ROUND UP — Dark Social, Ad Budgets, Sunsetting & More

Ever wonder how much the big SaaS brands are spending on marketing as a % of revenue? The data is in...

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TOP BRANDS ARE SPENDING A LOT ON MARKETING

Ever wonder how much the big SaaS brands are spending on marketing as a % of revenue? Well, thanks to Meritech Capital, the data is in, and it's staggering. According to Meritech, brands like Monday.com are spending as much as 69% of their revenue marketing. That's... yeah, wow. Check out the data below to see where 100+ brands sit!

GOOGLE CALENDAR APPOINTMENT SETTING

Here's a cool life hack I happened upon this weekend that I wanted to share. Did you know that Google Calendar has its own version of Calendly, where you can choose blocks of time to send as availability? Turns out this functionality exists and is nested under the rarely used 'Create' button on your calendar.

For a detailed outline of how to set this up, check out this article by Martech Zone.

A 'DARK SOCIAL' ANALYSIS

If you haven't heard of 'dark social', that's because it seems to be a relatively new term (as far as I can tell) that is meant to describe traffic coming from social sources that pass no source data along with the click. The idea came from breaking down seemingly high 'direct' traffic and doing a hold-out study across multiple platforms. In the post below, Rand Fishkin does a great job of breaking down a recent study showing the magnitude of this occurrence, with some platforms such as TikTok profile links passing back zero data 100% of the time... pretty wild.

GOOGLE ADS REMOVE MORE OPTIONS FOR MARKETERS

I recently published this article outlining my thoughts on why removing options for marketers in ad platforms is a bad thing, using examples from Google to illustrate how this is being done. Well, this didn't end there — Google has recently announced that they are going to be sunsetting four attribution models: First Click, Linear, Time Decay, and Position-Based. While these models are only being used by 3% of advertisers in favour of the cooler, younger brother Data-Driven, it doesn't change the fact that, in some cases, less is not more. Regardless, you can check out the article below for info:

AI-POWERED REELS ARE CRUSHING

Have you been feeling more captivated by Reels lately, being drawn in similarly to TikTok as time goes by? Well, you're not alone. In a recent earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg announced that people on Instagram spent 24% more time on-platform after the introduction of AI-powered Reels. In addition, Meta announced that their MAUs rose by 5% YoY to over 3.8B users. That's nearly half of the entire world. Pretty incredible. Check out the article below for more info on the earnings call.

AI-DRIVEN CONTENT IS THE NEW BLACK

AI is quite the hot topic lately, but it's not just a new fad — AI really is changing the content generation game. In this article, 65% of marketers who use AI said that they believe AI will only supplement, not replace, human jobs, and I tend to agree. As we can see in the article from Ross Simmonds on Moz below, AI has simply changed the way we are producing content. In a fantastic infographic, Ross illustrates how we used to produce content vs how it's being done now using AI. Personally, I love that the ideation phase of content generation is being sped up. This has been a historically hugely time-consuming task that has been expedited with AI, though not entirely replaced, and I think that's how it's best.