John Lincoln’s Post

Transcript

Hey, marketers, business owners. It's time for the digital marketing news this week. I have some really interesting stuff this week. I just went through it once and I thought to myself, that's pretty interesting. So I think you're going to get a lot out of this little mini Friday class on digital marketing. Let's dive into it. So the first thing is Sensor Tower just released their top apps for consumer spend in downloads. And I was actually a little surprised by some of the outcomes that were reported here. So in consumer spend. TikTok, YouTube, Google One, Disney Plus, Tinder uh Tencent Video Max. I QIYL, LinkedIn and Bumble were the top apps for consumer spend and then the top ones for downloads are Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp. Don't forget that you know, Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, Cap cut, Telegram, TAMU, Spotify, Snapchat and WhatsApp business. So really interesting to see these top apps across iOS and Google Play and in terms of downloads. Instagram has bumped TikTok out of the top spot, while Facebook and WhatsApp are holding strong at 3:00 and 4:00. One notable thing is that what's missing is X formally Twitter. So Elon Musk's app has really fallen out of favor for consumer spend and for downloads. And we know that X is now trying harder than ever to lean into its news app information next thing this week. Have you ever heard of MFA websites? So these are made for advertising websites and the reason that I bring that up is because these sites are eating up a lot of the programmatic ad spend. So programmatic ad spend is being sent to a lot of these sites. They're made for advertising and we don't actually know that there's a lot of quality content on these sites. Now, this is from a new study that was released by E Marketer. So the reason I'm bringing this up is because it's something to watch out for. You know, it was 2% of sites in the past. Now these made for advertising sites are making up as much as 11% of the sites that are getting this programmatic ad spend. So something to watch out for. According to Max Williams from eMarketer. The biggest issue is where the money isn't going. Even the highest quality web publishers or having a hard time right now. So every dollar that goes to a mate for advertising site takes money away from publishers that inform, entertain and connect our society. Interesting to see. He's thinking about the publishers and not necessarily the advertisers, but obviously it's impacting both. Next thing this week, we have an update on the SEO world. So what's happening is in Google's AI overviews, Google is testing moving link cards from the bottom of the AI overviews to the top. That's actually a pretty big change. It's making those links much more visible and more likely to be clicked on by searchers. So are they going to continue to have it up there? We'll see, but that's really increasing. Click through rates Now this is for the cards and AI overviews. The HTML results are still down below. I want to call out one thing. In our research, we've been looking a lot at this. We see that, you know, these AI overviews, they're only being served maybe 510% of the time and they're now they, they were first being served a lot around the brand name. They're being served around a lot of top terms, commercial terms. Now we're seeing them just around like general queries how how to do this. What is this, you know, more blog post type of information. So that's a little bit of a shift so that they've been pulled back a little bit. Next thing this week, Toys-R-Us is hoping to make a comeback and they're starting with being the first brand to use open AIS text to video tool to create new advertisements. So I want to flag this right now. OK, save this one. The tool Sora Sopra, it's only available to a select group of testers, but Toys-R-Us has used it to create an entirely new ad, so a text. The video tool, they've used it to create this video and then they've used it to create an ad. So I think a lot of people in the future, they're going to be trying Sora and seeing if they can do the same thing. You know, that being said, you know, it was just in chachi PT a moment ago, Chachi GPT for making an image and just kind of messing around. We're we're doing some memes at at work and just messing around. But I mean, it came out so poor, right? There's no way you could use it. And and so, you know, there's so many iterations in these things, so many times you have to refine it. More and more and Google's got this, this new text to video tool coming out. You know, they're they're getting better, but they all have that kind of feel that AI feel right. So we're never gonna lose, you know, all the quality that comes from the the real world. That's for sure. That being said, I I say try it. You know, maybe it could be a really effective thing if you think about, you know, using this to create videos for web pages and blog posts and you know, people love video. You can rank in Google search and YouTube, all these different things. Google video search next thing this week universally analytics. Is officially Sun setting on July 1st, 2024. They're getting rid of it. It's going away. I'm going to really, really miss it. I loved universal analytics. GA 4 is really, really tough. That being said, we are getting a couple new things in GA four that I'm excited about. The first one, expanded cross channel reporting to integrate data from select third party advertisers, including Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap. That's awesome. I love that data coming in from other sites and that being populated. In GTA4 from these other sites APIs, that's fantastic, right? Next thing, providing AI powered summaries to explain data trends in language business leaders can understand. Really exciting to see them bringing AI to GA four and then providing insights from that. That's something that we have been doing that Ignite as well and have a tool around. Also next thing, more advanced budgeting and