Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook To Remove Audience Insights. Please. Stop.

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Facebook Giveth, and Facebook Taketh Away… Behind the scenes at Pepsi’s remarkable digital transformation, why your online store is scaring off people in their early 20s, and Google adds more brand safety tools.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our 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. Today, Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away Be protected. Be Zen. April 16th, 2021. Happy birthday, Queen Margaret II of Denmark. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Facebook has filled a long-standing gap that should please social media community managers. They announced an upgrade to Business Suite today

that includes the ability to schedule stories for both Facebook and Instagram. It's always seemed a little odd that this wasn't possible before, but it is now, except for one catch. Many people still don't even have access to Business Suite. And here's where things get complicated. We're talking Business Suite on desktop here, not their app called Business Suite,

which contains some but not all of the features of desktop and also have some features the desktop version does not have. Then there's Creator Studio, which does everything that the Business Suite desktop does, except for the parts where it doesn't. Then there's Creative Hub, which has some parts of each, but is missing big chunks of both. So yeah, situation normal. Anyway, if you have Business Suite, consider yourself lucky.

You can now schedule your stories. Hopefully soon, Facebook will roll out the part of this we all actually want, scheduling ability in the API, so that our preferred third-party tools can do this, and we don't have to rely on the confusing dog's breakfast of apps, sites, and platforms that Facebook offers. Or doesn't, depending on your account, at least they're not taking away another analytics tool. In related news, Facebook today announced it would be taking away another analytics tool. This time, audience insights. As usual, Facebook's communication strategy for this was to run a banner on the top of the screen of exactly six users and rely on those users to screenshot it and put it on Twitter. That banner reads,

Audience Insights is going away soon. Starting July 1st, 2021, access to Audience Insights won't be available. You can use Facebook Business Suite Insights. Oh, God. To filter and save your audiences. But again, per our earlier story, not everybody has access to Business Suite on desktop. We don't. We're an agency with a dozen clients.

There is an insights page on Business Suite, the mobile app, but it's pretty bare bones. The only audience information it gives you is age, gender, cities, and countries, whereas the audience insights they're killing off gives you is age, gender, cities, and countries, whereas the audience insights they're killing off gives you relationship status, education level, job titles, top page categories, most popular pages you could sort by affinity or relevance, languages, device usage, and how likely any particular audience was to engage with Facebook pages compared to any other audience group, a stat that you could even drill down by comment shares and how likely they are to click ads. But hey, what do digital marketers need with that data? Am I right?

An interesting piece in Marketing Dive today reveals some of the ways Pepsi is trying to reinvent itself as a digital first brand. A couple of years ago, they quietly launched a venture arm called PepsiCo Labs. The idea was to attract startups they could partner with or buy out a phased approach. Opportunity, discovery, pilot, and scale. Quoting from Marketing Dive. Hundreds of startups can be considered in the running in a given year, but only a handful usually make it to the final steps.

The process, in total, takes typically six to ten months, depending on the startup in question. One tie-up moving through the pilot phase is Mountain Dew's work with Green Park, a virtual experiences platform that the soda brand deployed around the current NBA season. Fans can bet on and predict player shots, a nod to the burgeoning market for sports betting in the U.S., and to test their knowledge of previous games, unquote.

The piece also talks about their alignment with a firm called Myriad that applies computer vision technology to insert products and messages into content. It really is a great read if you're looking for some ideas on how to expand your brand's digital vision as well. You'll find it on MarketingDive.com, the headline, How PepsiCo Leverages Startup Expertise to Keep Pace with Digital Tech Trends. keep pace with digital tech trends. A shocking fall off of brand loyalty in the one demographic many marketers obsess over, Generation Z. A new study from Sitecore found that 80% of Generation Zers said they are more willing to try new brands online than before the pandemic. 80%. 57% admitted that they've become less loyal to their favorite brands than before COVID. The survey was of more than a thousand American consumers aged 18 to 24.

It was conducted in the first week of this month. And it gets worse. More than a third say they now allow a brand just one second chance to fix a mistake before they switch to a rival. About three quarters said that if an online store is out of stock, they will not wait for it to get back in stock. They'll just find another seller. 37% have either abandoned a purchase or posted a negative review because of a poor, no, not customer service, a poor digital shopping experience. And the big one, almost two-thirds said they want to keep buying almost everything online. A tiny nerdy update for you PPC people. Google today said it would be rolling out dynamic exclusion lists within Google Ads in the next couple of weeks.

These let you automate the process of blocking your ads from showing on specific web pages or websites. You can create these yourself or use a third-parties list, and you can also schedule automatic updates as new web pages or domains are added to Santa's naughty list. Also starting next month, Google Ads will be setting a first-party cookie with a new identifier through the global site tag. So if you're not using that site-wide tag in Google

Tag Manager, it's time to do that. Since it's a first-party cookie, it will be limited to users of your site. And finally, looks like TikTok is working on some changes to its moderation toolset, specifically being able to manage multiple comments at the same time, so you can take a bulk action on them, like delete, report, or block. Well, the nice weather is out here finally. My wife is out working on the porch again. I'm still in my office. It's not that I don't like the sun or anything, but, you know,

I've got my CNN monitor, my Twitch, my incense, my crappy 80-0 trash remixes. Life is good here. By the way, if you want to get the news in each day's podcast earlier than the podcast's release, there are two ways to do that. First, if you use TikTok, follow my account called Digital Marketing Secrets because I now live stream the voice tracking of the show

or sign up for our daily email newsletter. It comes out about an hour before the podcast. It's five bucks a month for the daily issue or free if you want the basic Friday issue every week. There's a link in the episode notes for both of those. And that puts paid to another week. Today in digital marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital. Production and fact checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends.

I'll talk to you on Monday. You want my frequency So let me set your feet We're gonna fall and strut Rock you till the sun comes up Leave all your business Bye.