Today in Digital Marketing - Conversions are down. It's not your fault.

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

On today’s show: Yes, your Facebook campaign conversions are down. No, it’s not your fault. How will Google’s new ranking policy affect marketers at news organizations And why Facebook’s most common ad campaign warning message is a lie Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's Thursday, September 19th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, yes, your Facebook campaign conversions are down. No, it's not your fault. How will Google's new ranking policy affect marketers at news organizations? And why Facebook's most common ad campaign warning message is a lie. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Don't panic if you've noticed your Facebook conversions being a little lower than you expected this week. Facebook this morning confirming its all-important Pixel suffered an outage earlier this week.

Seems the Pixel just stopped logging events entirely for some ad accounts. It's not just conversion tracking that affects, of course, it's everything the Pixel does. So custom audiences, dynamic course, it's everything that Pixel does. So custom audiences, dynamic ads, all potentially affected. You may want to double check your numbers or maybe add a little explanatory note to this week's report to your boss or client. While Facebook says everything is ship-shaped now, Facebook ads consultant Andrew Foxwell isn't so sure. He told Marketing Land, quote, reports are coming back in order but not yet fully recovered. We are currently working to understand if data will backfill into reports, unquote. And if you've ever boosted a post, selected an audience, only to have Facebook say your ad won't be shown because it's too

specific. Is that true? Will it really not be shown? I've been testing this over the last three months with more than 50 promoted posts and it turns out not true most of the time? I've been testing this over the last three months with more than fifty promoted posts, and it turns out, not true. Most of the time. I've not once had Facebook simply refuse to deliver any impressions, even those it warned about, though sometimes reach was a little low of course. Your mileage may vary, but these days, I'm mostly ignoring that message. And speaking of Facebook ads, if you've ever had a campaign decline and it's not really clear why, a new tool coming soon might help. Facebook says it will be rolling out what it calls a, and I'm quoting here, a new integrity surface. Whatever the hell that doublespeak means.

And it will be called account quality. Facebook says it's a centralized interface. I think they mean web page. And on it, you'll see your policy violations and the actions you can take, like appealing ad review decisions. And one nice addition over what's there currently is it will let you request a review for multiple ads or ad sets or campaigns in one go, rather than needing to request them for each individual item, as we have to do now. Sprout Social has launched a premium analytics add-on for its platform. The new package lets users compare custom date ranges, say month, last year, instead of just last month, that kind of thing. There's more filtering options, and you can configure which metrics are displayed and

how in various charts throughout the reporting platform. Sprout Social bot simply Measured a while back and then just essentially shut down that brand, so no real surprise to see this enhanced reporting becoming part of the main Sprout platform. Well, sort of part of it. You've got to pay extra for it. And as for the cost, they say, hey, that's a conversation you should have with your account rep.

Yes, that's code word for A, it's expensive, and B, it's probably different depending on who's asking. At my agency, we were quoted between $500 and $1,000 US per month. That's in addition to your existing Sprout Social plan. So marketers at news brands this morning are struggling to figure out Google's new policy around how it will rank news stories in its index. Google says it will now highlight, quote, original reporting in its search results, saying the move will keep those stories visible for a little while longer in the index. Not clear? I had a whole list of stuff, including will this mean so-called reactive news sources

like the more opinionated sites be deranked a bit? Or a lot? And considering this recategorization will largely be done by Google's Quality Raiders – that's a group of more than 10,000 actual human beings – how will they control for personal bias? Expect this one to be a work in progress. The slow movement of stories functionality to the desktop continues.

Thank God. Facebook says soon, when you edit your Instagram stories placements, you will be able to add effects to your call to action. Yeah. Right on the desktop. Effects, of course, are those little animated thingies that you have to add manually on your phone now before posting. I don't yet have this in my ads accounts,

but these things often do take a week or so to roll out, so you may have it by now. And finally, a couple of quick hits. Cool little web tool I found this morning on Product Hunt might be a thing for you if you do a lot of Instagram posts. The site is called instagramlinebreak.app, and like it sounds, it'll let you create Instagram captions with simple and clean line breaks, which is kind of tough to do by itself in Instagram. If you have an iPhone, you may notice this a little bit

differently today. The new version of the operating system, version 13, is out. Best feature, if that number calling you isn't in your contacts list, your phone won't ring at all. And finally, if your brand makes use of the group board feature on Pinterest, they've made some upgrades to that function. There are now quick reactions like light bulb, clapping hands, hearts, that sort of thing. And a new sorting feature that lets you organize pins by reactions and comments in case you want to prioritize the most popular ideas. If you are listening to this on the web and haven't yet subscribed, be sure to do that.

Today in Digital Marketing is published every weekday. You can find direct one-click links for your podcast app at bit.ly slash today in digital. That's bit.ly slash today in digital. That is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by engageq.com. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.