#Industry Insights

Targeted advertising has solidified itself as the king of digital marketing. Approximately 87% of all digital ad spend is devoted to programmatic, and nothing can get that popular without a few alternatives rearing their heads. To the crux of the issue: self-service vs. fully-managed programmatic platforms. There are many qualities that separate these two distinct tools of targeted advertising, and this article is going to take a deeper look at a key element that divides them: customer service.

Digital advertising is always on the move, and the industry has seen some recent shake-ups that can have an impact on your marketing strategy. From new advertising partnerships to rapidly expanding inventories, here are some of the recent digital marketing headlines worth paying attention to. X Now Selling Ad Space via Google Earlier this year (summer of 2023), Elon Musk reported that advertising revenue for X was down 50%. In an effort to combat the declining figures, X is now selling inventory through the Google Display Network to programmatically serve users on their X home feed. This marks a huge shift in the platform’s attitude towards advertising, which previously consisted of exclusively working with advertisers directly.

Pour one out, friends; Universal Analytics is no more. Unless you’re using 360, then Google Analytics 4 is now your current and only option from Google for tracking data and stats for your website. There is some good and some bad that comes along with any change, and we’re here to break down what you need to know about GA4. The Good Tracking Across Multiple Devices Universal Analytics focused on desktop interactions with your site; when a user hopped on, UA tracked the “session” as a group of user hits on your site. GA4, conversely, tracks individual hits and calls them “events”. It might seem like semantics, but tracking events offers more nuance in your report, distinguishing between pageviews and user engagements.

Digital marketing often feels like a guessing game, but it doesn’t have to. The promise of programmatic marketing is turning a broad announcement into a hand-delivered letter straight to those who could use it most – no guesswork needed. That personal approach is achieved through gathering copious amounts of industry data and, most importantly, knowing what to do with it.

Spam calls: perhaps one of the few universal experiences that can finally unite humanity with our shared annoyance. Whether it takes the form of an email, a text, or a good ol’ fashioned phone call, solicitous communication from companies is something we’ve come to expect in 21st-century America – but that might be about to change. The Future of Spam-Based Text Marketing Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released their Report and Order on fraudulent text messages, requiring providers to block text messages that are “highly likely to be illegal”. The stated intention is to “block scam text messages” that “can promote links to phishing websites… that can install malware on a consumer’s phone”.

Why are so many marketers talking about the cookie? Didn’t Google wipe out cookies this year? Well, not quite. There’s a lot of talk in the digital advertising world related to cookies, privacy, and restrictions, and we’re here to give you all the updates and info you need. Goodbye Cookies The word “cookie” usually refers to the data saved online that can store and remember information about you. When you visit a website, cookies could track your online activity. Now Google is phasing out the third-party cookie by the end of 2023, so many are using the term “cookieless,” but this term can be confusing.

When we entered 2020, nobody could predict what was going to happen. And nobody could foresee that the next two years would be full of immense change, online pandemonium, and masks. Don’t worry, this won’t be yet another pandemic article. Instead of focusing on COVID-19, Omicron, and worldwide effects of the virus, we want to focus on how the pandemic has affected marketing and advertising specifically.

The downfall of linear and traditional marketing has given way to new marketing mediums, such as CTV and Programmatic audio, which continue to rise. Television, streaming, YouTube, and other online media platforms continue to get more use as our lives become more diverse, which has allowed marketers and media companies to reach, track and target audiences in new and exciting ways.

Do you understand the difference between data and insights? Are you really understanding your data, or do you have surface-level knowledge that can be improved? In an Adweek article by Anastasia Leng, she warns against doing the same thing multiple times without ever “validating if it’s having the intended result.” Leng says many have easy access to metrics without the right tools to differentiate them.

As a leader in programmatic advertising, Genius Monkey knows that a well-rounded strategy includes display first and then other programmatic services added on to complement display. In fact, data shows that display campaigns are the backbone of almost every successful digital marketing media plan. Genius Monkey recently conducted a study in which we took a large sample of clients who were running multiple programmatic mediums (display, video, audio, OTT/CTV, etc) at once to analyze how each medium yielded conversions working together, and the results were no surprise to us! When an advertiser is running all services concurrently, these were the results on how much influence each medium had: