Clicks and impressions still form the cornerstone for many marketers determining campaign success. Partly, this abomination is due to inertia and providers’ inability to successfully offer deeper insights quickly. The McNamara Fallacy applies: "When you can't measure the things that are important, you make the things you can measure important."

But, things will not improve without pressure. What is the goal of the digital campaign should guide the metrics ask. Is it reach? Ask how many uniques within the target audience were reached. Is it sales? Tie clicks to a landing page and follow conversions to sales. Is it leads? Combine the two and find out how many of the uniques ultimately converted. Then further use data to profile the leads to determine the quality percentage.

Software providers like NinjaCat, Funnel, TapClicks, Datarama and a host of other analytics and visualization platforms make all of this much simpler. There is no longer any reason to settle for simple spreadsheets from providers. Facebook and Google make these metrics easy to access and that is one of the reasons marketers flock to those platforms. Everyone else needs to step it up quickly.

PROGRAMMATIC: Leading publishers are trimming their programmatic partnerships to increase control and quality of advertising. It’s not only about avoiding the proverbial Russian bride ads. It’s about ad load speed and increased viewability, which ultimately means greater revenue. MORE

 

NEW TECH : Combine wearable tech, AI and virtual assistants and you have Iron Man’s JARVIS. And I mean YOU have JARVIS. It’s coming and I’m ok with it, but many still are uncomfortable. MORE … From the simple to the complex, chatbots can serve a timely customer need rather well. Plus, all the data on the backend gives brands insights data they can’t glean as quickly or in as robust a manner. MORE … Well said -- “A lot of the hype is, 'buy the AI and forget about your problems.' And I've read a number of vendors' statements that this makes it easy, and that simply isn't the case,” Mitch Ratcliffe, partner at  Metaforce . MORE

 

SOCIAL: Snapchat is cracking down on certain types of sponsored posts, including popular Snap channels selling brand ads, but the rules remain confusing as Snap deletes some of the posts. MORE … Twitter users skew younger, democratic and educated compared to the general public. MORE … Social ad spending in 2019 will be close to half of what marketers spend on television. MORE … Facebook stories now has 500 million daily users. It’s more casual than newsfeeds as an advertising/marketing platform. MORE … Is your social media manager the only person posting items in your channels. Change that (and a few other things). MORE … A passive social experience is likely a more receptive environment for marketers than a forced-watch scenario. That points to stories (Snap, Instagram, Facebook, etc.). MORE

 

EMAIL: If the Google and Facebook duopoly wasn’t an option for a digital campaign, most experts agree that email remains the leading digital marketing option. MORE … SalesForce offers 50 best practices for email marketing, but it boils down to 1) Have a goal, 2) Target wisely, 3) Treat your recipients well, 4) Design well (mobile!), 5) Optimize. MORE … The ESP vendor landscape is wide-ranging, but if you are looking for one, make sure they stand out in these categories – 1) Email editor UX, 2) Support, 3) Data integration and management, 4) Automation, 5) Personalization, 6) Analytics. MORE

DIGITAL VIDEO: Advertisers plan to increase digital video spending by 25 percent in 2019, and half of those budgets will be spent programmatically. MORE … The challenge has always been that scale is required to take advantage of the advanced data offerings in video. Will it ever be as nimble as text? Maybe not, and that is ok. MORE … Some brands are co ming back to YouTube despite the platform’s continued struggles with brand safety. MORE ... When shooting and editing for social, are you taking full advantage of each platform? Use a 1:1 aspect ratio for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to gain greatest impact. SnapChat and Instagram Stories are vertical tools, so 9:16 is best. YouTube is old-school TV, so the 16:9 works here. MORE

DIGITAL AUDIO : Kantar’s Insights division threw water on the podcast marketing fire when it released a study stating podcast ads are received more negatively than other formats. MORE … The BBC announced plans to flood digital with audio options, including text-to-audio and behavioral content delivery. The text-to-audio AI has some concerned about delivery style for sensitive news. MORE ... Podcasting is hindered by scale but that scale is growing. Now it is predicted to be a third of the radio audience, which is a serious step forward. MORE

CONTENT MARKETING: Consumers don't like it when brands don't deliver content correctly. Publishers have spent years cultivating a style and strategy, so when brands take a different approach, it sticks out poorly. MORE

MISCELLANEOUS: The California privacy bill isn't exactly finished and won't kick off until January 2020, but, in a recent survey, only half of those who believe the law applies to them believe they will be ready to comply. MORE ... Google announced that it will allow users to automatically delete stored location data, but that might be trouble for users using Google Maps and hoping for location-based recommendations. MORE ... The war against fraud appears to be showing some success. While 20%-35% of impressions have fraud attempts backing them, most of those invalid impressions are getting filtered at some point. The real average for display is 8 percent and 14 percent for video. MORE