Today in Digital Marketing - Broad or Lookalike: Which is Better?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today is Thursday, December 5th, 2019. Happy International Volunteer Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Facebook is suing advertisers over deceptive practices. A nice addition for those of you who are face-deep in search console every day. Better check your Instagram to make sure their latest change doesn't cut your brand's DMs off, and the journey so far to put one ad, just one, on this very podcast. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:33 Honestly, I'm surprised anytime Quora does anything these days. To me, it's always been a bit of a spammy platform, but it is a platform and it does sell ads to us digital marketers. And now they have added lead forms to their ad platform. It's in beta right now, but users get the form after clicking on a sponsored call-to-action button, like a download a white paper button, that kind of thing. It works on both mobile and desktop, unless you have up to 12 fields, the usual, name, phone number, city. But you also get some B2B stuff like job

Starting point is 00:01:05 title and company size. You get the leads in a CSV file that you have to manually download, just like Facebook's implementation, and you've got 180 days to download them before they disappear. Plus, this is almost a bigger deal. They've added Zapier integration too, so you can patch them directly into your CRM or send send them by email, or post them to Slack, or hell, tweet out the contact details of each lead as you get them if you want. Actually, don't do that. Facebook is suing two former advertisers for running what it says was malware. The software would trick people into installing it, again, these are Facebook's words, compromising people's

Starting point is 00:01:45 accounts, then using those people's accounts to run deceptive ads. Not really sure how they were pulling that off since the vast majority of users on Facebook don't ever see ads manager. The way they got people was actually kind of clever. First, they used images of celebrities in their ads to entice people to click on them, a practice known as celeb bait. They also engaged in a practice known as cloaking. This is clever, devious, but clever. What it does is it deliberately disguises the true destination of the link in the ad by displaying one version of an ad's landing page to Facebook's systems and human moderators, and then a different version to actual Facebook end users. Those two companies are now heading to court over the practice. Google is adding another feature to their business reviews.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Some people are seeing a tag that lets you mark a company as, say, punctual or responsive. This is in addition to leaving a star rating and review. In screenshots of the feature being shared around the web today, it shows a local business review that reads, highly rated for, and then the tags responsiveness and quality are in there. If you're responsible for SEO at your agency or company, you probably spend a lot of time in Google's search console.

Starting point is 00:03:06 You may have noticed a nice new addition this week, a new way to check your messages in the console. There's a new notification bell icon that will light up when you have something new to review, and it can be broken down by the type of message it is, like coverage, enhancement types, performance, and so on. Google says the main difference from the old interface is now you'll have access to your messages throughout the product and no need to leave your reports. And yes, thank God, there

Starting point is 00:03:29 is a mark all as read button. Instagram has added some new controls for messaging in its app, which you may or may not have yet, depending on how recently you've updated your phone, or whether you're in the test group, or whether you're in the test group, or whether you're in the right country, or whether the moon is in Virgo. But if you are in the new group, there is a setting that lets you choose who is able to message you via Instagram DMs. This is a new setting. It looks like so far, everyone who's seeing this is seeing it set to everyone, which of course, as a brand, is what you want. But these app rollouts have a nasty habit of being inconsistent. So you may want to check your brand's Instagram account settings in app. Look for a menu item called message controls. If you have message controls

Starting point is 00:04:16 in your settings, tap it and make sure that it has been set to everyone and not just only people you follow. There are lots of ways to target your Facebook ads, of course, but two of the most common are broad interest targeting and lookalike audience targeting. But which one is better? I know that's not really a fair question because it depends on hundreds of factors, not the least of which is what the auction competition looks like for the day that your campaign is running. But that said, the folks at Ad Espresso have released the results of their small experiment. They took $1,000 and created one ad set targeted to a very broad audience of U.S. residents aged 18 and up.

Starting point is 00:04:58 That's 170 million people, one ad set. Then a second ad set, this one a lookalike audience of 18 plus Americans, but based off their completed registration event, that ended up being about 1.7 million people. And the results were about what you would expect. The broad audience was cheaper from a CPM standpoint. When you actually looked at the cost per conversion, the broad audience cost was nearly four times the price of the lookalike group. The lookalike group also had the best click-through rate, cost per click, and that ad got more engagement. That said, a thousand bucks to reach 170 million people is not a lot, and since the broad audience only got 18 registrations in total, that campaign never did

Starting point is 00:05:42 leave the learning phase. Still, always helpful to occasionally challenge your assumptions every once in a while. And in this case, confirm them. Which brings us to a very short lightning round today. Sprout Social has launched its new UI on iOS devices. It looks really sharp. Their recent web UI change, not quite as nice. Messages in the inbox now come with these huge headers and footers that take up way more space than they really should. And this podcast is now available on YouTube and on SoundCloud. If you choose to listen that way,

Starting point is 00:06:17 you can find links at todayindigital.com. And finally, a couple of days ago, I told you about an ads marketplace called Podcorn. The idea is that brands list what audience they want to reach, what their budget is, and then podcasters go through that catalog, and if they find something that seems like a good fit, they message them a proposal. I thought I would try it out more to see how it works than anything, and so over the next few days, I will tell you about that journey. It started today when I woke up to an email saying that we had a match.

Starting point is 00:06:46 I had found yesterday a brand called ShareKit on there. We'll talk about what they do later, obviously. Different brands suggest different ad types, pre-roll, mid-roll, something called topical discussion, something else called creative integration, even sponsored reviews. So I sent a proposal yesterday on their site. Pretty short, basically just said, hey, my audience is digital marketers. Maybe we're a fit. I would do a proposal yesterday on their site, pretty short, basically just said, hey, my audience is digital marketers, maybe we're a fit, I would do a mid-roll ad for

Starting point is 00:07:09 you. And this morning, they replied and confirmed. What happens next is actually quite clever. The podcaster and the brand rep get dumped into a workroom that gets created on their site. It's basically a chat page, but on the side, it's got some details of the campaign. And that's about where things are now. I asked him for some talking points. His name is Nick, by the way. He sent some. I suggested he set up a discount code for listeners, which he thought was a great idea, and he added it.

Starting point is 00:07:37 And now the ball is in my court to write up a script, which I will probably do tomorrow and send his way. As for the ad itself, you'll probably hear it sometime next week, maybe the week after. Anyway, that's the process so far, and I will keep you in the loop on the whole journey right through to how payments work and all the nitty gritty. To be honest, I don't even know how payment works, whether this Podcorn platform takes a cut or how much it is, or if they charge a fee to the advertiser.

Starting point is 00:07:58 I really have no idea. So I guess we will be figuring it all out together. If your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com and follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I rage quit Overwatch yesterday. Actually uninstalled it from my Xbox because, friends, once you fall below high gold, teams have no idea what they're doing and you will never see platinum again.

Starting point is 00:08:32 I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Broad or Lookalike: Which is Better?

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