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August 12th, 2022
Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued an interpretive rule laying out when digital marketing providers for financial firms must comply with federal consumer financial protection law. Digital marketers that are involved in the identification or selection of prospective customers or the selection or placement of content to affect consumer behavior are typically service providers for purposes of the law. Digital marketers acting as service providers can be held liable by the CFPB or other law enforcers for committing unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices as well as other consumer financial protection violations.
When it comes to online shopping, 61% of US consumers begin their product hunt on Amazon, close to half on a search engine like Google, and 32% on Walmart.com. It’s important to not discount the 11% of those who start their product search on TikTok, considering the platform is relatively new. That figure is likely higher among younger internet users, who are taking advantage of shopping-friendly features the ByteDance-owned app is rolling out. So while Amazon and search engines take the top spots, TikTok is the one to watch.
The US advertising market is being dragged by the ear into a new, more privacy-focused era. Thanks to regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the US, the market’s largest players—particularly Google and Apple—are making it harder for third-party firms to surveil the browsing behavior of internet users, chiefly by ending support for third-party identifiers and requiring users to consent to being tracked online. These changes have significant implications for how and where advertisers deploy their digital ad budgets, and as much as $10 billion of publisher ad revenues are at risk.
Meta is rolling out automation tools to help businesses make the most of their ad spending by leveraging automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in the midst of online privacy changes and overall economic challenges. Through Meta’s Advantage+ solutions, advertisers can tap AI to help develop campaigns that are more relevant to the people who are most important to their businesses. Advantage+ shopping campaigns are being launched to advertisers worldwide. Advantage+ shopping campaigns are intended to help advertisers gain quick intelligence about the campaigns that are converting consumers. The solution also gets rid of having to manually create ads and automates up to 150 creative combinations at once.
Another new report on teen social media usage, and another confirmation that TikTok is the dominant platform of the moment among the youth, while Facebook continues its downward slide in the broader relevance stakes. That’s no big surprise. Meta’s own internal research has shown that both Facebook and Instagram have seen declines among younger audiences of late, which has seen Meta put more of a focus on developing tools for younger audiences specifically.
As it works to mitigate the impacts of Apple’s ATT privacy prompts, which have reduced its capacity for personalization and data-based ad targeting, Meta’s looking to enhance its automated ad tools, and make them more available to more businesses, via a new expansion of its ‘Meta Advantage’ automation program. Originally launched back in March, Meta Advantage groups together its various ad automation and AI-based tools, in order to make it easier for advertisers to understand which elements do what, while also highlighting the various automation tools it has on offer.
August 5th, 2022
Increasingly, young people are using social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram to search for things to do and places to try, even seeking out news and important information, rather than consulting traditional discovery tools like Google Search and Google Maps. According to TechCrunch, Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president in charge of Google Search, said, “In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”
In a move that likely reflects a bigger concern for TikTok than it does for Meta, and its overall growth plans, Facebook has announced that it’s shutting down its experiments with live shopping in the app, as of October 1st this year. As reported by Business Insider, Facebook’s shuttering its native live stream shopping program, along with the ability to create product playlists, or tag products on Facebook, as it continues to refine its focus, and rationalize its development spend.
Whether you like it or not – whether you use social platforms for this purpose or don’t – the fact of the matter is that a lot of people are now getting at least some of their daily news and current affairs content from social media apps. Which can be problematic, for various reasons. For one, social platform algorithms seek to maximize engagement, which often sees more divisive, more argumentative content get more reach, because it sparks more debate. Algorithms are also attuned to your likes and interests, based on past engagement, which can lead to filter bubbles where you’re seeing fewer alternative viewpoints, while it can also mean that your political views are being shaped, one way or another, by your connections, and what they share in their feeds.
Best practices for SEO are generally regarded as those that abide within Google’s evolving guidelines and are not explicitly listed by Google as manipulative. But best practices are more than just what Google considers manipulative and what is not. For example, Google’s guidelines don’t tell you how to choose hosting, how to optimize a WordPress site, or whether a website builder makes the most sense for a specific situation. Those are the kinds of best practices this guide will cover.
