Today in Digital Marketing - 93: Go Home, Quora. You're Drunk.

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Monday, February 10th, 2020. at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. found their own way around it. Facebook quietly buys a company that may help them get around people turning location tracking off. Google can tell you if you're selling things at too high a price now. And a nice new feature coming to Instagram Stories. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. You know, you're not in Facebook's world long as a digital marketing person before you run up against some crazy batshit policy or a glitch in Facebook's ads manager, go to run an ad, you get an error message telling you that your geography

Starting point is 00:01:11 isn't set, when it clearly is. Well, from the you think you have it bad files comes this report from digital marketer David Herman, who tweeted, political ads. But rather than send me an email or have my partner manager tell me about this months ago, they wait until my verification expired. Their response? You should be checking your settings. We update there. Yes, Facebook. I check my Facebook settings on my personal Facebook page all the time. Here's the thing about David's situation that makes this even more ridiculous. It's not like he's trying to run ads for Trump or anything. He's running ads for a jewelry company about that company's donations to charity. This, he said, is deemed a credible threat to our democracy that I need to be verified and re-verified multiple times. Great work as always, Facebook.

Starting point is 00:02:28 Armageddon is coming. Well, cookie-geddon. I'm sure by now you know that Google is planning to drop supportive third-party tracking pixels in Chrome, which will, of course, add a huge challenge for us digital marketers, not only because of the loss of trackability, but it could also hike the prices of solutions that can piece a user's journey together. Some publishers think they've found a solution to build a kind of walled garden of their own.

Starting point is 00:02:54 After all, every time someone logs on to view their content, they've got that authenticated user record. On Friday, Digiday posted an excellent piece about this. It's a little too nerdy to get into any level of detail here, but there is a link to the article in this episode's description if Cookie Geddon keeps you up at night as well. Quora, you know, the question answering site, has added two new ads features. Advanced Match claims to give you more access to data to better optimize your campaigns. You do, though, have to modify your existing Quora pixel code.

Starting point is 00:03:28 Quora says that some advertisers saw a significant conversion lift after they did this. And they now have adjustable conversion windows. But those windows are kind of ridiculous. You can now set a 1 and 90. In other words, if someone clicks on your ad on Quora but doesn't convert for three months, Quora will gleefully report, hey, that was our ad. Give us the credit for that. Which sure might be true if literally the only place

Starting point is 00:03:57 you're running ads is on Quora, but chances are you're also running on Facebook and Google and maybe even offline ads that, in the case of three months, may be more responsible for the conversion than Quora claims. This is why, of course, you need to be tracking your conversions at your website level, with UTM parameters, with something like Google Analytics. Here, once again, is a story that is both exciting as a digital marketer and creepy as a citizen of the world. And guess which company is behind it?

Starting point is 00:04:30 Yes, Facebook, of course. Turns out they quietly bought a startup called Scape Technologies. They bought it for about 40 million bucks. And what does Scape Technologies do? Apparently, they are building a one-to-one digital map of the physical world in augmented reality. In other words, 3D mapping the physical world. Quoting Marketing Land, So, Scape has created 3D renderings of the world with location precision that doesn't

Starting point is 00:05:07 rely on current location technologies like cell tower triangulation, GPS, or reverse IP targeting. The company claims its visual positioning system provides centimeter-level location recognition at a previously unprecedented scale. And it has good pedigree. Scape was partly inspired by Pokemon Go, that AR game that was ridiculously popular a few years back, and still has a very active fan base. Well, that game was created by Niantic Labs, which was a spinoff from Google. The founder and CEO of Niantic actually ran Google Maps for years. He came to Google when the company acquired Keyhole, which he was CEO of, and became Google Earth.

Starting point is 00:05:51 It's really anyone's guess as to how this will play out, but you can certainly expect it to be something we advertisers could take advantage of. Will we one day be able to replace existing billboards in the real world with our own brands when people view that billboard in AR? Maybe, but it seems this is more a play for location information. After all, if this tech can triangulate the exact location of a user anywhere in the world within centimeters, this will become especially important as more and more people turn off location settings in their Facebook app. Scape last year said it had created 3D renderings of more than 100 cities around the

Starting point is 00:06:26 world. Google is now rolling out an interesting new report for people in its Google Merchant Center. It's called the Price Competitiveness Report. It will show you how your prices compare to other sellers who are promoting the same products as you in Google shopping campaigns. Fair warning, not everyone will get this. Google says it's rolling out only to accounts that meet certain minimum requirements. But if you have it, you will be able to find it under the growth section in the left nav bar. However, as Search Engine Land reported today, quote, depending on how widely the products you sell are searched and promoted by other merchants,

Starting point is 00:07:02 you may see a high percentage showing no benchmark price, unquote. That said, if you do have data, you'll be able to drill down into each product, see the number of clicks a product has gotten, your price compared to that product's benchmark price, and even the historical differences of pricing. You can, of course, download the report as well. All right, a handful of stories in the lightning round today. If your brand runs a Facebook group

Starting point is 00:07:29 and you're sick of members accidentally creating watch parties, you can now set your group so that only admins can start one. Google has increased the CSS limit for AMP by about 50%. That should be live by the end of this month. And Instagram is said to be working on a way for you to trim videos you upload to Instagram stories, which will be very welcome if it comes to fruition. And finally, friends, a preemptive apology. Here at my agency, we landed a pretty large contract with the federal government that is going to mean all

Starting point is 00:08:01 hands on deck this week as we onboard them, do the key stakeholder interviews and start work on their social media strategic plan. I have the best team in North America working with me on this. And so I will try my best to knock out a podcast each day this week. But if a day goes by and one is missing, you will know why. Well, if you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. Australian growth marketer Paul Hewitt did that, saying, If you're not listening to this yet, get on it. This is part of my daily routine. Thank you, Paul. And if your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing,

Starting point is 00:08:39 check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you hopefully tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 93: Go Home, Quora. You're Drunk.

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