Today in Digital Marketing - 131: Facebook Ads Are Ridiculously Cheap Right Now

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, April 15th, 2020. Happy National Canadian Film Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, new stickers from Instagram to help small businesses, give your naughty Facebook group members longer timeouts, where will you get the best ad results on Facebook, mobile or desktop, and YouTube working on a nice feature that may have SEO implications. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:29 It is getting cheaper to advertise on Facebook, this from a new study from Revealbot, which has access to data from its brand clients. In fact, the ad accounts they help manage add up to more than $200 million in ad spending from just Q1 of this year, so they've got a great data set. And what did they learn? Even before this pandemic crisis, cost-per-click ads were dropping, and by a lot. In January, down 16%, compared to January 2019. February, down 21%, and March, down a whopping 27% in the price of cost per click. The March number is probably not a huge surprise,

Starting point is 00:01:10 given that was the month when many countries closed non-essential businesses. And that drop in March was even more pronounced when you look at CPM rates, down 34% compared to CPM rates last March. Lower CPMs translates directly to lower competition in the ad auction in other words it's cheaper because there are just fewer brands advertising and when you break out the cpm rates by campaign objective the first three months of this year yielded some interesting numbers average cpm for conversions down from about thirteen dollars to under $10 this time. Traffic, you may better know this as clicks to a website, down from more than $6 to under $3 now.

Starting point is 00:01:52 And lead generation campaigns also down about 18%. But it wasn't all declines. The cost of reach objective campaigns actually snuck up a bit in Q1 compared to Q1 of 2019, a rise of about 50 cents. So CPM for reach right now is about $2.80 on average. And app install campaigns went up as well from $4.81 to $6.14. Quoting RevealBot's blog post, before seeing this data,

Starting point is 00:02:20 I would have guessed CPMs in reach campaigns would drop the sharpest as advertisers consolidate their budgets to campaigns with direct high ROI. Despite this, the data says CPMs in conversion and catalog sales dropped 26% and 23% respectively. Rather than attributing the decrease in cost to advertisers consolidating budget to bottom of funnel campaigns, this could A link to the full blog post is in this episode's description. Instagram is rolling out some new story stickers. These aimed at helping small businesses and restaurants stay afloat during the coronavirus outbreak. The new stickers make it easier for users to buy gift cards, order food, and donate to fundraisers.

Starting point is 00:03:11 These stickers for gift cards and food orders are up and running today in Canada and the U.S. and will come to the rest of the world in the coming weeks. The fundraising sticker, which can point people to online fundraisers held off the app, is coming later. Users can also reshare all of the stickers in their own stories to help out. And as I was recording this, came word from software reverse engineer specialist Jane Wong that they also appear to be working on some kind of challenge sticker, which will let you challenge your friends to, I don't know, do things. It's not entirely clear, but Jane did find the sticker hidden in the code of their latest app update, so that is likely coming too.

Starting point is 00:03:52 Facebook has added a way to put group members in a timeout corner for a longer period of time. Until now, group admins have been able to mute specific group members if those members needed a little timeout, and those mutes expired after a certain amount of time, from 12 hours up to a week. Now you can time someone out for two weeks, or even four weeks if you want. So what happens when someone is muted like that? They're not removed from your group. They can still see everything in it,

Starting point is 00:04:17 but they just can't post anything. No posts, not even comments. Quoting social media today, Facebook groups have become an important tool for connecting local communities amid the COVID-19 outbreak, though that's also led to penalize those who break the rules, it may better enable group admins to also play a part in reducing the spread of such posts. Folks at Agorapulse's social media lab have a new study out. I love these because they're pretty close to scientific in the sense that the methodology is sound and transparent, but they're not testing with huge budgets, So, you know, grain of salt. But this one that they just did tested which Facebook feed ad would perform better, desktop feed ads or mobile feed ads. So they bought $1,000 of ads in each of those two placements and nothing else.

