Today in Digital Marketing - Enjoy the Silence

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, August 15th. Today, Meta makes a big change to conversions, but you probably didn't hear about it. Why does Meta keep these changes such a secret? Also, LinkedIn wants you to stop trying to be funny. The informal pulse of the economy says things are actually looking up. And when CEOs say the quiet things out loud. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:00:28 That's ahead today in Digital Marketing. Meta is updating its ad algorithm, which may make the platform seem less effective for some advertisers and could lead to higher ad prices. At issue are conversion campaigns, and the change will be to give more weight to conversions that occur one day from when a user first clicks. Until now, the algorithm driving conversion campaigns wasn't distinguishing quality or weighting of those conversions based on the conversion window length. This was first reported by Adweek, which said it learned of it from a note the Wpromote agency sent to its clients. Quoting Adweek,

Starting point is 00:01:10 quote, with more conversions only counted by meta if they happened within one day of seeing the ad, advertisers might see fewer conversions reported for a given campaign than they did previously. Ad prices might also be higher because the change will cause meta to target a smaller pool of, looking for those who are more likely to convert in one day. Advertisers who hadn't already been optimizing for one-day conversion windows or who sell luxury products with longer purchase windows are likely to see ad performance decline, unquote. Changing how conversion windows are weighted in the ads algorithm is a big deal, which is why

Starting point is 00:01:45 it's especially peculiar, though not unexpected, that Meta chose to not announce this change on its website. In fact, on the same day this news was leaked, Meta put out a detailed blog post sharing three smaller changes to its ads platform, which we'll have shortly, but did not mention this conversion window change. Instead, Meta seems to dole out news about algorithmic changes and other major shifts randomly, sometimes to its biggest agency partners, sometimes seemingly accidentally from a support rep's email, sometimes not at all. Marketers have tried to get Meta to consider an industry liaison role like Google has for its search and ads businesses, but so far, their quest has fallen on deaf ears. It was only after significant industry pressure that the company put up a status page for its ads platform, though many times,

Starting point is 00:02:36 outages are widespread, and that page reports all is well. That means, of course, that those in the know can benefit from the news, while those outside Meta's chosen circle, the vast majority of advertisers, are running campaign strategies that might be outdated. While it might not legally be a form of insider trading, it sure as hell doesn't feel good if you are not in the circle. So, to those updates Meta did announce, let's walk through the changes, paraphrasing liberally from Meta's announcement text. First, conversion value rules. Meta says businesses can use this feature to express which audiences or conversions they value more or less. For example, you might have certain customer segments that have a proven 30% higher lifetime value.

Starting point is 00:03:26 In that case, you're probably willing to pay more to reach those customers. In the past, you'd have had to have broken those customers out into a separate campaign. With this new feature, though, you can define a higher bid for just these customers without having to create a separate campaign. Second, new incremental conversion settings. Starting later in the year, Meta says it plans to launch a new opt-in attribution setting that optimizes for and reports on incremental conversions. These are conversions that its system believes would not have occurred without the ad being shown.

Starting point is 00:04:01 This is in contrast to optimizing for volume, which focuses on driving as many total attributed conversions as possible. This new setting is designed to shift ad delivery to specifically focus on driving more of those incremental conversions. Meta says when it tested this in an experiment earlier in the year,

Starting point is 00:04:19 advertisers saw an average improvement of more than 20% in incremental conversions. And finally, cross-platform measurement has always been a challenge for marketers. Someone might see an ad on YouTube, research off a Pinterest pin, and then eventually make the purchase off a Meta ad. Of course, those platforms themselves can't see into the walled gardens of their competitors, so marketers have used third-party tools to try to cobble a better view of it all together. Now, Meta says they're going

Starting point is 00:04:45 to make it simpler by letting businesses connect their analytics tools to its ad system directly through an API. Meta plans to start with Google Analytics and NorthBeam with TripleWhale and Adobe on the list afterwards. If you want to get the best bang for your bucks on LinkedIn, use a video ad. That's the key finding from a study LinkedIn commissioned from Magna Media Trials. The study looked at content from more than 1700 users on the platform. Here are the key findings. For ad formats, video drives the higher response in all of the main metrics, though the company did also say display ads do fairly well. Second, it found that of all the perceptions it measured about B2B ads running there, emotional appeal, strong storytelling, being memorable, and so on,

Starting point is 00:05:37 that being funny or trying to be funny was the least helpful for LinkedIn ads. Most helpful? Having a clear message. That doesn't mean don't be creative. In fact, when polled, almost half those users said creative ads would make them more likely to look into the advertiser's other products and services, and 38% said it would make them feel a closer connection to the advertising brand. So lots of B2B brands are being creative, right? Not quite. Only about a quarter of people said the ads they saw on LinkedIn, they would consider creative. We have a link to the full study in today's email newsletter, which you can subscribe to by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter.

