Today in Digital Marketing - A Spreadsheet Is Not a Database

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, is that cookie disclosure banner on your website pulling you down in Google rankings? Instagram gets closer to e-commerce integration in its TikTok clone? The largest demographic of podcast listeners are teenagers? And how a single Excel spreadsheet is all that anybody is talking about in the UK today, Monday, October 5th, 2020. Happy World Teachers Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing,

Starting point is 00:00:30 brought to you by the Keep Optimizing podcast. If you run Facebook ads for a client or for your own brand, you may have noticed that for about a month now, your results may have been subpar. This isn't happening to everyone, of course, but enough people noticed a performance drop that it's becoming a popular topic on the Twitters. David Herman over the weekend tweeted,

Starting point is 00:00:51 your Facebook ads aren't working because the algorithm doesn't work right anymore. I've kept tabs on the ads for the last month. Something changed in early September. It was right around Labor Day, then fell from there, unquote. Others weighed in, too. One guy saying,

Starting point is 00:01:07 Ever since September 10th, they dropped to a 0.7 ROAS out of nowhere across hundreds of ads that have been consistent for months. A quick translation, 0.7 ROAS, that's return on ad spend, meaning those campaigns are not profitable. They are literally losing money since 1.0 ROAS is the break-even point. We've noticed this too here at our agency. I wish I had a solution to offer, but with Facebook being silent on any changes that may have caused this, it's left to us digital marketers to speculate and share what is working. One of the most common suggestions I'm seeing out there

Starting point is 00:01:41 are DABAs, that's dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences, basically product ads that try to put the right combination of image and copy and headline in front of people. So all that to say, if you're one of those marketers who said it and forget it, I know, I know you're not, but, but, you know, if you are, go check in with your Facebook ads dashboard, because something may be afoot. As I'm sure you know, one of the factors that Google takes into account when it comes to how high up the results page you are is the speed of your website. The faster it is, the better position you'll get. Google determines speed by looking at three points of data. How fast the first bit of content shows up, how soon a user can interact

Starting point is 00:02:26 with your web page, and how much your web page's layout jumps around. I know you've seen this latter thing, you go to a button and then suddenly the page shifts because a banner ad loads in or something like that. Google calls that last metric cumulative layout shift, or CLS. And recently, Google clarified one question that many digital marketers were asking, and that is, will you penalize us if the thing that causes our web page to jump around is the mandatory legal cookie banner that so many websites have now? Well, Google search engineer Martin Splitt replied on Twitter, quote, I have looked at a few sites and libraries to implement those and have seen

Starting point is 00:03:05 performance impact, but not really impact on cumulative layout shift. And anyway, there are already solutions that have zero impact on CLS, unquote. Also, he said, if your brand's website is extra jumpy because of one of these banners, you can send him a link to your site and he'll look into it. Some interesting data from the audio streaming app Deezer. They say total podcast streams on their platform more than doubled from last July to this July. The most popular genre? I know you're thinking true crime, but it's not. Actually, it's comedy. I guess we're all looking for a break from the doom scrolling. The largest demographic group growth came from people under 18 years old, with an increase of nearly 250% year over year. Still ahead, Instagram adds another placement for

Starting point is 00:03:59 your product ads. LinkedIn's change to the story format is a welcome addition for privacy advocates. And Facebook's automated enforcement bots get it wrong, again, this time in the most ridiculous of ways. That's in a minute, when Today in Digital Marketing continues. Two months and counting until one of the biggest days in a digital marketer's year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And this year, with consumers avoiding bricks and mortar locations, it's even more important that you're at the top of your marketing game. That's why the podcast Keep Optimizing has you covered with a special in-depth Black Friday episode featuring tactics and strategies from industry experts. Here's a clip. Your success will really be defined by the size of your subscribers list and by the engagement of your subscribers list. So you still have time to do that.

Starting point is 00:04:55 Invest in your marketing budget now. Don't wait last minute and start building relationships with your customers now. So if you're in e-commerce in any way, online or storefront, you owe it to yourself to check out the Keep Optimizing podcast. It's at keepoptimizing.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:05:18 Well, it's not an episode of Today in Digital Marketing until we briefly bitch about Facebook's AI making lousy enforcement decisions. And here's an example that happened late last week. Facebook banned a group run by the Free States Militia. These are a group of anarchists who believe the U.S. government is lying to them about nuclear fallout shelters. They've already built a series of their own bunkers in the Appalachia and are thought to be stockpiling weapons in those bunkers, all with the goal of eventually separating from the U.S. The group

Starting point is 00:05:47 was actually founded by a U.S. Senator, Sam Blackwell. But here's the thing. There is no Senator named Sam Blackwell. There are no bunkers. There are no weapons. Because the Free States Militia does not exist.

