Digital Marketing Mondays

Google has a challenge most companies would love to have. They have over 4 billion users and are likely close to the most users the market will allow. How does a company with no room to gain users increase its revenue? The upcoming PaLM (pathway language model) search update could help Google address this very issue. PaLM will have a significant impact on Google's ability to translate sites from English into many other languages with greater accuracy than ever before. Translated search results will be returned directly on SERPs. This means Google's existing users will be able to get translated answers to their questions without leaving the search result pages. Though the results will be cited, the incentive to click a result may actually decrease as Google better delivers answers directly to users.

In this week’s Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the impact this update will have on marketers, affects it will have on click through rate, and potential improvements to Google's translation services.

What use do you have for a 15 page report on your digital marketing initiatives? Not much. All reputable marketing agencies will provide reports on the state of your marketing on a regular basis. The point many agencies miss is that clients have no clue what to do with most of this data. The real benefit of a report is not metrics and numbers, but the insights and guidance an agency can provide based on and alongside your data. If your agency is not providing insights and actionable items from your data, you are being kept in the dark.

In this week’s Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss why data insights matter more that the data itself and how so many agencies miss the opportunity to truly inform their clients on the state of their digital marketing campaigns.

Google announced this week that it will be sunsetting Universal Analytics (UA), also referred to as Google Analytics 3 (GA3), on July 1st, 2023. It will be replaced with the currently released Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which promises to change the advertising process using AI. Historically, we marketers have concluded that Google's AI is far from perfect. In reality, the death of UA means less detailed reporting, less access to data, and more reliance on Google for insights. This slap in the face from Google also comes with an expiration date for all UA implementations of analytics. Starting July 1st, 2023, no further data will be collected from GA3 accounts, including page hits. This forced change to the new platform will reverberate through many online industries.

In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss this major change in depth and outline some high-priority tasks you'll want to complete before Universal Analytics is retired.

Facebook (Meta) has begun to restrict targeting certain categories (such as health causes and politics) within their advertising platforms. This affects not only Facebook but also Instagram and WhatsApp, which they also own. Now in a position no corporation wants to be in, Meta is in the process of performing damage control on their reputation and public image. Reacting to pressure from groups like Apple and the governments of various countries, they are playing catch up regarding their user data privacy policies. While this is great for users, marketers will face unique challenges as a direct result of this new direction. How the change impacts agencies and businesses will vary based on their industry, goals, and strategy. It also means that for the first time, many will look towards smaller platforms like Reddit and Pinterest that rely on their own first-party data.

In this week’s Digital Marketing Mondays, Devin and Hans discuss the challenges and opportunities that Facebook's changing ad policies are creating.

Google's biggest strength is that it holds the most market share in the search industry. This is also its biggest challenge. How does a company increase its revenue when its userbase is so vast it is unlikely to grow in a significant way? Google's answer to this is to increase the number of ads they display on search engine result pages. While this may be better for Google, it may not be better for businesses. Organic results are pushed down, potentially below the fold, with Google now showing up to 5 ads at the top of the page. The question many are asking is how will this affect their SEO and PPC strategy moving forwards.

In this week’s Digital Marketing Mondays Devin and Hans discuss the challenges that Google's decision to place more ads on SERPs is creating and how you can best navigate this change.

It's hard to not notice Facebook (Meta) is having some big issues these past few weeks in February. The company has lost billions of dollars, active daily users are stagnating, and the momentum of their eCommerce offerings has slowed. Undeniably there are some big red flags for the platform overall. To add to the trouble, TikTok is ever-growing and Apple is applying pressure with its tracking transparency initiative which is affecting how companies target their audiences online. Many businesses and marketers are asking if they should continue to advertise on Facebook or if they should spend their budget elsewhere. The answer may surprise you as a loss for Facebook is not a loss for everyone around them.

In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Devin breaks down all of the issues Facebook is having and explains how this changes how you need to think about Facebook for your advertising campaigns.

Sponsoring your brand or trademark as a keyword in paid search might seem like a great strategy to beat out your competition. Over the years, we have seen this strategy work for some clients, but for others, we have witnessed it hurt the bottom line. Flipping this technique on its head by sponsoring branded keywords belonging to your competition may seem like a great way to take over some of their market share in your industry, but this can create its own problems and even trigger a keyword bidding war where the only winner is Google.

In this week’s Digital Marketing Monday, Devin and Hans discuss how to determine when it is appropriate to sponsor branded keywords and how to avoid situations where you would waste your ad spend or instigate competitors to go on the offense.

A few months ago Google introduced its Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposal as its answer to cookieless tracking. This past week, Google announced FLoC would be replaced with a new proposal, Topics API. While it was clear from the beginning replacing cookies would be a challenge, this new proposal brings to light Google's struggle to solve the problem of collecting user data while maintaining their privacy. 

In this week’s Digital Marketing Mondays, Devin and Hans discuss what effects Topics API will have on the marketing industry and how it will impact your ability to target audiences in the future.

AT&T developed the digital advertising platform Xandr to improve ad buying opportunities across streaming media. It was recently announced that the Microsoft acquisition of Xandr has been approved and is under regulatory review before being finalized. Microsoft previously acquired LinkedIn and has generated much revenue through ad sales on the platform. While Bing offers ad placements, it does not have the volume to compete against the likes of Google and Facebook alone. Acquiring Xandr is a logical move as it will increase Microsoft's ad real estate, strengthening its placement opportunities. With data from LinkedIn, Bing, and Xandr along with the vast number of platforms on which ads can now be offered through Microsoft, it is likely that they will take a huge chunk away from the duopoly on advertising that is Google and Facebook.

In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Devin and Hans discuss what effects Microsoft's acquisition of Xandr will have on advertising and its potential to disrupt the industry.

Reporting is critical in marketing. While there are many services both paid and free to help you create custom reports for your clients, we found Databox's features and workflow beat out every other reporting service we've tried to date. Databox integrates with many data sources including social media platforms, CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, SEO software and services such as SEMrush, and many more! Being able to merge data sets from Google Search Console and Google Analytics with so many other platforms and quickly generate easy to digest reports from the latest data sets has alleviated the heavy lifting from our workload and lets us spend more time on helping clients make strategic decisions. While Google Data Studio does an adequate job, marketers are looking for more systematic ways to evaluate all marketing information coming in and act on decisions in close to real time. The limitations in creating custom reports and presentations in Google Data Studio became a bottleneck, and Databox was our solution.

In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Devin and Hans discuss the shortcomings of Google Data Studio and talk over the additional tools Databox offers that appeal to them as digital marketing experts.