Today in Digital Marketing - 169: It’s Time. Delete Your Grey Account.

Starting point is 00:00:00 It might be one of the most requested features that digital marketers have had for Facebook in years. And now that feature is rolling out. But it's probably forcing a lot of managers like you to clean up their grey accounts today, Tuesday, June 10th. Happy Autonomy Day, Finland. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by Ladder. Facebook is rolling out a new inbox on Messenger today to help people who manage brand accounts. People like you, I'm guessing. Until now, if you wanted to monitor your brand's Facebook or Instagram DMs on the weekend or something, you'd need to install the Pages mobile app, which has always been a bit of a dog's breakfast, that app.

Starting point is 00:00:47 Well, now they will be sending you those business messages via Messenger. Yeah, the same Messenger app that you use to chat with family and friends. And don't worry, it will not be all completely intermingled. You will need to manually switch accounts in the app to get to the business messages, but Facebook says it should start working for anyone whose personal Facebook account has some kind of admin privileges on their brand page. Which brings us to gray accounts. Those are the people who have two Facebook accounts, one for their personal life where they add and engage with people they know, and one where they log in to handle their business stuff. To be clear, this second account, which we call a gray account, is still technically a personal profile. Instead of the name Jane Smith, people often call that fake personal profile something like Jane Smith at

Starting point is 00:01:34 work or something like that. Please, people, for the love of God, stop it. Stop using gray accounts. There are a million reasons for this, but one is that you will not be able to take advantage of enhancements like this messenger integration. I cannot tell you how many times we have onboarded a new client and spent the first 10 hours just trying to untangle their spaghetti strings of gray accounts. We have one client who had six separate gray accounts. Each one had a different type of access to a different Facebook asset. Like one had access to the page. Another fake account had access to the actual ad account that was attached to that page. It was a complete, complete nightmare. You only need your personal Facebook account. That's it. Just one. Nobody in the public will be able to tell who you are

Starting point is 00:02:26 when you reply as your brand. Anyway, okay, sermon over. Facebook says this new business inbox is available today on iOS, although I just checked, I don't seem to have it yet, so maybe rolling out in the hours to come, and it will arrive on Android in the coming weeks. Google is expanding its COVID response now by letting businesses add different sets of hours for different services. For instance, if you're a

Starting point is 00:02:53 restaurant, you might have one set of hours for your dining room, but a different set, say expanded hours for takeout and delivery. If you're an admin on your brand's Google My Business profile, you can make these changes in the dashboard, and these changes will appear immediately on your search listing and your maps listing. One important thing to note, your additional hours will only show up if you have also detailed your regular hours as well. There's a lot of social media and online advertising in the digital marketing space, but let's not forget the grandfather of our world, plain old television. And as more consumers

Starting point is 00:03:33 switch to the over-the-top streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and Disney+, some brand managers are looking to these platforms to add to their program. Roku is certainly in this space, of course. They are a digital TV box, kind of like the Apple TV box, but with less, you know, Apple. And they have now launched a new shopper data program that they say will improve targeting and measurement of television advertising. One brand that is going all in here is Kroger's in-house marketing agency. Kroger is a big, huge grocery store chain if you're not in the U.S. They will be pumping their own data from 2,800 stores into this new Roku platform. That's 60 million households worth of data.

Starting point is 00:04:17 For its part, Roku has about 40 million active accounts as of Q1 of this year. By comparison, Netflix had about 180 million. Still ahead, it's one of the most important numbers in all of digital marketing, and I'll bet you don't know what that number is for your brand. Also, CPM rates are on their way back up, a short lesson in math for marketing metrics, and I will introduce you to the product marketing database that Pinterest may one day all but force you to be in. That's in a minute when Today in Digital Marketing continues. I am not an athlete, but my wife, who is a scientist by training, was on Canada's national

Starting point is 00:05:02 wheelchair basketball team. Today, she coaches. And when I got my vanilla protein powder from Ladder, I made her try it. Ooh. It has a kind of like grown-up vanilla pudding kind of feel. Would you drink that? Yeah, I'd drink it. I think it would be great with a banana.

Starting point is 00:05:20 Ladder was founded by LeBron James and Arnold Schwarzenegger. And unlike other supplements, every batch is tested by a third party to verify the highest quality standards. My wife and I head to the blender, where she finally learns that I lost that top part years ago. I need something to cover it. We don't own the thing anymore. I do this all the time. You're weird.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Ooh, that's good. It's good with a banana? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's good taste. Use the code BETTEREVERYDAY for 30% off everything site-wide at ladder.sport. That's BETTEREVERYDAY at ladder.sport. More interesting use of augmented reality, this time from Pinterest. They are beefing up the camera in their mobile app to provide a new tab full of shoppable pins.