There will be nearly 3.6 billion monthly social network users worldwide this year, amounting to more than 8 in 10 internet users. But growth has fallen dramatically since the pandemic peak. Fewer new users are logging on, and some have decided to abandon social networks, leading to the slowest growth rate since we began forecasting social network usage in 2009. Still, there will be a 2.9% growth this year, amounting to nearly 3.6 billion social networkers around the world. That accounts for 8 in 10 internet users, making using social networks still one of the world’s most popular digital activities.
Clubhouse, the social audio app that rose in popularity amid the pandemic, is looking to shake up its platform with the launch of private communities called “Houses.” The company’s new offering allows any person or group to create their own curated “House” within Clubhouse. Users can sign up to create Houses starting today, but Clubhouse says it will approve new Houses slowly in order to learn from feedback and tweak the product accordingly.
July 29th, 2022
We’re still at least two years away from ditching the invasive cookies, fingerprinting, and other tech that track user information and behavior across multiple sites for advertising to using Google’s preferred Privacy Sandbox set of replacements. Google originally published its intention to phase out support for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome within two years in early 2020 — now about two and a half years (and one global pandemic) ago.
Tough times at Meta, with the company reporting a decline in monthly active Facebook users, and a further slowdown in revenue, as global economic trends continue to impact the company’s overall performance. On usage – Facebook is currently seeing 1.97 billion daily active users, a slight increase on last quarter. The increases were almost entirely driven by the Asia Pacific market, with Facebook continuing to grow in India and Indonesia specifically. Though Facebook usage has continued to decline in Europe, this time in a significant way. Facebook’s monthly active user counts look even worse.
Google confirms the July 2022 product review update, the fourth in a series of updates targeting low-quality reviews, is now rolling out. The update began rolling out July 27 and concludes within two to three weeks. Google made the announcement on Twitter while linking to the official page for search ranking updates. If Google’s announcement comes as a surprise to you, that’s because it is. Many of Google’s algorithm changes come without warning, including all of the product review updates so far. However, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. With every algorithm update, there’s a chance for ranking improvements, especially if the last update hurt you.
Instagram’s head defended the app against a user backlash, after the social network launched a series of changes intended to make it more like its arch-rival TikTok. The changes, which include an extremely algorithmic main feed, a push for the service’s TikTok-style “reels” videos, and heavy promotion of the TikTok-style “remix” feature, have resulted in users struggling to find content from friends and family, once the bread and butter of the social network.
How often do you use DuckDuckGo? If you answered “never,” you might want to read this article. Over the years, DuckDuckGo has redesigned itself and evolved to better meet searchers’ needs and protect their privacy. In addition to its excellent search capabilities, DDG (DuckDuckGo) has many helpful features that can help you improve your search strategy while cutting the time it takes to complete research.
As of July 2022, online search engine Bing accounted for nearly nine percent of the global search market, while market leader Google had a share of around 83 percent. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s market share was 2.55 percent. Ever since the introduction of Google Search in 1997, the worldwide market share of all search engines has been rather lopsided. Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining a 92.47 percent market share as of June 2021. The majority of Google revenues are generated through advertising. Its parent company, Alphabet, was one of the biggest internet companies worldwide as of 2021, with a market capitalization of 1,392 billion U.S. dollars. The company has also expanded its services to mail, productivity tools, enterprise products, mobile devices, and other ventures. As a result, Google earned one of the highest tech company revenues in 2020 with roughly 181.69 billion U.S. dollars.
July 22nd, 2022
Thirty-two percent of consumers — an estimated 83 million people — used smart home or automated chore technologies in May, according to “The ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report,” a PYMNTS publication based on a survey of 2,696 U.S. consumers. That was equal to the share of consumers who had done so in April but about four percentage points higher than the share who had done so six months earlier, when 28% of consumers said they had used smart home or automated chore technologies in November 2021.
