Today in Digital Marketing - Hacking Facebook's Ad Policies for Fun and Profit

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, getting around Facebook's ban on before and after ads, Be protected. Be Zen. more than you think. Performance Max Data is coming to Data Studio and on the Premium Podcast with more stories, no ads, and exclusive deep dive weekend episodes. Link in the show notes. If your brand's website is slow on desktop devices, this is going to be a bad month for you. It's Tuesday, February 1st, 2022. Happy Chinese New Year. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 552. Facebook has a lot of rules when it comes to what you can and can't put in an ad.

Starting point is 00:01:14 Some make sense, like no weapons or naked people. Some, not so much. Sorry, why can't we use five emoji stars in a row again? One of the more irritating policies is its ban on a kind of creative that's been used in marketing for decades. Yeah, so technically what Facebook says is that you cannot use before and after ads to show an idealized result. Dara Denny is the director of performance creative at Thesis Testing in New York.

Starting point is 00:01:42 She and her colleagues handle the ad campaigns of many DTC brands, and they found a couple of clever workarounds to this before and after thing. I spoke with her earlier today. And in our experience, this does relate mostly to weight loss and cosmetic procedure ads. But Facebook has also said

Starting point is 00:02:00 that one of the best ways to communicate this before and after effect is to use a user testimonial or UGC testimonial. So we found that by using a user-generated content style review on the product with a few other strategies, we've been able to get around this limitation on Facebook and get our ads improved and most importantly, improve performance. We'll also sometimes swap out the words before and after with, with or without. That's a really easy change that tends to not get flagged by Facebook. Another strategy that we've used is also what I call internally like the implied with or without but is actually just

Starting point is 00:02:46 like an us versus them ad so really you're showing like the life of someone before they use your product and like the like the problems they have um versus like what life is like with with your product and I think that a lot of brands do this us versus them style to communicate that really well and one of the things in in versus them style to communicate that really well. And one of the things in one of your YouTube videos that you mentioned as well is, is tying it to dates. You know, this is after five days, and this is after 30 days. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Being able to show the progression of time is a really good way to show like a before and after without using the terms before and after. We have found that more recently too,

Starting point is 00:03:27 especially if you've built up a good history with Facebook, which means you didn't just open up the account last week. You've been spending a decent amount over the last few months, maybe years. You can get away with using more of the before and after language, especially if you pair that with your brand name. So, you know, before X company and after X company. This is something, this is a strategy that Pro's Hair uses a lot. So if you go look through their ad library,

Starting point is 00:03:57 you can actually see they have tons of different split screen ads that have user testimonials that show before pros and after pros. And one of the reasons they're able to use that language is because they've built up a really good history with Facebook. Dara Denny is the director of performance creative at Thesis Testing. You can find her YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Dara Denny. That's D-A-R-A-D-E-N-N-E-Y. Speaking of Facebook ad policies, some media buyers are reporting seeing a warning message in their Facebook's ad manager, saying they have a week to accept some new terms and conditions, and if they don't, they'll be barred from creating new ads. The message reads, As part of our ongoing efforts to keep discriminatory

Starting point is 00:04:45 advertising off our platform, we require all business account admins who create and manage system users to review and certify compliance with our non-discrimination policy on behalf of their business. Starting February 8th, 2022, system users will not be able to create ads unless the business admins do so, unquote. So this is all part of their so-called special ad categories. Those are the ads that promote housing or credit or employment. What they're looking for you to do is accept that non-discrimination policy. By the way, system users are third-party tools that you connect your Facebook business account to.

Starting point is 00:05:20 Yes, this is one of many policies Facebook ads comes with, but this one they seem to ask you to confirm your acceptance of it every so often. If you haven't seen the message, chances are you've accepted this recently. But if you want to check to be sure, go to facebook.com slash certification slash non-discrimination. The deadline to accept again is February 8th. Microsoft has announced new ways to manually adjust and configure campaigns on its ad platform. First, portfolio bid strategies. Bidding is automatically adapted across multiple campaigns to balance under- and over-performing campaigns that share the same strategy.

