Today in Digital Marketing - 187: All Your Source Code Are Belong To Us

Starting point is 00:00:00 All the metrics you can eat, average order value, conversion rate, all the metrics that weren't in Facebook's Ad Manager are heading there now. Plus, YouTube explains why some of your brand's best videos get the lowest engagement, a nice addition to Sprout Social, and if you're not friends with structured data, you may want to cozy up to it soon. It's Monday, July 6th, 2020. Happy Statehood Day, Lithuania. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start today with a bit of history. Back in 1977, the Indian government took a hard line on foreign companies. A non-Indian entity couldn't own more than 40% of its company. And so many companies like IBM, Mobile, and Kodak

Starting point is 00:00:45 just pulled out of the country entirely. As did Coca-Cola. Partly because of this new ownership requirement, but also partly because the socialist Indian government really took a hard line on Coca-Cola, noting that while 90% of the country had access to Coke, only 10% had access to safe drinking water. And for Coca-Cola, one extra

Starting point is 00:01:07 rule. If you want to stay in India, said lawmakers, you've got to give us your secret recipe. Coca-Cola said nope and left. They came back in the 90s. Well now, it's possible that history may repeat itself in the digital space. India's government has drafted legislation that will require tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook to hand over the source code to their algorithms. India says it's to protect the country against unfair monopolistic practices and give Indian companies a better shot at success. To be clear, this is a draft, not yet law. But so far, India has been signaling that the affected companies may not even get a hearing. Instead, they'll let them make comments on a government website. And amidst all that came news last week that the country banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese owned mobile apps. And today we hear reports that Instagram has moved up its plans to launch

Starting point is 00:02:07 its TikTok clone, which it calls Reels in India. Already some Indians are reporting being able to try it out. Some good news for you data nerds who run Facebook ads. They are rolling out the ability to create custom metrics in Ads Manager. What are custom metrics? They're formulas that calculate the numbers you care about. Facebook's Ad Manager comes with a whole slew of metrics like reach and click-through rate and frequency, but you've never been able to create your own metrics that show up in Ads Manager. Metrics like average order value, or conversion rate, or the ratio of people who add to cart versus those who purchase. If this sounds familiar, Facebook has had the ability in the ads reports section for a while now, but you've never been able to see those metrics in the main ads manager screen where, let's face it, most of us use to quickly check our campaign's performance.

Starting point is 00:03:01 So definitely some good news there. You don't often get to sit down with the people who control the social algorithms and ask them a lot of questions about how it all works, but the folks at YouTube have sort of done that in a recent video for creators. And it's given us a few good insights as to some strange discrepancies that people have noticed. One of those discrepancies? Often, the videos with the most views actually have the lowest click-through rate. YouTube's explanation? Fresher audiences.

Starting point is 00:03:38 They say you get more views by being on people's homepage or in their suggested feed. These are people who don't subscribe to you, don't know you, and so aren't likely to click. But as Social Media Today noted, that can make it hard to measure your overall performance or even track relevant trends. On this, YouTube recommends that creators take into account all of the available metrics, including the new insights, in order to get a better comparative view, i.e. if one metric seems out of whack, the other may better qualify it. In isolation, any single metric could theoretically be confusing, unquote. In the video, YouTube said that they are planning to launch A-B thumbnail testing,

Starting point is 00:04:18 which certainly got my attention, but the phrases that they used around that feature were things like eventually and in the long term. So, you know, don't hold your breath. Google appears to be testing putting thumbnail images in its main search engine results page. In other words, if people do a search there and your organic listing shows, there's a chance it might have a thumbnail beside it. This is good, of course, because having a compelling image beside your listing could entice more people to click on it. This is similar to how Google News displays thumbnails. These are square cropped, of course, because we absolutely need yet another image dimension to plan for, am I right? One interesting thing that people who are in this testing group have noticed, not all sites get the thumbnail.

Starting point is 00:05:02 Also not clear how they're getting the thumbnails. In other words, where is Google pulling that from? The first image it finds in the source code? A meta header tag? Structured data? It's not clear yet. Many people believe it's the latter. Sites that didn't get a thumbnail in the listing were sites that didn't declare an image in structured data,

Starting point is 00:05:22 nor did they include it in an OpenGraph protocol meta tag. Incidentally, Google also appears to be testing showing images in the Google Suggest dropdown. So while this is not rolled out, and may in fact never roll out, it's never a bad idea to implement the OpenGraph protocol or to use JSON Schema Org for your website. And finally, Sprout Social has released a nice addition to their suite, notifications in Slack. This is still in beta, and it's only for publishing and task-related notifications, so things like failed posts, approval requested, internal message, and so on.

Starting point is 00:06:00 Their notification systems do not extend to their inbox, so there's still no way to get desktop notifications of new comments or reviews or whatnot. But for those who rely on the publishing notifications and use Slack, definitely a welcome addition. Well, Friday, I talked about the new California legislation that has a very big impact on digital marketing. Tomorrow, a special episode devoted to that legislation. Simon Poulton from the W Promote Agency joins me for an in-depth discussion that will answer all your questions, including can our brand really get sued if we're not in compliance? How exactly do I change our Facebook pixel to get in compliance? And does this mean the end of marketing to California? Also, Simon lives in California, so we'll find out how his news feed changed since Facebook turned on limited data use a week ago.

Starting point is 00:06:51 That's on a special episode tomorrow. Don't forget, if you've got a marketing position you're trying to fill, or maybe you're looking for that next great gig, consider a classified ad right here. It's just 20 bucks. You can book it online. Link in this episode's description or just go to todayindigital.com slash ads. Our regular theme music is by Mark Blevis. Ad sales by Podcorn. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. Studies show the most important factor for a successful business is timing. Launching the Thank you. and ideas at trendhackers.co for free to launch your next business or product. The service was launched by a serial entrepreneur who's bootstrapped multiple companies to the millions through finding trends. So check out trendhackers.co. That's trendhackers.co. You won't regret it.

Today in Digital Marketing - 187: All Your Source Code Are Belong To Us

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