Amazon’s annual sales event Prime Day delivered more than $12 billion in sales, according to third-party estimates. The retailer hosted the popular shopping event in the U.S. and in more than 15 other countries worldwide on July 13-15. This was the first Prime Day event under the new CEO Andy Jassy, who took over Jeff Bezos last year after the Amazon founder stepped down. The company was bullish on its Prime Day results and said it was the “best ever,” mentioning that consumers across the world spent $1.7 billion. Amazon claimed that it sold more than 300 million items during these sales, but didn’t disclose any revenue figures.
In an early read of the full 48 hour Prime Day 2022 event, the average order size was $52.26, up from $44.75 in the same reporting period on Prime Day 2021. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of households shopping Prime Day placed 2+ separate orders, bringing the average household spend to roughly $144.56.
According to internal data, Google found that around 40% of Gen Z is using social media in place of Google. When looking for a place to eat or to find an answer to a question, Gen Z is becoming more likely to search on TikTok or Instagram, according to Insider. The survey found that younger people prefer “visually rich” forms of search, according to TechCrunch.
Yogi Berra, the baseball sage is also often credited with saying, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” While there is no crystal ball to show where Gen-Z is going after TikTok, new platforms are emerging daily. These platforms will not kill TikTok any more than video killed the radio star; rather, they will provide alternatives for marketers who want to reach Gen-Zers. Given the speed of change that happens with technology, it’s important for advertisers and content providers to keep an eye on new platforms and allocate a certain amount of budget to test their potential and prepare for the future.
In response to rising inflation, one in five marketers have cut their spending, per new Advertiser Perceptions data. Budgets decreased by an average of 16%. Upper-funnel campaigns have seen the biggest cuts, with 47% of marketers surveyed suspending connected TV (CTV), 44% halting digital video, and 42% pausing linear TV.
TikTok really wants to make live-stream commerce a thing, which would then enable it to follow in the footsteps of its Chinese sister app, Douyin, and turn the short-form video platform into a money-making machine for a huge number of creators. TikTok recently commissioned a new survey by Ipsos to provide more perspective on why brands should be looking to live-stream commerce in the app. The study found that; 1 in 5 live streaming users watch TikTok LIVE, and of that group 62% watch it every day, Users on TikTok are 50% more interested in branded LIVE content than non-TikTok users and 50% of TikTok users have bought something after watching TikTok LIVE.
July 15th, 2022
A major shift in the U.S. app economy has just taken place. In the second quarter of this year, U.S. consumer spending in non-game mobile apps surpassed spending in mobile games for the first time in May 2022 and the trend continued in June. This drove the total revenue generated by non-game apps higher for the quarter, reaching about $3.4 billion on the U.S. App Store, compared with $3.3 billion spent on mobile games. After the shift in May, 50.3% of the spending was coming from non-game apps by June 2022, according to new findings in a report from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. By comparison, games had accounted for more than two-thirds of total spending on the U.S. App Store just five years ago.
Twitter is suing Elon Musk to force the tech titan to commit to his bid to purchase the company for $44 billion. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, Musk said he was seeking to withdraw from the purchase agreement, arguing Twitter had violated it by refusing to turn over information about spam and bot accounts on the site. In its suit, filed Tuesday, Twitter accused Musk of breaching the purchase agreement while causing its share price to tank.
Nearly 40% of Gen Z prefers using TikTok and Instagram for search over Google, according to Google’s internal data. Google is changing features in Search and Maps to try to attract a younger audience. TikTok poses a threat to not only Google Search but also to YouTube. TikTok is coming for more than just its social media competitors.
YouTube has announced a new milestone for YouTube TV, with its subscription content service now up to 5 million total subscribers, highlighting the popularity and expansion of the option. Originally launched back in 2017, in five US markets, YouTube TV is now available in ‘over 99.5% of households in the United States’, providing an alternative to traditional pay TV options, and access to a heap of popular channels and content.
