Today in Digital Marketing - 148: Is That a New Ad Format In Your Pocket, Or… ?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Does targeting one country in Google drop you from listings in the rest of the world? TikTok gets its augmented reality ad product ready. Google tests organic listings inside paid ads. YouTube's most popular ad format expands, and while reducing your attribution windows, might yield some amazing results. It's Friday, May the 8th. Happy Great Prayer Day, Denmark. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:01:07 And a quick note before we start, if you're here because you saw this on Product Hunt, welcome. I put out an episode every weekday around 5 p.m. Eastern. So if you are hearing this on a Monday, you are listening to this past Friday's episode, because Monday's is being produced as you hear this, and will be out in a couple of hours. Even more reason for you to subscribe. All right, let's get started. Every so often as you're in an ads dashboard or some SEO tool, you'll find a checkbox that sounds like it would be good to use, but carries with it consequences that you may not know about. Such is the case with international targeting in Google Search Console. Just to back up a little, Search Console is how brands can get a little more insight into how Google is displaying their webpages in its index.

Starting point is 00:01:52 It'll report when it can't access pages, give you some hints on being more mobile-friendly, you know, that sort of thing. It's worth checking out if you've never poked around in there. Anyway, one of the options there says international targeting, and it gives you a pull-down menu of countries. The idea being that it will let you signal that your site is more relevant to users of a specific country. Now that might sound good at first, but grisly digital marketing veterans know Newton's third law by heart. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And in this case, the question is, if I tell Google to focus our site results in one country, does that reduce or eliminate our site's visibility in other countries? Well, this week, Google gave us an answer to that question.

Starting point is 00:02:39 I'll tell you what that answer is at the end of this episode. Get ready to push your creative team, especially if your brand's target demographic is younger people. TikTok is getting ready to launch a new ad format, augmented reality. Well, new to TikTok anyway. AR offers some pretty engaging tools for ad creative. Imagine your brand's car zooming across a living room table or being able to walk fully around a virtual model wearing the jacket that you sell. Even better, TikTok will offer this as a camera effect so your fans can put your product virtually into their space and then share that with their friends and followers. And because they're ads, users will be able to tap the screen to go to your brand's website to, you know, buy that thing.

Starting point is 00:03:26 Snapchat already has something like this. They call it a sponsored lens. Instagram also has augmented reality effects, though it's not really part of any ad product over there yet. No specific date on a rollout for this TikTok thing, but they are saying probably around the third quarter or so. As for pricing, also no word, but expect it to be pricey at launch. Digiday says their existing branded effect tool costs $100,000 a day. And that, friends, is a bargain compared to the price that Snapchat charged for its sponsored lens ads when they launched that. Half a million dollars a day for a national takeover.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Ouch. Nowadays, though, you can buy that without the fancy takeover at regular auction CPM rates. YouTube is bringing one of its most used ad formats to TV screens later in the year, the skippable ad. You know these already, of course, they run for five seconds, and then the user has the option to skip them. Digital marketers like you and me tend to favor this format because we only get billed for the impression if the user watches 30 seconds or more of it. If they hit that skip button after those five seconds, you don't pay anything, but you still get the benefit of whatever brand awareness you were able to squash into those first five seconds. Anyway, YouTube confirmed they will be coming to TV. So we're talking about things like the YouTube app on the Apple TV box,

Starting point is 00:04:49 or on the Xbox, or connected TVs like that junk Samsung keeps trying to sell despite them apparently not having a single decent UX designer on staff. Don't get me started. Nothing fancy about these skippable ads in terms of pricing. You pay on impressions and have the usual options like target CPM, target CPA, or maximize conversions. So many things up in the air these days because of the pandemic, including, of course, the online ad markets that you and I spend our days in. For a while, CPMs were at rock bottom low rates. But as I've been reporting here over the last week or so, those are starting to creep back up now as brands reenter the marketplace

Starting point is 00:05:28 to run very original and unique ads. Here for you. Here for you. We're here for you. We're here for you. We are here for you. We're here for you. One of the people I follow to get a sense of what's working

Starting point is 00:05:39 in terms of Facebook bid and campaign strategy is David Herman. This morning on Twitter, he reported that he is seeing better results now than at any time over the last six months. And he thinks he knows why. Quoting David's tweet, the three biggest levers I changed in ads