Starting point is 00:06:24 There are lots of indicators economists use to try to forecast what the short-term future holds, inflation rates, interest rates, and so on. But one informal measure analysts use is how Walmart is doing. Walmart, the largest retailer in the United States, is often used as a rough gauge for how American consumers are faring. After all, 90% of the U.S. population lives within 16 kilometers of a Walmart store. The company saying today sales at its stores in the U.S. rose just over 4% to $115.3 billion that beat analysts' estimates. Its U.S. e-commerce business jumped 22%. That seems to fly in the face of some recent media speculation

Starting point is 00:07:08 that the American economy is entering another downturn. Another sign, say economists, about a third of customers were willing to pay extra for delivery time under three hours. John Rainey, Walmart CFO, told the New York Times, quote, if the consumer was so stressed, I don't think we'd see that behavior, unquote. Quoting that New New York Times, quote, if the consumer was so stressed, I don't think we'd see that behavior, unquote. Quoting that New York Times piece, quote, another snapshot on the state

Starting point is 00:07:30 of the consumer came today with data on nationwide retail sales from the Commerce Department. Sales in July were stronger than economists had expected, rising 1% from the previous month. The increase outpaced inflation over that period, reinforcing the notion that consumers remain resilient, if more selective, about what they're buying. One tool that social media managers like to keep close to their chest is a free service by Google that can let brands get a jumpstart on trending topics. That tool is Google Trends, which is a very high-level look at what people are searching for on the web. This week, Trends got a nice update, one that international users will especially like.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Now users can drill a little deeper into the trending topics to see a few headlines and links that explain why something is trending. There's also more data on how long it's been trending, total search volume, and a small line chart showing interest over time. But perhaps more importantly, you can now filter it by country and even regions within a country, like a state or province.

Starting point is 00:08:37 And there are time filters to let you see only the most recently trending topics down to a window of four hours. Google says it now detects 10 times as many emerging trends as before, and if you leave the tab open, it will refresh every 10 minutes. I should note you will find this under the Trending Now tab at Google Trends. You can get to that tab directly by going to trends.google.com slash trending. Do you have business insurance?

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Starting point is 00:09:30 the quiet thing out loud. In a video that just recently surfaced, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking to Stanford University students, made this somewhat startling admission. Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.

Starting point is 00:09:51 And the startups, the reason startups work is because the people work like hell. And I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is if you all leave the university and go found a company, you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week. Then he told students that startups can steal all the IP they want. They just need to hire smart lawyers to make the resulting lawsuits go away. All's fair in tech and war, I guess. The opinions weren't startling, of course. It was the fact he said it at all. Those sorts of thoughts are usually kept at the boardroom table. Indeed, at one somewhat

Starting point is 00:10:30 hilarious point in the video, he asked students to keep what he told them confidential. Then, when the moderator pointed out that several students were already recording the lecture on their phones, Schmidt seemed surprised, maybe even a little bit embarrassed. You can probably guess what happened next. Media reported on his comments, and Schmidt tried to backpedal, telling TechCrunch yesterday he'd just misspoken. Stanford University, which had its own cameras running, has removed the video from their site. And a brief classified ad before we close out the show. Save time and money by ditching multiple social media tools. Fedica schedules posts to 11 platforms like PixelFed and BlueSky

Starting point is 00:11:14 while unifying analytics and analysis for Mastodon X and more. Fedica gives you insights you can't get anywhere else. Get free cross-platform scheduling at Fedica.com. That's F-E-D-I-C-A dot com. Tomorrow on the show, a special treat, the story of the brand that got 34 times return on ad spend for their Google ad campaign and why that campaign was still a failure. Our Google ads correspondent, Jill Saskin-Gales has her own podcast called inside Google ads. Tomorrow, we will be bringing you a full sample episode from her podcast.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Jill, as you might remember, worked at Google ads for six years on the show. Tomorrow, she'll be answering the most common questions about the platform. Like what is a good row ass in Google ads? What is a decent impression share? And what dashboard data is the most important for marketers to pay attention to? That's tomorrow, right here in the feed. Or if you want to get it earlier, by all means, just search for Inside Google Ads in your podcast app.

Starting point is 00:12:20 I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Enjoy the Silence

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