Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook's New "Stories" Aren't Stories At All. (Or Original.)

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, the new AIDA, Facebook style, at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It's Thursday, September 9th, 2021. Happy Geneva Prayer Day, Switzerland. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 464. Ask, make, learn, and adapt. Those are the four phases of developing a successful Facebook ad campaign, says Facebook, and it's outlined this structure in a new guidebook called

Starting point is 00:01:05 Creative Prototyping. The 29-page guide covers a number of suggestions to help you test and improve your campaigns. Document is primarily written for brands in the gaming space, but it's pretty easy to adapt to almost any vertical. A lot of it maps out as a kind of template for testing ad creative. Facebook also provides various flowcharts and examples throughout the guide, highlighting how you can implement each testing process. They also provides various flowcharts and examples throughout the guide, highlighting how you can implement each testing process. They also have some advice on landing pages or the first few seconds of people opening your app, with examples of immediately impactful moments and prominently displaying your brand early. And they recommend against what they call a winner-takes-all mentality, in which you A-B test something, then shift all your budget to the

Starting point is 00:01:45 winner. This is a bit at odds with Facebook's own platform, since that's generally what it does with its own A-B testing, but they're not wrong there. Finally, they've got some fill-in templates you can use to help identify your most important KPIs in each funnel stage. Confirmation of audience targeting and the likes. Overall, it's a pretty solid resource. You can download Facebook's creative prototyping guidebook at the short link we've made for you. That's b.link slash fb.doc. As we all start working on our holiday shopping plans, a good reminder from Google this morning about the optimum use of web pages to keep your products at top of search.

Starting point is 00:02:28 Google's John Mueller posted this on Twitter. Having a dedicated page for some seasonal sales events is a good idea for e-commerce sites. Keep them indexable after the sale. Worst case, people will find them when there's nothing special on them, but that means they're still finding your site. If you don't need them for the rest of the year, it's fine and normal to make them less prominent on your site, unquote. Google actually has some very good documentation on how to handle deal pages. Everything from what to put in your title tag, insert they'll rewrite it anyway joke here,

Starting point is 00:03:01 and how to get Google to recrawl your page once the event details are launched. The link to that resource is in today's premium daily newsletter, which you can get a free trial for at todayindigital.com slash newsletter, or tap the link in today's episode notes. It's not always easy to follow the trends, but if you're in content marketing, it's kind of your job. Luckily, most of the social media platforms regularly release information about the kind of content that's gaining traction. Facebook has one out this week

Starting point is 00:03:30 called their Topics to Watch report. It covers the second quarter of this year. Among the topics they note saw a big spike, weddings and wedding receptions. Pop-up retail also saw a comeback after COVID restrictions were lifted. And with that newfound ability to go on holidays and out in the real world came a bump in posts and comments about pet sitting. On Instagram, among the big topics there, family reunions.

Starting point is 00:03:55 That's up three times year over year. And I don't know if I saw this coming, but apparently drag shows were also big on Instagram this last quarter. Socialmediatoday.com thinks they know why. Quote, likely sparked by the popularity of RuPaul's Drag Race, more people are now discussing drag shows and looking to attend events. While Facebook also notes that many drag shows saw increased audiences during the pandemic as they went virtual instead. Unquote. So overall, and I hope you didn't need Facebook's report to tell you this, themes around getting back out, seeing family and friends again,

Starting point is 00:04:30 going to events and the likes are pretty big. Or at least they were by the end of last June. These numbers do not include things that happened later in the summer, like, you know, the resurgence of the pandemic and reinstated lockdowns. So maybe this is more helpful to get an early jump on the hopefully forthcoming second wave of reopenings. Today's premium newsletter has a direct link to the full study. Facebook has done it again. They've copied Snapchat.

Starting point is 00:05:01 This time copying Snapchat's physical glasses, which Snapchat called Spectacles. Yes, Zuckerberg Corp. has partnered with Ray-Ban to sell these for 300 bucks US. They are almost identical in appearance to the original Spectacles, right down to the rough shape and location of the camera. And just in case you think that Facebook's cloning of competitors' successes is not as egregious as it is, get a load of what they're calling their glasses. They call them stories. I'm not kidding. Stories, like the vertical format they ripped off from Snapchat

Starting point is 00:05:35 and bolted onto Instagram. Quoting The Verge, The frames feature two front-facing cameras for capturing video and photos. They sync with a companion camera roll app called Facebook View, where clips can be edited and shared to other apps on your phone, not just Facebook's own. There's a physical button on the glasses for recording, or you can say, hey Facebook, take a video, to control them hands-free. Speakers on both sides of the frame can play sound from your phone over Bluetooth,

Starting point is 00:06:02 allowing you to take a call or listen to a podcast without pulling your phone out. A touchpad built into the side of the frame lets you change the volume or play and pause what you're hearing, unquote. These types of glasses do raise some privacy concerns. How will you know if someone's in a gym locker room recording people walking around naked?

