Today in Digital Marketing - Are Exclusion Lists Our Only Hope 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, how do you target people without cookies? By excluding them from targeting, Be protected. Be Zen. and today's episode of What's Facebook Copying Now? It's Wednesday, June 30th, 2021. Happy International Asteroid Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. The car manufacturer Audi says it's managed to get a 70% conversion rate with a campaign that used an interesting alternative to the third-party cookie. Quoting Marketing Dive,

Starting point is 00:01:06 The solution leveraged a mix of audience and contextual targeting. The campaign narrowed in on most likely buyers, while forming an exclusion list of least likely buyers, based on media consumption habits and demographic characteristics. A second effort applied Audi's first-party data to uncover lookalike audiences and identify publishers and pages where converters were greatly overrepresented. The news suggests marketers will continue to roll the dice on cookie-less experiments as they search for methods to reach prospective customers online that are both effective and

Starting point is 00:01:44 privacy safe, unquote. Also impressive here, I think, is the fact that these campaigns were run in Denmark, which analysts say applies a rather strict interpretation of the GDPR. With that and the country's high adoption rate of Apple devices, only 35% of the Danish population is targetable at the user level. Audi says... Audi also says two phases of the follow-up campaign reduced their cost per acquisition by more than 50%.

Starting point is 00:02:13 I think everyone's had this experience. You're bored, you download a free-to-play mobile app, and to get more stars or diamonds or beans or whatever the in-game currency is to keep playing, you have to watch a short video. These videos almost always promote another free-to-play game, monetized by the same video ad method. It's a pretty lousy user experience, but some people dutifully watch those videos to get the 10 points they need to finish off a puzzle. Well, looks like those terrible short videos may be coming to video game consoles soon, and you, as a digital marketer, may be able to buy them to promote your own brand. The ad platform is called PlayerOne, that's W-O-N, and it launches this week.

Starting point is 00:03:01 It's actually owned by the TV ad tech firm Simulmedia. The placements will be either a 15-second or a 30-second video ad. The company says it's already got contracts in place from some of the world's biggest gaming studios, including Electronic Arts and Hi-Rez Studios from Tencent. Gamers are used to seeing ads, but they've been pretty subtle until now. Banner ads flying past you on the sides of racetracks, that sort of thing. But this is definitely a step up, or down, depending on your perspective. Simulmedia says in testing, players were willing to watch up to 10 ads per day

Starting point is 00:03:37 in order to unlock free perks. Did Clubhouse accidentally leak its next big feature? The live audio app, which everyone's copied, seems to have inadvertently released a messaging feature earlier than they wanted to. Some users reported that for a brief moment, they were able to access a messaging platform called Backchannel. It looked like a place to chat via text during a room's live broadcast. The Verge reports that it looked blatantly unfinished, their words, and that it was pulled quickly after.

Starting point is 00:04:13 But not before five separate rooms had sprung up to talk about it. Quoting the Verge, It's unclear the scale of the rollout because, again, the feature seemed to only be public for a brief window of time, making it hard to gauge if it was merely spotted by a few users who happened to have the app open at the time, or if it was only intended to go out as a limited beta. In either case, naming a feature back-channel and then very unsubtly dumping it into the lap of the entire world? That's comedy, folks.

Starting point is 00:04:50 If you've ever published a new page on your brand's website then sat for days wondering why Google hadn't picked it up yet, that could have been your fault. In this week's episode of the fantastic Ask Googlebot series that Google puts out on YouTube, search advocate John Mueller explained how long it takes a new page to get indexed by Google and what you can do to speed up that process. When a new page is published on a website, it can take anywhere from several hours to several weeks for it to be indexed. In practice, I suspect most good content is picked up and indexed within about a week. Sometimes there

Starting point is 00:05:22 are technical issues on the web that make it take longer, and sometimes it's just that our systems are busy with other things. There are a few things you can do to help speed this up. Make sure that your server can handle a reasonable number of requests in a timely way. When your server slows down, search engines tend to slow down as well. Link to your new pages prominently

