Today in Digital Marketing - How Does Facebook's New Profiles Test Affect Your Reach?

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

What is a person, exactly, and how will Facebook count its new Multiple Profiles test? Also: A strange change to how Google ranks your videos... Yet another big brand jumps on the livestreaming bandwagon... and I am about to PayPal you $100.Complete the LIstener Survey for a chance to win one of three $100 cash prizes: https://TodayInDigital.com/survey • Get a Free 14-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia(TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and more) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). 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

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. 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, what is a person exactly and how will Facebook count them for your ad campaigns with its new multiple profiles test?

Also, a strange way to how Google ranks your videos. Yet another big brand jumps on the live streaming bandwagon. And I am about to PayPal you $100. It's Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021. Happy shout out day, Sean Callahan. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 497. Facebook has a problem.

And yes, I know it's called meta now, but I'm still not used to that. The problem, well, one of its problems, is that it's shedding users in cohorts that it would really like to hold onto, young people in particular. Which is why I think a lot of marketers thought it was a little, I don't know, shady when the company announced it would start counting people who hadn't connected their Facebook and Instagram accounts as two different people. Thus, artificially and inaccurately increasing your ad campaign's reach numbers. It's not like Facebook couldn't tell they were the same people.

They have all sorts of data points to match with, phone numbers, IP addresses. So yeah, a little weird. Then, last night, in my Facebook app, pops this notice. Todd, create another profile to express different sides of you. There's you at work, you with friends, you at home. Now you can create customized profiles and choose how you show up, unquote. Which is weird, considering their own policies state, quote, Sure enough, when I tapped Get started on that little pop-up, I got a message that included, choose how you show up, connect with other groups of friends,

or go by another name. Which made me wonder, if both profiles see your ad, would that count as two users, even though it's actually the same human being? We reached out to Facebook this morning and asked how this would affect the reach metric of advertising campaigns and if Facebook has a way of de-duping. A spokesperson provided this statement,

quote, To give people more flexibility on how they express themselves to different friend groups, we're conducting a limited test for people to have more than one profile under a single Facebook account. Anyone who uses Facebook must continue to follow our rules, unquote. They provided some additional background, which made a distinction between an account, that's what we all log in with, and a profile.

Of course, until now, they've been one and the same. We asked again about the impact on ad campaigns, and the spokesperson said they were conferring with their colleagues on that, so we will update this in the coming days if we get an answer. That said, it will all come down to how Facebook determines what a person is. An account or a profile? Watch this space. A surprising update from Google today on its best practices for ranking your videos. They've changed their documentation and the new video SEO recommendations state that Google will give your video a higher rank in Google if you put that video on its own web page.

Quoting the company, to give your videos maximum exposure, create a dedicated page for each video where the video is the most prominent subject on the page. Some features require that type of video page, including key moments, the live badge, and other rich result formats. It's fine to include the same video on both a dedicated page and its original page alongside other information like a news article or a product detail page, unquote. According to Google, it doesn't matter if your website embeds videos from third-party platforms like YouTube, but it does recommend that you provide structured data. Google also recommends that you include your video in an appropriate HTML tag and submit a video sitemap to make it even easier for Google to find your videos.

Interrupting today's news for just a moment, we have some big plans ahead in the next year to serve you even better. A major announcement on that is coming December 1st, but we need your help. We have a listener survey up at todayindigital.com slash survey. There's also a link in the podcast episode notes. We did one of these last year and gave away a $50 Amazon gift card. This time, we are not tying it to Amazon. We will just straight up PayPal you cash. And we have doubled the amount to $100. And we have tripled your chances.

Yes, we are giving away three cash prizes of $100 each. And that's $100 American, so my fellow Canadians, that's like, what, $8,000 or something? It only takes two minutes to complete, and again, the URL is todayindigital.com slash survey, or tap the link in today's podcast episode notes. More brands jumping aboard the choo-choo to live streaming. Wayfair now is the latest to board the live shopping train ahead of the holiday season. The company announced Wayfair On Air, a mobile shopping platform that offers entertainment ideas and inspiration and features new episodes several times throughout the week. Quoting Wayfair,

We are bringing amazing video content to our seamless mobile shopping experience, making product discovery entertaining and fun. We look forward to building upon this feature as we further expand our cast of creators and deliver even richer content experiences that engage and inspire our customers. Unquote. iOS users can access Wayfair on air on the Wayfair app and can browse featured products while they watch, then add their favorite items to their cart. So, bully for you, you're not caught up in the supply chain issues. Your manufacturers are shipping product just fine. Well, we have some news of some more potential hell coming your way in the form of your ability to deliver said products, at least if you

use Amazon. Because according to a Vice report, Amazon is threatening to terminate the contracts of several Amazon-affiliated delivery companies. Why? Well, those companies can't find enough workers to maintain service levels. Vice shares some insight into what it's like to work as a delivery service partner for Amazon in an interesting piece up on their site today. One Amazon delivery company said it received this email from the e-commerce giant, quote, Amazon hereby notifies your company that your company is in breach of certain requirements of the program agreement. If your company fails to cure the breach, Amazon may terminate the program agreement

and end the business relationship between Amazon and your company, unquote. Delivery companies across the country have reportedly received similar letters from Amazon with termination threats. Despite the fact that these delivery companies are independent businesses, Amazon has incredible power over them. And for some, Amazon is their sole client. Amazon makes the business decisions, while the delivery companies front their own capital and assume a lot of liability, Amazon can cut them off at any time. It's no surprise this controlling approach

