The Cookiepocalypse Has Begun

[00:00:00] It is Friday, January 5th. Today it's finally here Google starts turning cookies off. Also the secret to reaching Gen Z might be simpler than you think. X's metrics aren't as good as they think they are. And Andrew Foxwell on the future of TikTok's increasingly expensive

[00:00:20] commerce platform. I'm Tod Maffin, that's a head today in digital marketing. Every Friday we check in with our meta ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell. Andrew has visibility into $300 million in meta ad spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. Hello Andrew, happy new year.

[00:00:40] Hey, thank you so much. Glad to be here. So we covered this a little while ago. TikTok shops are increasing their fees to marketers up to 8%. Can you walk us through that and what you think the impact of that will be? And let's talk about meta afterwards.

[00:00:55] Yeah, I mean, TikTok shops had a decent adoption in Q4 of 23 and Q3 and Q4 of 23. And it was getting a lot of adoption because they weren't charging any fees. So that was a huge part

[00:01:12] of it that made it helpful for folks to give it a shot. And so of course, meta hasn't instilled any fees yet to do this. We're with meta shops and I think has continued

[00:01:23] the adoption and obviously made the default now when you create a campaign that it'll send it to your website or shop depending on what meta chooses. The big thing with TikTok is

[00:01:34] I knew that they were going to be stupid about this. I just had this really big feeling. But they announced two people that have shops set up that they're going to have a 2%,

[00:01:47] up to 8% plus 30 cents in order charge. So it's going to be the transition rate is going to be 6% and then it'll be going up to 8%. So if you're utilizing TikTok shops and you didn't see this, it's important to know I think that that really does affect a lot

[00:02:07] of margins for folks. So something to be aware of. I had heard anecdotally that the TikTok shops team was only six people actually working on this in California. So I don't really know if you're building your strategies for 24, what if TikTok shops is a place I would go

[00:02:28] to, you know, to really build that to feel confident in it unless you have already been seeing decent results in it and you can eat those fees and you feel like, yeah,

[00:02:40] that's something I want to continue to try to invest in. I think it's a tough place to get started. And is that 8% on top of like Stripes fees and whatever payment processor you're using?

[00:02:52] Yeah, it basically just says 8%, it goes up to 8%. So it would be on top of whatever else you're paying. Yeah. And I wonder if it's being sent through Google or Apple if their 30% is also going to be part of that, you know, or on top of that.

[00:03:08] This wouldn't be through that, it would just be directly through TikTok that they're going to be charging for any sort of transaction or any sort of revenue that comes through it. So, you know, if you've seen results and you have the margins, I don't think there's

[00:03:27] any reason to change other than to know that it's going to incur this other cost. Again, if it's brand new and you're thinking about it, I just don't think that you're building that on a solid foundation. So something to be aware of moving into 24.

[00:03:40] What we're talking about, of course, is the direct purchase through the app kind of process that Meta's had for a while. Meta shops, they have for, I mean, really since they launched it sort of waived their fee, is it still 0%? Are they charging

[00:03:55] now? Where do you see that going this year? Yeah, I think that it's still 0%, it is still 0% and I don't think they're going to change that at this point in time.

[00:04:04] The reason I don't think they're going to change this is because the signal that users give to Meta by doing using shops is really important. You know, certainly the signal basically is now,

[00:04:18] my signal, I mean like the things that it's sending back to Meta to continue to serve more relevant ads. The signal is basically cappy, which is on your website and then its shops

[00:04:30] is a big part of it. So if somebody clicks on it and clicks around, you know, and looks at a product, it will be able to give you that. And I actually saw something the other day,

[00:04:41] I was looking at a product and they got a notification that had a little shop thing in it, in my Instagram that actually said like continue shopping on these particular shirts,

[00:04:53] because I had looked at it. So there's going to be more of that connection. And I think that in 24 Meta shops will continue to get better. And it's going to be, you know, utilizing product

[00:05:05] tagging even more effectively, it's probably going to be utilizing obviously AI in some way. So I could see if you're looking at one product, it would automatically potentially show you other things obviously within the new within your feed or within stories from that, but it could also

[00:05:22] you know, allow you to try certain sizes on a different products and show different product show you different competitors of that particular product because they want to obviously bring about as much choice as possible. So I think yeah, if you haven't tried shop, I mean, most of you

[00:05:37] probably tried shops, if you haven't tuned that up and gotten your shop in order, that's going to be definitely a big thing for 24 for Meta for sure. And I do think that's a good place to

[00:05:45] keep testing. Before I let you go for the week, you know, our agency, we handle engagement moderation for medium to large size brands. So we're monitoring their Facebook messages among a million other channels. And we're getting like dozens a day of these, your page has committed

[00:06:03] some copyright fraud and you must click this link. And of course, it's it's fake, it's hacking. Are you seeing an increase in these messages as well? Or are we just unlucky?

