Today in Digital Marketing - Will Your Web Pages Break on October 24th?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, 34 days and counting before millions of web pages are due to break. All because of a change being made by Facebook. Google will now let publishers place first-party cookies on their brand site. Nielsen unveils a massive database of marketing benchmarks to help you understand how well your digital campaigns are doing. And the TikTok drama train continues today, Friday, September 18th, 2020. Happy first day of Rosh Hashanah. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Millions of web pages around the world will break on October 24th, and it's

Starting point is 00:00:40 because of a change being made to the Facebook and Instagram APIs. APIs, of course, are the backdoor that lets other websites and services get access to a platform's data. So here's what's happening. Lots of web content platforms, like WordPress and Drupal and countless others, use a simple technique these days to embed content onto web pages. Content like Facebook Live videos or an Instagram post. I'm sure you've seen these on web pages before. This simple technique is known to nerds as an oEmbed. It lets you just paste the URL of the post into your web page,

Starting point is 00:01:15 and that would create a full embedded post. Before oEmbeds existed, you needed to create an actual embed code, which wasn't complicated, but was a couple of lines long and not nearly as friendly as just pasting in the address of the post you want to see on your site. And that is what is breaking. Starting October 24th, your website will need an app ID with a developer account if you want those links to work. And getting that is not a simple process. Without it, those embedded videos and posts will just break. Quoting WPTavern.com, requiring authentication to use oEmbed links

Starting point is 00:01:54 seems like a violation of its intended purpose. For more than a decade, oEmbed has made it possible for users to easily share media across websites and social networks without having to touch any code. Some users will not be motivated to surmount the hurdle of setting up a Facebook app and may resort to posting screenshots or omitting the content altogether. A feature so widely used by non-technical users should not be suddenly locked away behind developer credentials, unquote. Some developers

Starting point is 00:02:23 are working on plugins that could restore some of that functionality, but honestly, all those plugins can do is guide you through the convoluted process of setting up a Facebook developer app. Earlier this week, WordPress removed the Facebook and Instagram widgets in their latest update of the Gutenberg page editor. Quoting WP Tavern again,

Starting point is 00:02:43 Facebook's upcoming change will leave millions of broken embeds in its wake, with little pieces of embedded history lost along the way. People who use Google's AdSense monetization can now choose

Starting point is 00:02:59 whether Google drops first-party or third-party cookies on your site. Backing up here a little bit, both first and third-party cookies are used to track user behavior. third-party cookies on your site. Backing up here a little bit, both first- and third-party cookies are used to track user behavior. First-party cookies are directly stored by the website you visit, and third-party cookies and third-party cookies are created by domains that are not the website you're visiting. In most cases, these are ad platforms, dropping in tracking for retargeting and analytics and so on.

Starting point is 00:03:24 This change is coming because many web browsers are now blocking the creation of third-party cookies by default. Google says allowing first-party cookies may increase your revenue because it enables features like frequency capping on ads. You'll find this option in the Ad Serving tab in your AdSense account as of today. Just be warned that even if you turn this on, those first party cookies don't start serving until October 16th. All right, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on TikTok because it's all over the rest of the news. And honestly, this will probably all change over the weekend anyway. But this morning,

Starting point is 00:04:00 the Trump administration said it will restrict access to TikTok in the U.S. coming this Sunday. Specifically, that means they will order Apple and Google to remove the app from their respective app stores. Which is weird, especially considering Trump's whole apparent reason for all this nonsense is to protect the security of Americans. But without the apps in the stores, nobody will be able to get security updates to patch out newly discovered vulnerabilities. If hackers find one such gap, they'll be able to exploit it day and night, and TikTok legally won't be permitted to send a security update. An important note here, if you already have TikTok on your phone, you will still be able to use it past Sunday. And if you're outside of the U.S., none of this applies to you anyway. The U.S. Commerce Department this morning also said that they'll require the servers to stop serving content to Americans on November 12th. Incidentally, that's about a week after the U.S.

Starting point is 00:04:55 election. So a couple of things here for us digital marketers. First, how will the ad platform be affected? This morning, TikTok was frantically emailing their biggest spending ad clients to say it's no problem. The ad platform will not be affected, which honestly doesn't really make any sense. Trump's order talks about barring transactions involving TikTok. Certainly paying the company for ad space would be considered a transaction. Or maybe TikTok will just block visits to their ad site from American users. That's what's happening in India right now, but people there are getting around it by just using a simple VPN. Plus, you can actually get nearly all of TikTok's functionality using a mobile

Starting point is 00:05:34 browser anyway. You don't even need the app. You just go to TikTok.com, log in, and it works exactly the same. Swipe up to advance, heart, share. In fact, after a minute of using the web version on a phone, I would bet that you will not be able to distinguish it from the app. Hell, you can even make a shortcut to the website to appear on your phone's home screen, just like the app. Nobody really knows what the actual endgame here is. Some people believe it has nothing to do with security and everything to do with security and everything

Starting point is 00:06:05 to do with the fact that Trump is pissed off that one of his rallies was punked by thousands of TikTokers. The measurement company Nielsen is launching a new global database that will provide benchmarks for campaign outcomes across platforms and regions. It's going to be called Compass, and the data set, which they say they'll update every year, will have about 25,000 campaign ROIs across 100 categories in 50 countries. They'll include brands, promotions, media platforms, pricing, part of this data apparently coming from machine learning models. Quoting the company, Each year, billions of advertising dollars go to waste as marketers

Starting point is 00:06:45 rely on incomplete data when making decisions on their cross-media strategies, especially when attempting to scale across countries and brands. Our mission is to deliver outcome measurement around the world so marketers can maximize their ROI, move with velocity, and be budget-friendly. You'll be able to access it via a web portal, scheduled reports, or a direct feed into Nielsen's media planning suite. Finally, two small items. Shorby, that's one of those Lincoln bio services, has added a few nice new features.

Starting point is 00:07:19 First, links on your page can have a schedule now, so you can automatically turn on and off links during specific campaign date ranges. They've also added QR codes you can print out, put in a schedule now, so you can automatically turn on and off links during specific campaign date ranges. They've also added QR codes you can print out, put in the store window, which will send people to your Shorby page. And maybe this one's already a little bit out of date, but they've added TikTok as a social account button to all of their pages. And also Squarespace says it is recovering from delays to the analytics data for email campaigns. And don't forget, our Slack channel is bustling, full of super smart digital marketers swapping tips and campaign ideas

Starting point is 00:07:54 and posting job opportunities. It's free to join. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in this episode's notes. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio, and this podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital. Find us at engageq.com. Full transcripts to every episode are on our website, todayindigital.com.

Starting point is 00:08:18 I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. And I'll talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Will Your Web Pages Break on October 24th?

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