Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook ad competition is ⬆UP... but costs are ⬇ DOWN?!

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

More competition for Facebook ads — but ad costs are... DOWN? Facebook shuffles around its video metrics Google’s new all-in-one Wordpress console And how do you REPAIR your Facebook page��s algorithmic performance The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital 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. • Connect with Tod: [e-mail] or use this contact form. • More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site Sources: https://searchengineland.com/google-launches-site-kit-plugin-for-wordpress-324372?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow https://marketingland.com/facebook-ad-impressions-rise-driven-by-news-feed-instagram-stories-and-feed-ads-270309 https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-announces-changes-to-ad-metrics-including-removal-of-10-second-vi/566382/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Friday, November 1st, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Be protected. Be Zen. Google's new all-in-one WordPress console comes out. And how do you repair your brand's Facebook page's algorithmic performance? Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. While most media were focused on Facebook's financials in their earnings call this week, the company also trickled out some interesting data on its advertising products. They say there's been a 37% increase in ad impressions compared to the same quarter last year. An increase in impressions usually comes from more advertisers, or to be more

accurate, more spending, which is a nice way of saying increased competition. So we would expect to see higher ad costs as a result, right? Normally, yeah, but this quarter, ad costs declined. Not by much, only 6%, but still. They say the growth in impressions partially came from newsfeed ads on both Facebook and Instagram, but really from brands shifting their spend to have more Instagram stories in the mix. This tracks with what we're doing for our clients here at EngageQ. We've seen a pretty dramatic increase in results on Instagram stories. People seem to be tapping open those stories ads more than when they first came out. Facebook made more than $17 billion off of ad spending last quarter alone.

That is up 29% over the previous quarter. Mobile ad revenue accounted for 94% of that. Sticking with Facebook advertising for a moment, some tweaks to their metrics came out today. They are removing the 10-second video view metric. For the geeky of you, that includes total 10-second views, cost per 10-second view, and unique 10-second views. This is more housekeeping than anything.

Back in July, they replaced the 10-second video view metric with what it calls through play, which, despite its name, doesn't mean people actually watch a video through to the end. It actually optimizes for views of at least 15 seconds. So, really, they're just cleaning up the reporting UI here. They're also renaming their remaining video metrics. Anytime it used to say views, it will now say plays. Since I suppose Facebook knows for sure that a video was played, not necessarily that everyone was looking right at the video and viewing it as it played.

I guess we'll all have to wait for the Facebook eye-tracking microchips to get surgically embedded before we can be sure people are, in fact, viewing our ads. Some nice news if you have a WordPress site for your brand. Google yesterday released its SiteKit plugin for WordPress users. It's basically a one-stop screen inside your WordPress admin section that reports on all of Google's stuff, like search console, analytics, page speed insights, even AdSense, all on one screen within your brand's WordPress dashboard. And it's not just pretty charts. You can do things like run individual page reports to see how well your

content is getting out and more. Well, this was embarrassing and hilarious. An email campaign by Chick-fil-A went off the rails when it promoted specials just in time for National Sandwich Day. Which makes sense. They make sandwiches. They have specials. Cool, right? Except for one thing. This year, National Sandwich Day fell on a Sunday. Chick-fil-A's are closed on Sundays for religious reasons, but still out went the email

campaign. Hey, come in Sunday and get a special deal. Ouch. To its credit, the company quickly sent out a second email blast, this time with the subject line, well, this is awkward. Competing fast food joint Popeyes couldn't resist picking the low-hanging fruit, tweeting a screenshot of that second email campaign with the words, seriously, y'all good? And you thought you had a bad week. Only one thing in the lightning round today.

Hootsuite has fixed a bug where manually typing a URL in Composer prevented the link from correctly shortening. That has been fixed now. That is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by EngageQ.com. If you are looking for some weekend listening, November's premium episode just dropped this morning. This month, it is about social algorithmic repair. What do you do when you inherit a client's dormant Facebook page or start posting on your brand's page after a content absence? I will walk you through the steps that we take here at my agency, EngageQ, to repair that page's standing in the Facebook News Feed algorithm. When you subscribe to the premium feed, you will get that plus all of the previous episodes, which include a deep dive into the TikTok algorithm,

plus my exclusive interviews with Mitch Joel on the future of digital agencies and Scott Stratton on why the so-called social funnel will fail. The premium feed is only five bucks a month. You can find it by going to todayindigital.com. Look for the button that says premium episodes. That's todayindigital.com. I am in Toronto Monday for client meetings, so no episode Monday.

And now I am off to see if I can romance Parvati in the outer worlds. Wish me luck. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a great weekend. See you Tuesday.