Starting point is 00:06:03 Well, not in the real world, anyway. The group is part of the lore of the Fallout video game series. And a bunch of Fallout enthusiasts created a group to roleplay and trade tips on the game. But Facebook's AI enforcement bots are not smart enough to make that distinction, so not only did Facebook remove the group, but it also banned the admins of that group. I don't mean banned them from the group, but it also banned the admins of that group. I don't mean banned them from the group. I mean, Facebook banned their personal accounts entirely. That means those people couldn't access their account, couldn't administer any ad campaigns, couldn't manage any

Starting point is 00:06:37 brand pages they owned. One of these admins said, it makes no sense, especially when there are real life militia groups still up and running on Facebook. Facebook eventually restored everything, but not because of any on-site appeal forms. No, those went nowhere. It was only when the media started asking that Facebook put things right. Facebook claims it has 15,000 human content reviewers, but all I hear about these days and have experienced personally are inaccurate enforcement decisions made by AI bots,

Starting point is 00:07:10 appeals automatically denied by different bots, and no way to get a human being to actually look into it. That's actually why last month I stopped using Facebook and Instagram for any personal use. I mean, one wrong decision

Starting point is 00:07:24 by an automated enforcement robot could shut me out of our clients' accounts. Facebook has a long way to go if it wants to be a trusted partner for digital marketers. This morning, Instagram expanded its shopping platform into IGTV. Shoppers will be able to watch an IGTV video, then check out with a few taps. Theypers will be able to watch an IGTV video, then check out with a few taps. They'll either be sent to the brand website

Starting point is 00:07:48 or, if hooked up right, they can do the purchase right in the app, although you will give up a cut of your sale to Instagram if you want to do it that way. Instagram says soon they will be testing shopping integration in its TikTok clone called Reels. And soon those shoppable IGTV videos will surface on

Starting point is 00:08:03 Instagram Shop as well. Quoting TechCrunch, Instagram isn't alone in seeing the potential for shopping inspired by short-form video content. Walmart's decision to try to acquire a stake in TikTok is tied to the growing social commerce trend, which mixes together social media and online shopping to create a flurry of demand for new products, like a modern day QVC aimed at Gen Z and broadcast across smartphones' small screens. By comparison, TikTok so far has only dabbled with social commerce. It has run select ad tests like a partnership with Levi's during the early days of the pandemic to create influencer-created ads that

Starting point is 00:08:42 appeared in users' feeds and directed users to Levi's website. It has also experimented with allowing users to add links to e-commerce sites, to TikTok profiles, and other features. Instagram didn't say when Reels would be gaining shopping features beyond later this year. A couple of lowercase s stories about uppercase S stories. LinkedIn has added the ability for people to view stories anonymously. In case you missed it, LinkedIn added the vertical format about a week or two or so ago. This is actually a nice touch since platforms like Instagram stories and Facebook stories

Starting point is 00:09:18 all reveal the names of people who viewed them. To be clear, by default, your name will be shown to the original poster when you watch their story, but you can change this now by going to Settings, clicking the Visibility section. Inside there, you should see the option Story Viewing Options. And YouTube has a new Speech Enhancement option within YouTube Stories that will reduce background noise in video clips. So far, that is only available in the iOS app.

Starting point is 00:09:48 And finally, here's a cautionary tale about the tool that I suspect digital marketers use the most. That'd be spreadsheets. In the UK, health authorities have begun reporting a significant spike in coronavirus infections, but it's not because there was a sudden spike. They're actually catching up on a backlog of infection reports that they didn't report earlier. Why didn't they report it earlier? Turns out, the database of infections was being managed in Microsoft Excel, and nobody noticed that the spreadsheet they were using

Starting point is 00:10:22 had reached the maximum number of columns. This means not only reporting data was inaccurate by tens of thousands, it also means those infection details were not passed along to contact tracers. The government health body said today, no problem, we fixed it by splitting the Excel files into multiple Excel files. I mean, what could go wrong? That's it for today. More people joining our Slack community.

Starting point is 00:10:52 You should be in there too. It's free to join. There's exclusive content and almost 200 people. Other digital marketers, super smart people. You can pick their brains. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack. That's todayindigital.com slash Slack. Or's todayindigital.com slash slack. Or click the link in this episode's notes

Starting point is 00:11:07 under About This Podcast, and it'll be right in there. I'm Todd Maffin. I will talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - A Spreadsheet Is Not a Database

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