towards its delivery companies puts pressure on its drivers and that nobody wants to work for Bezos. Well, it only took nine years, but you can finally now see Instagram link previews on Twitter. The link will now include an image instead of just the plain, ugly, boring URL. Why did it take so long to fix such a simple problem? For once, it actually isn't Zuckerberg's fault. The decision was made by Instagram's former CEO Kevin Systrom after it

was acquired by Meta in 2012. The reason was they wanted the images to be viewed on Instagram. In retaliation, Twitter removed the feature that lets you find people you follow on Instagram. I guess time heals all wounds. 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. Two platforms have launched new opportunities for you to learn about their platform. Snap has added a certification course to help you build your Snap ads, and TikTok has posted step-by-step guides for creating branded content. Snap's course aims to take a deeper dive into the strategies and tactics designed to improve campaign performance. Quoting the company, Snapchat Ads Manager Optimization is a five-course certification path designed to help media planners, buyers, and strategists report on and optimize for full funnel results on Snapchat. By the end of this course, you'll have gained a deeper understanding of the tools and resources available to report and measure campaign performance, as well as how to apply those learnings to optimize and improve campaign results, unquote. As for TikTok's guide

to creating branded content, here's what the platform outlines. First, create an introductory first-person story clip outlining your business product or service. And two, post a product showcase clip outlining key features, how it works in your call to action. And three, post a customer's story to establish trust in your brand. TikTok also notes how to turn your video into an ad directly within the app to reach a wider audience. That step-by-step guide includes timing and framing down to the second, and overall provides a pretty clear overview of how to create a successful TikTok promotion. A link to both guides is available today in our premium newsletter. A couple of technical issues have been reported by Google today.

First, if you were having problems with Google's ad preview tool, you're not alone. Turns out there was a widespread issue with Google ads regarding ads not showing because of a bug with the location targeting setting. After two weeks of advertisers' complaints, Google has apparently resolved the problem. But some advertisers are reporting that the issue has not yet been resolved, at least not across all accounts yet. And second, turns out Google may have been over-counting mobile page experience data for the past four months. This apparently happened between June 29th and November 1st, quoting the company, on rare occasions there might be an event in Search Console that could

affect your report data. Search Console was over-counting data for page experience search appearance data during this period. On November 1st, you should see a return to correct data, unquote. A big shakeup in the digital agency world, Publicis Group, which owns Leo Burnett and Sachi & Sachi, is now the largest ad holding company in the world. It has overtaken Omnicom and WPP for that title in terms of market value. It's just around under $17 billion. The others are close.

WPP is $15.4 billion. Omnicom is $15.1 billion. Interpublic is $14.4 billion. Publicis Group recently acquired the digital consultancy Sapient and the data tech platform Epsilon. Meanwhile, Interpublic picked up Axiom earlier in the year. Quoting Forbes,

Perhaps the most meaningful bragging rights belong to neither the publicist group nor to WPP, but to Interpublic. That has been the fastest growing ad group even before the start of the pandemic. This is quite a reversal, as a decade ago, Interpublic had been struggling and was trailing other ad groups. Instead, Interpublic transformed its model into what they call open architecture, which align resources more closely with client needs. Overall, U.S. ad spending is predicted to be returning to pre-COVID levels.

However, most agency valuations remain deflated. So this was strange. As some of you know, I run a digital agency as well. This podcast and newsletter is kind of a side project for us. Our agency handles engagement and moderation for medium to large-sized brands. And we have a payroll company, of course. Payroll company is great. Love their service.

Been with them for a while. We were having some issues with one particular payroll run, so we emailed them at their support address and more than a week went by and we hadn't heard anything back. So I tweeted at them like, oh, what's going on here? Still nothing. So eventually I did kind of a mass email on LinkedIn to all their senior management, which, you know, finally or their communications person or whatever emailed me and said, Hey, I thought we resolved this to your satisfaction. Why did you just write a one-star review? And he linked to Google reviews. And sure enough, there's a review with my name on it that bitches about this payroll company, which I did not write. Is this a thing? Somebody went to the trouble of creating a Google account with my name on it, didn't even bother to put a photo on it, and then wrote a negative review of this company,

which I presume they knew we were having problems with because they follow my Twitter account, maybe? Eh, that was a new one to me. Anyway, if it's one of you, please knock it off. Well, my wife and I are off on a mini-holiday starting tomorrow, but do not fret, friends! Our associate producer Steph Gunn will be here bringing you each day's news, whether you listen to the podcast or subscribe to the newsletter. She's just like me, but better at enunciation.

And a final plug for our listener survey. We are giving away three $100 cash prizes just for completing it. It only takes about two minutes, and it is going to help us shape the next year ahead. We have big plans to serve you even better with a major announcement about this podcast coming December 1st. Don't worry, you will like it. The survey link is todayindigital.com slash survey, and there is a link in the episode notes too. As for me, I will be back Tuesday

for our 500th episode. Please be nice to Steph. Talk to you then. Crumble from the pressure And you feel like you're never gonna get up When it all falls down Just remember giving up We will never We will put the pieces back together When it all falls down When the walls crumble from the pressure And you feel like you're never gonna catch up When it all falls down Just remember giving up

We will never We will put the pieces back together Yeah I've been trying lately just to act right