Today in Digital Marketing - How to Rent Your Pixel for Fun and Profit

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Now, you can syphon pixel data from brands in your market space Facebook ratchets up its ad enforcement Twitter widens availability of brand lift surveys Reddit’s on fire, in all the right ways And the tactic SEO pros say is most effective is why your email box is full of whiney emails 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. Like this podcast? Click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can send out to your followers. Find Tod here: Twitter • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site • Email [e-mail] Sources: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/04/reddits-monthly-active-user-base-grew-30-to-reach-430m-in-2019/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/03/google-photos-adds-a-chat-feature-to-its-app/amp/?utm_content=buffer45a47&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=buffer&__twitter_impression=true https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2019/42143/the-most-effective-link-building-strategies-according-to-seo-experts https://www.semrush.com/blog/link-building-strategies-professionals-choose/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/google-releases-listing-of-top-ten-gif-trends-of-2019/568374/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/twitter-expands-access-to-brand-survey-tools-to-help-brands-understand-ad-e/568368/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-adds-new-measures-to-enforce-targeting-restrictions-on-potentially/568367/ --- 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, December 4th, 2019. Be protected. Be Zen. Twitter widens availability of brand lift surveys. Reddit is on fire in all the right ways. And the tactic SEO pros say is most effective is why your email box is full of whiny emails. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Really interesting new service out called Repixel. As the name sounds, it's about ad pixels. And I mean, we've seen a lot of services that focus on that all-important pixel,

like being able to pixel a visitor who just clicks a link instead of visiting a site that you own. But this one, this idea here, this is a new one to me. Repixel.co. It is essentially a marketplace of brands who are willing to share their pixel with you. That way you can get access to their audiences so you can create lookalikes, or hell, I guess just target people who visited those companies' websites. I know you're thinking, cool idea, but why the hell would any company share that? Well, money. That's why. As the site owner, you set a CPM price for access to your pixel data, then give Repixel access to it, and they will manage the access, so no need to drop a Pixel for every advertiser that wants it. You can approve or reject requests individually, so presumably you'd deny direct market competitors.

And other than pressing the cash out button each month, apparently that's it. Repixel says it plans to expand beyond the Facebook pixel soon and will support other ad platforms like Taboola and Quora. Here's a sentence that probably makes most digital marketers feel a little ill. Facebook has ratcheted up its advertising enforcement. The company today saying it will limit discriminatory audience targeting across its whole platform. So a bit of context here. It used to be you could advertise, say, housing or job opportunities and then exclude seniors from that ad or Jewish people or black people. You get the idea.

So Facebook then created a special category for ads about housing, employment, or credit opportunities. And if you tried to set up a campaign in the ads manager around those topics, you had to declare if your ad was that topic, and if it was, your targeting options would be limited. But that restriction only applied to ads created in the back-end ads manager. Now, Facebook is rolling it out across its whole ad platform, including Instagram Promote, the Marketing API, and ads created using the Facebook Pages app. Also, heads up if you work in those industries, Facebook says it will now surface all those ads

in its Ads Archive tool, letting people view what ads you are running in those categories at any time. On the flip side, of course, you can now also see the ads your competitors are running. Speaking of Facebook, they have revamped their Agency Reports tool. That's the service that can spit out monthly analytical reports for you to better understand the performance of ad accounts in your agency's business manager. Among the new features, you can now translate reports into more than 10 different languages, convert metrics into more than 40 currencies, download reports as PDFs to share with the rest of your agency, that one was a long time coming, and analyze client-level adoption of qualifying spend and qualifying placements. Again, you can look for those in the agency reports tool.

Twitter is expanding availability of its brand lift campaigns. Those are the campaigns that are followed up by a survey in the feeds of people who saw the ad to see if they remembered it or not. Now those surveys are available for all managed accounts in the US, UK, Canada, Japan, and Brazil. Also, Twitter says its brand lift system can actually tell you which tweet is creating your lift. They said this, Additionally, marketers can learn how the frequency of their ad exposure affects brand metrics or understand the lift in message association for their brand and its competitors. Hint, if there is a lift for your competitor, perhaps the creative and messaging is not

differentiated enough, unquote. Sadly, while open to a wider group now, it is still only available for managed accounts. So email your account rep to see if you qualify. Interesting research today from the SEO tool SEM Rush. They asked 850 SEO professionals, what is the most effective way to grow a website's backlink portfolio. Still at number one, guest posting. That's you offering to write a blog post on a highly ranked site with a couple of links to your site using the anchor text that you want to get ranked for. I get why this is number one.

You know, when you understand how page rank works, it's pretty obvious, but I don't know about you, but I get like a dozen spam emails a day from people offering to write a blog post for our agency's website. And hey, they'll do it for free as long as they can include a link to whatever they're selling. Other effective strategies include replicating competitors' backlinks, creating a link resources page for other websites, something I hadn't even considered, but honestly just sounds just as spammy, and getting placed in business directories. 39% of SEO pros in this survey said that this was helpful, which I think actually shows how the industry is a little bit behind the times.

Google has said many, many times, and in fact even reiterated it recently, that listings in business directories don't usually help, and in many cases can hurt your ranking. So, SEO is still a bit of a dark art. I spend way too much time each night on Reddit. Shout out to my homies over at r slash cats who chirp. It seems like I'm not the only one. Reddit reported today its user base grew 30% this year alone. That means they now have 430 million MAUs. That's monthly active users. Same month last year, they were at 330 million. Even then, and here's the point, that's bigger than Twitter.

And the content metrics are way up as well. Comments up 37%, views up 54% just in the last year. In particular, they say some of the biggest growing communities were in the beauty and style forums, apparently driven by recent drama between the various YouTube beauty bloggers. The most popular community in that space is about skincare. Also up by a big margin, wedding-focused topics, and communities about spirits like whiskey and bourbon. But one number that Reddit didn't release? Their revenue. But according to an e-marketer projection, Reddit should hit about $119 million in ad revenues this year. If that

number turns out to be true, that will give Reddit a share of one-tenth of one percent of the online ad space. Which brings us to the lightning round. Google today released its list of the most searched for animated GIFs of the year. The top three were PSH, OOP, and Hustle. Revealbot this morning added Snapchat ad automation to their service, so now you can pause, start, and adjust budgets for campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Facebook is testing a new ad preview UI within the ads manager. Honestly, it looks pretty good. You get these small little ad thumbnails of the previews, and then you could click to zoom into the preview. And in the nobody asked for

this file, Google has added guess what into their Google Photos app. Ready? Messaging. Because exactly nobody needs this. Well, that is it for today. Links to everything I talked about are in the description of this episode. If you have Alexa, you can add this to your flash briefing every day. Just search for Today in Digital Marketing on the Skill Store. If your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing on the SkillStorm. If your brand could use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com and follow me on social. Links to my channels and agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.