Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 17 — Podcast Speed: FAST (Ep 216)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, consumers are more willing to give you some of their personal information, if you know what to ask for. Plus, Google is poised to show the world how fast your brand's website is. Facebook doubles down on its TikTok clone. And I reveal the numbers behind this very podcast's ad campaigns. You are not going to believe which platform has the lowest CPC. Where the hell did the summer go? It's Monday, August 17th, 2020. Happy National Engineers Day, Colombia.

Starting point is 00:00:32 I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. We're going to start with a quiz. You can probably guess that Google's Chrome browser is the top used browser in the world. But what is the number two web browser in the world? Is it Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox, Microsoft's new browser Edge, or Microsoft's old school browser Internet Explorer? The answer at the end of today's episode. The last few months have been full of crappy news, so let's start with some good news, at least for us digital marketers. A new study from InnoVid says nearly a quarter of consumers are more comfortable sharing data with brands than they were just one or two years ago.

Starting point is 00:01:18 It comes down to what data they're sharing and how we brand advertisers are using those data to target them. 60% said they were fine getting personalized ads based on what they like and dislike online. After that, though, it falls under 50% with gender targeting squeaking by at 47% of people okay with it. Then it's just no good. Location, only 30%. Birthday, 21%. Employment or income, 8%. Side note, though, of course, this comes down to messaging more than anything. At my agency, we routinely use income or inferred income as a targeting criteria. The trick is to just not say that you're doing that in the creative. You know, you don't want, since you're on the poverty line, maybe you'd like this payday loan.

Starting point is 00:02:06 I mean, Facebook just won't even approve ads that mention the targeting you're using in the ad text. Anyway, back to the study. Study also found that the best topic of digital ad in terms of getting the most engagement, something promoting an event. 41% said they'd be likely to click on a personalized ad for an event.

Starting point is 00:02:24 38% said products in which they had already expressed interests are also fine. I'm sure I don't have to say this, but just in case, do not use any tool that purports to increase your Instagram following and does so by requiring you give it your Instagram password. Any tool that asks for your username and Instagram password is a bad one, and Instagram is now stepping up enforcement by blocking accounts temporarily and requiring an ID check, like literally photo ID. The company said,

Starting point is 00:03:00 Starting today, we will begin asking people to confirm who's behind an account when we see a pattern of potential inauthentic behavior. Unquote. And yes, I know it's not you, you don't do it, but your brand's Instagram account could still be caught up in this, even if you don't use sketchy third-party tools. And here's how. Instagram's software for detecting bad behavior is based on what those accounts do. If they suddenly follow 100 people and then a day later you unfollow those 100 accounts, that's a tip-off. Doing a hashtag search and then spending an hour liking every photo you see there. And yes, those are actions that humans can do. And that's the problem.

Starting point is 00:03:44 There's nothing wrong with having your brand account comment on photos related to your industry. That's actually good practice. Just don't go crazy. You know, do three or four, then take a break. Then after lunch, do a handful. Use different language and something that's relevant to the post you're commenting on.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Don't just spam, wow, amazing on every single post. And you might be thinking, it should be fine though. Even if I get caught up in this, I'll just give them my ID and then we're back again. And you, my friend, would be wrong because Instagram and Facebook seem to mostly be run by AI software now. So there's no guarantee you'll ever get that request for ID

Starting point is 00:04:22 or if you do and provide it, it's entirely likely that then nothing will happen. You'll just be stuck in a pending processing loop and be locked out of your brand's Instagram account indefinitely. So be very careful with what you do with it. And again, don't use any tool that does not authorize directly with Instagram or Facebook. You know by now, of course, that the faster your brand's web pages, the higher you're likely to appear in Google. And an announcement from the company this afternoon

Starting point is 00:04:56 shows that they are doubling down on that. Starting soon, they will be putting a label on search results where they've found the site to load quickly. A label that people searching in Google will see. It will literally say fast page. Now, the label itself doesn't have any algorithmic power, but think about it. If you're a user and you're searching for, I don't know, shoes and you get a bunch of results from Google and one of them says fast page, you are probably more likely to go there. I'm telling you, page speed is going to be one of the most important

Starting point is 00:05:30 factors in digital marketing. Forget about Google if you want. We know that page speed has a direct effect on conversion rates. Anyway, there are a couple of things about this label you should know. First of all, it won't be on all search results. For now, it will only show up for Android users of the mobile Chrome browser, and only then if they long press on a link to get more information about it. This will start with the Chrome 85 beta. They are basing it off what they call the core web vitals, which are actually three things, how fast the page loads, how soon someone can interact with it, and how much the layout jumps around. And though they didn't directly say it, you can absolutely bet this is a test to see if it would be good to roll out in the general Google search results.

Starting point is 00:06:17 A couple of more Google-y things for you. They are rolling out a new feature inside their ads platform, Performance Planner. This will try to forecast performance based on different spend and ROI levels. And it comes with three specific features, quoting the company. First, shared budgets in search campaigns. With this update, you can create, modify, and download forecasts for your shared budget campaigns. Next, we know that others may have a say in your budget decisions. To make it easier for you to collaborate on your performance plans,

Starting point is 00:06:45 you can now share them for viewing and editing. And last, if your conversions or conversion value take longer than seven days to report, Performance Planner now accounts for this conversion delay. For example, if you're planning November spend, your plan may include predicted conversions that could happen in November and December. This, they say, makes it easier for you to get a more accurate performance forecast. And wrapping up the googly news, they have started testing a new insights tool for news publishers. There's a new section called Your New Content that shows how well your new content is

Starting point is 00:07:24 performing and comes with some pretty solid numbers like how many views the piece had and There's a new section called Your New Content that shows how well your new content is performing and comes with some pretty solid numbers like how many views the piece had and how long people stayed to read it. There's also a day-by-day graph and, notably, an area that reveals how people found your articles, including organic search, referral, social, direct, those sorts of things, and a social media section that breaks down page view duration from the various social networks so you can see which platform is stickier. You may not have this yet. In fact, you probably don't since they're rolling it out slowly.