[00:06:14] No, honestly, there's been a ton of increase in hacking. And I think that a lot of it is, you know, there's due to a bunch of different factors. One of them is that there's there's still too many apps that people have connected through their accounts on Facebook. So

[00:06:30] you know, if you're not and you haven't gone in and checked about what apps are connected, that's one thing. The next thing is that you've got to turn on two factor authentication. And especially in your business through your business manager, if you've added an employee

[00:06:43] Jenny Smith that years ago worked on your social media and you've not taken her out, you have to remove these folks because we've had a massive influx like probably at least 15 folks

[00:06:56] out of the 550 in our membership in Q4 that like either lost an account entirely or it really upset the spending because somebody got hacked and then a person went in and spent 125 grand on pornographic ads or something, right? Like it's really been bad. And I think it's because

[00:07:17] the hackers know about more vulnerabilities than they used to. And there's also people do, you know, it is a place that people spend the most money. And I think it's easier to hack than

[00:07:28] Google honestly, because there's a lot of these data accounts that are out there that people get into. So make sure to keep that in check and make sure you have, you know, who's like who's on

[00:07:42] the account, what they're doing, why they're there. And then make sure that everybody that's on your account has two factor authentication setup, you know, or in the case of Todd, you're the one

[00:07:51] that told me about using, you know, a UB key or something that allows a different way to enter into the accounts and keep things secure, the better off you're going to be. So yeah, it's been a

[00:08:03] major issue and that's definitely a focus for making sure if you're going to spend in 24 that you keep those things up. So yeah, even with all the permissions, you can still get hacking links

[00:08:13] when you have to kind of teach your staff obviously what to click and what not to click. Definitely. All right, Andrew, thank you. See you next week. Thanks. Andrew Foxwell is our Mid at Ads correspondent. You can learn more about Andrew's digital

[00:08:23] ads training at b.link slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers at B.link slash founders. Both of those are affiliate links and you can find those links in our show

[00:08:36] notes. We've been telling you about this for months, God years, but now it's finally here. Third party cookies in Google's Chrome browser are gone, though only for about 1% of the user base as of now. Still, that's about 30 million people that advertisers will now lose

[00:08:57] some tracking data on. As marketers, we live in a weird state. The business half of our head realizes that this is going to make our job harder. Though you'd have to have had your head in

[00:09:07] the sand to not see this overall industry trend. But we're also consumers. And for that side, this increased privacy is good news. It's not like advertisers will have no data on people using Chrome. For those one percenters, Google is dropping them into their new interest

[00:09:23] grouping system, which has received lukewarm reception from the marketing industry. Quoting social media today.com quote, the impact of Google removing tracking cookies will be significant with cookies traditionally providing key insights that help power the internet's targeted ad system. Google's replacement will instead see users categorized into topic

[00:09:43] listings in an anonymized way. So brands will still be able to show their ads to subsets of users, but they won't be able to use granular targeting based on the specifics of what people have engaged with across different websites, which will likely lead to worse performing campaigns,

[00:10:01] meaning less money for web publishers and a lesser web experience overall for users via more generalized ads. At the same time, it'll also increase the costs of ad targeting for many businesses. Unquote. Of course, the real marketing G's know that the solution to all of this is to

[00:10:19] invest in your own first party data. Email lists, SMS marketing, CRMs where you own the relationship directly. Google says by the end of this year it expects to fully remove third party cookies for all its users. Almost 60% of people in Gen Z have made a social

[00:10:43] purchase in the past year, according to new data from eMarketer, a big portion of those purchases influenced by TikTok and Instagram shopping discovery. eMarketer's study also found they're not as afraid of AI as older generations, more than 60% have positive attitudes toward AI-generated

