Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 19 — Ryan Reynolds is Having a Very Bad Day (Ep 218)

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, the QR code is back, baby. Be protected. Be Zen. What did you tweet on our brand's account? It's Wednesday, August 19th, 2020. Happy World Photography Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. It's the code that just won't die. The QR code is enjoying a bit of a resurgence lately.

Starting point is 00:01:04 You know these, of course, those square black and white images of dots that when you scan with your smartphone's camera will usually take you to a website or someone's profile. Last month, WhatsApp added them to let you add contacts quickly. And now Instagram is getting them. And they are aimed at us digital marketers. First, a bit of history. Instagram used to have its own QR-like code that they called name tags, but you could only scan them in the app. And only then if you could even find how to do that, which was like several levels deep into the menu. But these new QR codes can be scanned with any smartphone camera.

Starting point is 00:01:36 The idea is that bricks and mortar stores or restaurants and the likes will be able to put their Instagram QR code in a window or on a menu. That latter option becoming even more important during a pandemic, of course, when many diners may not really want to touch your grimy laminated menu and might prefer to scan a code and see your menu on their phone. Or maybe you'd rather have that link open up in your store's Instagram profile. Anyway, to get your own code, log into your brand's Instagram account on your phone, tap the hamburger, that's the hamburger menu, of course, and look for the QR code item. If your app still says name tag, just give it a day or two, that will change and it will say QR code. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know I'm a huge fan of Agora Pulse's social media lab.

Starting point is 00:02:27 This is where they test digital marketing hypotheses like can we expect a lower click through rate on Instagram stories than we can on Instagram feed posts? The interesting thing was the story ad in the end got 78 percent more clicks. Scott Ayers is the resident data scientist there. Reached 44% more users than the feed ad. Ended up having 23% higher conversion rate than the feed ad. So 44% more reach. Do you think that's just because fewer advertisers are using stories and therefore there's more inventory? I think it's also the fact that when most people are looking at stories, they open up their phone, they tap on the first person who shows, and they let it autoplay. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:16 And so your ad is in between other people's that they already follow, their stories. And so I think sometimes the reach is just going to get higher because of that, because the autoplay idea where the feed requires your thumb to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And so I think the reach could be because of that. We also talked about exactly how they run these experiments, how you can set them up for your own brand or clients right down to the little details like how long you need to run tests about organic content to get a good data set. By the way, it's longer than you think it is. And you can listen to the entire unedited 20-minute interview by joining our Slack community. It's free. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in the episode's notes. Once you're there, introduce yourself, head over to the channel called Exclusive Content. You will also there find a deep dive interview I did recently with a TikTok marketing expert. That's todayindigital.com slash slack or tap the link in the notes.

Starting point is 00:04:18 A couple of months ago, I reported on Google's forthcoming plan to ban targeting on campaigns that advertised employment, housing, or credit products. Well, today we found out the date for that ban, October 19th. So exactly two months. This doesn't mean you can't run ads about those topics. It means that you won't be able to target those ads to audiences based on gender, age, parental status, marital status, or zip code. In case you're curious if your brand falls into those three broad groups, here are some examples that Google provided. In the employment bucket, ads for jobs, job recruitment sites, or job listing sites. In credit, credit cards, loans, including home loans, car loans, appliance loans, and short-term

Starting point is 00:05:06 loans. And in the housing category, housing listing sites, individual houses for sale or rental, or real estate services. So yikes, real estate agents. I mean, you can still target based on keywords, of course, like homes for sale near me. But soon you will not be able to apply important targeting, like in the case of that industry, whether someone is married or not. This change only applies in the U.S. and Canada. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, my God, TikTok must be blushing these days. Everyone is copying that app. Instagram has reels. Vine is basically back under a new name. And now Snapchat is ripping a page out of the TikTok playbook and letting users share more content more widely, specifically sharing content

Starting point is 00:06:00 that they didn't make. In other words, maybe your brand's Snapchat stories. It goes further than standard stories, though. Even some Snap originals and publisher stories will be shareable. If the sharee doesn't have Snapchat, they will be able to see it on a web page, just like, you know, TikTok. And they aren't stopping there.

Starting point is 00:06:21 Snapchat is adding a For You feed. Well, they call it Spotlight, but it's basically the TikTok For You page. Snapchat now has 238 million daily active users. Their most recent quarter added 17% more people, thanks mostly to very bored people in lockdown. While we're speaking about TikTok, today they announced a new connection with Alexa. In case you can't press the start button on your phone, you will be able to tell Alexa to start a TikTok recording. Some good news if you want to buy some ad space but don't want to pay Google's rates. Microsoft has brought its audience ads platform to Australia and New Zealand.

