Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 6 — “Boosting” or Ads Manager: Which Is Better? (Ep 209)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, you could boost that post, or you could set it up manually in Ads Manager. Will there be much of a difference in the results? There sure will. Also, Bing adds some nice reporting, Google adds lead forms to YouTube ads, and the one Facebook ads tip that could save you thousands of dollars. It's Thursday, August 6th, 2020. Happy Independence Day, Jamaica. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital,

Starting point is 00:00:26 and here is what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by Podcorn.com. You've heard me say it countless times. You've heard others say it. The speed of your brand's website has a direct correlation to how high up in Google search results your brand's website will land. The faster your pages load, the better ranking you'll get. And now some people are spotting a new way that Google is testing this

Starting point is 00:00:51 by directly asking your website visitors. Someone posted a screenshot this morning on Twitter showing this. It showed up for her when she first did a Google search for something, clicked a result, and went to that website, then hit the back button to land on the same Google search she was on before, only this time it was a little different. Under the link she had just tapped appeared a short survey asking her how fast did this site load. The responses are fast, average, slow, or didn't notice. So again, check your brand's website's speed. Google has a free tool that can

Starting point is 00:01:27 do this for you. Also, another reminder that mobile-first indexing is coming. That means that Google will only crawl the mobile version of your brand's website. It will all but ignore your desktop version. That can have big consequences for you if those two sites have different content, or you exclude mobile indexing on page or in a robots.txt file. The Google Webmasters YouTube channel has posted a really helpful video about this, and there's a link in this episode's notes if you'd like to check it out. I'll bet for many of you, the preferred conversion event you want for your ads isn't a website visit or post engagement, but rather a phone call. But it's always been a little glitchy in trying to set up campaigns that can be that direct, at least on Facebook. Well, John Loomer has an excellent blog post up today on his website,

Starting point is 00:02:20 walking you through exactly how to set up a campaign for this using some new features in Facebook's Ad Manager. It turns out there are two ways to do this now, using the reach objective and a call now call to action, and using the traffic objective and a phone call ad destination. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a way to optimize your campaign for calls, at least not yet. There is an important distinction between the two methods, though. Quoting John's piece,

Starting point is 00:02:48 quote, there is some confusion with the call now CTA option. If you click the thumbnail image, it drives to a web page. But if you click the CTA, it initiates a phone call. You may or may not want this. The phone call ad destination has one central action. If you click the image or CTA button, it will initiate a phone call. You don't even provide a URL when creating the ad, unquote. So if you want calls, the latter is probably the better approach unless you really, really, really want a reach objective. Anyway, John's piece, as with all of his stuff, is top notch. Lots of step-by-step screenshots.

Starting point is 00:03:24 His site is at johnloomer.com. That's J-O-N-L-O-O-M-E-R.com. And do check out his Power Haters Club, a membership we have had here at our agency for years now and worth every penny. Bing will soon be expanding its reporting on images and videos. Currently, their Webmaster Tools platform does have a search performance report, but it doesn't let you filter the data by vertical, for instance, web, image, video, news, and so on. Quoting seroundtable.com, this seems to imply that Bing will be providing at least more refined data on how your images and videos are performing in Bing search.

Starting point is 00:04:03 Bing added it may even expand them to show you traffic from knowledge panels. Heads up if your company uses Google Apps as its main business platform and you have built one of their sites. Google Sites is a kind of scaled-down website builder. Think Squarespace, but with only like 10% of its features. Most brands do not use Google Sites for their main websites, but some smaller ones do, and some companies, like our agency in fact, use it for our intranet. So if that's you, be aware that today Google said it will be transitioning to a new platform, a new version of Google Sites. Here is the sunset

Starting point is 00:04:44 timeline for the current version. This August, the new platform will become new version of Google Sites. Here is the sunset timeline for the current version. This August, the new platform will become the default way to build a new site. Next May, you won't be able to create a new site in the current version at all. Next October, you won't be able to edit anything if you're still on the current version. And next December, they will just straight up disable it. Again, we're talking about next year, 2021. But if you move a little slowly, you know, you may want to add this as a to-do at some point. Still ahead, which is cheaper, running that paid Facebook post as a boost or setting that post up in Ads Manager? We have the answer. A study confirms the suspicions of American conservatives who think social media algorithms have a political bias.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Problem is, it's not the bias they think it is. And the one simple tip in Facebook ads that could save you thousands of dollars. That's in a minute when Today in Digital marketing continues. You may have heard me mention every Friday that we work with Podcorn for our ads and wondered, how does that work? It's actually quite a nifty system. If you've got a podcast, you browse a list of brands that are looking for a home for their ad.

Starting point is 00:05:58 Then when you've found one you think fits your show, you send them a quick note. They just have to click approve. That's it. Now you've got a paid sponsor. As the podcast producer, you control everything Thank you. review segments, topical discussions, and more. And on the brand side, it couldn't be easier to get your message out. You just add a profile of what kind of show would be a good fit and sit back while podcast producers pitch ways

Starting point is 00:06:31 to help you promote what you do. You approve the script, the final audio file, and Podcorn takes care of the money stuff. Whether you're a podcaster or a brand marketer, I can't recommend Podcorn highly enough. Click the link in the show notes to sign up free and start browsing sponsorship opportunities. That's Podcorn.com.

