Today in Digital Marketing - 157: The Lovers, The Dreamers, and Me. 🌈

Starting point is 00:00:00 Facebook and Instagram stories come to desktop. Twitter's stories continue rolling out around the world. Which bid option performs best on Facebook? And some nice changes to their ads manager app on mobile. It's Thursday, May 22nd. Happy Father's Day, Germany. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Facebook today gave marketers some clarity around how they can and can't use music

Starting point is 00:00:28 in their ads and organic posts. First, and this one surprised me, there are no limits on music use in stories, either Facebook or Instagram stories. If I'm reading their statement right, you are free to use whatever you want. I guess maybe because stories by default automatically get deleted after a day, so maybe they bought like a 24-hour platform-wide

Starting point is 00:00:48 usage license from the right holders. Kind of like how TikTok bought rights for short clips of songs. Also, no limits on musical performances, so a band performing or an artist singing live. As for full-length music pieces, which honestly I'm not sure many marketers would be using anyway, but for those, Facebook says the greater the number of full-length tracks in a video, the more likely it may be limited. That means if you are using music in a live stream, it might be interrupted, or parts of your video could be muted, or it could be removed entirely. And they say there should always be a visual component to your video. Recorded audio should not be the primary purpose of the video.

Starting point is 00:01:26 Attention, fellow old people. Facebook appears to be rolling out stories creation on desktop. Of course they are going to jam it into the clusterfuck that is Creator Studio. I don't have it yet but the screenshots I've seen show it popping up under the content library tab. This is good news for those of us who prefer to edit and create these things on desktop as opposed to on our phones. Certainly makes it easier to get approvals from clients or colleagues. One of my pet peeves are the patch notes in mobile apps. You know, when you go to update the app, there's a section that tells you what's new in the app. For instance,

Starting point is 00:02:01 we've added background playing, or there's a new settings page, or hey, new colors, that kind of thing. Far too many apps just paste in the same thing every update. Bug fixes and performance improvements. Some even try to be clever and make haikus or little treasure hunts. Like, just stop. Just tell us what's new in your app. Anyway, Facebook has been one of the most egregious of these. I don't think I have seen a single app of theirs have any actual update information. Until now. And it's on the mobile Facebook Ads Manager app. So now we know what they've changed. And in case you're curious, they have added the ability to duplicate ads and ad sets in the app.

Starting point is 00:02:43 You can now edit ads created with Instagram. There's access to more detailed audience targeting. And they've added what they call a, quote, fresh new design, which, to my eyes at least, looks identical to the previous design. But hey, whatever, we don't care. At least we are getting updates. Keep it up, rogue developer friend. If you've ever used Facebook's ads manager, you're probably familiar with the setting that asks what bid strategy you'd like

Starting point is 00:03:11 to use for your campaign. After all, it is an auction. And while most people choose the default, which is lowest cost, there are other choices, notably cost cap and bid cap. Jason Berland has a great breakdown on his site with the differences, and I've got a link to his full piece in the notes. So quoting him, with cost cap, you are telling Facebook that you never want your cost to be higher than a specific price. This means if you tell Facebook your cost cap is $20, it will aim to keep the cost per purchase at or under $20. Some conversions might be higher than 20, some might be lower than 20, but your overall cost should be up under $20. Some conversions might be higher than $20, some might be lower than $20, but your overall cost should be up to $20 cost per conversion. With bid caps, on the other hand,

Starting point is 00:03:52 Facebook will not bid in an auction higher than your bid cap. If it doesn't think it can get a cost under $20 per conversion, or whatever you set the goal and price at, it simply will not participate in the auction. You can expect a lower cost per conversion, but more work in adjusting bids to get more delivery, unquote. But how do both work in the real world? Warning, we are about to get a little nerdy here, lots of numbers and acronyms. So if you are not up for that, you can jump right to the lightning round by using the chapter function in your podcast app or manually jump to the time code 8 minutes and 30 seconds. Corey Dobbin is a longtime listener of this podcast and founder of Aaron Advertising.

Starting point is 00:04:32 And he joins me to share the results of a campaign that he did. Hi, Corey. Hey. So you had two campaigns. You had one that was top of funnel and one that was sort of down at the bottom of funnel. Can you walk us through the results that you got for the top of funnel first? So when we say top of funnel, we're talking about introducing people to a brand. So more brand awareness, just kind of a, here's who we are instead of the bottom of the funnel,

Starting point is 00:04:51 which is okay, buy our stuff right now. So let's start top of funnel. I tested lowest cost versus cost cap versus bid cap. It was in three separate campaigns and each campaign had the same budget with the same audience. The idea of separating it by campaign, I was using CBO. So I wanted it to spend equally on all the audiences. I find that having different sized audiences within one CBO kind of skews performance towards one. And what sort of budget are we talking about here? So the upper funnel test came in at about $40,000 by the end of it.