Google Ads will now have an optimization score. The addition of a new feature will increase compatibility and help advertisers better track their ad campaigns. In addition, they will be able to perform max campaigns. Google will soon roll out six new features for the Performance Max campaign. It will also incorporate awaited optimization score. Advertisers will now be able to quickly get insight into how well the ads are doing. It will help identify sections to improve with this new optimization score. It will answer questions regarding the campaign.
Every so often, the dominant form of communication is upended by new technological developments and changing societal preferences. These transitions seem to be happening faster over time, aligning with the accelerated progress of technology. Time travel back just 20 years ago to 2002, and you’d notice the vast majority of people were still waiting on the daily paper or the evening news to help fill the information void. In fact, for most of 2002, Google was trailing in search engine market share behind Yahoo! and MSN. Meanwhile, early social media incarnations (MySpace, Friendster, etc.) were just starting to come online, and all of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the iPhone did not yet exist.
July 8th, 2022
TikTok may seem like an unstoppable global entertainment machine, but at least one part of the company’s offering isn’t quite taking over: TikTok is scaling back its live commerce plans in Europe and the US, the Financial Times reported, after early launches simply haven’t been successful. TikTok has been testing live shopping in the UK since late last year, starting with a multi-brand event called “On Trend” last December. But the FT reported that those shopping livestreams haven’t drawn big audiences and haven’t sparked many sales, and some of the creators involved in early TikTok Shop projects have dropped out altogether.
Despite the name change and metaverse hyperbole, Facebook has always been at the center of the Meta suite of software for users engaging with its wider ecosystem. While that may continue to be the case indefinitely, it’s clear the company is taking steps to ensure that its next swath of users aren’t tied to a network that may still pay the bills but isn’t where the company sees its reinvention. Next month, the company will be introducing a new type of login called a Meta account that will allow users to engage with products that previously might have required a Facebook account to use.
Looking for ways to give your Twitter marketing efforts a boost, and/or ensure that you’re maximizing your opportunities in the app? This will help – Twitter has published a new, 45-page ‘Twitter Connect Playbook’, which is essentially a guide on how to utilize Twitter’s various ad formats and tools, including notes on the platform’s audience, key best practices, case study examples, and more.
Google Search Console Insights, the cute analytics that joins Search Console and Google Analytics with a goal of making it easy to understand your content’s performance, now works with sites that only use Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This is welcomed news for sites that was set up without Universal Analytics but instead with only GA4.
Throughout the pandemic, in-person and analog services have rapidly fallen to digital alternatives. Many restaurants and bars have left physical menus behind in favor of QR codes, apps, and webforms. At Walt Disney World in Florida, an app-based chatbot is telling people to visit long-closed restaurants. While the digital divide has been excluding economically disadvantaged and elderly people for years, its rapid expansion is creating a new problem: The technology is often terrible.
This year, US adults will spend 25.7% of their social media time on Facebook, down 9.6 percentage points from 2019. As Facebook’s share drops, TikTok’s will continue to grow. US adults will devote 16.7% of their social time to TikTok this year, up 12.2 percentage points from 2019. Daily time spent with social increased from 59 minutes in 2019 to 1 hour, 15 minutes this year, and it will stay at this level over the next few years, even as the way users divvy up that time is changing. TikTok is eating into Facebook’s share, and so is fellow Meta-owned app Instagram. Meanwhile, for social platforms other than the six shown, their share of time spent will decrease by 5.0 percentage points this year compared with 2019, as usage consolidates among the major players and away from less-established apps.
July 1st, 2022
In what could be a significant step towards protecting children from potential harms online, the California legislature is currently debating an amended bill that would enable parents, as well as the state Attorney General, to sue social platforms for algorithms and systems that addict children to their apps. If passed, that could add a range of new complications for social media platforms operating within the state, and could restrict the way that algorithmic amplification is applied for users under a certain age.
