Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Pulls One of the Best Ad Formats Around 😡

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. It is Tuesday, November 12th, 2019. Happy Don Cherry finally got fired today, Canada. Today, Facebook ads manager crashes. Instagram is positioning itself against TikTok. Google will narc on your brand's website. And Facebook pulls one of the best ad formats in existence because, of course, they did.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. We start, as usual, with Facebook. Their ads manager went down today for some people. He was refusing to show them any data at all about their campaigns. If this happened to you, you are not alone. Rest assured, as far as anyone can tell, the ads are still serving. You just can't get in to see the numbers. Or, more troubling, pause any campaigns or make any changes.

Starting point is 00:01:22 This is, sad to say, a regular thing for Facebook these days. And it's not just the reporting that seems to be off. Many people are saying their campaigns really aren't performing very well at all. Quoting Facebook ad consultant David Herman, quote, seen results this poor across so many accounts. I've got folks calling me nervous, our clients calling nervous, and yet Snap is doing well, Pinterest is doing well, email is doing well. The catalyst seems to be Facebook. Andrew Foxwell of Foxwell Digital says they're, quote,

Starting point is 00:01:57 pulling back and setting goals of breakeven to remarket toward later, unquote. A lot of people freaking out today reading reports that Facebook was secretly taking pictures and video of you using your phone's camera while you scrolled through the news feed. Like most of these things, it's not true. Here's what actually happened, according to Facebook. There was a bug in their iPhone app where if you rotated the phone horizontally, it would open the camera as if it was ready for you to take a picture. Facebook says no pictures were actually taken, no videos were actually shot, no images were actually uploaded. One security researcher called it harmless but creepy looking.

Starting point is 00:02:38 Facebook says the glitch in the app has been fixed, and they are waiting for Apple to approve it. So stop sharing that article that is breathlessly claiming that Facebook is spying on you. So this is disappointing. It looks like Facebook is taking away our ability to use one of the most effective ad creatives out there for e-commerce. I say looks like because, as always, Facebook hasn't actually announced this or posted anything official. This just comes from lots of reports I'm seeing out there saying that the format is being denied. Here's what it is. It's using multiple gold star emojis in an ad about a specific product, a sort of shorthand way of showing a five star review. And in a lot of cases, ads that look like that did really well. However, people in many of the Facebook ad groups

Starting point is 00:03:24 that I'm in are reporting that they are receiving an error message that says, this ad can't be run because it uses tactics intended to circumvent our ad review process or other enforcement systems. This includes techniques that attempt to disguise the ad's content or destination page, and it goes on from there. Again, as usual, Facebook hasn't said one way or the other officially if this is a new policy. But if you run ads using four or five gold star emojis and you are getting denials, that could be what's behind it. And finally, in Facebook news, apparently unable to buy TikTok, Facebook is doing what Facebook does, copying the competing app. Just like how they

Starting point is 00:04:05 stuffed stories into Instagram to copy Snapchat, it now seems they're stuffing TikTok-like editing features into Instagram too. It is launching today and is called Reels, and you would find it alongside Boomerang and Superzoom, if you live in Brazil, that is, since that's where the test is. Quoting The Verge, with Reels, users can record 15-second videos, adjust their speed, set them to music, or borrow audio from others' videos, similar to the Duet feature in TikTok. They can share them to their stories, send them via DMs, or post them to a new section of Instagram's Explore tab called Top Reels,

Starting point is 00:04:42 where the company is hoping the best clips will go viral facebook was earlier trying to make an actual tiktok clone called lasso that is to say a full app but if we're reading the tea leaves right here it looks like they are just going to take a page from their snapchat playbook and put the functionality into instagram all of which makes that $1 billion acquisition of Instagram a few years back seem downright cheap. Okay, enough Facebook news. Let's turn to Google. They are not playing around when they say they want your company's website to load faster. First, they made page load speed a big consideration in your Google listing. And lately, they've been bulking up their page speed insights tool.

