Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Ads’ “First Time Impression Ratio” Problem

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Why is Facebook showing your ad to the same people over and over again? A huge development for people who sell things online… Pinterest and Instagram both add announce welcome platform upgrades… and an inside look at the American military’s social media negative-response strategy.➡ Join our free Slack community! TodayInDigital.com/slackHELP SPREAD THE WORD:Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publishReview Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST:Produced by: engageQ.com Advertising: RedCircle.com/brands and TodayInDigital.com/adsClassified Ads: TodayInDigital.com/classifieds Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com Source links and full transcripts: TodayInDigital.com Email list: TodayInDigital.com/email Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA:Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffinTod’s agency: engageQ.comTikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffinTwitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (game livestreaming)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, why is Facebook showing your ad to the same people over and over again? A huge development for people who sell things online. Pinterest and Instagram both announced welcome platform upgrades. And an inside look at the American military's social media negative response strategy. It's Tuesday, October 27th, 2020. Happy National Architect Day, Colombia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. There's an interesting discussion underway on Twitter this week about an apparent bug

deep inside Facebook's ad algorithm. A bug that may have been crippling your campaigns for weeks or even months. The bug is related to how Facebook chooses how many people to show your ad to. So let's say you have an ad set where the targeting is a million people. You give it a decent budget, say 100 grand, but for whatever reason the campaign doesn't seem to perform well. You dive into the delivery insights of that ad set and discover that the first-time impressions metric is about 20%. What that means is that even though you had a big audience and a lot of money,

80% of that audience saw your ad more than once. Even though you had a million people in your targeting group, four out of five saw your ad at least twice. Why? When there were hundreds of thousands of other people who've never been exposed to it. So what's happening? Honestly, nobody really knows.

David Herman, who runs a lot of DTC campaigns on Facebook for his clients, tweeted, To Facebook, an audience of 9.5 million hits 56% of its first-time impression ratio after reaching 34,000 people. That's a problem. Facebook's ad reach is not hitting your desired numbers and instead just hitting the same people over and over again, unquote.

Some people are speculating that this is an inventory issue. That is, Facebook has run out of inventory. But if that's true because of the U.S. election, then it really should only affect inventory for U.S. users. And this seems to be a global problem. Angela Ponsford, the VP of Media Buying at Tier 11, says, quote, We've been seeing it for the past couple of months and have raised it with Facebook multiple times. They just give us a nonsense reason why it's happening and no resolution, unquote.

So all that to say, check your delivery insights and the first-time impression metric. If you have a decent audience and budget and it's under like 60%, something may be up. Big news for merchants who use Shopify. This morning, the company announced a deal with TikTok to enable shoppable video ads.

This doesn't sound like it's going to be as deep an integration as you might think. The transactions will still happen on sellers' Shopify sites, but the direct one-tap over to the store is most definitely a huge deal. It comes at an interesting time. Remember, Walmart, which in itself is an e-commerce giant, Walmart has provisionally agreed to buy a 7.5% stake in TikTok's American operations, pending approval from the Trump administration. So then, if that's still in the offing, why is TikTok cutting deals with Walmart competitors? Well, sort of competitors.

I mean, who knows what's a competitor these days? Walmart itself cut its own deal with Shopify this past June to expand its online marketplace. Also this month, Shopify surged past Royal Bank to become the most valuable company in Canada. Just in time for the holiday buying season, Pinterest today announcing a number of solid upgrades to its marketing platform. First, an updated profile that will let merchants transform their shop tab into a storefront with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups, and dynamically created recommendations. And when users search for shopping-related ideas on Pinterest, they will see recommended merchants based on the product category. Also, they're testing an improved product tagging tool that gives merchants the ability to tag their own scene images with exact products. Company says it will make this more

seamless for shoppers to shop from a scene to, quote, make that inspiration a reality. Pinterest also says it's now easier to upload catalogs and activate shopping ads with faster catalog feed ingestion video as the main hero image in collections that's a nice touch collections as a new shopping ad format and a new scheduling tool and finally conversion analysis gets a bit more granular

you can now see how customers are completing their path to purchase all summarized in a familiar funnel in the visualizations tool. Instagram also today announcing some changes to its platform, changes that brands who live stream on the app will appreciate. First, an extension of the live stream time limit to four hours. That's a big change from its current one hour limitation. This applies to four hours. That's a big change from its current one hour limitation. This applies to all users. You'll also soon be able to archive your live broadcast for up to 30 days. So basically the same as stories and that archived version will contain the comments and likes as they came in. They're also updating the live now section within IGTV to provide better discovery options and also

putting those live now recommendations at the end of other Lives, that actually may be a brand safety issue for you. This is kind of like how YouTube puts that, hey, you should watch these videos next boxes at the end of every video. And there doesn't seem to be any way to turn that feature off. As you probably know, if you've been listening for a while, I am a big video gamer. During the workday, my second monitor is always playing Twitch, the game streaming site.

I usually watch ML7, who is a support main in Overwatch. I am also a support main in Overwatch, so I like to see what positioning he uses, how he manages his cooldowns, all that stuff. Twitch itself can be a marketing opportunity for brands. Last week, popular American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, my apology, I'm sure I'm screwing that pronunciation up. Anyway, AOC, as she is known, played some games on Twitch as a get out the vote strategy. Apparently, the get out the vote website she was plugging ended up having record traffic. Another interesting marketing use of Twitch

is from the US Navy, where members play games to promote military recruitment. That channel has added share of controversy. Twitch channels all have chat rooms, so you can talk to the streamer and other viewers while you watch. Since the Navy started streaming, people would troll them by asking about the U.S. military's record on war crimes. Their first strategy was to just block people from the channel. That went about as well as you think.

So lately they've been just sort of gritting their teeth and bearing it, which got some people to wonder, did the U.S. Navy produce any kind of internal guidelines for how to deal with being trolled on Twitch? And if so, wouldn't it be great if there were, I don't know, some kind of legislation that let people request public records under some kind of, call it like a freedom of information initiative? Yes, someone has FOIA'd the U.S. Navy and has received the internal policies for how their streamers should respond when someone asks in chat, what is your favorite U.S. war crime? They actually made a response flowchart for this with a number of quite robotic response suggestions,

including And And will not speak on behalf of others. And I am here to play games. I have no interest in engaging in personal attacks. And if you have concerns about Navy policies or actions, I suggest you contact the federal elected officials from your state. The gaming website Kotaku.com nailed it perfectly today with their headline, U.S. Navy tells its Twitch streamers when asked about war crimes, respond like whiny cowards. And finally, some people reporting bugs with Microsoft's Bing search engine. Apparently, Bing is having some indexing problems. There was some kind of issue

with cloud flare links, but it sounds like this bug is on the Bing side of things. And it also sounds like they are working on the issue. If you are looking to get a new gig in the digital marketing world, or maybe break into it, our Slack community might be perfect for you. In the last week alone, jobs were posted for an agency content strategist, a marketing coordinator position that you can work remotely, a Facebook ad specialist in the cosmetics industry. See what you're missing? Tap the link in this episode's notes to join our Slack group. It's free.

Or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. The video game plan tonight, my wife and I are playing Sea of Thieves with our niece and nephew in Montreal. While my wife and I will be doing the mission work, the kids will be on the other side of the map doing what they usually do, emoting and barfing and giggling their faces off. I'm Todd Maffin.

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