Starting point is 00:06:22 Facebook's solution? A tiny pinprick white LED light that lights up when recording. And totally can't be covered over with a small piece of electrician's tapes, am I right? 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.

Starting point is 00:06:57 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.C-A. 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 Okay, to be fair, Snapchat copies stuff too. But they all do. I only pick on Facebook because it's fun and I'm immature.

Starting point is 00:07:45 Indeed, just this week, Facebook copied a popular Facebook feature, the part which reminds people of memories and friends' birthdays. In 2017, Facebook reported that more than 155 million people had opted in to get notifications about these. So, enter Snapchat with their new tool called the Birthday Minis Reminder Tool. Minis, by the way, are Snapchat's name for small little apps that live inside their main app. Users can see a list of upcoming and recent birthdays, as well as birthdays organized by a Zodiac sign. The company was careful to note that only people

Starting point is 00:08:15 who've agreed to make their birthday visible can be serviced in this, and it'll only report that you've had a birthday. It will not give away your age. More movement in the red-hot buy-now-pay-later space. PayPal announced it will acquire the Japanese startup PayD for $2.7 billion. Back only in March, a funding round placed its valuation at $1.3 billion. PayD's model is three monthly interest-free installments. The company says its 6 million users have made about $3.5 billion worth of purchases since they launched last year. PayDee has deals in place with Apple and Amazon. For its part, new owner PayPal's stock is up more than 40% this year. It is indeed a very busy space right now in e-commerce.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Last month, Square bought an Australian buy-now-pay-later company for $29 billion. Also last month, Amazon partnered with Affirm to provide the option on purchases of at least $50. Speaking of Amazon, you may know of their Amazon Go grocery stores, which were kind of large beta tests of their just-walk-out shopping technology. The idea is that sensors and cameras detect what you've put in your shopping cart. Remember, these are actual bricks-and-mortar grocery stores here, and Amazon just bills you with what you walk out of the store with. Until now, that tech had been kept pretty close to just those test stores and a small chain it started called Amazon Fresh, but that's about to change.

Starting point is 00:09:42 Next year, Amazon says it will introduce the concept to two Whole Foods locations in California and Washington, D.C. Amazon owns Whole Foods, in case you missed that news a couple of years back. It won't be mandatory. Shoppers will still be able to check out the regular way. But Amazon is so confident in the technology, it actually started selling the technology to other retailers last spring. As you can imagine, employee groups and labor unions say the move will only serve to eliminate jobs. Amazon spectacularly says no, they will have a comparable number of staff who will perform tasks. Which tasks? Well, that's unspecified. Remember msn.com? Okay, it's a little different, but it's basically just a pretty page on msn.com. It does look a lot like Google's Discover with little tiles, most of them linking to news stories,

Starting point is 00:10:55 and about maybe one in five are tiles that link to ads. They've also launched some mobile apps for it. And a general rule on new placements, these things tend to be pretty inexpensive in terms of CPM, so it might be a good idea to drop a little bit of media spend there to see how it does. YouTube says it's reducing the number of subscribers you need to create community posts. The previous number was 1,000 subscribers. Now you'll only need 500. The company says the change should bring the feature to millions more channels. If you're not familiar with those, community posts are kind of like status updates on Facebook.

Starting point is 00:11:28 I personally hate them and choose the little don't show me these again option, but that only works per creator. Community posts will replace the discussion tab on YouTube channels on October 12th. And finally, a couple of bugs out there today. Some people were reporting that a lot of core functions at Shopify were down for a while. People couldn't add anything to their cart. That seems to be fixed now. And Facebook's learning limited bug appears to be back,

Starting point is 00:11:57 at least for some people. This is when your ad set gets the learning limited warning on the second day, regardless of how many optimization events you have. Apparently they are aware of this and working on it again. Well, on the show tomorrow, a new study gives us the answer to a question long asked by SEO professionals. Does putting location metadata into your website's images help your Google ranking?

Starting point is 00:12:21 We will have the answer and a guest expert with us on tomorrow's show. And this weekend, premium newsletter subscribers are getting a bonus episode. How to know when you are wasting your Google Ads budget. 11 lessons learned in Google Ad account audits. That's this weekend. Talk to you tomorrow. I gotta go. There's nothing for me now. It's shocking I know. Bye.

Today in Digital Marketing - Facebook's New "Stories" Aren't Stories At All. (Or Original.)

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