Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook to Restrict How Many Ads You Can Run

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Spotify is burning up the podcast charts, in all the wrong ways… Facebook’s putting ads on sites that never asked for ads… How Pinterest’s algorithm changes could affect your brand’s content strategy… and the World Health Organization paying an influencer to talk up contact tracing… an influencer that is completely computer-generated. JOIN OUR SLACK COMMUNITY! • Click: TodayInDigital.com/slack SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: engageQ.com • Advertising: TodayInDigital.com/ads • Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • TikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin Source links are in the transcript (visit TodayInDigital.com and click today’s episode). --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, Spotify is burning up the podcast charts Be protected. Be Zen. is paying an influencer to talk up contact tracing, an influencer that is completely computer generated. It's Tuesday, September 9th, 2020. Happy Children's Day, Costa Rica. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start with some breaking news. Just as I was heading into the voicing booth, Facebook announced they will be restricting how many ads a brand can run at any one time. Again, this just happened, and I haven't had a chance to look into it much deeper, so I will be quoting here fairly liberally from Search Engine Journal.com's coverage. Quote, this new enforcement of ad limits will begin rolling out in February of next year and continue through the summer.

Why limit volume? Facebook is stressing more ad volume doesn't mean better performance. Adding more of anything Facebook needs to optimize can actually prevent that from happening effectively. Brands may notice certain ad creatives get few, if any, impressions and may find the status stuck in the learning phase for a while.

Every time an ad is shown, the algorithm builds its learnings. But more ads means each version is shown less times. And so I know you are wondering what those limits will be. optimized for winners, costing brands more money in the long run, unquote. And so I know you are wondering what those limits will be. Apparently, Facebook will place your brand into one of four groups. Those groups determined by how much your page has spent on ads in the past year. That's the page, not the ad account. The more you spend, the more number of ad creatives you can run. If you try to run ads past your limit, you'll just get an error. If you really want to run those ads, you will have to stop or pause ads that are currently running to open up one of your slots. And if you're thinking,

well, I guess we'll be creating two brand pages. Facebook, of course, warns that if you do that, your pages would then be competing against each other in the ad auction. You'll end up with two different learning sets. And of course, you'll have to manage the customer confusion around why your brand has two brand presences. Also, Search Engine Journal notes that it's not clear what is actually even considered one ad. Do dynamic creative ads count as one or as the sum of all their rotating assets. Again, this due to start in February. Since we are kicking Facebook for the moment, it might amuse you to know that they are a little red-faced today after jamming ads onto websites that never signed up to have ads

there. Some website publishers were seeing their news articles on mobile served with those interstitial ads in between their content. The ads seemed to come from Facebook's audience network. One brand caught up in it, the Danish Public Broadcaster, which as a public broadcaster isn't meant to have any ads. They're funded by a media license that citizens pay annually. As for how those ads got there, Facebook didn't say, of course. They also didn't say how long that error lasted, or how many ads got served, or how many users were affected, or how many publishers ended up with those ads. No, they didn't say much as per usual, but did

apologize. Also, while we are still kicking Facebook, do you remember last week I reported on the Agora Pulse study that found that removing the call to action buttons on ads will improve performance. Guess what Facebook just took away? Your ability to remove call to action buttons. In their latest iteration of the ads manager, you must select a call to action button. There is no longer an option to run a link ad without one. Honestly, Facebook, why do you hate us digital marketers so badly? Meanwhile, Google has added really a nice touch for businesses that have to make outbound calls. So we're talking sales calls or following up on support requests, that sort of thing. Until now, of course, when those calls appeared on their customers' or prospects' phones,

the numbers showed up as unknown. Or maybe their call display would say the name of your brand, but with call spoofing so rampant these days, a lot of people just plain don't believe it. Now, Google has added what they call verified calls. The way it works is this. Whenever your brand calls someone else, on the recipient's end, their screen has a blue checkmark and the phrase verified call from with your logo. And even better, in the screenshots Google showed, there's a new field that indicates the reason for you calling them. The examples they gave were a bank's reason to confirm transaction activity.

An airline example said flight time changes. A meal delivery service would read your food delivery. It wasn't clear how your people would input that information before dialing, though apparently you'll need to use one of Google's many telephony partners. It also wasn't clear if this is something you'd need to pay for as the brand above and beyond their partner fees. And there's one catch, one big catch. This will only work on Android phones. above and beyond their partner fees. And there's one catch, one big catch.

This will only work on Android phones. It's already preloaded onto many Android devices, and Google says the Android 11 upgrade will bring even more in. Verified Calls is launching first in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Spain, and India. And more countries will be on the way after. Some podcast marketing news now. PodTrack, one of the main measurement firms, says Apple had a 61% share of the market of all podcast downloads that they tracked in August. But Spotify is closing in fast.

