Today in Digital Marketing - And You Thought You Hated "Modeled Conversions" Now...

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today. Hey, you enjoying Facebook's new modeled conversions? Yeah, me neither. Be protected. Be Zen. time. Twitter's idea for a new brand safety tool. And Facebook tried out its new clubhouse clone today. How did it go? Not great. It's Tuesday, June 15th, 2021. Happy National Book Day, Argentina. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in digital marketing. We learned today of three big changes coming to Facebook's ads platform, all of which part of their reaction to the cookiepocalypse. First, they'll be relaxing the 72-hour reset period for all ad sets optimizing to the top eight prioritized events in Events Manager. All right, so what does that mean? Let's say you're a brand and you want to change your event configuration and reprioritize your top event to be purchase instead of add to wish list because you've got a, whatever, 50% off sale coming up.

Starting point is 00:01:31 The way it works now is you would need to wait for 72 hours and then manually restart your ad campaign. With this change, you can start optimizing for purchase events immediately without waiting for the reset period to run. And that said, you can still only make changes every 72 hours. To be more precise, here's how Facebook describes the effect. and event manager, we pause all ads using that event and lower priority events from that event for 72 hours to ensure accurate optimization and reporting for their campaign. Starting June 16th, that's tomorrow by the way, advertisers with ad sets that are optimizing to an event prioritized in events manager will not be paused if they make changes to their event configuration.

Starting point is 00:02:24 All right, so that's the first change. Change number two, starting at the end of this month, they will expand their use of conversion modeling to include it in their seven-day click default attribution setting. As it stands today, they only slap modeled conversions on one-day click attribution. The default window of seven day is only showing you partial data. And here's the most important part of this. When they throw the switch on this on June 30th, expect to see a big jump in conversions within the seven day click

Starting point is 00:02:57 attribution window. Thing is, they're not real. They're modeled, which is a nice way of saying they're guesses. Depending on who you ask, the quality of these estimated conversions range from mediocre and unreliable to straight-up fantasy. At least Microsoft's ads platform has the common sense and respect for their advertising customers by putting their modeled conversions in a separate breakout metric rather than lumping it with real conversion data. Don't get me started. And third, they'll be allowing optimization beyond the top eight prioritized events for website conversion campaigns that mostly target Android. Right now, advertisers that use their Pixel and Conversions API

Starting point is 00:03:41 to optimize for off-site events are limited to eight events per domain, as you probably know. But starting tomorrow, advertisers who are primarily targeting Android users or who, for whatever reason, can't meet the new requirements of the new aggregated event manager, those folks can now optimize for website conversions using non-prioritized events. Yes, Android. So when you're optimizing for non-prioritized events, you won't be able to reach a report on iOS 14.5 users that have opted out of tracking, of course. That said, Facebook recommends that you still optimize

Starting point is 00:04:14 for the top eight prioritized events in Event Manager so that you can get larger audiences and more complete reporting. We stayed away from covering crypto on this show for two reasons. One, I don't understand any of it. And two, it hasn't really had any direct connection with our work as digital marketers. Until now. Now, users in the US, except Hawaii for some reason, will be able to add their Coinbase card to both Apple Pay and Google Pay. This means they will be able to add their Coinbase card to both Apple Pay and Google Pay. This means they will be able to pay you for your products or services using crypto.

Starting point is 00:04:52 Now, luckily, you as the business owner won't need to do anything special. When someone uses their Coinbase card in their phone at your store, whatever cryptocurrency they're using will get converted to your local currency. This, in theory, should let customers pay with crypto anywhere a merchant accepts credit cards. Quoting WeRSM.com, For example, depending on the price volatility of the cryptocurrency being used, people who hold it in their wallets as an investment asset rather than a medium of exchange may feel the need to conduct a price analysis before deciding whether it's the right one to spend in the transaction. Coinbase says it won't charge a fee for the currency conversion at point of sale, but there is a 2.5% transaction fee, which is more than most banks charge.

Starting point is 00:05:53 Also a small related item, in addition to accepting crypto, if your brand uses the e-commerce tools to sell things on Google, Facebook, or Instagram, you will soon be able to accept payment via Shopify, even if you don't have a Shopify store. Their own checkout tool set, which they call ShopPay, will become the first Shopify product that can be used by non-Shopify customers. The rollout starts in a couple of months for all American sellers using Facebook's platform,

Starting point is 00:06:17 then the rest of the world, and Google later this year. Speaking of Google, they are rolling out a new platform for those nerds among you who love diving deep into your search console. It's called Search Console Insights and is, well, you know, about what you'd expect from a digital marketing platform named Insights. Pretty charts, info tidbits, and the likes. One of the best things about this is it gives you your top five search queries for your domain. Actually, you can get like top 15 and top 20, but the first screen is just your top five for your domain, the search queries that people are typing into Google, which is data that's been missing from Google Analytics since, by my count, the 1800s. Yes, you can get that from the regular

Starting point is 00:06:57 search console, but this is a nice little summary page that you could easily screenshot and dump into a report or something. Some other things Google says this new tool can help answer. What are your best performing pieces of content and which ones are trending? How do people discover your content across the web? And which article refers users to your website and content? Honestly, I couldn't see any of those on the search consoles that we have access to, so perhaps that's coming. You can get to Search Console Insights on Desktop through the new link at the top of the overview page.