[00:11:02] content on social media. They report it as a tool to simplify their lives, editing essays, checking code, planning, travel, itineraries and so on. Not surprisingly, Gen Zedders aged 18-24 spend more time on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat than any other group. Oh, if you're writing

[00:11:21] marketing copy for that generation, what do you focus on? According to eMarketer, gaming. Quote, nearly 71% of Gen Zedders are digital gamers and they're likely to spend three to six hours gaming each week. This is one of the few digital arenas where Gen Zed beats millennials

[00:11:39] not only in penetration, but also in size by nearly a million users according to our forecast. This lead is likely to change though as Gen Zedders lose free time as they age. I feel ya kids. High end B2B sales don't happen through generic AI-generated content.

[00:12:05] Want to sell a $20 shirt with a random Instagram post? Go for it. But to sell a $20,000 business service, you need a longer on-ramp. Social media is great for connecting and networking, but long-term, evergreen website content is your paved path

[00:12:21] to high-end B2B sales. Whether your business makes $100,000 a year or $100 million. The second edition of Pamela Wilson's Master Content Books share her proven frameworks for crafting long-term, evergreen content consistently. Plus the second editions, which you'll find at

[00:12:39] mastercontentbooks.com, cover the practical ethical use of AI tools to help your marketing team create better content faster. If you're ready to increase your website ROI in 2024, buy and read Pamela's newly updated Master Content Books at mastercontentbooks.com.

[00:13:01] X, the platform formerly known as Brandsafe, may have accidentally revealed user metrics that make them look, well, a little less impressive than they might think. And by they, I mean Elon Musk. X's owner yesterday tweeting, quote, this platform is seeing incredible usage growth,

[00:13:20] unquote. And then showed a chart of total user seconds, which if that metric doesn't sound familiar, that's because literally nobody else uses it, but whatever. The table appears to show the platform's growth rate spiking. But Andrew Hutchinson at socialmedia.com put those numbers

[00:13:39] into an advanced processing model known as basic math and figured out that actually it shows the opposite, quote. In terms of total user seconds, X's average over the last week is 360 billion

[00:13:54] seconds per day. That's the whole time that user spent in the app, which on the face of it, is an incredible amount of time. But breaking that down, 360 billion user seconds equates to

[00:14:06] 6 billion total minutes per day. X claims to have 253 million daily active users at last check. So if you divide the total minutes by the total users, that's an average of 24 minutes per day

[00:14:20] spent per user in the app every day, which is not close to what X reported back in October when it said the users were spending an average of 32 minutes per day in the app.

[00:14:32] And lower than what the former Twitter team was reportedly seeing at 30 minutes per day per user. So while the top line numbers look impressive at many billions of seconds, the actual time spent per user is seemingly declining, not increasing as Musk claims,

[00:14:49] unquote. For some reason, I am an authorized contributor to X's community notes, the crowdsourced fact checking system. One note there adds quote, Elon compares the week of December 27th with the week of December 20th. Social media traffic is low on public holidays.

[00:15:05] This growth is likely a return to normal after a Christmas drop, unquote. As of the time of our deadline, that correction had not been published to the public site. TikTok this week published its content planning guide for 2024 and has taken a slightly different

[00:15:26] tack this time around by focusing on specific events that can enhance your ad campaign's impact. They've included chapters for major regions like North America, Europe and the Middle East, but it's more than just a list of dates. It integrates key events with additional tips

[00:15:43] on using TikTok's various ad tools. There are insights on each date period, suggestions on how to integrate the events with marketing campaigns, an added bonus is the campaign planner template. A link to the guide is in today's newsletter,

[00:15:57] which is free and you can sign up to it at todayindigital.com slash newsletter or by tapping the link in the show notes. Hey, Black Friday is still on here. No, I'm kidding. Boxing day week,

[00:16:16] boxing day quarter? Anyway, all that to say that for the next seven days and seven days only, our ads are on sale. And if you want to drop an ad into the podcast or into our newsletter,

[00:16:29] go to todayindigital.com slash ads, you can book it right online or just tap the link in the show notes. It'll take you there as well. That will do it for the week. Today in digital

[00:16:38] marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Sunamik First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Bleves, music licensing, source audio ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Mappen. Thanks for listening. See you next week.