Starting point is 00:05:44 within your website. The easier our systems can recognize that you think this is an important page, the easier it is for them to prioritize crawling and indexing of it. For example, if your website is for e-commerce, it helps our systems to find links to your new products on your home page so that we don't

Starting point is 00:06:04 have to crawl through several layers of categories to find them. Avoid filling your website with unnecessary URLs. Whether it's an event calendar that goes back to the dawn of civilization or shop category pages that allow filtering and sorting by every possible combination, search engines can get bogged down trying to figure out all of these URLs

Starting point is 00:06:25 and might miss URLs that you do care about. On dynamic websites like these, work to keep functionality open for users while preventing crawlers from getting lost. Again, make it easy for our systems to recognize that your new pages are important. Then, use URL submission methods available to you. Use a site map to tell Google about new pages automatically. For individual URLs, use the Inspect URL tool in Search Console.

Starting point is 00:06:53 Last but definitely not least, keep your website's overall quality high. Taking a step back, the easier it is for our systems to recognize that your website is critical for users on the web, the better they can prioritize the website for crawling and indexing. John's YouTube channel is a wealth of SEO tips. You can find it on YouTube by searching for Google Search Central. Do you have business insurance?

Starting point is 00:07:20 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Two months ago, LinkedIn was fending off a government probe after the personal data of 500 million of its users was scraped and posted online. Now, it's happened again. But this time, it's 700 million users.

Starting point is 00:08:00 LinkedIn's entire user base, by the way, is 756 million users. That means, if reports are accurate, more than 92% of its user base has been compromised in this new breach. What specifically was taken? Apparently, phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, inferred salaries, email addresses, full names, gender, social media accounts. I mean, a lot. The data set is said to be up for sale on the dark web with a sample set of 1 million users. The website 9to5google.com reached out to the hacker, who told them they didn't hack anything. They didn't have to. They used LinkedIn's official API to collect all the data.

Starting point is 00:08:50 In today's episode of What's Facebook Copying Now, I swear to God, I'm going to find something. Hey, wait a minute, side note. Does anyone here a musician? Can you make me a little five-second jingle? You know, what's Facebook copying now? Please, I beg you. Anyway, Instagram has confirmed that it is building out a version of Twitter's Super Follow, which lets users pay to get access to gated content. It seems the content in this case would be stories that are only available to paying fans. Early leaks of this show the

Starting point is 00:09:15 subscription stories won't be able to be screenshot, but creators can share them as highlights, though it looks like there'll be a separate highlights section for the paying people. Which brings us to the lightning round. Facebook has started rolling out a new task center in Events Manager. This was spotted by Florian Litterst. David Herman reports that TikTok now has chat support for advertisers. Facebook is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Facebook Marketing Partners Program by removing it. Well, in name only.

Starting point is 00:09:48 It'll still be there, but they say they'll now start calling themselves the Facebook Business Partners Program, as Jill David on Twitter said. And just like that, thousands of agencies now have to update all their websites, bios, and download new partner badges.

Starting point is 00:10:01 And Twitter's own official Twitter account seems to have taken a page from the snarky Wendy's Twitter account and is now kind of trolling its own users. Yesterday tweeting, you don't need an edit button, you just need to forgive yourself.

Starting point is 00:10:16 Twitter, of course, has never had an edit function, and that's bothered a lot of people, so it's a little weird that they're just rubbing salt in people's feeds. Of course, other brands started jumping in. Adobe replied to that, saying forgive, but never forget that you can always Photoshop it.

Starting point is 00:10:34 And one small programming note, tomorrow is Canada Day, which is, of course, a stat holiday, and as all Canadians do, when Canada Day falls on a Thursday, we also take Friday off. So, that's it for this week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital. Production support and fact checking by Sarah Guild.

Starting point is 00:10:52 Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. And I will talk to you on Monday. it up. Keep your feet right on the ground. Been slipping up. Gotta step it up. Every time it comes around. Gotta step it up. Gotta step it up.

Today in Digital Marketing - Are Exclusion Lists Our Only Hope Now?

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