Today in Digital Marketing - Why is Microsoft Changing Ad Campaigns Without Permission?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Microsoft may be creating campaigns and spending your money without you knowing about it. LinkedIn is working on a freelance marketplace. YouTube adds a nice new analytics tool. And the podcast ad industry continues to consolidate. It's Friday, February 19th, 2021. Happy National Soldier Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:29 Microsoft has started to change things in some ad campaigns without the direct consent of advertisers. And we're not talking about campaign names here. We're talking about big levers. Some marketers are receiving this email from Microsoft, quote, Hi, good news. Your Microsoft advertising account has been chosen for optimization. The Microsoft advertising team will make simple changes to help improve the performance of your ad

Starting point is 00:00:53 and save you time in your campaign management. We will review your keywords, bids, extensions, images, and campaigns and potentially optimize each using current or new campaign features, including features you opted out of previously, or generate additional campaigns that are relevant for your account, unquote. I'm sorry, what? This makes Facebook's infatuation with machine learning look like an act of holy benevolence. Back to Microsoft's email.

Starting point is 00:01:27 It's an easy no-charge service that lets you get better ads performance using insights only Microsoft advertising experts have access to. These adjustments may also shift and share budget between your campaigns, unquote. The email contains a form that managers of affected accounts have to fill out by Tuesday if they want to opt out. Honestly, at first I thought this was a phishing link, but we reached out to Microsoft and they did confirm the email came from them. As far as we can tell, it's only like a test group, a small group, so if you didn't get this email, in theory, you're not going to be affected by this.

Starting point is 00:02:04 But how many marketers got this email and didn't see it? Or it went to spam or something? To be fair, other ad platforms try this too. Google has something they call auto-applied recommendations. But you have to manually opt in for that. This Microsoft implementation makes people opt out. As far as I can tell, we're the first media outlet to report on this. We actually learned about it on Wednesday, but held the story until we heard back from

Starting point is 00:02:29 Microsoft. But you would have heard it Wednesday too, if you are in our Slack community, because it was a member who shared that email with all of us in there. It's free to join. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack, or tap the link in this episode's notes. Heads up, if you find freelancers for your agency or company on places like Upwork or Fiverr, LinkedIn is said to be developing a competitor, a freelance marketplace that would let businesses find, contract, and pay freelancers all on the LinkedIn site. They do have a tool already that provides part of that. It's called Profinder, but that service doesn't manage the hiring and paying workflow. Honestly, this is one of those genius no-brainer ideas. LinkedIn already has the professionals and has the freelancers. Why not connect the two and maybe take a cut of the project fees along the

Starting point is 00:03:19 way? YouTube has a nice new tool that will let you compare the performance of multiple videos. You'll find it in the analytics section of YouTube Studio, of course. You can actually chart the performance of up to 100 videos at a time, as long as those videos were published from 2019 and later. It's a pretty nice-looking chart, too. Easy to see which ones did the best and which ones did the worst. You can have it graph specific performance time periods, like the first 24 hours, the first week, and so on. And a number of metrics are available like views, impressions, click-through rate, average percentage

Starting point is 00:03:53 viewed, likes, dislikes, and so on. Like I say, it's in analytics in YouTube Studio, but it's a little tricky to find. So here's how to do it. Once you're in YouTube analytics, click on advanced mode in the top right corner, then compare to, again, that'll be in the top right corner, and finally click first 24 hours video performance in the top right pull down menu. The consolidation of the podcast ad industry continues. Word today that iHeartMedia will acquire Triton Digital for $230 million. iHeartMedia is the biggest owner of American radio stations, and this acquisition can only mean they're planning to invest deeply into their podcast business. That deal includes Triton's content delivery system that dynamically inserts ads into audio streams and podcasts,

Starting point is 00:04:43 and reporting tools that can track and create audience groups. Quoting Marketing Dive, iHeart's acquisition of Triton comes as media and technology companies, including Spotify, SiriusXM Holdings, Amazon, and The New York Times, ramp up their investments in podcasting to grab a share of the growing market for digital audio advertising. The percentage of U.S. consumers who have listened to a podcast grew to 37%, or 104 million people from 32% last year.

Starting point is 00:05:13 49% of them last year said audio ads are the best way to reach them, up from 37% of listeners who said the same in 2019, unquote. Spotify, as you might recall, bought the Gimlet podcast network last year, and some drama happening over there. Two of its key talent are on leave after a blow-up over union organizing. PJ Vogt and Truthy Pinamani of the wildly popular podcast Reply All are stepping away from the show after a former Gimlet producer accused them of creating a toxic dynamic at the company.

Starting point is 00:05:50 Facebook today released its State of Small Business report, a survey of more than 30,000 small business owners from around the world. Some key findings, all sectors are seeing lower sales numbers than they saw last year, but the segment of businesses that don't offer any digital sales channel dropped dramatically from 35% to only 13% last year. They found that 70% of small businesses in minority communities had lower sales, while only 41% in non-minority communities had that decrease. The full report is 50 pages, and there is a link in today's newsletter.

Starting point is 00:06:27 Remember, you don't have to pay a penny to get the Friday newsletter. It isn't the full premium edition that members get, but it's pretty close. You can sign up for either the free weekly version or the full daily premium version at todayindigital.com slash newsletter, or tap the link in today's episode notes.

Starting point is 00:06:52 Don't forget, I'm now posting daily digital marketing secrets on my TikTok account, mostly web tools that we use here at the agency that are super helpful. You'll find me there as Todd Maffin. That's T-O-D-M-A-F-F-I-N. And there's a link in this episode's notes too. That's it for this week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital. Production support and fact-checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:07:20 Have a restful weekend, friends, and I will talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Why is Microsoft Changing Ad Campaigns Without Permission?

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