Starting point is 00:07:52 But rest assured, it will get to your dashboard soon. Last week, I reported that Instagram's copy of TikTok, which they call Reels, is kind of hard to find in the app. There's no Reels tab. The videos don't open by default. They're just kind of sprinkled into the regular Explore tab. Well, what a difference a week makes. Facebook, not the Instagram app, mind you, the Facebook app, is now showing these videos at the top of the news feed in a section called Short Videos. Don't go looking for this in your app, unless you're in India where it's currently being tested, but you can absolutely expect this to make it to the main app everywhere soon.

Starting point is 00:08:35 Remember, Facebook is not shy about putting their new stuff there. Stories have been at the top seemingly forever. And above that important real estate are links to their Zoom competitor, which they call Rooms. So far, the tests look like the short videos link will be first in the stories row, which you can be sure will get many more people tapping it. Incidentally, YouTube is also testing roughly the same thing, also in India. Why India, you might be asking? Well, the Indian government banned TikTok about a month or two ago. Since then, use of Facebook has jumped more than 25%.

Starting point is 00:09:10 What does this mean for digital marketers? If TikTok-like videos do make it to Facebook's mobile app everywhere, this is prime real estate for your brand message. But listen, don't do what so many brands do when they encounter something new. TikTok and Reels and all the rest, these are not secondary platforms for you to cross-post your YouTube videos. These videos have their own personality,

Starting point is 00:09:37 their own culture. And the best way to learn about that culture, immerse yourself in it. If you haven't already, download TikTok, spend a night or two with it, tap the heart on things you like. That algorithm learns fast and is eerily accurate. According to my iPhone, the most used app last week was TikTok. I am a 50-year-old man. TikTok, number one. And a couple of tiny items to wrap up. Instagram is a bit buggy today.

Starting point is 00:10:13 Some third-party platforms say they're having trouble pulling messages. As of the time I record this, mentions are offline, and you can expect delays to comments and posts. And Squarespace has a sale, 20% off any new website plan. It's only there till Thursday. Use the code AUGUST2020 at checkout. And finally, the answer to the quiz at the top, the second most used web browser by a hair, Firefox. But just to show you how dominant Chrome is, Firefox's share is less than 9% globally. That's the number two position. 9%.

Starting point is 00:10:45 Firefox, for the record, does have a mobile app too, but its market share is under 1%. And it was looking for a little bit recently like Firefox would go out of business, if you can call it a business given that Mozilla is a non-profit. Just last week, they laid off 250 employees. But today came word that the main source of their revenue will remain stable for a while. 90% of Firefox's revenue comes from a single client, Google. Sources say Google pays them between $400 and $450 million a year to be the default search engine there.

Starting point is 00:11:32 By the way, the average annual salary at Mozilla is $286,000. So I've been running ads all over the place for this podcast. You may have come here from one of those ads. I've run ads on other podcasts like the Tech Meme Ride Home, inside podcast apps like Overcast, in Google, on Facebook, and elsewhere. And I thought I'd share some numbers with you in case you too market a podcast or are just generally interested in costs. I should say, I have not put a ton of money into this. Most of its growth has come from word of mouth. So the data I've got here is based on small budgets. But first, Google. The keyword marketing podcasts was averaging more than $10 a click. A click, not a conversion. $10 a click.

Starting point is 00:12:13 So that got stopped pretty quickly. Facebook was around $6 a click until their software AI banned my podcast page from running ads for no apparent reason. Over on Microsoft's ads platform, which most of it goes to their Bing search engine, it's actually hard getting impressions over there at all. On the keyword marketing podcast, it has only served my ad 126 times since the beginning of this month. Now, I could have screwed up the keywords there, who knows, but that's garnered me exactly four clicks this month at a decent rate of about $1.15. The podcast app Overcast is nice because I can actually get conversion data from them because they know how many people have actually subscribed. And so far this month, I've had 957 clicks. That's a click through of about 1.1% and 56 subscriptions.

Starting point is 00:13:04 So almost 6% conversion. The campaign cost me $675, and we're halfway through it, so that's so far working out to just $0.33 a click. But the big winner, and this surprised the hell out of me, Quora. Yeah, Quora.com. CPC currently averaging just 24 cents. I've had nearly 250 clicks and so far haven people. We chatted for 45 minutes about how the content algorithm works, what type of unique campaigns they offer digital marketers, and how much you can expect to pay for said campaigns. It was a great conversation, and you can listen to it right now for free. It's in our Slack community, which you can find

Starting point is 00:13:59 today in digital.com slash slack, or tap the link in this episode's notes. It's free to join, of course, just introduce yourself, and then you will find the episode in the channel called Exclusive Content. And a heads up, we are onboarding two new clients at our agency this week, so it'll be all hands on deck, which means one or two episodes this week may come out later than usual. I may even have to skip a day.

Starting point is 00:14:22 I'm hoping not to, but I will certainly let you know on my Twitter account if that happens, to which you will find a link in the notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. If you can call it a business now that Mozilla is... If you can call it a business given that Firefox... Oh my god.

Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 17 — Podcast Speed: FAST (Ep 216)

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