Today in Digital Marketing - Did Facebook deliver your ads to the WRONG audiences? Yeah, maybe.

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

On today’s show: What happens to reach when you don’t post ANY caption on your Instagram posts? A big glitch on Facebook’s ads platform may have sent ads delivering to the wrong audiences Facebook is testing delivering dynamic cropped images Facebook’s “no like counts for you!” test is underway Google says don’t worry about sites that hotlink images from you. Here’s what you missed… today, in digital marketing. 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. More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Facebook • Web Site --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, September 26th. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, what happens to reach when you don't post any caption on your Instagram posts? A big glitch on Facebook's ads platform may have sent your ads delivering to the wrong audiences. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. I'm sure you'll agree that Instagram marketing has been talked and blogged and studied to death. How many hashtags is the right number? How long should your caption be? Should you dump all your hashtags into a comment instead of the main post? But nobody's appeared to actually have studied, should you use captions and hashtags at all? After all, you could, if you wanted,

just post an image on the account of your brand or client and leave it at that. How would that affect Instagram reach and engagement? The fine folks at Agorapulse's social media lab tested that, and I will have the results at the end of today's show. If your Facebook ads got unexpectedly paused this week and you didn't do it, don't worry, there's no ghost in the machine. Facebook paused a handful of campaigns after they discovered a pretty big glitch happened last month. It seems if you edited multiple sets of audience targeting at once, this glitch may have caused one of the sets to take on the audience targeting intended for another set. Ouch. Facebook says they've fixed that now, but this past Tuesday they paused campaigns they thought this may have happened to.

So if you are one of those people who make bulk changes and don't check in on your Facebook campaigns every day, first of all, shame on you. Secondly, this would be a good time to check to see if they're still running and delivering to the right audience. Facebook says it's fixed the glitch, but from now on, they will pop up a little notification in Ads Manager if you make bulk changes to the audience targeting, reminding you to double-check them. Also from now on, you will no longer be able to duplicate ad sets that have been flagged for review and not yet been confirmed. Oh, and Facebook says it is, quote, investigating the possibility of refunds. David Herman spotted a nice addition in Facebook's ad manager. You know how you can upload a bunch of different creatives

and Facebook will serve the one it thinks the user will respond best to? Well, now they seem to be testing that same customized creative delivery on image cropping. A new button called Dynamically Crop Per Person showed up in his image upload screen, with the help text reading, quote, Help improve performance by automatically cropping your image in different ways to create multiple versions of your ad, then show people the version they're most likely to respond to, unquote. This did look like it was testing for now, but might be coming soon, which would be kind

of cool. Today is the day, folks. Facebook has started to hide like counts on posts. The test that started today is only in Australia for now. And if this whole social media mental wellness thing picks up, Facebook could roll this out globally. So what does this mean for you as a brand marketer? Really nothing, actually, at least in the tests we're seeing so far. The author of the post can still see how many likes it got. It's only the general public where that count will be hidden.

And that's really all that's hidden. They still see the names of people who gave a reaction, presumably if they're Facebook friends. It pretty much looks identical just without the actual number of reactions. Also being hidden in these tests, by the way, the number of video views a post has racked up. Okay, enough Facebook. Let's talk Google. An analyst there today clarified policy about hotlinked images and how that affects your brand's listing in their search engine. Hotlinking, of course, is when another website pulls an image from your website to display directly on their website.

If you're following that, you know, instead of doing the polite thing and just pulling that image onto their own server and paying for the bandwidth themselves, Google's John Mueller says the index does not consider that image to be an official link to your website for algorithmic purposes. As Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable said this morning, quote, there is no need to no-follow those links, but there's also no reason to be excited that the person is stealing your images and wasting your bandwidth along with it. Unquote. Indeed.

Okay, lightning round. Google has redesigned its call-only ads. Now the brand name and headlines show below the phone number, and there's a larger phone icon. Looks really sharp, actually. Google says when they tested this, they saw a 14% increase in phone calls. SEO guy Scott Clark says he thinks it's only a matter of time before Google integrates sentiment analysis of those calls. Yikes. Is your business verified on Google My Business? What's that? You don't know? That's okay. Google has a

new tool that will tell you. It is in the My Business Help section. But heads up, if you have more than 10 businesses, that quick tool will not work. Matt Navarro spotted a change to Messenger settings on Facebook pages. Seems they're retiring the setting on your brand's Messenger account that indicates whether or not you want to be discovered. You will still be discoverable through the search functions. It just looks like now you won't be able to not be discovered. You will still be discoverable through the search functions. It just looks like now you won't be able to not be discovered. This is something they quietly announced about a month ago, but this change is just starting to roll out now. And LinkedIn has

published a guide to its still relatively new objective-based campaign advertising. You can find that on their marketing solution blog. No real surprises in it. If you're familiar with what the Facebook ad objectives do, they basically correlate directly to LinkedIn. Oh, and as for that Agora Pulse study of how your brand's Instagram performance is affected if you just post an image without any caption or hashtags, they used five real accounts to test this, posting once a day for 20 days, varying up the posting time. No location set, no other accounts tagged, literally just an image. And the results? Posts with captions got 53% more likes, 29% more reach, and 127% more comments. So there you have it, friends. Caption everything.

And that is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by engageq.com. If you're listening to this on the web and haven't yet subscribed, you will find direct one-click links for your podcast app at bit.ly slash todayindigital. I'm Todd Maffin. You can follow me on Twitter at toddmaffin.com, and I'll see you tomorrow.