Today in Digital Marketing - Who Killed Black Friday?

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

The tragic data behind Black Friday. Even Twitter's founder is leaving Twitter! Where art thou mobile-first indexing? Are consumers ready to shop in person? And TikTok takes the next steps in its growing eCommerce venture!• Get a Free 14-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter Showcase your marketing tool for free! Apply at https://todayindigital.com/showcase ADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads ABOUT THIS PODCAST: Produced by engageQ digital — https://engageq.com JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia(TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and more) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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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, the tragic data behind Black Friday. Even Twitter's founder is leaving Twitter.

Where art thou mobile first indexing? Are consumers finally ready to shop in person? And for once, TikTok is the one doing the copying. It's Monday, November 29th, 2021. Happy Cyber Monday. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, Episode 515. Well, I can't say I saw this coming.

Online sales, for the first time ever on Black Friday, fell this year. They fell to $8.9 billion, according to the Adobe Digital Economy Index. This falls short of their $9.5 billion prediction and the $9 billion that was spent in 2020. Spend on Thanksgiving Day was $5.1 billion compared to Adobe's prediction of $5.4 billion. The company noted that 2021 is the first year neither day saw an increase year over year. Adobe suggests the downward trend may have been caused by early spending. There is still hope for Cyber Monday today, of course. According to Adobe, today will be the biggest online shopping day of 2021,

with an estimated total of between $10.2 billion and $11.3 billion in online spend. Some additional numbers from their report. The most popular products sold online on Black Friday this year included toys and kitchenware. Out of stock messages were up 124% in November compared to pre-pandemic levels. Smartphones accounted for 44% of online sales on Black Friday. That's up nearly 11% year over year. And curbside pickup was up 70% compared to 2019. Though we know that Black Friday sales didn't break any records, the pundits are already out with their take on what caused this, other than Adobe's feeling that the increase in early spending was to blame.

A couple of other takes floating around today. The deals just may not have been as good this year. Some early numbers are finding that retailers kept prices as close to full price as possible during the holiday season so far. Data provided by Salesforce found that the average discount on American Thanksgiving Day was 27%, and that is down 7% from last year's average discount. That said, the average order value is up 11%, despite the fact that 3% fewer items were purchased. From November 23rd to November 25th,

the average selling price was up 22% compared to the same period last year. That's the deals. Also, it seems that people still may not be ready to shop in person. A study out today by Sensormatic Solutions found that shopping in physical stores on American Thanksgiving decreased by a whopping 90% compared to 2019, as many

retailers closed their doors on the holiday. Black Friday in-store shopping increased compared to last year, but it fell 28% from pre-pandemic levels. Quoting the study, 65% of U.S. consumers plan to shop in-store this holiday season for product-related reasons, like browsing for gift ideas or to see and touch products before buying. Inventory inaccuracy is especially detrimental during this time of year because demand is at its peak

and there is a greater risk of lost revenue, productivity, and shoppers. With concerns about supply chain delays, we expect to see consumers make the most of in-store shopping opportunities. Coupled with unified commerce options like buy online, pick up in-store, and pick up at curbside, consumers can ensure they are getting their holiday shopping done when and where it's most convenient. If you love something, set it free. Maybe that's what's behind the news today that CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has resigned.

The board of directors has appointed Parag Agrawal as CEO and a member of the board, effective immediately. He was the company's CTO until now. Quoting an email that Dorsey sent to the company this morning, and of course tweeted, there's lots of talk about the importance of a company being founder-led. Ultimately, I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure. I've worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founders and founding, unquote. Dorsey says he will serve on the board until his term expires to help with the transition. It is worth noting that Dorsey is also CEO of Square, which has a

market worth of just over $99 billion, while Twitter is worth just over about $40 billion or so. Twitter said these changes will not affect the company's previously shared outlook for Q4 and 2021 or its 2023 goals. Twitter Twitter stock, for the record, started falling around October 20th when it was $65 and change. Today, it is still down, hovering at just under $46. 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. Has Google changed its mind about mobile-first indexing? The company keeps pushing back the date it plans to only index mobile versions of websites and pretty much ignore desktop versions of sites. Today, though, Google search advocate John Mueller announced that they are postponing the switchover indefinitely.

Quoting Mueller, After analyzing the sites that are not yet indexed mobile-first, we've determined that some of these sites are still not ready to be shifted over due to various unexpected challenges that they're facing. Because of these difficulties, we've decided to leave the timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing. We recommend that websites which Google has not yet moved over to mobile-first indexing follow the mobile-first indexing best practices guide.

We'll work gradually to move those remaining sites over. If a website is not verified in Search Console, we won't be able to inform it of a pending switch to mobile-first indexing. Earlier, we thought we could complete the move to mobile-first by March 2021. However, we found that some sites were facing time if your site is not yet mobile ready. If you haven't already, here's how Google says to prepare your website for that switch when it happens. Ensure that your content can be accessed

and rendered by Googlebot. Make sure that the content is the same on both desktop and mobile. Verify that structured data is present in both versions of your site and put the same metadata on both versions of your site. Today's premium newsletter has links to a couple of Google's resources on mobile-first indexing.

Well, for once, other platforms aren't copying TikTok. TikTok is copying other platforms, in particular the idea of a business registration option. This will be an enhancement of their current business account profile idea. With the update, brands will be able to list their business category on their profile, as well as receive early access to new business features. This is not the same, by the way, as a verification badge. Because you will display your business category on your profile when you register, TikTok will be able to collect data about business users and categorize pages into different segments. This could help e-commerce listings by better highlighting different businesses and making them more visible to relevant users. Additionally, it could be an effective way to display what your business offers, making it easier to convert

profile visitors to a sale. The business registration option in TikTok's business suite is now available to some business profile managers. On the show tomorrow, the most popular GIFs, GIFs, GIFs, I can never remember. Anyway, most popular animated images from 2021. Also, we will have some new insights into general ad targeting versus narrow ad targeting on Facebook's platform. And I have been plugging it for a couple of months now. Big changes to the podcast coming December 1st. That will be Wednesday. And tomorrow, friends, I will let you in on the big secret. And now, deep thoughts by digital marketers.

One thing clients love are pretty reports with colors and. And little dots. And if our ROAS is tanking. It's totally natural to rephrase it with something like. Signs of positive increase and reduction. And then hand it to them with a glass of gin. Saying. Honestly. Q4 is kind of a shitshow for everyone.