Rabbbits Weeekly: 📉
Wait, businesses are supposed to make money? Plus, other marketing happenings and headlines and things about the æconomy, algorithms, ads, audiences, analytics and attack vectors.
Last week was earnings week in the tech world, and it wasn’t all rainbow hugs and unicorn giggles. Most of the major players took a hit, some for the first time. Hiring freezes or lay offs are replacing nap pods and sushi day as the Silicon Valley trends du jour.Â
What happened to which?
Snapchat signaled the start of the bad news when their stock dropped 39% in one day after missing expectations.
Twitter was a bit down but ad revenue was a bit up. Guess who they blame.
Meta revenue dropped 1%, in part due to lower ad spending. Not a big number, but this is the first revenue drop in company history.
Pinterest revenue is up but still missed expectations and users are down.
Microsoft revenue increased but missed estimates. Ad revenue was down but LinkedIn and Bing Search Ads revenue both increased.
Google revenue increased, but not at their normal levels. And YouTube missed expectations.
Shopify took a big enough hit that they’re laying off 10% of their workforce.
Apple’s slowing sales were boosted by their mysterious Services revenue, but growth there is slowing too.
Amazon’s ad revenue beat expectations and continues to grow, showing the power of first-party data.
Spotify, however, isn't feeling the tech squeeze. The audio platform added nearly 20 million monthly active users in Q2 and beat revenue expectations. So, maybe the ears have it?
Why the heavy economy focus lately? Because it will impact the short-term of marketing more than any platform changes. The approach for the past couple years has basically been: shove as much money as you can manage into digital ad platforms and hold on for the ride. Maybe complain about Meta and Apple a bit, but tinker around until stuff feels like it’s working. Unless, of course, you were a business that was tied to a physical experience or IRL setting. In which case, the approach was save as much as you can and hold on for dear life. But now the habits and trends have been shuffled up again and the hens may be coming home to roost. Confidence is shaky and the second half of the year is uncertain.
Customers can’t give you money if they don’t have it or don’t want to spend it.
Æconomy
US GDP dropped again. Welcome to the recession.
But maybe it's on purpose? Speculation amongst investors is that the Federal Reserve will continue raising interest rates through the end of the year. And then start dropping them back next year. The logic seems to be to cause a recession to fight inflation, or maybe to avoid a recession in the near-term to boost confidence. It's a weird game, modern monetary theory.Â
Note: recessions are a completely normal part of the economic cycle. It's not a matter of if or even when, it's a matter of how deep.
Another price metric fell big, but this time that's good news. The retail price of diesel fuel (what powers the supply chain trucks here in the US, for the most part) dropped over 16 cents in one week at the end of July. That's the biggest one week drop since 2008 (wonder what was happening in the economy back then). That drop capped a 5 week period that saw the retail price drop over 50 cents. Supply chain costs coming down can only be good news at this point.
The US semiconductor industry might be getting a boost in the form of the CHIPS act. This is a big deal since the industry is currently constrained to a handful of major manufacturers, many with close China ties. Plus, everything is chips these days. Developments here and in battery tech will have ripple effects far into the future.
Audiences
The holidays are gonna be crazy this year (do the kids still say "lit"?), according to Pinterest. Peeps is ready to party. They also recommend starting your relevant messaging earlier than you probably thing to, per usual.
Ads
I like this framework for competitor ad analysis from the Stacked Marketer newsletter:
Analyze a competitors ad to identify the value propositions they are asserting and the consumer objections they are addressing.
Repeat 10+ times on other ads.
Identify patterns.
Apply what you learned to your own ads.
Profit?
Another way to steal ideas from your competitors: check their sitemaps to see if you can find their landing pages.
Cookie-less Chrome got pushed back again, now targeting 2024. What does this mean? Topics isn't taking off like they hoped and they need more time to figure out how to keep the money printer in the basement running without cookies.
If you spend a lot of time in Google Ads, you probably turn off the Display Expansion feature in your search campaigns. It's been SOP for most marketers for ages now. But maybe it's time to rethink that? A Google rep recently told our team to allow that recommendation to auto-apply to campaigns The Almighty Algorithmâ„¢ thinks would benefit from it. If it determines that you won't spend your entire budget on search ads and won't compete with any other display ads you're running. And, since they're basically just responsive display ads at this point, the old concern about them looking terrible doesn't really apply. YMMV but worth checking out if you're looking to boost performance.
Big Goog is testing a tool called Confirming Gross Revenue that aims to bring more transparency to digital ad spending. Always follow the money.
Rounding out The-Search-Bar-Formerly-Known-As-Backrub quadfecta, data-driven attribution is here for Google Ads, at least automatically applying it is. I'd only worry about it if you very intentionally selected your attribution setting previously. And if you're still using last click, don't.
Vodafone is bringing mobile user tracking for advertising back. Or at least trying to. The privacy vs. targeting war wages on.
Algorithms
Not to be left out, Amazon is getting in on the TikTok clone wars too. Or at least they're testing it. Someone posted a screen capture video on LinkedIn showing product videos autoplaying in search results on mobile.
Carousel posts come to LinkedIn. And not just the hacky PDF upload version, but actual carousels. With different media types and everything.
Analytics
Google keeps adding to the Analytics 4 feature list. The newest (old feature) addition is custom filtered reports. Which you could already do in Data Studio, which is the tool they really want you using for reporting and stuff.Â
And you can see the performance of Performance Max and Smart Shopping campaigns in the Traffic Acquisition report. Again, really nothing fancy.
Attack Vectors
Do you manage a Facebook Business account? That makes you the target of a popular new scam. Why? They want your money.
Those new privacy regulations are going great, thanks for asking. A new study says 11% of businesses are fully compliant with California's privacy act. Not impressed? GDPR is at 6%. I, for one, am shocked that such well reasoned and clearly actionable pieces of legislation haven't seen higher compliance rates.
The Big Tech antitrust crusade's future seems to be in doubt.
IBM says data breaches are expensive.
There is a computer exploit that can survive a fresh OS or hard drive by infecting the bridge between the software and the hardware. Turns out, it's not that rare. This is an in depth and technical article (that I did not read in full) if this is of interest to you.
Alternates & Assorteds
When wrong numbers go really wrong. How texts that start absurdist end in an all too common scam. And the underbelly is even darker than that suggests.