All The Cool Kids Want Stories
TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:
It’s all coming back — digital media spend showing signs of returning to normal.
Instagram Stories sees a HUGE increase in advertiser interest.
A big rebranding in the digital experience space.
And why is Google emailing people asking them to verify sites that they have no connection to?
Below is the transcription from this episode
It’s Wednesday, January 27th, 2021.
Happy Spirituality Day, Serbia.
I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, today in digital marketing.
Returning to Normal
Numbers keep looking up for our digital marketing space — new research from Merkle this week said online media spend is returning to normal, after a tumultuous 2020.
Quoting BusinessWire: “Trends are emerging that indicate a steady return to pre-pandemic levels. Google's yearly ad spend growth rose 12% in Q4, as cost per click (CPC) growth climbed for the first time since Q1 2020. Facebook's spending growth was steady as CPMs rose 10% during the holiday quarter, the first gain since Q1 2020.
“Brick-and-mortar retailers and travel-related businesses that bore the brunt of the pandemic… signal recovery, though store visits and ad spending for travel were still lower at the end of 2020 than in the prior year.
“Instagram experienced similar growth, with its Stories format gaining share to make up 33% of ad spend among participating advertisers. But while spending on Instagram ads jumped 30% in Q4 from a year earlier, the growth rate was slower than seen in Q3. Pinterest's share of social media ad spending was 14%, besting Snapchat and Twitter at 12%, and suggesting its newer ad formats and recent features drew appeal from marketers.”
Episerver
The digital experience platform Episerver today said it is rebranding as Optimizely. You might know Optimizely already — that’s one of the brands that Episerver acquired recently.
It also bought Idio, an analytics and personalization platform, InsiteSoftware, a commerce platform in the manufacturing and distribution space.
Also, the company launch an Optimization-as-a-Service (OaaS) service, for enhanced campaign targeting and testing.
Bugs
There are a couple of bugs out there in our world to report on...
Google is sending out some weird emails asking people to verify their sites in Search Console. Problem is, they’re going to people who aren’t the site owner. So they have no way to verify those sites. And the domains are wrong in the email too. Google is aware and looking into it.
Hootsuite is seeing an issue where messages scheduled for publishing are not going live — EVEN THOUGH they’re marked as sent in the Planner. If this is affecting you, for the time being, you should be able to publish these messages directly using the Post Now option. They are working on a fix.
Source
And a bug from this podcast to report. Yesterday, 214 of you received an episode with pre-roll and mid-roll ads — something I’ve said you wouldn’t get. The issue is with our hosting platform. After you upload the podcast episode, it asks you to mark where the midrolls should insert. This is where we actually delete the midroll and preroll slots. BUT, while you’re on that screen, and before you’ve made any changes to the ad slots, Redcircle publishes the RSS feed. So the quick podcast apps — and it always seems to be the Overcast app — they grab the feed and download the episode. There was a workaround where we’d upload and set the publish time a few minutes ahead, but even that workaround appears to no longer work. So, my apologies if you’re hearing ads at the start and middle. I promise, we’re working on getting that fixed.
Finally, we’re up past 1,600 downloads per episode now, so I wanted to get a better handle on the kinds of stories you’d like us to cover more of, and we’ve set up a quick listener survey for that purpose. We will be picking THREE people at random who complete it to get a $50 gift card for Amazon. Now listen, you’re a digital marketer, you probably know that most people will never fill this survey out. Your odds are actually pretty good.
There is a link in today’s episode notes to take you there, or just go to TodayInDigital.com/survey. That’s TodayInDigital.com/survey — you have until the weekend to be entered in the draw.
That’s it for today, and now — here it is, your moment of digital marketing zen.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today in Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.