Today in Digital Marketing - 186: Plenty of Room at the Hotel California

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. So you checked your Facebook ad manager today and wait a minute. Why are the metrics from an entire state just missing? You're not alone. Thousands of digital marketers woke up this morning to a huge gap in their numbers. And it's all thanks to a new American law that may have serious legal ramifications for your brand. It's Friday, July 3rd, 2020.

Starting point is 00:00:48 Happy Independence Day, Belarus. I'm Todd Maffin, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Well, Twitter's interesting today. Lots of digital marketers posting screenshots of their Facebook ad managers, many showing the usual state-by-state breakdown, but with one new thing today. A lot of data for California is just straight up missing. Number of purchases, average conversion value, all gone. And you can thank the California Consumer Privacy Act for that. The legislation actually went into effect in January, but things are

Starting point is 00:01:23 turning off now because as of the first of this month, the window for litigation opens. One very important note here, I am not a lawyer. I'm not an expert in the CCPA. Hell, I don't even live in the US. So if you're at all concerned about this, please do your own homework on it. Okay, with that caveat, quoting from an excellent blog post yesterday on searchenginelland.com, this week, Facebook announced a new feature called Limited Data Use. As of July 1st, Limited Data Use has been automatically enabled for all Facebook business accounts, limiting the way user data can be stored and processed in the Facebook ecosystem for all users Facebook identifies as residents of the state of

Starting point is 00:02:06 California. The feature automatically detects if a user resides in California and applies limited data use rules. But that feature will only stay on until July 31st. Then, Facebook requires businesses to update their pixel to include a limited data use parameter. If you do not take action by July 31st, your business will take on sole responsibility for compliance and all associated risks with noncompliance, unquote. So here's what I've been able to parse so far. There's a new toggle switch in Facebook's Business Manager. If it's on, you'll get that California data back, but legally speaking here, only if the CCPA doesn't apply to you, or you're filtering events before sending them to Facebook, or you've completed the limited data use for the data source in question. Once you turn it on, while you might be on the right side of the law, you're going to lose some marketing power. You won't be able to include California residents in website-based retargeting campaigns, for instance. One easy way to make sure you're in

Starting point is 00:03:09 good shape, just exclude all of California from your future ad campaigns. This won't work for all brands, of course, but if dropping a state won't impact you, that's certainly an option. Search Engine Land's piece on it is excellent, with a series of possible paths to take ranged from lowest risk to highest. You'll find a link in this episode's notes. And to answer your next question, this applies regardless of where your business is located. As long as your business is marketing to California residents on Facebook, you must be in compliance or open your business to liability. Google has changed what it does with spam reports. Did you even know you could

Starting point is 00:03:48 report entire websites as spam? You can, in Search Console, and until today, Google might have even taken what they call a manual action on that site's listing in the search engine, usually, of course, to demote it or to list it. This led some less ethical people to report the sites of their competitors, of course. Today, Google says it won't take any manual actions on spam reports anymore. Quoting the company's blog post, most of the manual actions come from the work our internal teams regularly do to detect spam and improve search results. Today, we are updating our help center articles to better reflect this approach. we use spam reports only to improve our spam detection algorithms. Most of the time, it's much more impactful for us to fix an underlying issue with our automated detection systems than it is to take manual action on a

Starting point is 00:04:37 single URL or site, unquote. So sure, if you see a spammy site, certainly report it. Just don't expect them to do anything with that specific site. Most of us haven't seen Twitter's versions of stories out in the wild yet. They're calling them fleets. Get it? Fleeting tweets, I guess. They're testing it in a handful of countries, but already people are reporting an interesting variation. Collaborative fleets. Instead of seeing a single bubble indicating a user's story, sorry, fleet, you'll see a kind of double bubble.

Starting point is 00:05:14 Tapping that would let you see the collaboration. This, of course, has interesting implications for influencer marketing, a very visual representation of a brand and an influencer working on a campaign together. Instagram has something like this, but it's only for live streams, so this would be the first take on it inside of a stories format. Although some might argue this is just an expansion of TikTok's duet feature, everything old is new again. Reports say Facebook is getting back on the hashtag train. Facebook has supported hashtags for years, but only in the most anemic way possible.

Starting point is 00:05:57 They were clickable or tappable, sure, but clicking them took you to a dog's breakfast mess of a results page. Well, they've cleaned that up, and the results page is actually fairly helpful now. It shows you friends of yours and pages you follow who use that hashtag and surfaces some other stuff too. Mari Smith says she believes hashtags will increase the organic reach of your brand's posts, though I have to say I haven't seen that claim anywhere else, and I actually have my doubts about that. And again, Mari is well-connected internally to Facebook, so who knows.

Starting point is 00:06:21 Also, apparently some people are seeing a small Browse this hashtag bar below posts that contain hashtags, so maybe some room for discovery there. So far, there doesn't appear to be any way to follow a hashtag like you can on Instagram. There doesn't seem to be any technical limit to how many hashtags you use, but I have to say, be gentle with this. This is not open floodgates to spam hashtags like you do on Instagram. Keep it to one or two at the very most. And maybe for the next couple of weeks, measure the reach and engagement on those organic posts to see if there is a lift there. Mari Smith recommends going back through some of your best performing Facebook posts and adding hashtags to see if it might give those posts a bit of a resurgence.

Starting point is 00:07:09 My favorite tweet this week was from at Spunky Turnip, who proposed this paradox. If you ask Rick Astley for his copy of the movie Up, he cannot give it to you, as he will never give you Up. However, in doing so, he lets you down, thus creating the Astley Paradox. That puts paid to another week. Happy 4th of July to our American neighbors. Please wear a mask. Our regular theme music by Mark Blevis. Ad sales by Podcorn. Special thanks to the band Arbutus Roots from my hometown of Nanaimo, Canada, for their permission to use this song, Something About a Ditch. Check them out on Spotify, Arbutus Roots.

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Today in Digital Marketing - 186: Plenty of Room at the Hotel California

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