Starting point is 00:05:28 Lowest cost performed about what we had expected. It achieved the greatest scale, but the worst results, which is kind of expected because it doesn't have that threshold to work off of. So it'll spend all of your budget, but it will also get those conversions that are worth a lot more that bring your average up. Cost cap performed the best. A big issue that I find with caps

Starting point is 00:05:56 is that it's hard to get deliverability out of them because it restricts spend so much. We set the caps higher than what our goal cost per acquisition is. I set the cost cap, I think about 125% higher than what our goal would be and bid cap 200% higher. That said, even though cost caps cap was more restrictive, it's still spent more than bid cap ended up with a higher ROAS overall. ROAS being a return on ad spend. Yeah. So it spent more, obviously there were more purchases there,

Starting point is 00:06:31 but our cost per acquisition was lower and our ROAS was higher. There were two audiences that I was testing. I was testing a broad audience and a purchase lookalike audience. And across the board, the cost cap performed best on the broad audiences and bid cap performed the best on the lookalikes. I've almost always been pleasantly shocked by the performance of, of broad audiences. You know, I never expect them to really work. Yeah. As a, as a marketer,

Starting point is 00:07:01 you kind of think that segmenting down as tight as you can is, is the most obvious path. But Facebook's really been pushing the broad audiences lately. How did your bottom of funnel stuff do? So we tested it on product view retargeting and we tested on add to cart retargeting. The bid cap campaigns performed nearly twice as well as the lowest cost. So I tested the bid cap with the min max spend modifiers at the ad set level. I didn't use a max spend, but I set a min spend and I set it very low. The campaign had a daily budget of like $200 and I set the minimum spent

Starting point is 00:07:43 to $20. I found at the end of the test that it actually did force it to spend more. And I think that maybe just having that min spend in place was telling the system that it had to push spend a little bit further than it would have otherwise, even though the min spend was going to get hit daily, whether I put it there or not. For context, the control period on lowest cost came in at a return on ad spend of 2.18. And the bid cap with a minimum spend modifier came in at a 9.34 during the same timeframe. So massive increase. Yeah. Corey Dobbin, you can learn more about him on his Twitter account at Corey Dobbin. That's C-O-R-Y-D-O-B-B-I-N. There is a link in this

Starting point is 00:08:27 episode's description to his Twitter profile. Which brings us to the lightning round. If you've been waiting for a decision on your Google reconsideration requests, looks like they're starting to process that backlog. So hang in there. Both Twitter's replay API and historical power track API were down earlier today, so if your third-party listening tool seemed a little glitchy, that's why. Fleets are coming to Italy. Fleets are Twitter's version of Stories, and they are slowly being rolled out around the world.

Starting point is 00:08:56 I found a great little Chrome plug-in for those of you who do a lot of image work on social media. It is at resizing.app, and it is a really quick way to crop and resize your images into platform-friendly dimensions, even if you don't know the right dimensions to use. Bloomberg is reporting this afternoon that Apple is on the hunt for podcasts to buy. They're also said to be planning some original podcasts and looking for an executive to run all that. So heads up, Spotify. And if you are not already on Andrew Foxwell's excellent email newsletter, I'd recommend you check it out. Really good stuff in there about scaling Facebook ad campaigns.

Starting point is 00:09:30 It's at foxwelldigital.com slash email. And finally, Paul Vasquez had many jobs in his life. Firefighter. He drove a truck for a while, was a cage fighter for a couple of years. And then he settled outside of Yosemite Park, set up camp on the side of a mountain, and he lived there in nature for many years. And you probably know him as this guy. Double rainbow all the way across the sky. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 00:10:06 Double rainbow guy Paul Vasquez has died. He was 57. The lovers, the dreamers, and me. May there be triple rainbows wherever you are now, dude. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Bye. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. never tell you and that you will pay for what was not delivered. Get negotiation help with

Starting point is 00:10:46 traditional radio or TV campaigns. Go to medianegotiator.us.

Today in Digital Marketing - 157: The Lovers, The Dreamers, and Me. 🌈

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.