Today in Digital Marketing - 110: Stop Everything and Check Your Facebook Pixel Events

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

Your Facebook conversions might be MUCH higher than you think Hootsuite Launches a Premium Listening Platform…. At least I THINK they have? YouTube launches a very helpful new measurement tool And guess who’s copying their competitors and putting other people’s ideas into THEIR app? Here’s a hint…. It rhymes with Minsterblam. Can you help spread the word? Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today AND/OR click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: Tod’s web site: http://TodMaffin.com Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin Instagram: http://instagram.com/todmaffin Facebook: http://facebook.com/tmaffin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@todmaffin Mixer: https://mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy SOURCES: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagrams-testing-a-new-video-response-option-for-igtv/573407/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-stories-and-youtube-are-both-seeing-rapid-growth-in-2020-infograp/573354/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-analytics-compare-metrics/353100/#close https://wersm.com/hootsuite-teams-up-with-brandwatch-for-a-new-social-listening-power-tool/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-only-worry-about-sitemaps-if-your-site-meets-this-criteria/353290/ Game show music by Kevin MacLeod CC BY 3.0 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Thursday, March the 5th, 2020. Happy 57th birthday, hula hoop. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, your Facebook conversions might be much lower than you think. Hootsuite launches a premium listening platform. At least I think they have.

YouTube launches a very new helpful measurement tool. And hey, guess who's copying their competitors and putting other people's ideas into their app? Here's a hint. It rhymes with minstablam. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. So you've done what a good digital marketer does and set up all your analytics, your reporting, and your pixels, like those all-important tracking pixels from the social platforms like Facebook. And everything is

within your control. So imagine your surprise when Facebook suddenly starts reporting way more events firing on your Pixel than you know you should be getting. That happened this week to Swedish marketer Matthias Flink. He reported it in John Loomer's excellent Power Haters Club. The extra events were real, but they were of Facebook's making. As you may know, for the longest time, the way Facebook's pixel worked is you'd tell Facebook what, for instance, a conversion event looked like. How do we define a sale? So you'd tell Facebook, okay, listen, anytime anyone

who saw our Facebook ad lands on this thank you for your purchase page, that's a sale. Because the only way they'd get to that page is by purchasing. You see traffic on that page? Count it as a sale, Facebook. But there are other events, like when someone clicks this button, consider them having added something to their cart, and so on. And then, Facebook came up with something it calls the automatic event tool. What basically happens here is Facebook looks through your activity on your Then, Facebook came up with something it calls the Automatic Event Tool. What basically happens here is Facebook looks through your activity on your site, and when it sees patterns of activity, it will create an event for you, whether you want one or not,

and thus including potentially a grossly inflated number in your reporting. That is basically what happened to Matthias. He had set up an event or a trigger on the thank you for purchasing page, no problem there. But then Facebook came along and said, oh, hey, this submit button over here, I'll bet when someone clicks that they're buying something. And they identified the submit button as the conversion event. So they were actually adding those conversions on top of my conversions. Let alone the fact that Matthias was already tracking purchases, just not on the button click. His was on the thank you page. So everything started getting counted twice.

Yeah, all the numbers were double what I saw in my Google Analytics. I got quite angry. Actually yell out loud for a little bit. And you might think, well, maybe Matthias was overreacting. It can't be that big a deal. Oh, yes, it is. Think about it. If suddenly Facebook's ads manager or your third-party tool reports a sudden doubling of sales, your strategy is likely to change to capitalize on that,

like throwing more money at it to see if you can scale up that obviously well-performing set. Luckily, though, there is a way to check and delete any of these automatic events that you don't want. Yeah, if you go into the events manager and click the event, you can actually see how many of them are automatic and how many are manual or sent by you. And in there, they'll tell you how they've identified the events. And you're able to click delete from within there. So to reiterate, it's worth going into Events Manager on Facebook and making sure that they haven't automatically added pixel events that you are not aware of. Hootsuite is adding a new deep listening tool set to its platform thanks to a

partnership with Brandwatch. It will be called Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch. Come on guys, knock it off with the co-branding shit. It's 2020. Anyway, this is essentially a deep search tool that lets you run Boolean searches on the Twitter Firehose API, blogs, news sites, and so on. It's sort of a confusing name because the name Hootsuite Insights as a product has been around for years now. So is this a totally new tool with the same name? Is it an upgrade on the existing tool? I wish I could tell you. When I went to the web page that Google lists as Hootsuite Insights, I got a 404 file not found.