While Google’s newest campaign type, Performance Max (PMax), is devoid of keyword data, some new information may help advertisers better steer their efforts with the product. PMax campaigns are unique to all other campaign types as no keywords are required and no keyword data is delivered to advertisers. The closest existing campaign type is the fully automated shopping-only product, “Smart Shopping” which will be shuttered in July. The big difference between the two is that Performance Max campaigns can run without a product feed and can also include local ad elements.
Google’s Freshness Update was a significant ranking algorithm change that introduced the trend of making the search results more precise and responsive to user intent. The result of the update was the ability to add time as a relevance measure for search queries. This enabled Google to surface content that is trending, regularly occurring (like a yearly event), or subject to frequent updating (like new product models). The Freshness Update was made possible by the infrastructure changes introduced by the Caffeine Update, which enabled Google to scale up web indexing at an unprecedented scale, enabling Google to surface the most up-to-date content that is literally up-to-the-minute relevant.
Brands will soon have more options for posting Instagram Reels to their accounts, and managing related activity, with Meta announcing that it’s launching its Reels API for external use. API access enables platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout Social to provide cross-platform posting and analytics capacity within a single dashboard, which can make it much easier to keep track of your various social posts and schedules in one place.
Two-thirds of the US population will use social networks on a monthly basis in 2022, with the largest influx of new users coming from Gen Z. This year, 4.0 million Gen Zers (born between 1997 and 2012) will become social network users, up 8.4% over 2021. That momentum will continue, and in 2025—the year the youngest members of the generation turn 13—there will be 13.8 million more Gen Z social network users than there were in 2021. With each year that passes, younger Gen Zers become teens and start to use social networks for the first time. As a result, all the major social networks will see growth in Gen Z users this year, with double-digit gains on Reddit (up 15.3%), TikTok (11.5%), and Instagram (10.5%). Among the rest, Pinterest will be up 7.9%; Twitter, up 5.9%; and Snapchat, up 5.1%. Even Facebook will be up 4.9%.
June 24th, 2022
They’ve been threatening it for a while, and now, it’s finally here, with some LinkedIn users seeing a new alert in the app. That’s right, you now have a new Reaction on LinkedIn, with ‘Funny’ being added to the six other emoji response options on LinkedIn posts. Or you may have it – according to LinkedIn, the ‘Funny’ Reaction is gradually being rolled out, and isn’t available to everyone just yet. But it is coming, giving you a simple way to express that a LinkedIn post ‘made you laugh, felt humorous, or offered light-hearted fun in a professional context.’ Professional context being the key parameter that LinkedIn wants to emphasize, because there’s a lot of untargeted junk on the platform, posted by users seeking attention.
Twitter’s move into the payments field is about to accelerate dramatically. And it’s very likely to include cryptocurrency. Elon Musk made that clear in his all-hands virtual meeting with employees. Asked about integrating payments into the social media giant’s platform, Musk said, “money is fundamentally digital at this point and has been for a while,” the New York Times reported. “It would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter, so it’s easy to send money back and forth.” Musk previously said he’d want to see $15 million in revenue from payments in 2023 — a drop in the bucket — growing to $1.3 billion by 2028.
Digital audio has been taking up more than an hour per day of US adults’ time since 2016, and 2022 will be another year of solid growth. They will consume an additional 3 minutes per day of digital audio this year, to reach 1:40. Among active digital audio listeners, the daily figure will be a robust 2:17. Digital audio will account for 12.7% of overall media time among US adults. Within digital media time, audio’s share will be 20.3%—a high figure compared with many alternative digital options.
As more tech companies develop virtual and augmented reality products, some oversight groups are trying to keep the industry on the same page. The newest of these is the Metaverse Standards Forum, which aims to drive open interoperability, which could make it easier for developers to build across platforms. The forum already has some major players on board, such as Meta, Microsoft, Epic Games, Adobe, Nvidia, Sony, Unity and others. But there are also some glaring absences, including companies like Niantic, Apple, Roblox and Snapchat, which are building consumer “metaverse” products as well.