Starting point is 00:05:22 No stories, no right-hand column, just the main eyeball feed. The ad promoted a blog post of theirs, and they optimized for landing page views. How did the two placements fare against each other? Quoting their post, Facebook mobile ads outperformed on every data category, except the social engagement numbers, based on our study. Desktop ads shouldn't be completely eliminated, as there is lots of ad inventory there, but based on our data, it doesn't perform as well, unquote. Now, the actual numbers. On mobile, 73% more link clicks, 75% more reach, 30% more impressions, 28% lower cost per click, and a 29% higher click-through rate, and so on. The blog post, which is linked in the description, of course, has many, many more metrics there.

Starting point is 00:06:12 But more striking, clicks as a whole were nearly six times higher on mobile than on desktop. But it was not a full sweep. Interestingly, the mobile ad only got half as many shares and two-thirds fewer reactions. I love this idea. YouTube is testing a new kind of chaptering system that would let viewers skip to specific parts of a long video. Like in the case of a newscast, you'd be able to click forward to the start of the next story. As you hover over the playback timeline, it expands out, gives you a small description of what segment you're over is all about. Now YouTube has had timestamps for a long time, but they've never been directly attached to the video or the timeline in this way. They've just been links that you put in the description that will jump to a particular

Starting point is 00:06:59 timestamp in the video. These new ones are much more interactive, and honestly they look great, and I cannot wait for this to roll out. It doesn't happen automatically. Creators will have to delineate where those sections are. And let's not forget, these could become an SEO consideration. Maybe in the same way as H1 and H2 tags on a website that help organize content also helps Google understand content hierarchy. It's currently in a small test on desktop and Android. No word yet on a small test on desktop and Android. No word yet on a timeline for a wider rollout. A couple of small tidbits now.

Starting point is 00:07:33 Google, like everyone else, has canceled their conference, their regular webmaster conference. This morning, though, they announced that they will be rolling out a series of tutorials in a series they call Lightning Talks. Those will come out over the next year, starting this month. Subscribe to the Google Webmasters channels for those. Sprout Social has added reports into their mobile app. Honestly, this surprised me. Sprout's reporting on the desktop is excellent. It's one of the few that lets you group channels together and do an amalgamated report. I really did not expect this to make it over to mobile,

Starting point is 00:08:02 but it's not on all mobile devices for now. It's only on Android. And Hootsuite will now let you log into your dashboard there using Apple ID. Obviously, this is not supported on Android. It probably never will be. The tweet of the day comes from Andrew Foxwell. There are agencies that are good at marketing themselves and those that are good at marketing. Very rarely do you find a combo. The best agencies I've ever come across are usually the quietest you'll find with heads down and results that speak for themselves.

Starting point is 00:08:37 I don't know if this is a thing as well, but just by coincidence, our agency's website, engageq.com, hasn't been updated in maybe a year and a half or two years or so. We are busy with client work. Well, as I told you last week, I took myself off social media for a while. Like I literally deleted every social media app on my phone that had a comment section. So Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, all gone. And I've got to say, not getting into pointless fights with random idiots online actually provided a really nice long weekend. I am slowly adding these apps back. TikTok went back last night because, you know, honestly, their comment section doesn't really exist if

Starting point is 00:09:20 you don't tap the icon. And even then, people don't really use it to debate stuff. This morning, I cautiously put Twitter back so that I can get the news alerts from my local city newspapers. As for Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, honestly, I don't miss them that much, so for now, they are staying off my phone. It is a very exciting video game time. The new DLC for Fallout 76 came out. I played a couple of hours of it last night and really liked it. And the spiritual successor to Myst, from the same developer even, also came out. I just bought it this morning and will be diving into that headfirst after work today.

Starting point is 00:09:56 So, I'm going to wrap this up quick so that my workday can end sooner. Talk to you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to rakuten first join free at rakuten.ca start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or paypal

Today in Digital Marketing - 131: Facebook Ads Are Ridiculously Cheap Right Now

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