Starting point is 00:05:59 Whether it's to maximize conversions, clicks, impression share, or other goals, all you'll have to do is select a strategy type and include complementary budgets. That update is now available globally. And automated integration with Google Tag Manager. The update will let you copy the setup used by your existing Google Tags. You can do this by signing into Google, selecting the Google Tag Manager account, and the container in Microsoft Advertising Online. After you enable the permissions, Microsoft Advertising will set up the UET tag with

Starting point is 00:06:30 additional parameters. 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. How much time do you spend crafting the perfect title tag for your webpage? Well, you might be wasting your time. Because a new study has found that Google rewrites your page titles more than 61% of the time. And we're not talking about them literally changing the title tag on your website itself, but rather using a different title tag in your search engine results than you've specified. Why? Well, basically, if Google doesn't think your page title provides users with enough context about the page,

Starting point is 00:07:31 the algorithm will change how it appears in the search results. Some things that commonly trigger a rewrite? If your title length isn't the right length, the ideal length of a page title that Google wants to see is between 50 and 60 characters. Incidentally, 99.9% of page titles that were more than 70 characters were rewritten by Google. And almost 97% of titles with 1 to 5 characters were also changed. And second, Google doesn't like your brackets or parentheses. It changed the title with brackets almost 78% of the time and removed the words between the brackets 33% of the time.

Starting point is 00:08:11 62% of titles with parentheses were changed, and 20% of the time, Google just straight up removed the words between parentheses. Also, it does not like your title separators. Colons, pipes, and dashes are common ways to break titles up. But Google especially does not like the pipe for some reason. That's the vertical line. It eliminated the pipe 41% of the time and replaced it with a dash. But they also sometimes don't like dashes.

Starting point is 00:08:40 Those are removed 20% of the time. Other factors that often result in the algorithm changing your title tag include too many keywords, the same title across multiple pages, and the overuse of brand names. Data has been provided by Zippy, which examined 81,000 page titles. Some good news for search marketers. Google has enabled auto-tagging for free listings in Google Merchant Center. This feature allows you to track conversions from free product listings and free local product listings on your website on all browsers.

Starting point is 00:09:16 Additionally, auto-tagging adds a parameter called result ID to the URLs that users click through, which is created at the time of an impression. The same result ID will be used if the user clicks the same free listing or local listing again. You can then track conversions, purchases, and shopping campaigns more effectively. You'll need to enable this feature

Starting point is 00:09:34 through Google Merchant Center, which means, of course, you'll need to be an admin. Once you've signed in, click the Tools icon, then click Conversion Settings under Settings. Toggle the auto- tagging button to be on. Three updates from Google ads now to share with you. First, several advertisers have complained that the performance max data was not presented in Google Data Studio after the company announced performance max will replace smart shopping and local campaigns later this year. Company confirmed on Twitter today it will be adding support to have Performance Max data to Google Data Studio in what they called, quote, the very near future. Second, according to an email sent to some advertisers yesterday,

Starting point is 00:10:15 Google Ads will merge its advertising identity and business verification programs into a unified advertising verification program beginning next month. Here's what will change. New section about your business. The company will ask advertisers questions related to their account. You must submit your about your business answers within 30 days. Failure to do so will result in your account being paused. As for the third update,

Starting point is 00:10:40 the platform has announced that it is rolling out recommendations to discovery campaigns and manager accounts can now apply recommendations automatically if you ever really want to do that, which, by the way, you probably don't. But if you do, you will see an optimization score for your discovery campaigns. Recommendations to those campaigns can be an easy way to help you implement the best practices, but they can also fairly easily steer you wrong. The platform is also adding more recommendations for video campaigns. A special welcome to those of you who came here from the Tech Meme Ride Home. I've been a big fan of Brian since the early days of his podcast. And if you're comfortable there,

Starting point is 00:11:21 hopefully you'll be comfortable here. It's basically the same show, well, same format anyway. But we focus, as you've heard comfortable here. It's basically the same show, well, same format anyway, but we focus, as you've heard in the last 11 minutes, on digital marketing, SEO, and things like that. We put it out every single day. It's short, brief, punchy. It's also a premium podcast and a premium newsletter, which is basically the entire script of the show,

Starting point is 00:11:39 but with images, related links, videos, and so on. You can check out those options at todayindigital.com slash premium. Or to follow this free podcast, just hit subscribe or follow. Well, you know how it works. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Hacking Facebook's Ad Policies for Fun and Profit

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