Starting point is 00:06:10 Basically, you take a picture of, say, a lamp, and it will return a set of lamps that look similar, that you can buy. Or you can upload an image from your phone's camera roll. Yes, this functionality did exist before today, but until now, those search results would bring back all pins that matched, even if you couldn't buy directly from them. Now those results can show you only those pins that you can buy from. So how will this play out? I actually suspect this is more of a threat to bricks and mortar stores than anything. Nobody's really going to use this in their home, are they?

Starting point is 00:06:44 I mean, who takes a photo of a lamp and then says, find me another one of these? I don't know, maybe some people. I would just buy it from the first store that I got the first lamp at. No, I think this will have more consumer value while in an actual store. Imagine being at Ikea and finding a lamp you like, taking a picture of it, and having the app return a list of shoppable pins of lamps just like that lamp. Now, there's no location-based tech involved yet, but can you imagine adding geo data to that? Now you've got not just a list of similar lamps, but rather a list of similar

Starting point is 00:07:11 lamps within a five minute drive of you. And if that comes to fruition, this will be a database that retailers must be in if they want to compete. Scary times ahead, friends. Quick, do you know your conversion rate? That's the percentage of people who take an action when you ask them to. For most of us, that's buying something or maybe it's subscribing to a newsletter or some other action. Unbounce.com, which is a landing page provider, says it studied 186 million visits to landing pages belonging to their customers across 16 industries and the average conversion rate nearly 10 percent higher than you thought it would be yeah me too here at our agency without historical client data we usually put one percent in as a placeholder number until we get some real world data in. That said, let's not forget

Starting point is 00:08:05 Unbounce's pages are designed with pretty clear conversion design, so they might be a little higher than most. And I would venture to say that most of Unbounce's conversion events are not purchases as much as signups to newsletters and webinars. In fact, in that respect, I'd actually say that 10% average might be a little low. So context, as with any of these surveys, is always important. As is math. That was the average conversion rate I reported, not the median conversion rate. No, the median was 3%. Quick math refresher, the median is the middle number of a data set, whereas the average is the result of

Starting point is 00:08:45 adding up all of the numbers and then dividing that by the number of numbers. And that can be an important distinction. Take this data set of five numbers. You ready? Here's the data set. 1, 2, 3, 19, and 20. The median is the number 3 in this case, because it's the number in the middle. But the average is nine. So next time you're looking at a report or a study that reports the average, maybe also dig a little deeper to make sure you're understanding the full story. Well, the party's over, friends. CPM rates are on their way back up. They were cheaper during the opening days of the pandemic because, well, most digital ad platforms operate as an auction and with fewer advertisers come cheaper prices.

Starting point is 00:09:33 But those cheaper prices are now on their way out. And this is especially so on video content. Digiday says Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube all now have higher CPMs than they did two months ago. CPMs, of course, being the cost to reach 1,000 eyeballs. Well, 1,000 people. I guess that's 2,000 actual eyeballs. Anyway, you know what I mean. Yes, video ad CPMs on Facebook were up 28% last month from April,

Starting point is 00:09:59 though that's still 20% lower than February was. Over on Snapchat, which reports how much money they make per thousand unique views, so slightly different metric, although certainly relatable. This month, those numbers rose to $3 from a low of $1.50 in late March and early April. So they're basically close to where they were before all this COVID stuff hit. As for YouTube, those CPMs are around $23, which is more or less stable. By the way, I have re-enabled publishing this podcast to both YouTube and the Facebook page

Starting point is 00:10:28 in case you prefer to listen that way. You can find the YouTube link under the subscribe to podcast button over on todayindigital.com and on Facebook, you will find it at facebook.com slash todayindigital. Special thanks to El Camarda Tapiatio from Mexico. Oh my gosh, I'm sure I pronounced that wrong. Anyway, this person reviewed this podcast on iTunes saying,

Starting point is 00:10:51 this is the best social media show with news you need as a marketer. Thanks for having your show ads running in Mexico. That's how I found you the first time. Thanks, but wait, am I still running ads? Maybe I need to check my settings because I really thought I'd turn those off. Anyway, if you would like a shout out, just rate and review this podcast. You will find a special link in the notes that makes this an easy 10 second process. Special thanks to Ladder.Sport for sponsoring this episode. Ad sales by Podcorn, music by Mark Blevis. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:11:23 Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 169: It’s Time. Delete Your Grey Account.

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