Rabbbits Weeekly: Still Twitter
Weirdly, Elon is keeping Twitter in the headlines. And the usual round-up of analytics, ads, audience, algorithm, and attack vector news.
A quick Rabbbits Weeekly update: I’ve decided to focus in on the areas that interest me most instead of trying to share all the marketing news (I think) you can use each week. There are just some topics I don’t care to dive deep on (organic social for brands, for instance). So, because I’m a sucker for alliteration, these areas (for now) are: Above the Fold (whatever digital marketing topic has my attention at the moment), Algorithms (platforms & AI), Ads, Audiences, Analytics, and Attack Vectors (hacks, cybersecurity, regulation, and related stuff).
Above the Fold
Twitter is (Still) Having a Moment
Previously, on Rabbbits Weeekly, we ran through a quick timeline of the Twitter insanity. Guess what? It’s not done yet!
Last week, Elon offers to buy all of Twitter, for $43 billion. Two of his biggest (or at least most talked about) plans for the platform include going full free speech (based on the laws of the country the users are in, I think) and open sourcing the algorithm.
In response, Twitter went poison pill to block the offer.
Elon’s pitch has put Twitter in play as at least one other group is now toying with the idea of purchasing The Fail Whale. Apollo Global, a buyout firm and owner of Yahoo (not great company to have in the tech world), is considering getting in on the action. Could we be entering the stage where it’s not if Twitter will be sold but to who that’s the real question?
But this Elon thing is just another one of his stunts right? Maybe not, he’s got the funding secured.
Grab some popcorn, I’m sure this saga isn’t done yet.
Ben Thompson, of Stratechery, put together a piece that is both a useful crash course in Twitter and a proposal for a new business model that I actually really like. The gist of the proposed model is kind of like Wordpress. King Solomon the baby into two pieces: the back end where the real value is (social graph, infrastructure, connections, protocol, etc.) and the front end where Twitter has historically been less than stellar. I think of it as .org vs .com in the WP world. Anyone can build a site wherever they want with Wordpress.org, it’s a tool that gets built upon to create something users will interact with. Wordpress.com is one (the “official”?) way to use WP without having to think about as many of the technical details. New Twitter would allow anyone to create their own client or tool using APIs and the Twitter app would have to compete with these new ones. Current Twitter claims to want to decentralize more, this is how they could do it. And if they feel like they need to go true Silicon Valley and copy someone else to prove it’s a good idea, they can just point to Mastodon.
Note for advertiser’s: Ben’s piece has a useful section to chew on comparing Insta and Blue Bird. Insta is about discovery and procrastination, good for direct response advertising. Twitter is about information and speed, not good for direct response advertising.
Now for the important Twitter news, the Edit button is still being developed and tested. Screenshots and experiences are starting to come out and the most interesting finding so far is that editing a tweet on the front end actually creates a new tweet on the back end. This would be really useful for tracking changes, etc. so I hope it’s a feature and not a bug that gets removed at some point in the development process.
Analytics
Universal Analytics is limping off into the sunset. We already knew they were no longer actively supporting it and now Big Goog has announced they won't be fixing the issues with realtime reporting. So if you live in the now to the extent that you use that view often, it's time to get on the GA4 train if you haven't already.
If you're implementing GA4 on your own and have no idea where to start, this approach might help.
Another easy way to get started with GA4, migrate your UA events. (I enabled a different yet similar feature and see UA events showing in a new GA4 install for a client.)
And after you set up GA4, make sure your data retention settings are right. (I forgot about this one all the time, this is a good reminder.)
A quick and handy guide for the GA4 interface, namely Reports vs Explore.
This is a weird report in my mind because it basically says what we knew was going to happen, the rollout of Mail Privacy Protection on iOS would make open rates unreliable. (I don't think this was the first time this approach has been taken either, I think Gmail does something similar.) But a good reminder to ignore your open rate.
Ads
If you want to make money, sell digital ads! The industry grew 35% last year, to $189b. A number so big even Elon can't buy the whole thing (probably, at least not if he buys Twitter, right?)!
If you really want to make money, sell ads on/in streaming media! Digital audio and video ad revenues both grew over 50% last year.
You know who wants to make money? Netflix. Pulling a Peloton has them planning a lower cost ad-supported subscription tier.
Social media spend is projected to increase big over the next 6 years, but isn't most of the internet social now?
Hopefully if you are managing Facebook ads this isn't news to you, but Big Brother Meta randomly turned off a bunch of ads last week. (upside down face emoji)
Back up the Brinks truck, TikTok is about to get paid. The Trend Machine’s ad revenue is set to triple this year.
You know what TikTokers want from their ads? More things trying to capture their attention, and The Trend Machine is delivering! They've announced interactive add-ons like cards and stickers (lots of stickers) and pop ups and gestures! Honestly this sounds like old banner ad and dancing baby stuff, maybe the 90s really are back.
Ads featuring UGC (user generated content (aka influencer ads aka creator ads)) outperform "conventional" ads by 20-50% according to one study. It makes sense, it plays as social proof or word of mouth.
