Today in Digital Marketing - Why is Microsoft Changing Ad Campaigns Without Permission?
Episode Date: February 19, 2021Microsoft 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 i...ndustry continues to consolidate.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterMORE:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Reach Marketers: Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)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
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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
Remember, you don't have to pay a penny
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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
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or tap the link in today's episode notes.
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.
Have a restful weekend, friends,
and I will talk to you on Monday.