Starting point is 00:05:55 over the last 45 days was turning off detailed targeting expansion, ditching CBO, and running mostly on one day click and view. I'm running the same ads, the same audiences, the same promos, unquote. So to unpack that a bit, if you are new to online media buying, targeting expansion, that's the checkbox under where you put in your interest targeting, like shoes or education level college or job title president.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Check that box and Facebook will add related interests that you haven't specifically input if and only if it finds those results will get you a lower cost per result. Honestly, we rarely use this at my agency. We just don't trust it, frankly. And David also is leaving that off. Ditching CBO, that's campaign based optimization. In other words, letting Facebook decide how much of your spend budget to assign to each ad set. And one day click view is making his attribution window a lot shorter. But as with everything in our business, your mileage may vary. Heads up if you do digital marketing for an e-commerce brand.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Google is testing a new ad format for its shopping ads. And it's a little weird. The new format adds a text block under regular product ad blocks, and that text looks exactly like an organic result, right down to the lack of an ads label. Now, to be clear, the whole thing, product and this new text block, are grouped together in a box. So I guess Google thinks people understand it's an ad. But honestly, I'm pretty sure most users will see that and think it's an organic listing because it looks just like an organic listing. Even weirder, as for where the copy for this new block comes from,

Starting point is 00:07:38 it looks like they are pulling it from the product landing page. SearchEngineLand.com reports they have learned it's a very small test just running in the States right now, but if it performs, it may indeed roll out wider, which, for you and me, means double-check the copy on your landing page. All right, time for the lightning round. Reddit was reporting elevated error levels on its platform this morning, so if it seemed buggy, it wasn't just you.

Starting point is 00:08:06 Facebook is switching lots more people over to its new UI this weekend. If you hate it, and you will, for now you can switch back under the top right arrow button. Instagram is working on letting users forward direct messages to other users. Tests so far also show an unsend button. Sure, I guess that's nice, but what we all really want is the DMs in the API so our third-party platforms can see them. Some marketers reporting today that Google Search Console's data is falling behind, making reports lag a bit. Google says they're aware, they're working on it, and it is not related to the big core update that they pushed out Monday. And Sprout Social today added a new card view to its post-performance report in case you'd like to see things a little bit more, I don't know, Pinterest-y. I tested this

Starting point is 00:08:50 and found it a bit buggy. Thumbnails on lots of video and link posts just weren't rendering and there's still apparently no way to do a cross-platform report of post performance. On the bright side though, you can also export this new card view to PDF. Oh, and as for whether targeting a specific country in Google Search Console will negatively affect your brand's website's performance in other countries, a senior Google engineer this week confirmed on Reddit that targeting one region will not affect your site in other regions. Well, if you're new to this podcast, it's just like this. Every weekday, eight or 10 minutes or so, everything that changed that day in the world of digital marketing,

Starting point is 00:09:31 social media, community management, online PR, and internet ad buying, and nothing more. No long interviews, no how-to guides, no rambling. Just get what you need to know and get out. If your podcast app supports chaptering like both Apple Podcasts and Overcast do, you can even jump to specific stories. As for me, my name is Todd Maffin. For the last 10 years, I've owned and run a social media engagement agency called EngageQ. We handle engagement and moderation, as well as organic content, social ad campaigns for medium-sized brands. Link in this episode's notes. Before this, I spent a decade as the National Technology Columnist for the CBC. That's Canada's version of NPR and PBS. brands. Link in this episode's notes. Before this, I spent a decade as the national technology

Starting point is 00:10:05 columnist for the CBC. That's Canada's version of NPR and PBS. As a reminder, if you are here from Product Hunt, this is Friday's episode because I publish these around 5 p.m. Eastern each day. So subscribe to the show now and you will get today's episode in a couple of hours. Unless you're listening to this on a Friday, in which case, you know what? You get the idea. Have a restful weekend, folks. I am off to farm gears and kill ghouls in Fallout 76. Talk to you next Monday at 5 p.m. Eastern. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots.

Starting point is 00:10:41 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. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:11:06 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - 148: Is That a New Ad Format In Your Pocket, Or… ?

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