💾 (Over) Sharing on Social?

In Today's Issue

• You Weren’t Supposed to Share That

• 1 Free Newsletter > $200k Marketing Degree

• Bots, Beacons, and Biometrics

• Backing Up Google Analytics

• Communication is Key

• Creative Spending

Could Social Sharing Make Your Brand Blush?

Branding is serious business. No less an authority than David Ogilvy observed that “every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.”

A recent article in the New York Times put the spotlight on a social media trend that has emerged in response to the challenging economy (live quitting). It raises interesting questions about the changing calculus of cost-benefit analyses. It suggests that success in the future will require anything but a business-as-usual approach.

As companies from startup Discord to Alphabet (Google) have shed hundreds of jobs in recent weeks, some tech workers are taking to social media to share their layoff experiences, and many of these videos have gone viral. The trend is part of a movement driven by Generation Z and millennials to share every aspect of their lives on social media. 

Vanessa Burbano, a professor at Columbia Business School who studies how company practices influence employee behavior, said remote work had emboldened people to speak out online.

Companies need to realize that anything can be recorded and shared, in an age when people are increasingly comfortable posting things online, said Lindsey Pollack, an author of career books on multigenerational workplaces.

Chris Celletti at Ogilvy goes straight to the heart of the matter, arguing that “we have entered the age of Social 3.0, a new era which necessitates brands become culture-first players.”If you’re not up to speed on the social media terrain, the folks at Social Media Examiner just released a guide to the latest updates on Instagram.

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🤖 Bot clicks and fake traffic set to cost advertisers over $71bn in 2024

It’s never been more important for marketers to maximize ad spend efficiency. But a recent study conducted by Lunio analyzed 2.6B paid ad clicks and 104B impressions from 60,000 ad accounts across the platform’s customers and discovered that 8.5% of all paid traffic across major marketing channels, including Google, Meta, LinkedIn, X, and TikTok was invalid. That’s not very efficient, is it?

Even with ad spend growth slowing, this emerging trend could cost businesses $71B in direct ad spending and a staggering $204.8B in lost revenue opportunity this year.

🔒 What the future of contextual advertising looks like in a privacy-first world

While audience targeting has been a foundational application of custom AI in digital advertising, its potential extends far beyond. Forward-thinking advertisers have leveraged custom AI to guide their contextual strategies for years. As the industry moves toward a post-cookie, privacy-first future, this application of custom AI promises the most significant breakthroughs.

The latest advancement in this evolution is fully customized targeting designed for the cookieless web. As the digital advertising industry grapples with signal loss and heightened privacy standards, custom contextual AI stands as a beacon of innovation, guiding the way to more effective, responsible, and sustainable advertising practices.

🧑🏽‍🔬 Juniper Research estimates biometric transactions will hit 46B by 2028

Experts are projecting that Biometric POS terminals will handle more than 46B transactions annually by 2028. That’s an increase of 138% over 2023’s 19.5B.

In-store biometrics provide a better consumer experience, allowing retailers to experiment with in-store offerings as they respond to pressures from e-commerce and consumers grappling with a cost-of-living crisis.

💲 Ad Prices Drove Continued Growth in Retail Media and Paid Search, While Commerce Ads Boosted Paid Social Investment

Skai, an omnichannel advertising platform you’ve probably never heard of, published its Q4 2023 Digital Marketing Quarterly Trends Report, an in-depth analysis of the digital marketing trends that defined the fourth quarter of this year, along with an interactive infographic detailing key analysis.

Double-digit growth in cost-per-click helped propel robust year-over-year increases in spending for retail media, and modest growth in paid search. Average cost-per-click (CPC) grew 18% in retail media and 13% in paid search over Q4 2022, but these increases were offset by conversion rates that rose by more than 10% in both channels.

How to Back Up and Blend UA Data with GA4 for Continuous Reporting - February 7th

Our friend, Ameet Wadhwani of Analytics Canvas, is back! We’re opening up a live Brain Gainz session to the public so he could share some ways to blend your Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 data sets for continuous reporting. 

Ameet will share how he uses his Analytics Canvas solution to back up your UA data, and he will also show you how to blend your UA data with GA4 data for continuous or comparison reporting

You’ll also learn how to work with GA4 data now that there’s sampling, tokens, and SQL involved. 

TOPIC: How to Back Up and Blend UA Data with GA4 for Continuous Reporting 

DATE: February 7, 2024 at 1:00 PM Eastern Time

[Register Here To Join Us]

Note: While this workshop will be recorded, the recording is only available to our Data Driven Insiders Members. If you can’t make it live, you can still join Insiders with a 7-day trial.

Improving Analytics Success through Communication

From our good friend Anna Lewis at Polka Dot Data.

This week I had the wonderful pleasure of speaking at the Superweek analytics conference in Hungary. In a week full of technical discussions about AI, GA4, server-side GTM, predictive modeling, and more, I broke the mold and delivered a talk about communication. 

I was inspired to do this topic, having thought about all of these issues we face and seeing how many talks at previous conferences came down to communication needing to be improved. 

I also had some great conversations about this idea and was encouraged to go for it by Jeff Sauer, Mariia Bocheva, and many others. So, thank you to anyone who spurred me on!

Here are my top tips summarized:

• Think about the objective of your communication

• How you can make them see the benefit of taking the action you’re suggesting? 

• Consider your tone of voice, remember to be kind.

• Template common communication and write business wide rules / guidance to help everyone do their best

• Speak their language – be it technical, marketing speak or fluffy

• Remember to be empathetic, listen and (attempt to) care

• Learn handy scripts for when you know you often don’t know what to say (see slides)

• Think about other people’s situation and communication preferences, do they like the details or simple information? 

• Do they need personal touches or find them superfluous / too early in the relationship

• Think about how this communication might be relevant to them. Why should they care?!

This is more of a conversation starter and something to get you thinking more about people and how you can communicate effectively. I won’t ever claim to be perfect at this. I have just noticed that it has been beneficial to teach myself these techniques and I look forward to learning even more from others in the future! Do get in touch with your favorite tips or techniques and I can add them in too!

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