Starting point is 00:05:23 Well, yesterday came word that if Google thinks your website is too slow, it will tell people who try to visit your site. At least, if those people are coming to your site via Google's very popular Chrome browser. Slow sites may get what Google calls a badge. Essentially, it's a kind of splash page that appears while your site is loading. Oh, and it gets worse. Google says what it considers to be slow will become more stringent over time.

Starting point is 00:05:49 Oh, and it gets even more worse. They say even if your website is fast, they might put the badge up anyway if through no fault of yours, your visitor has a crappy Wi-Fi speed or a really old device or something. So be sure you know how fast your brand's website loads, because it is a really big deal now. Google is also rolling out some new features

Starting point is 00:06:13 to its advertising platform. Among the new goodies, if you have a bricks and mortar location, you'll be able to force your location to show up right within Google Maps. That is to say, right on the map itself. Yes, Maps will still show people your location, and they show it now if they're zoomed in enough. But with this ad product, you will still show up as a pin even when they are zoomed out. The pin will have your logo,

Starting point is 00:06:36 and people can tap an add stop button to make it easier for them to drop by. There's a bunch of other little tweaks that are especially helpful for local advertisers. Check the link in the description for a great article from Search Engine Land. LinkedIn has put back a nice little feature that they pulled earlier. When you are on your brand's LinkedIn company page, you will be able to invite your personal connections to follow your brand's page. You will find this under admin tools. LinkedIn pulled it a while back because they found it was getting a little too spammy. So now there's a simple limitation.

Starting point is 00:07:09 You can only invite up to 50 of your personal connections at a time. None of us have this on our agency's company page, so it looks like it is still rolling out. A couple of the big third-party platforms have added some new functionality. Hootsuite has added the ability to bookmark certain social accounts as favorites in the publisher. And it now lets you create Zendesk tickets from social messages, though you'll need to install the Zendesk Pro app. And they have revamped their weekly account activity email.

Starting point is 00:07:40 They've also added metrics and reporting for LinkedIn personal pages. Sprout Social's Android app now lets you find social content to share directly with your audience. You will find that under Find Content and you can search and filter for links to publish. Okay, lots in the lightning round today. Snapchat now lets your ad campaigns expand their audience if Snapchat's algorithm thinks that it will help you. Facebook lets you do this, as do others. Honestly, I have found it to produce worse results in most cases. Your mileage may vary. If you use WordPress.com, that is to say WordPress hosts your brand's site, you don't self-host your own site,

Starting point is 00:08:18 you can now accept recurring subscription fees from your audience. It all goes through Stripe. And if you self-host, you can add it too, but you will have to install Jetpack. YouTube is making creators nervous with some troubling language in its new terms and conditions. The text says YouTube can now delete your channel if you are not, quote, commercially viable, whatever the hell that means. A Google engineer this week clarified that using the geographic target in Google Search Console does not prevent traffic from users outside your targeted countries. All it does is try to increase the relevancy for people coming from the regions you do want. Search Engine Roundtable reports,

Starting point is 00:08:56 quote, Google is testing displaying results from the same domain name in a box that groups them all together. It doesn't save that much real estate by putting them in the same box, but it does subtly show to the searcher that these results are similar. Also, Google has removed its toll-free support line for Google My Business. Don't bother calling the number you used to have. Now you will get a recording telling you to go to the website for support before it hangs up on you. To be clear here, you can still request a call from their website. You just can't call in directly anymore.

Starting point is 00:09:28 Bastards. And over the weekend, Instagram announced it will be removing like counts for US users. This only affects what other people see. You, as the brand manager, will still be able to see how many likes your posts have gotten and reporting remains unaffected. So that is it for today. If you value a short and ad-free daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast

Starting point is 00:09:50 wherever you listen to it. It really does help. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com or in the description here. I'm Todd Maffin. I will see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook Pulls One of the Best Ad Formats Around 😡

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