Starting point is 00:06:50 On Facebook, as I'm sure you know, there are two ways of paying to get one of your brand's posts out to a wider audience. You can use the boost function. Sometimes people call this promoting a post. It's kind of a quick wizard that lets you apply some basic targeting in a budget. Or you could set it up manually in the Facebook ads manager as a post engagement campaign, which gives you some more control over audience placement and so on. But can you expect the same results regardless of which method you use? That's what those beautiful bastards at Agorapulse's social media lab tested. They spent 750 bucks boosting a post

Starting point is 00:07:28 and then another $750 setting up an identical post in the ads manager. And the results? The ads which were manually set up in the ads manager outperformed the simple boosted post and not by a little either. The Ads Manager version had 17% more clicks and 64% higher reach than the boosted post. But of the more important metrics, again, the ad campaign version 1,

Starting point is 00:07:58 with an 18% lower CPC and a higher click-through rate as well. One methodology glitch, the boosted posts were posted everywhere Facebook allows, whereas the ads manager ads were just on the news feed. They also did a breakdown between how the ads performed on desktop via mobile and the mobile ads outperformed there also by a pretty solid margin. You'll find the full study on their website. Link in the episode notes. American conservatives have long accused social media platforms of being politically biased. A new report suggests they might be right, but not in the way they think. The Tech Transparency Report found that when Instagram users searched for content about Joe Biden,

Starting point is 00:08:48 it would most often show them hashtags about the presumptive Democratic candidate, which were negative in tone. When they did the same for Donald Trump, they got no results, negative or positive. Quoting TheNextWeb.com, at times Biden searches led to hashtags that insulted the former VP, such as creepy Joe Biden, an echo of the nickname beloved by allies of Trump. Other searches led to more baseless and inflammatory accusations. Searches for hashtag no malarkey, a Biden campaign slogan, pointed users to the related hashtag Joe Biden pedophile. Meanwhile, searches for hashtags associated with Donald Trump, such as MAGA

Starting point is 00:09:26 and Drain the Swamp, didn't trigger any related hashtags. According to a follow-up investigation by Buzz News, this pattern continued for at least two months. Instagram, for the record, said, it was only a bug, guys. Calm down. And they say they have fixed it. Okay, if you've listened to nothing in today's podcast, don't worry. I know you're busy vacuuming or driving or whatever. Anyway, if you've listened to nothing else, try to pay attention to this one because this tip could save you a lot of money. Facebook's ads manager is really, really buggy right now. Not for all people, but for the ones it is buggy for, it's really, really, really buggy. David Herman, who manages million dollar campaigns for clients, hasn't been able to do anything in ads manager for four days now. When you can't make any changes to

Starting point is 00:10:18 your currently running campaigns, that also means you can't turn a campaign off when you want to. Again, for some people, Facebook Ads Manager is so buggy that they are unable to stop their campaigns from spending. So, friends, here's your tip. From now on, all of your Facebook ad campaigns should have an end date. Maybe run them only in one-week runs, then extend the stop date manually every Friday. Actually, this is probably a good practice for all the platforms. Which brings us to the lightning round. First, you can now use Google's lead form extensions

Starting point is 00:11:00 in YouTube and Discovery campaign ads. They can autofill too, so that when logged in users click on a Google Leadform ad extension, some of their information pre-populates. Those ad extensions will be coming to display campaigns later this year. Google search engine spokesperson John Mueller says the order of your header tags doesn't matter. So if you have an H5 tag before an H1 tag, not to worry, it won't hurt your ranking in Google search. An important tweet to remember from PPC pro Colin Slattery, who tweeted today, 30 million Americans lost between 60% and 80% of their income this week. This fact certainly

Starting point is 00:11:41 has some impact on your sales. Those soft sales numbers are probably not your fault. Yes, it is Jamaican Independence Day today. 58 years ago, they pulled the union jack flag down and raised their own. Many people believe that Jamaican musician Kool Herc is the father of hip-hop and rap. And I know you think they're all weed-smoking Rastafarians. Actually, only 5% of Jamaicans are Rastafarian. That's not to suggest they're not a faithful people. The island of Jamaica has one of the highest number of churches per capita in the world.

Starting point is 00:12:15 And to this day, kids recite the Lord's Prayer every morning in school. My wife and I got a Roomba yesterday. I spent a good solid two hours last night basically just following the thing around. It's actually quite fascinating, you know, to kind of to watch it learn where things are. It did one learning pass first where it spent three hours just basically bumping into everything and terrifying our cat and then went out on a cleaning run and I'll be damned if the thing didn't slow down right where it knew there'd be a wall. I know, I know, it's just code.

Starting point is 00:12:48 It's just programming it learns. But it's still really, really cool. A special thanks to Podcorn.com for sponsoring today's episode. Would you like a free shout-out on this very podcast? I will plug you and your brand for free. All you need to do is tweet. Go to this episode's notes, look for the heading Spread the Word,

Starting point is 00:13:09 and then click the link beside Tweet It. You'll get to see a preview of it before it goes out, of course, and you can edit it prior. As always, full transcripts to each episode are at todayindigital.com. And follow me on social media. All my links are in the notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 6 — “Boosting” or Ads Manager: Which Is Better? (Ep 209)

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