This may be likely to their rush to pay big bucks to acquire major podcast names like Joe Rogan and Michelle Obama. It hasn't been easy sailing, though. Spotify was under fire recently for removing some of Rogan's more extreme right-wing guests before putting his entire library up on the site. And Spotify is now getting some negative attention because of another one of their recent acquisitions, the podcast hosting platform Anchor. Some podcast producers reporting that people are copying their podcasts, same title, same art,

same description, and simply downloading the real show's episodes and re-uploading them to their own fake podcast account on Anchor. When you look at the real and fake podcasts, side-by-side in Anchor, it's almost impossible to tell which is the real one.

And why are they doing this? First, Anchor is free for podcast producers to host their show. But probably the real reason, Anchor has monetization and can insert ads into podcasts paying the person who created the show, or in this case, copied the show. Full disclosure, this show is hosted on Anchor. We do not use Anchor's monetization program. Not that we don't want to.

It's just not available in Canada. A couple of other podcast marketing tidbits while we're here. The Wondery Podcast Network has cut a deal with American Express. New cardholders can get a year free of Wondery's subscription level. Google Podcasts now lets you cast shows you're listening to onto different speakers or displays. eMarketer says U.S. podcast ad spending will increase by 10% in 2020. The IAB pegs it a little higher at nearly 15% growth.

And I'm sure I'm reading more into this than I need to, but Gimlet, the podcast network that was acquired by Spotify the same day they bought Anchor, Gimlet shows are apparently back to saying listen wherever you get your podcasts in their trailers. Until now, since the acquisition, they had been saying, listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You won't believe what these two companies announced today. That's probably the way Taboola and Outbrain would have written their news release. They are the two leading content farms you see jammed at the bottom of many news websites

telling you about credit offers in your city or five credit cards charging 0% interest. For a year now, the two companies have been deep in negotiations for a merger that some say would have been worth $850 million. But now that deal is off. It would have made a formidable entity, to be sure. People familiar with the talk said they would have used the Taboola brand and tried to compete head on with Google and Facebook. One reason for the failed talks, say insiders who spoke to CNBC, Taboola tried paying less than half of the price both parties agreed to. Also, the recent trend of regulators sniffing around for antitrust cases

apparently was a factor that scared them off. Quoting Marketing Dive, Tabula and Outbrain together were unlikely to topple the dominance of Google and Facebook, but their failed merger reinforces the myriad complications in establishing a new digital advertising entity that can match the power of the duopoly.

The companies still would have been able to offer impressive scale with an estimated combined audience reach of 2 billion users per month, unquote. According to a recent study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, digital ad spending will increase 6% this year in the U.S. compared to an 8% drop for all other forms of advertising. Pinterest has changed its content algorithm, and they say the move may help digital brand marketers reach more people. According to the company, Pinterest has revised its system to improve the relevance of its recommendations and listings. The process involves taking into account more user actions and building a system that's capable of responding to variable inputs. That process has led to various advances in feed display. We were able to show

more relevant pins to users by improving the accuracy of our prediction. We improved engineering velocity by separating the model predictions from the ranking layer. We can now iterate on ranking functions by modifying utility terms and in parallel do model iterations, unquote. Yeah, I don't understand most of that either. To be fair, this wasn't a news release. This came from their engineering blog, which was written, I presume, by engineers. I think what they're trying to say is that they are ranking user engagement as being a more important factor than they used to. If that's the case, getting engagement on your brand's shoppable pins will be even more important. This tracks with pretty much every

other social algorithm's priorities. They also said they are increasing the prioritization of pins with videos in them. A particularly disturbing troll over the weekend affecting TikTok kept many people off the platform. I found out about it through a tweet on Sunday claiming that some people's For You feed was showing video of a man committing suicide. Today, TikTok confirmed the report. Apparently, the video was originally-streamed on Facebook last month, which, of course, is horrifying. But then trolls took the video and edited it into seemingly innocuous videos. So you'd be watching kittens playing,

and then suddenly it cuts to a man shooting himself. TikTok was trying desperately to shut it down, but the multiple variations apparently outwitted a lot of the automated detection tools they have. Many people tweeted recommendations to stay off TikTok for a few days, and I'll be honest, I took that advice too. And finally, the British government is paying young social media influencers to talk up COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. Apparently, not many British citizens

have been willing to share details of their recent contacts. And after nine weeks in a row of failing to meet their contact tracing targets, the National Health Authority is turning to Instagram stars to help in the effort. After all, traditional public health channels have usually meant TV ads or radio ads, places that young people just aren't. One such influencer who has one and a half million followers on Instagram posted a selfie of her and a friend with the caption, the best way for us all to get back to doing the things we love is to get tested. The government isn't saying how much they're paying,

though they do say more than 7 million people have seen the messages. The next web.com says influencers with more than a million followers earn about $13,000 in US dollars per post. Quoting their site, the World Health Organization has been using influencer marketing techniques in its coronavirus messaging since April. It has gone a step further by using a computer generated influencer named Knox Frost to get accurate vetted information about COVID-19 in front of millennials and Gen Z. The AI, which is said to be 20 years old, has just under a million Instagram followers. Nothing much to say here. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.