planning tools to help you understand the most of your ad spend. So great. Thanks Jay four, that's super excited. Make sure to check those out now there's a couple other ones. So Google also announced updates to some of its advertising data. I thought this was pretty interesting. So the first thing, in the past, users reported on discrepancies between GA Four and Google Ads Manager. They think they've fixed that now. And then the other thing is there's a new update that also displays advertising segment sizes. So now you're going to know the size of your advertising segment when you did it before. This is available in the advertising segments panel in the advertising section. And to me, that's really. Exciting to have that inside of Google Ads because you'd have to put a bunch of segments together and sometimes it would show you the size, sometimes it wouldn't. But now just to see the size of the segment. So you really helpful for advertisers. Next thing this week, there's some new things in Google ads. If you're not a Google ads expert, this might not resonate a lot for you, but let's just take a look at it really quick. So the first thing is search term reporting includes misspelled search queries in the search term report. You know, you'll know what those are. Now the next thing is negative keywords. They're going to have blocks of misspellings of negative. Keywords, they're going to have brand inclusions for broad match. This is going to limit ads to queries that include specific brand names. They're going to have brand exclusion expansion and this applies brand exclusions to all match types in dynamic search ads, which is actually that's really exciting to be able to do that because now you can get those branded terms excluded out of everything. You can run more to non branded if you like next thing this week. Google says that if people search for your brand name, it actually helps you rank better in Google and it can help you. We've known this for a while, but if you have a strong brand, say your Coca-Cola, a lot of people are searching for you online. That helps you rank better than if you're a smaller soda brand and and nobody's searching for you for a term like soda. And then next thing this week, Google has gotten rid of infinite scroll in their search results. So that's gone away and I'm really happy about that. It just didn't feel right. For one reason or another, I like to be able to Click to the next page, not just go forever next thing this week. This is a big story that we've actually seen reported on multiple times over the last couple months. And Ignite has designed a whole new service around this, which actually we're presenting to the entire company today. And we've already started doing for some clients, some really excited about it, but the study is from Reddit. And Gen. Z is using social media more and more. I'm calling it social search. They're doing social search right now, traditional search to find brands and products. They're turning away from search engines. This is Gen. Z specifically. Not everybody, just Gen. Z. And so that's why it's so important that you have a holistic strategy. You can't really just be optimizing for Google. You need to be optimizing for TikTok. You need to be optimizing for Instagram. You need to be optimizing for Facebook Watch. You need to be optimizing for every single platform out there, Quora. About it, but what they're saying is Genz, they're less interested in an expert review and they're kind of more interested in what's Oing U and their search inside of these social sites and that's kind of connected to the people they're following, you know the hashtags they're following friends and family, etcetera. But they tend to use mobile platforms for much of their research and some search engine results don't offer a mobile friendly experience. So that's that's an issue as well but according to the study brand. Discovery and social media increased 36% in 2018 and then it's increased 49% in 2023. So that's a pretty large jump. Now it's still you know, just one segment of the market and it's just it don't quote me on this specifically, but I think in the last study I saw it's only a portion of the market maybe 30 to 50% in Gen. Z or are using social search. So it's kind of an emerging thing just like you know, the AI, the generative AI optimization if you don't know what that is, there's. The option now to optimize for ChatGPT so you can show up in there. There's the option to show up inside of Google Gemini responses. And that really starts with doing analysis, seeing where they're pulling the information from and doing your best to also be listed in those areas that they're pulling information from, as well as having information on your own website that has facts about your brand that you can submit to these search engines. So anyways, social search, it's on the rise. Don't forget about it, bring it up. Your meeting next week, you're marketing meeting next week and tell them that you heard about it here alright next thing is YouTube. They are now allowing you to edit videos that are longer than six hours in length and they also say here that it could take a long time to process, which is probably true and then the last thing this week is Meta has rolled out expanded access to its broadcast channels so now pages with more than 10. 1000 followers have the opportunity to create a broadcast channel in an in an attempt to improve communication. What these channels do is users now have the ability to automatically share updates between Instagram and Facebook. They can also share content via Stories with a dedicated sticker format. And there's another big perk of the update and Pages can now send exclusive content to channel members before the general public. You can only do this if you have a page with over 10,000 followers. That's it for the digital marketing. Use this week. Do me a favor, send this to somebody. Give me a like a comment. I'll see you next week. I hope everything's going great with you. Have a good summer. See you soon. Goodbye.