Today in Digital Marketing - 🚨 Facebook is Turning ON Campaigns You’ve Turned OFF

Starting point is 00:00:01 Today, check your Facebook ad campaigns closely, because it seems the Facebook bots are messing with them again. Snapchat may not get the headlines, but they're getting the eyeballs. How will this antitrust lawsuit against Google affect your Google ad campaigns? And if these 1,500 British people are anything to go by, we are all doomed. It's Wednesday, October 21st, 2020. Happy ride to work day, Australia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Sometimes when web developers want to hide a bit of information from public view,

Starting point is 00:00:38 rather than just removing the content from the website they manage, they'll do what developers call commenting it out. We're not talking about comments you'd see on a Facebook post or a blog post. These are notations inside the HTML code itself. If you put the start of the notation somewhere, then, say, three lines later, put the end of it in the code, then those three lines in the middle

Starting point is 00:01:00 won't appear on the web page when someone visits it. This is often used if developers want to temporarily hide information for a short time or talk about the code immediately below it, like below is the Facebook pixel. But when Google's crawling bot comes along and reads the HTML of your website, does it take content it finds inside one of those comment regions and considers it for ranking? We have an answer from Google, and I'll tell you what it is at the end of today's episode. A bunch of new e-commerce stuff rolling out on the Facebook platform today.

Starting point is 00:01:38 First, Instagram ads with product tags. You've been able to use product tags in organic posts for a while now, but this upgrade will let you create them as ads directly in Ads Manager, so no need to start them as organic. They show up as white dots that when tapped will show the product name and price. These can be applied to any format, including video, interestingly. Second, shopping engagement custom audiences. This will let you reach people who've already shown an interest in your product or brand by doing things like saving a product, viewing a shop, or initiating a purchase. Third, shopping lookalike audiences. So you'll be able to get a bit more intent based in your lookalikes. And

Starting point is 00:02:15 finally, you will soon be able to add discounts in your Facebook shops. The discount options available will be sale pricing, minimum purchase requirement, and discount with code. You'll do this in the promotions tab of Commerce Manager. It's currently just in testing right now in the U.S., and so far that test doesn't seem to permit you to do things like setting minimums or offering promotions like free shipping or first-time customer offers. The real question, of course, is should you be trusting Facebook with your ad campaigns at all these days, especially given the huge number of bugs on the platform? Here's one from DTC advertiser David Herman, who tweeted this afternoon, quote, I bet you didn't have Facebook turn back on your ads after you shut them off twice,

Starting point is 00:03:02 costing you thousands overnight, did you? Nope, no automated rules in campaigns off, and then Facebook just turned them back on. And this isn't a conspiracy theory. David posted a screenshot from Facebook ad manager's own activity audit where it says it went from inactive to active and in the who did this field, it literally says Facebook. Judging from the audit log, it seems that in both cases, Facebook turned those campaigns back on within 15 minutes of David turning them off.

Starting point is 00:03:47 So, all that to say, please, if you have turned off your Facebook ad campaigns recently, go check to make sure they're still off. Honestly, if this were any other platform, like Snapchat, for instance, we advertisers would drop them wholesale. Speaking of Snapchat, this week the company released its latest earnings report. In Q3, they added 11 million more daily active,

Starting point is 00:04:13 so that brings them to just shy of a quarter of a billion users. Most of that growth is in developing nations, a result of them finally spending more development time on their Android app. More interesting, I think, than the user base is what that user base is consuming. The amount of time users spent watching Snapchat shows jumped by 50% over Q3 last year. The company says that more than 40% of Gen Z in the U.S. watched Discover content about sports last month alone. Again, if their numbers are to be believed, two out of every five people in the US,

Starting point is 00:04:48 aged up to 25, watched a sports show on Snapchat in September. Those are big numbers. I've said it before and I will say it again, TikTok might get all the headlines, but don't count Snapchat out. In fact, if you spend much time on TikTok, you'll quickly learn that a lot of creators will actually make their video in Snapchat

Starting point is 00:05:09 using the better AR lens options there and then publish that video on TikTok. The AR lens that's popular right now turns people into anime characters. Snapchat said that lens was engaged with three billion times in its first week. After its quarterly report, where Snapchat also posted a 52% year-over-year increase, shares in the company jumped 20%. You may have heard yesterday that the American Justice Department has filed a massive antitrust lawsuit against Google, apparently its most significant antitrust action in more than 20 years.

Starting point is 00:05:49 In case you're wondering how this will affect your Google ad campaigns, apparently, probably not much. Quoting Marketing Brew, the agency is most concerned with Google search. Specifically, it's worried about the company paying carriers, internet browsers like Apple Safari, and cell phone manufacturers to make Google their product's default search engine. So marketers breathe easy.

Starting point is 00:06:11 Google is the bigger fish within the digital ad duopoly, so antitrust investigators have been eyeing its advertising dominance along with its search practices, but the DOJ has, at least for now, chosen to set the former aside. But that doesn't mean other regulators have forgotten about the duopoly. Texas officials are currently in the process of filing a complaint about Google's place in the search advertising sector. File this one under signs of the apocalypse. A British organization has polled 1,500 people

Starting point is 00:06:45 and found that 41% of Britons have no idea that advertising is what funds their favorite online news sites and social media platforms. 41%! 10% of them think their internet service provider pays websites to operate. 5% thinks it's their taxes. 2% think it's either the Chinese or the military. 2%! That's a big number. Look,

Starting point is 00:07:15 if you extrapolate those 1,500 people to the entire British population, that's more than a million people who think that the Chinese or the military are, you know, now that I think about it, they might be right. But anyway, that's another, that's another topic. When they were asked whether they realized that their favorite websites and apps would simply stop working without ad revenue coming in, 78% said, huh, had no idea. Oh, and as for whether Google will consider commented out code and links in the HTML of your brand's website, the answer, Google's bot will read it, but it will not factor any of it in for ranking purposes. Some of you yesterday may have heard a pre-roll ad on this podcast for another podcast called Code Story. For all I know, it could have been in what you heard today, too.

Starting point is 00:08:08 This is all part of that Red Circle platform that I switched to about a month or so ago. It's quite clever. They have a whole section in their back end for cross promotions. So you search for similar podcasts, send them a message with a short MP3 ad for your show. If they like it, they upload their MP3 ad to the platform, and then the platform inserts it in both podcasts from there. Apparently, we are both going to be getting about 3,700 downloads with our respective ads. So far, his ad has reached

Starting point is 00:08:34 about the halfway point in impressions on this show, and my ad on his show is about a tenth of the way through. In case you're curious, this is all quid pro quo. No money changes hands. Finally, are there any gamers out there? Look, I really need a different multiplayer game to play. I really like Overwatch.

Starting point is 00:08:52 I liked Rainbow Six Siege, but I need a new one. And I hate battle royales. So if you're a gamer, Xbox gaming by the way, and you have any recommendations for a team-based, cooperative, non-Battle Royale game, one that also isn't a loot grinder like Halo or Destiny or Division, please let me know. And I know Minecraft fits into that category, but, you know, I'm looking for real games.

Starting point is 00:09:18 All right, that's it. Talk to you tomorrow. Hey, hey, don't ever pay This is natural fun They say they want you, want you, want you Hey, hey, don't ever pay. This is natural fun. They'll say they want you, want you, want you, but let you drive up in the sun. Hey, hey, don't ever pay. This is natural fun. They'll say they want you, want you, want you, but let you drive up in the sun.

Today in Digital Marketing - 🚨 Facebook is Turning ON Campaigns You’ve Turned OFF

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