Starting point is 00:07:03 And coming on September 8th, France and Germany. Audience ads are how you get your brand onto MSN or intooutlook.com and on Microsoft's Edge browser. At rollout, you'll only be able to use them as an extension to Microsoft search campaigns in these new markets, but they will be available as a separate audience campaign later in the year. Until now, they've only been available in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Speaking of ads platforms, apparently Quora's ads manager had a scary bug this morning

Starting point is 00:07:34 that showed some campaigns spending over their defined budgets. I don't know about you, but I got shivers just reading that. It's not clear whether it actually was overspending. In one statement, Quora said, there is no issue to our ad delivery systems. It's only the performance data views that are impacted. But then also said, if your account was charged for any spend beyond your defined budget

Starting point is 00:08:02 before we were able to turn off billing, it will be refunded as soon as possible. So, yeah, maybe your campaign is spending more than you told it to. Or maybe it was just a reporting error. Either way, probably best to double-check your numbers if you are running ads over on Quora. And while we're on the topic of glitches, apparently promotional pop-ups aren't working today on Squarespace.

Starting point is 00:08:24 They are aware of it. They're working to fix it. And Hootsuite this afternoon reported issues with LinkedIn publishing, specifically video posts appear to be failing. It sounds like this is an API issue with LinkedIn and not something broken at Hootsuite. An interesting blog post today on reputation.com about Facebook reviews. They have discovered something interesting with the Facebook API that might impact your brand if you rely on historical data to analyze your Facebook reviews. Quoting the blog post, in February of this year, Facebook stopped providing a unique ID for the old rating-only type reviews. Historically, every review on Facebook, star rating only or star rating in comment, would have a unique ID associated with it. Facebook's actions demonstrate that it no longer sees enough value in old reviews to attach

Starting point is 00:09:20 a unique identifier to them for API review management purposes, unquote. A bit of backstory here to understand this fully. Back in the day, Facebook reviews were a one to five star system. Now it's just do you recommend or do you not recommend? So it's these older star reviews that seem to no longer be available to pull. It's a little weird that they would take them out of the data pool, but something you might want to check if you indeed look at data from your Facebook reviews and those older historicals are important to you. Sprout Social has added a couple of nice new features to its platform.

Starting point is 00:09:57 You can now tag other Instagram accounts in your Instagram photos. This is similar to at mentioning a Facebook page. It's a little hard to find on their platform. Here's how to do it. Once you attach a photo in Compose, look for the pencil icon on the top right, and you will find tag Instagram users there. You can also now add alt text to images

Starting point is 00:10:17 that you post on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This is more an accessibility thing than an SEO thing. Again, you're looking for the pencil and then add descriptive text. In case you think you had a bad day today, be grateful you're not the person behind the Twitter account of the annual E3 video gaming convention. This morning, they tweeted out to their 2 million followers, great list of games women gamers are playing. Any of your favorites make the cut? And then there was a link to a blog post called 25 Online Games That Women Enjoy.

Starting point is 00:11:00 On that list, games like Animal Crossing and Bejeweled and Candy Crush and Kim Kardashian Hollywood Adventure. You know, girl games. The section on Bejeweled read, in part, diamonds are a girl's best friend. Am I right, ladies? The blog post itself led with the sentence, girls love gaming just as much as men. Oh my god, where do we start with this one? Maybe at least if you're going to say men, then match it up with women, not girls. Anyway, you know what came next, right? Tweet deleted, apology post up, saying we messed up, we are taking down the post, and apologize for perpetuating a harmful stereotype. We will do better. And finally, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with digital marketing, but I do try to put a smile on your face every day,

Starting point is 00:11:48 so I thought I would share with you the actual out-of-office email message that movie star Ryan Reynolds has on today. It is making the rounds on Twitter. Some backstory, he owned the Aviation Gin Company and recently sold it for about $600 million. He would get half of that in an earn-out. In other words, if the company didn't keep performing, he would get less money.

Starting point is 00:12:10 Apparently, he didn't understand the subtleties of that deal. His out-of-office today reads, Thanks for your email. I am currently out of the office, but will still be very hard at work selling aviation gin for a long time, it seems. In related news, I just learned what an earn-out is, and I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone I told

Starting point is 00:12:34 to go fuck themselves in the last 24 hours. My lawyers just explained how long it takes to achieve an earn-out, so turns out I'm not as George Clooney as I thought. That was a reference to George Clooney selling a different booze company for a flat billion dollars. Continuing with Ryan Reynolds out of office message, quote, the point is to those listed below, I'm sorry. And then he has a big list of apparently everyone who he has told to go fuck themselves in the last day. And that list, because I know you want to know what this list is.

Starting point is 00:13:10 That list includes Mom, The Rock, George Clooney, Betty White, and the restaurant chain TGI Fridays, and a whole bunch more. Hey, if only we mortals had those kinds of problems. Thank you. Be with us. Go to todayindigital.com slash slack or tap the link in our notes. Very exciting night ahead for me. Our friend Amy is staying over. She's buying my wife and I sushi for dinner. I mean, I love sushi and all, but my God, it's nice to see other people in person these days. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:14:20 Talk to you tomorrow. Just give me a reason not to leave right now. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 19 — Ryan Reynolds is Having a Very Bad Day (Ep 218)

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