Google is launching a redesigned version of Google News on desktop that users can customize to meet their information needs. This update adds: The ability to add filters, Customizable topics, and An expanded Fact Check section. Google says the new look for Google News on desktop is inspired by feedback received from readers.
Digital advertising spending worldwide – which includes both desktop and laptop computers as well as mobile devices – stood at an estimated 378 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. This figure is forecast to constantly increase in the coming years, reaching a total of 646 billion U.S. dollars by 2024. Mobile internet advertising is a heavily invested sub-sector of the digital advertising industry. Mobile internet advertising spending is forecast to increase from 276 billion U.S. dollars in 2020 to nearly 495 billion U.S. dollars in 2024. Following this pattern, mobile advertising spending in the U.S. is also forecast to grow in the coming years. Mobile ad spending in the U.S. is projected to nearly double between 2019 and 2020.
June 17th, 2022
Walmart and Roku, Inc. announced a first-of-its-kind partnership to make TV streaming the next e-commerce shopping destination. Walmart will be the exclusive retailer to enable streamers to purchase featured products fulfilled by Walmart directly on Roku, America’s #1 TV streaming platform. This unique partnership evolves shopping beyond the QR code and will change the way customers interact and shop TV and video content. The new experience offers product discovery with a seamless checkout experience, enabling purchase directly at the time of inspiration.
Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, is “re-examining its commitment to paying for news,” according to several unnamed sources who were described as familiar with Facebook’s plans. The potential loss of those payments, was “prompting some news organizations to prepare for a potential revenue shortfall of tens of millions of dollars. ”According to a Journal report, for the past two years—since the original payment deals were announced in 2019— Meta has paid the Washington Post more than $15 million per year, the New York Times over $20 million per year, and the Journal more than $10 million per year (the payments to the Journal are part of a broader deal with Dow Jones, the newspaper’s parent, which is said to be worth more than $20 million per year). The deals, which are expected to expire this year, were part of a broader system of payments Meta made to about 200 news outlets, including Bloomberg, ABC News, USA Today, Business Insider, and the right-wing news site Breitbart News. Smaller deals were typically for $3 million a year or less, the Journal said.
TikTok has added some new tools to help users track and manage the time they spend in the app, with break reminders to limit the endless scrolling in feed, and a new dashboard for monitoring screen time. It’s also implementing compulsory reminders for younger users after a certain time period in the app.
Google Analytics and Search Console data do not match. The discrepancy creates the impression that the data is inaccurate in some way. The reality is that the data is in fact accurate. The discrepancy exists in what is being tracked and how Google chooses to present it. Reconciling Google Analytics and Search Console data can be difficult because the numbers don’t really match. The reason is because both services are solving different problems. Because of that reason, both services take different approaches to how data is collected and reported.
Twitter has conducted new research into the effectiveness of its warning prompts on potentially offensive tweet replies, which it first rolled out in 2020, then re-launched last year, as a means to add a level of friction, and consideration, into the tweet process. Twitter’s warning prompts use automated detection to pick up any likely offensive terms within tweet replies, which then triggers this alert to add a moment of hesitation in the process. Back in February, Twitter reported that in 30% of cases where users were shown these prompts, they did in fact end up changing or deleting their replies, in order to avoid possible misinterpretation or offense. According to Twitter’s research, for every 100 instances where these prompts are displayed (on average) 69 tweets were sent without revision, 9 tweets were not sent and 22 were revised.
Approximately 17% of all ads delivered through connected TV (CTV) devices like dongles or gaming consoles are playing while televisions are off, costing marketers $1 billion per year in wasted ad spend, according to a report from GroupM and iSpot. GroupM and iSpot said they found “virtually no incidence” of the issue when users were streaming from native smart TV apps. Native smart TV apps make up around 50% of all CTV streaming, meaning approximately 8% to 10% of all CTV ads are broadcasting on a dead screen.
