copywriting and spend extra time preparing subject lines and preview text.

Starting point is 00:04:58 The piece, again, is on entrepreneur.com. It's called Five Email Marketing Habits to Leave Behind. 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. To measurement now, the attribution platform TV Squared has been acquired by ad tech company InnoVid, which focuses on connected TV, this in a bid to achieve cross-platform measurement. The announcement comes as the industry is requesting a more transparent and accountable television ecosystem. This deal could set a new currency-grade standard for cross-platform measurement. TV Squared's CEO will step down to

Starting point is 00:05:56 take on a strategy role to support the integration, and the company's president will become an innovative executive heading up the measurement business. Together, the company will represent both buy-side and sell-side customers, as well as offering ad serving and audience measurement services for the TV and digital worlds. Twitter is now testing downvoting on replies for more Android, iOS, and web users worldwide. The platform tweeted, explaining that when testing the downvote feature, the majority of people did so because the tweet was offensive, irrelevant, or both. As a result, downvoting became the most popular way for people to flag content that they didn't want to see, and users in the test group felt the quality of conversation

Starting point is 00:06:43 was improved. It has not rolled out fully yet, no word whether it will or when, but it looks like it probably will. Google Search Console experienced yet another issue with its performance reports, this time affecting Google Search, Discover, and NewsData. According to the company, this was due to a logging issue on analytics that occurred between February 1st and February 3rd. In case you're wondering, no, apparently it did not have any impact on your rankings. As a result, Google has added an annotation directly to performance reports for you, but if you send analytics to your clients, you may want to mention the data issue

Starting point is 00:07:24 with those reports. Some nice changes to Reddit. They've added two new features to their ads platform. First, Audience Manager. You can now save and reuse audiences across multiple ad groups. Your saved audiences can also be viewed and managed in the new Audience Library. And a Post Library, which enables advertisers to create, view, and manage all of your ad posts in one place. So over the last year, I have been working on a secret project

Starting point is 00:07:55 which got launched today in our Slack community. See, why aren't you there yet? All the good stuff happens there. It's a course on going from freelancer to owning your own digital agency. When I was first starting out owning my own agency, 11 some years ago now, 12 years ago, maybe lots of people took me under their wing, got me all sorts of great advice, shared with me how to put a spreadsheet together to track your financials and all that stuff. So I wanted to pay it back in a course. The course, by the way, is completely free. Like I don't even get your email address. There's no registration. There's no sign up. It's just on a notion page, essentially.

Starting point is 00:08:30 So if you want to take it or you want to take a look at it and see if it's valuable for people in your network, it's at b.link slash agency course. Again, that's b.link slash agency course. Again, completely free, probably not complete. I'll be adding stuff to it as we go. But I think it's a good starting point for people that are trying to move away from freelance and into starting something more agency-like. Anyway, and yeah, Slack community. That's where the good stuff is.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Today in digital.com slash Slack or tap the link in the episode notes. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - What's a Little Data Loss Between Friends?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.