IAB says the time is now for in-(video) game advertising. Not at all a surprise, the user base and demographics are there (games, consoles, and accessories aren't cheap, eSports are growing, and it's a lot of voluntary time spent in the ad delivery channel.
Microsoft is playing with the idea of adding ad placements to free-to-play Xbox games. Plenty of open questions, but they’re a player that could accelerate the in-game ad market.
And PlayStation doesn't want to be left out.
Nextdoor has expanded their ad platform, creating new options for those that want to advertise in a non-Meta owned version of Facebook. But seriously, worth checking out if your business is home and/or local related.
Google is giving Topics a trial run, this should be interesting.
Audiences
Your audience is on...Microsoft Edge? At least more of it that is on Safari now, Gates' Group moved into the 2 spot, where they can almost see Chrome wayyyyyyy off in the distance in first place. Sadly, 1% of desktops still use Explorer. Please, for the love of all things holy, do not use IE.
Your audience is (probably) on TikTok.
Your audience is not only TikTok, they're buying stuff because of TikTok. Does this mean I have to learn TikTok?
Pinterest is primed to be a powerful shopping platform, and now it’s easier for WooCommerce users to connect their catalog and start selling.
Maybe people will opt-in to app tracking on iOS. The rate of opt-ins continues to climb, hitting 25% recently. I wonder how much of this is dictated by app category and pop up messaging.
It appears many internet users are approaching the final step of the 5 stages of grief and now don't really care about sharing their data with brands / marketers, but make it worth it for them.
Inflation just keeps on, well, inflating. So your audience is likely closing in on (if not already past) the point of cost consciousness. Prices are also on the rise for producers. Buckle up.
Algorithms
Big tech companies, they're just like us! They complain about various taxes. Unlike us they then go out and impose their own taxes that are way worse. Meta wants half of whatever money is made in The Metaverse™. Nothing screams financial desperation like, well, this.
Clubhouse is dead to the point that Meta doesn't even care about trying to copy it anymore. Now they'll try to pivot their podcast partners into the two areas they want to make happen worse than fetch: ecomm and The Metaverse™
And the Insta-algorithm is changing...again. It will now penalize reposted content (cough cough TikToks cough) and reward "original content". They just don't quite now how they'll determine originality, yet.
Coming soon to a search algo near you: TikTok videos!
I haven't hit the required 4689 mentions of TikTok yet so here's another one. Its advertising scale will soon be Twitter + Snapchat, and will probably be YouTube in a couple years.
YouTube is rolling out a new search insight tool that could be very useful for those peeps looking to meet their audience with the content they're looking for.
New from Google's robots: calling your business to make sure your business hours are listed correctly. What could go wrong?
New from Bing's ad robots: automated bidding seasonality adjustments to train the algo better, or something.
There's a bot for that! Is both a play on an old marketing slogan and a search engine for bots. So if you need something done and ran out of interns, maybe you'll find something there?
Audiences + Ads: A Deep Dive
A nice look at the audiences that many are reporting to be the most effective for Facebook ads currently. There are 4 buckets:
As broad as you can go, maybe layer age or location
Interest stacks based on your personas, with matching creative
Super Lookalike, stack up a bunch (up to 5-6 maybe?) of 8% lookalike audiences based on high value custom audiences
All your old lookalikes that did well pre-iOS 14 all crammed together
I've begun testing this out in one client account, here's what I've seen. (We're talking a little over 2 weeks of data so, grain of salt, etc.)
Setup: I duped an existing campaign and created the new audiences to see how they perform in comparison. All creative is the same and we haven't testing persona breakouts (yet). The brand sells kid products so I added being a parent as a criteria to my broad interest targeting. We have integrations with some of our other marketing/ecomm platforms so that might impact how data is handled and therefore performance for custom audiences.
Since launch, the New Audience campaign has lower CPC, CPM, and Cost per Landing Page View along with a higher CTR. (The original campaign is being aided by a retargeting audience that isn''t in the new one as well.)
Amongst the audiences themselves, the Old Lookalikes audience is dominating. The Broad Interest audience is a distant second. And 8% lookalikes is running, confusingly, at a lower CPC but a Cost Per Landing Page View 3x the Old Lookalikes group.
My verdict: give these new audiences a shot and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you learn what you were doing works better and you can focus on optimizing. Learning is always a good thing.
Attack Vectors
Good news! Google's zero day tracking team reported that the number of exploited bugs more than doubled last year. Wait, did I say good news?
DuckDuckGo (my default search engine*) has released their iOS browser in beta. Simple privacy but light on features currently. The big selling point is it not being based on Chrome’s underpinning (like most other browsers).
Data scrapers gonna scrape, and the courts say that's ok. If data is public, scraping it isn't fraud, the 9th circuit court of appeals ruled in a case against LinkedIn. Strike a blow for walled gardens.
*editor’s note: I’m now testing Ecosia
Awesome Article As Always