Starting point is 00:07:26 They'll also be adding it to their mobile apps shortly. One important and peculiar note, this only supports Google Analytics UA properties right now. Though they're working on supporting the Google Analytics 4 tag. It is rolling out now. You should have it within a few days if you don't already. What if you didn't set a price for your product on your next ad and instead relied on AI to determine what an individual might be willing to pay for it and putting that price there? That's what programmatic ad company Moloco has launched this morning.

Starting point is 00:08:01 They're calling it Dynamic Creative and say it will automatically generate complete ads in real time by matching the best-selling products in your catalog at the moment, the placement, and the behavior of the individual viewing the ad. And yes, they will even try to predict the ideal price to be advertised to each person. A company spokesperson said, Unlike other traditional retargeting engines that only show the exact items that users have expressed direct interest in, A company spokesperson said, I get the value here, but is it possible this could backfire on brands? Think about the airlines, another industry that uses different pricing for the same product. I mean, at least once in everyone's life, we've had this experience where you compare

Starting point is 00:08:58 pricing to someone sitting next to you. You know, you paid 700 bucks for your seat and she paid 150 bucks. And it was all because of some dynamic real-time pricing model that based her price based on, you know, what city she searched from, her past online behaviors, and a lot more. Could we see that with this too? You see an ad for a mattress that's $400, but your friend tells you their version of the ad told them the mattress was $299. Strange new world, friends. Last night, a Twitter engineer posted screenshots of a privacy function they're working on that

Starting point is 00:09:33 might help those focused on brand safety. It's essentially an unmentioned tool that lets you separate your brand's account name from a tweet that you didn't like. The tool is meant more for regular people dealing with shitty people, but it certainly has applications in our world. So they're thinking of letting you remove your Twitter account's name from someone else's tweet so that you're no longer tagged in it. The other advantage, any ongoing chatter around it won't keep appearing in your mentions feed. And based on the early version of this, when you do unmention your brand,

Starting point is 00:10:05 that actually prevents that person from at-mentioning you ever again. To be clear, they can still talk about you. They can still tweet your handle. It's just that you won't see it anymore in your notifications or presumably your third-party tool of choice. It's something you may or may not want. Also, they are apparently thinking of letting you do this on a time basis, preventing anyone on Twitter from at-mentioning your brand's account

Starting point is 00:10:28 for a period of one day, three days, or seven days. We have a lot of ways to measure the brands we work with, sales, ROI, and even reputation. The metric sometimes used there is RQ. New research from the Harris Poll and Axios has uncovered the reputation scores for the top 100 brands. The highest RQ score? Patagonia.

Starting point is 00:10:56 Then Honda, Moderna, Chick-fil-A, and SpaceX. Honestly, Chick-fil-A surprised the hell out of me given the widespread knowledge of their support of anti-LGBT issues. But I guess that's a positive to some consumers. The lowest score, fifth from the bottom, Sears. Like, is Sears even around anymore? Anyway, then Wish.com, Facebook. The second worst was the Fox Corporation. And the worst reputation score for any company in this study, the Trump Organization. This is a study they do every year. And the biggest declines in score were the Fox Corporation, TikTok, and Google. All three of those being the only companies to drop more than 5% in reputation score.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Today's premium newsletter has the full list of 100 plus the top 10 improvements and declines. The report came from a study of about 43,000 American consumers polled in April. If you are not yet on the premium newsletter, go check it out at todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in this episode notes. We put it out every single day and there's a free tier as well. And finally, Facebook today turned on its Clubhouse clone for a test run featuring The Zuck himself. How did it go? You tell me.

Starting point is 00:12:18 It didn't work on any desktop device. It wouldn't open on many people's mobile devices either. It was only available in the U.S. And then somehow only to some people. Like maybe at one point during the broadcast it was only open to Facebook employees. Apparently there were big echoing issues. As far as what it looks like, pretty much an exact duplicate of the Clubhouse interface. Which, to be fair, is what Twitter did too with Spaces.

Starting point is 00:12:42 Perhaps coincidentally, Facebook's ads platform was having issues yesterday and today delivering to Instagram, and some people weren't seeing any reporting at all in Ads Manager, an issue that continues right up to the moment that I'm recording this podcast. In other words, situation normal. Facebook did not give a release date for the Clubhouse clone feature. A whole bunch of people have piled into our Slack community in the last few days. If you're not in there, you should. It's free, and there's exclusive deep dive episodes in there.

Starting point is 00:13:18 Content we have not put out on the podcast feed. They are only in our Slack community. People are posting jobs in there. People are using it to get advice, all sorts of stuff. Again, it's free to join. You just have to tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. Don't believe that this is true Cause I know you're out there by my side

Today in Digital Marketing - And You Thought You Hated "Modeled Conversions" Now...

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.