Today in Digital Marketing - 156: TikTok’s Ad Algorithm Revealed

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

We learn a bit more about how TikTok places ads… Facebook expands its test of mid-roll video ads… Does your brand have a policy for when “no reply” tweets come available?... Bing adds real-time index inclusion… and more. Produced by engageQ.com. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Email [e-mail] or visit engageQ.com/contact Today’s episode is sponsored by: MediaNegotiator.US Help Spread the Word! • Review this podcast at ratethispodcast.com/today • Click bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish Advertising: Reach ~1,000 Digital Marketers • Classifieds ($20) — todayindigital.com/classifieds • Mid-Rolls — todayindigital.com/advertising TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Tod’s web site: TodMaffin.com • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • Instagram: instagram.com/todmaffin • Facebook: facebook.com/tmaffin • TikTok: tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Mixer: mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy • Xbox Gamertag: Radio#9573 SOURCES: https://digiday.com/media/how-tiktok-ranks-ads https://www.seroundtable.com/bing-webmaster-tools-migrates-new-29482.html https://twitter.com/OvercastFM/status/1263122624760229892 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/testing-new-conversation-settings.html https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-expands-test-of-skippable-mid-roll-ads-in-videos/578279/ https://twitter.com/BidenInsultBot --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Facebook expands its test of mid-roll video ads. How will Twitter's new feature affect your brand's messaging policy? Bing adds real-time index inclusion and some other nice features. And I may have found the single best Twitter account in the world. Trust me. It's Wednesday, May 20th. Happy World B-Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.

Well, we marketers are really controlled by one thing online. No, not our bosses, not our clients, but rather algorithms. How high up your brand's website appears in Google, whether or not your content shows up on your customers' Instagram feeds, all controlled by algorithms. And the advertising side has their own algos as well. As with most of these, not much is known about them. But Digiday today has a great piece up deconstructing the ad algorithm at TikTok. Quoting the piece, at a high level, it's a combination of bid price, ad relevance, and the quality of the ad. This is roughly familiar to how many leading ad algorithms work,

the idea being that while price is important, ads that are more relevant and simply better will make the platform more money since people will opt for them more often. Ad buyers said TikTok will consider other factors like engagement, which on TikTok includes likes, shares, and comments, unquote. The Digiday piece then quotes Brendan Gahan, an executive at the Mechanism ad agency,

who says TikTok heavily weights watch time and loops. TikTok is likely weighting that relevant aspect measured by watch time above all else. And Paul Casimias from the agency Starcom says they believe that your quality score is held across your entire ad account. He said if an account you're running puts out a set of promotions that are low quality, you will be penalized in terms of a higher cost.

So all in all, very similar to the other platforms, especially Facebook, which directly rewards good ad performance with cheaper CPMs, but also a good reminder to spend time on your creative. Facebook is expanding its test of mid-roll video ads, the ad format being made available to more marketers as of today. These ads, for now at least, are non-skippable for the first five seconds. Then people can tap a skip button to go back to watching their video. They have a maximum runtime of 15 seconds. The test expansion applies not only to more ad accounts, but also more video placements. Until now, the early tests were just inside live broadcasts. Now they're

testing them in regular publisher videos. And as for those live streams, they're now being used to test a couple of other video formats, a pre-roll that runs before the live stream, an image ad that appears below the live stream, and a mid-roll ad that plays in the main video player during the live stream while the broadcast continues playing in a shrunken window. Twitter is rolling out their new tweet restriction settings. This will let you select who can reply to your brand's tweets, everyone, in other words like it is now, or only people or brands that your account now, or only people or brands that your

account follows, or only people or brands that your tweet mentions. People outside of those settings will still be able to see your tweet, retweet it, like the tweet, and even retweet your tweet with a comment, but the reply button will be grayed out. Again, this is just rolling out now to a handful of people globally on their website and mobile apps. You may have it. You may want to check. It's certainly coming to everyone soon. I haven't heard anything about it being included in their publishing API so that third-party tools can also use these settings, but I don't know why they wouldn't include that.

Then again, Instagram doesn't include direct messages in their API, for God only knows why. What does this Twitter change mean for you? Maybe time to add this to your next marketing meeting to develop a policy. When your brand account gets this option, will you go no reply as your default setting? It's an interesting question. I'd love to know what your plans are,

so tweet me, at Todd Maffin. Microsoft's Bing search engine has announced three new features for its Webmaster Tools dashboard. URL submission. Now, they've actually had a way to submit a URL before, but now when you submit a web page, it could be popped into their index immediately. Block URL. So if you need to temporarily prevent a web page from your brand site from appearing in the search results for some reason. You can also use this to force a refresh of Bing's cache

for a particular page if you've updated content there. And crawl control, where you can suggest to Bing's bot how often you'd like it to drop by and re-index. I use Bing as my main search engine. Is it better than Google? No, it is not. But I use it because Bing has a rewards program. Did you know this?

You get three Microsoft points for every search you do there, up to 10 searches a day, and then another three times 10 for mobile searches. Every 5,000 points or so, which is about every couple of months for me, I get a $5 credit on Xbox games. You can get Starbucks cards and other retailer gift cards like gas stations, movie theaters, and the like.

This is not a paid promotion, by the way. Bing does the job mostly. I do find, you know, maybe once or twice a day I've got to flip over to Google to find something. But still, five bucks is five bucks, am I right? All right, it is time for the lightning round. The podcast app Overcast, which is the one that I use, reports that podcast listenership is slowly increasing toward pre-quarantine levels. For a few weeks of the lockdown, we're down about 16% listenership from the prior average last week, only down about 12%. An update to YouTube's mobile apps today

includes a bedtime setting. So it will tell you if you are past your bedtime and you should stop watching. Shopify has enabled installation payments for merchants, so now your shoppers can pay in four chunks if you'd like to enable that. Twitter seems to be working on some kind of interface for audio inside tweets. A mock-up design credited to two Twitter designers is making the rounds today. It's a full screen treatment on mobile, maybe is a way to bring podcasts a little bit more into the Twittersphere. Twittersphere? Twittersphere? You know what I'm trying to say here. And my favorite Twitter account of the week, at Biden Insult Bot,

which appears to tweet at you or reply to you if you tweet at it, I should say, with a number of just fantastic, almost British-level quality insults, including, Cool your heels, you milk-swillin' son of a peach basket. You're dancing at the wrong hoedown, you scone-eating clam-fister. And my personal favorite, Sell your glove-bot atlas somewhere else, you dribble-mouth biscuit nibbler. God, I love the internet.

Shout-out to Roy Narr from Israel, who reviewed the podcast on iTunes, saying How come I found this only now? Great content, going to be a regular listener for sure. Thank you, Roy. If you would like a shout out of your own, just rate and review this podcast. You'll find a link in this episode's notes that makes this a simple one-click process. You may have heard me mention before that classified ads are an option here if there's something you'd like to tell your fellow listeners about.

One of those classifieds is running today and for the next few days, so I would encourage you to have a listen at the end of the show. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. Did you know if a traditional media outlet under delivers your advertising impressions, most will never tell you and that you will pay for what was not delivered. Get negotiation help with traditional radio or TV campaigns. Go to medianegotiator.us.