And the only information I could find on the Hootsuite site showed pretty vector drawings of people jogging and standing in front of a chart. No actual screenshots. Side topic, web app marketers, please knock this shit off too. Show us what your tool looks like. Not pretty clip art showing how much better our day will be because of it. Anyway, Hootsuite Insights, powered by Brandwatch, is only available to business and enterprise customers. And even then, it is not included in your existing subscription.

You've got to call your rep and get it added on for an additional cost, not unlike similar services like Sprout Social's premium reporting. And there are also limits to the number of searches that can be saved at one time, all based on how much money you give Hootsuite. It's one of the first things you learn when you take an SEO course, create a sitemap for your brand's website. A sitemap is an XML file that in most cases lists every page on your website and how often that page's content is expected to change. You don't make this file manually yourself. There are tools like WordPress plugins that will do that for you. But do you need a sitemap at all? Google says, maybe not. In its online course about ranking

better, they say if your site is relatively small and its pages are all properly linked, then their Googlebot can find your content just fine without a sitemap. In fact, they say you really only need to go to the hassle of installing a sitemap plugin in one of three cases. Your brand's website is really large, or its web pages are isolated. In other words, content you want in Google's index isn't linked. Or three, your website is new or the content changes a lot. Also, Google says just because you have a sitemap doesn't mean their bot will crawl every page listed in it. They may still ignore some. And the opposite is true too.

Just because you didn't include a page in the sitemap doesn't mean Google won't crawl it anyway. Quoting Search Engine Journal, Although Google doesn't outright recommend that all sites have a sitemap, there's no harm in having one. So if you're not sure whether or not your site needs one, you can always err on the side of caution and use one anyway. A nice upgrade to YouTube's analytics. Now you can compare multiple metrics side by side. It's a little buried, so here's how to find it. Click the See More link beside any of the metrics on the overview screen, and then click Compare To in the top right.

This is actually a big deal. Until now, we've only been able to see the performance of one metric at a time. You can also compare month versus month performance, or year versus year. You can compare a channel's overall top videos from one month to another or a geographic comparison showing where your audience is coming from from month to month. Nice little additions there. Quiz time. Out of 100 digital marketers, how many do you think post videos on Facebook Stories for their brand at least once a week? Are you sitting down? 67.

Yeah, 67% of marketers post videos on Facebook Stories for their brand at least once a week. That surprised me too. That number came from Animoto's most recent social platform insight study. It's not clear to me in the study whether this number includes uses of Facebook stories in automatic placements of Facebook ad campaigns. And I would suspect that that's where the dramatic increase comes from. Because while I know we run our client stories inside the Facebook ads format, we so far rarely use Facebook stories organically. Certainly not as often as we use Instagram Stories. Other interesting findings from the study,

73% of marketers uploaded two or more marketing videos to YouTube in the last month, and 59% of marketers have run video ads on YouTube in the last year. Well, here we go again. Instagram is testing a new feature that they basically stole right off the plates of another platform. This time, no surprise, the platform in question is TikTok, which I'm sure has been the subject of a number of Instagram's executives' meetings. And the feature they're copying? Reactions and duets. If you use TikTok, you'll know what both are.

Basically, the camera videos you watching another video and then shows both to the viewer, what you were watching and you watching it. Sometimes side by side, that's a duet. Sometimes picture in picture, that's a reaction. People use it to sometimes jointly dance together or maybe video their reaction to someone else's video. Well, Instagram is testing that in IGTV, of all places. They call it video reactions.

This isn't public yet. It only surfaced through some reverse engineering of Instagram's apps code, but that code shows that this new video reactions option lets viewers reply with their own video response. Quoting social media today, it's difficult to imagine exactly how it would work in an IGTV context. On TikTok,

the short nature of TikTok clips makes them perfect fodder for simple video responses. But IGTV is focused on longer content. That could make it more difficult to add in the same, though maybe there's a way for Instagram to showcase certain sections of IGTV videos where people have responded. Maybe by simply adding the personal visual nature of video reactions, it will provide more engagement potential for IGTV. So, not a lot to go on on this stage, but it will be interesting to see if this gets rolled out and what it will mean for the app. Well, if you get value from this daily news show, please rate and review this podcast. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one click.

Follow me on social. Links to my channels are in this episode's description. I was very excited to watch the premiere of Big Brother Canada yesterday, but our DVR crapped out. So I'll be watching it on their website right now. No spoilers, please. Also, for those of you who care about my Farm Together progress, I have some melons coming due in about an hour, so daddy's going to be rich! My thanks to Matthias Flink for joining me for an interview from his home in Sweden for this episode.

I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.