Today in Digital Marketing - A New Way to Spy on Your Competitors' Ad Targeting

Episode Date: November 7, 2019

Catalog ads in What’sApp Facebook’s new campaign recommendations aren’t really helpful at all A new way to see the targeting your competitors are using And your annual reminder to NOT screw up November 11th The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. • Connect with Tod: [e-mail] or use this contact form. • More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site Some sources: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9612141 https://marketingland.com/whatsapp-rolls-out-smb-product-catalogs-to-support-local-discovery-and-commerce-270824?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-expands-access-to-brand-collabs-manager-adds-new-insights-to-crea/566765/?utm_content=buffer517d9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer https://www.facebook.com/fmp/agencies/tools?selected_tool=RECOMMENDATIONS https://www.facebook.com/fmp/agencies/planning-buying-decks --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, November 7th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Happy Crown Oaks Day, Australia. Today, catalog ads are coming to WhatsApp. Facebook's new campaign recommendations are really not that helpful at all. A new way to see the targeting that your competitors are using. And here it is, your annual reminder to not screw up November 11th. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And we're going to start today with a whole bunch of Facebook marketing news that broke today. They seem to be doubling down on WhatsApp, which they bought a while back. You and I might consider it a messaging app.

Facebook obviously has bigger goals for it. Earlier this year, they said that they will be putting stronger ad capabilities into it, and now they are delivering on that. Starting soon, you will be able to run catalog ads in WhatsApp. Only in some countries, though. Brazil, Germany, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the UK, and the US. More countries will come online later. Catalog ads let people flip through your products, and this is kind of cool, lets brands like you share specific product pages with customers via direct messages.

Consumers will also be able to browse your products on your business profile. WhatsApp is not really widely used in North America, but it is huge elsewhere, more than a billion daily users. Also today, Facebook launched what it calls Advertiser Spend Optimization Recommendations. This is a screen that claims to check how your campaigns are set up and provide a kind of checklist of things that you can be doing to improve those campaigns. If you've ever worked with off-the-shelf SEO tools, you may be familiar with this kind of audit checklist like, hey, this page is too slow, and hey, there's too much text on this page. I had a look at a couple of recommendations

that Facebook spat out for the client accounts that we run and found them to be, well, underwhelming at best. Most of the recommendations were telling us things that we were already doing, like, shouldn't you target people by geography? Yeah, we are. Hey, shouldn't you use lookalike audiences? No, not for this campaign, but thanks. Anyway, your mileage may vary. Your recommendations may be helpful. If you work for an agency, you will find this in your marketing partners portal or click the link in the show's description. Still with Facebook here, they are expanding access to their oddly named brand collabs manager. That's collabs as in collaboration.

We really need a better name than collabs. Anyway, this is a list of influencers that your brand could approach for potential partnerships. At launch, it was only open to a handful of influencers, but now their database will accept more. What makes someone a qualified influencer, you ask? Well, they need at least a thousand followers and had to have had more than 15,000 engagements on their posts over the last two months. So here's something I noticed just by chance last night. And it turns out it's actually really valuable if you want to do research on ads that your competitors are running. I'm sure you know that there is the ads library where you can look up ads that are running from pretty much any page, which is cool. It doesn't really tell you what kind of targeting they've used. And you may already know that when

you see an ad in the news feed, you can click the why am I seeing this ad, and it'll tell you some basic information like this advertiser wants to reach adults in Europe. Well, now it seems like Facebook has quietly expanded that latter function. And it turns out it's actually kind of valuable. Now, instead of one targeting criteria like geography, it's showing you a lot of the criteria. I'm looking at an ad right now on my feed from a brand called WeVideo. And when I tap, why am I seeing this?

It tells me the interest targeting it's using, freelancer and coworking, and the ages of the targets, and the geography. So if you run across ads that make you think, I wonder what targeting they're using, now we are getting more of that data. And finally, in today's Facebook news, if you're one of the two or three brands that actually use Facebook's Creator Studio, you may want to know that they are adding the ability for you to turn commenting off on your Instagram posts. You can actually do that right now from the mobile app. Did you know

that? But it is going to be on the desktop soon. Maybe, crossed fingers, this will make it into the API so we can start doing this using the third-party tools that we all actually use. Also, there is a new data visualization in the Creator Studio called Traffic Source Insights. It lets you see how your brand's content is distributed across Facebook, which lets you figure out how to better optimize for each source. Okay, enough with Facebook. Google has updated its Ads Editor with some really nice improvements. Among the changes, they now support shared negative keyword lists.

Negative keyword lists, of course, help make sure your ads don't show when you don't want them to. Now you can share your existing lists across accounts by applying them in the shared library within the editor. And sometimes when you see an item marked with a specific error in editor, it can be time-consuming to look for all the places where the issue occurred. Now there are searchable errors to make that easier. Okay, lightning round. A word to the wise. We are entering crazy town with Black Friday and holidays coming. Keep a close eye on your Facebook placement breakdowns as some placements have started spiking dramatically, at least on our client accounts. Instagram feed seems to be especially high CPM and CPC right now.

YouTube today is rolling out a new refreshed homepage. It will have bigger thumbnails, which means fewer videos, but that also means more room for longer titles. If you work at an agency and find yourself pitching clients on whether or not they should put some of their media spend into social, Facebook today added a couple of new PowerPoint decks for them. You will find a link to them in the episode's description. Salesforce is getting into the content business.

Just hours ago, they launched a new content management platform called, I think you know where this is going, the Salesforce Content Management System. God, I love B2B sometimes. And today is your last chance to run political or social issue ads on Facebook if you have not yet done the verification thing. Enjoy. That verification process is a special kind of hell. Finally, Remembrance Day, or you might call it Veterans Day, is coming Monday.

Here is your annual reminder, social media community managers. Do not create any kind of special promotion for November 11th. Do I really have to say this? Don't make a soldier's sale. Don't make a deadly discount. Don't do anything other than something simple and respectful. On our clients' channels, we are posting photos of poppy fields and the likes just with the words thank you on them. No client logo, not even an on-brand color scheme.

I'm sure the November 12th episode of this show will feature some brand that screwed this up. Let's just hope it's not yours that we are talking about next week. My wife and I are taking advantage of the long weekend and going off on a short little vacation starting tomorrow. Since Monday is a holiday, that means I will be talking to you next on Tuesday. And a quick favor, if you're finding this podcast helpful and enjoying the fact that I haven't littered it with ads, please do share it on social media. Tweet it, post it to your LinkedIn network. The URL to use is todayindigital.com. And thanks. You can follow me on social. All my links are in the episode's description here or at the bottom of TodayInDigital.com. I am Todd Maffin from EngageQ. I will see you on Tuesday.