Today in Digital Marketing - Have You Been Calculating ROAS Wrong?

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

Some potentially good news about social ad prices heading into Black Friday A brilliant way to keep bad customers out of your targeting groups Is improper attribution the single biggest issue for our industry right now? And an excerpt from the Ecommerce Influence podcast about calculating ROAS — the RIGHT way. The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. Find Tod here: Twitter • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site • Email [e-mail] --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur 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. It is Wednesday, November 20th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Be protected. Be Zen. prices heading into Black Friday, a brilliant way to keep bad customers out of your targeting groups, is improper attribution the single biggest issue for our industry right now, and an excerpt from the e-commerce influence podcast about calculating ROAS the right way. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. When you are looking to forecast what digital ad prices will be for your brand in the coming weeks, one very important number to look at is inventory. Inventory is an important and sometimes opaque number because the less there is, the higher your prices will be in the ad market. Edgewater Research apparently is sending investor notes out with some estimates on Facebook inventory this quarter. An Edgewater client posted this in one of the many social

media Facebook groups I'm in. Quote, I received this investor note yesterday. Facebook inventory is viewed as being more available in the fourth quarter of 2019, in other words, right now, than in prior fourth quarters. November pricing is increasing at a slower rate ahead of the peak ad period around Black Friday. It's unclear if laggard pricing is demand-related, supply-related, i.e. stories, I'm assuming he means here availability of stories as a placement, or calendar-related, in other words, too early relative to the late Thanksgiving Black Friday Christmas season, unquote.

This, of course, comes from a research firm and not Facebook directly, but still some interesting and maybe even encouraging numbers. Rana calls a brilliant way of removing bad players from your custom audiences. What I mean by bad players are people who leave bad reviews, bad comments, customers that return a lot of products and that sort of thing. A fellow named Miguel Madrid had this idea to keep people out of your custom audience targeting. Quote, place an unsubscribe link as a comment on your ads or reply to bad commenters with the link. Then pixel that landing page. Create a custom audience of visitors on the landing page and exclude that audience and its lookalike.

Unquote. A clever little hack. Some good news for those of you who also buy television in addition to digital. YouTube has launched Nielsen TV data in Reach Planner, so digital marketers can now infer the optimal mix of TV and YouTube to maximize the reach of a video-based media plan. Using this together with the Nielsen total ad ratings, you can now compare YouTube and TV reach from the planning stages through to post-campaign reporting. According to Nielsen, TV's decline in reach to 18 to 49-year-olds now requires

a 46% increase in frequency if marketers want to achieve the same GRP levels. That's gross rating points, which is the percentage of the target market reached multiplied by the exposure frequency. TV data in Reach Planner is available to all users of Reach Planner in the U.S., although you'll have to ask your ad manager to set it up for you for now. It will roll out to the other countries next year. So this is either amazing or frightening. I have not decided which yet.

But it looks like Google might be testing becoming its own booking or reservation system. Someone on Twitter posted a screenshot that showed under the booking tab, Google was listed as a provider. As of today, the way it works is Google gets you part of the way through a booking, but eventually hands you off to an outside engine like a hotel's website or an airline's booking page.

The fellow who spotted it on Twitter said, I guess it would make sense for Google to eventually take this over too, just like they take over everything. I don't usually recommend long reads because you're busy and I figure it's my job to summarize important stuff for you. But I do want to point you to a great article posted today on marketingland.com. It's called digital advertising is not the dot-com bubble, improper attribution is. Quoting author Kirk Williams here, I am positing that paid search advertising itself has not failed. It's that an understanding of how to use paid search advertising as part of an integrated marketing mix for individual companies has failed. Improper use of attribution has led to an obsession with directly tracked results that, over time, do not build a brand

and incremental sales. They simply retarget the same users already in the sales cycle, ad nauseum. In this regard, I would suggest that conversion tracking is as much of a curse as it is a blessing, unquote. Again, excellent read. The article is on marketingland.com. Look for the piece called Digital Advertising is Not the Dotcom Bubble, Improper Attribution Is. Google says it lost some data of image search clicks. This could explain a dip in your clicks and or click-through rate, if you're seeing that. The data that was lost was from last Thursday through to yesterday.

Apparently this is just a reporting thing, though. Doesn't actually impact your performance. You still got the clicks. And this happens from time to time. God, Facebook seems to lose data every day. It's an exaggeration, but it feels like it. And remember, only a big deal in this case if you care deeply about image search clicks. Facebook today released a bunch of new features designed to increase brand safety.

They include a one-stop place in Business Manager or Ads Manager to create block lists. Honestly, I kind of felt they already had that there, but whatever. Get delivery reports and set an account level inventory filter rather than applying it to one campaign at a time. Improve delivery reports that allow the advertiser to search by account ID or publisher without having to download it. And soon they will be adding content level information to that delivery report. And they are beginning to test publisher whitelists for audience network and in-stream ads on Facebook with select advertisers

and they are expanding more broadly next year. And that brings us to the lightning round. Check your Facebook automated rules right now. Some people are reporting that they are just not running at all. Ads don't launch. They aren't pausing spend on out-of-control ad sets. Jesus, Facebook, come on. Snapchat says it will pay more than $750,000 to its top augmented reality stars next year.

That's triple what it paid creators last year. TikTok is testing an easy way to switch between multiple accounts. Nice news if you work at an agency. And Twitter has added a DM quality filter. It's important to know about. If you have the allow DMs from anyone setting enabled on your brand's Twitter account, which you probably do, at least probably should,

some of these message requests may now be filtered out and hidden at the very bottom of the request's inbox. So be sure to check that closely. Finally, there are a lot of podcasts out there about digital marketing. Most of them are really, really basic, like 10 ways to increase your engagement and other basically recycled blog posts. But one podcast that stands out that is consistently excellent

is the e-commerce influence podcast. It's put out by Andrew Foxwell and Austin Brawner, both legit social media buyers. And they do not talk about the basics. They get right into the weeds with in-depth discussions. With their permission, here is a 90-second excerpt from their latest episode called Are You Spending Too Much on Advertising?

You know, one of the things that you need to look out for when you're looking for return on ad spend calculations is the difference between top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel. And is your agency or your freelancer, are they rolling in all the numbers into one ad set and reporting return on ad spend blended between top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel? Because if they are, then you're not getting a true representation of, you know, you could be tanking and losing a lot of money on cold traffic and making it up with warm traffic. Yeah. I mean, I, that's, that's interesting. I, I didn't expect you to

say that. Um, and hashtag Chicago sessions. Um, as buyers, we rarely get asked what, what's the row as based on where it is in the funnel. And so, um, which is good. So if that's something that's actually a distinction that needs to be made, um, then, then we should be doing that more often. I think that the idea is always from a buyer standpoint that we can make, we can spend money on prospecting and potentially lose money, but the remarketing will make up for it, which is good. But as you're saying, if the goal is to grow and scale, then you need to have a really floor-based ROAS break-even for prospecting. And then you need to have basically a much rosier look from a remarketing standpoint. And the blended is still helpful, but you need to kind of separate those two.

That's Austin Bronner and Andrew Foxwell. You can find and subscribe to their podcast at ecommerceinfluence.com. separate those two. Hey, if you've got Alexa, you can add this to your flash briefing every day. Just search for Today in Digital Marketing on the Skill Store. Follow me on social. All my links are in this episode's description, or you can find them at the bottom of todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. I will see you tomorrow.