Today in Digital Marketing - In Google’s World, Green Is Blue

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, the global ad industry suffers its biggest drop in decades. The head of Facebook's ads platform doesn't want to hear from you. Which platform will crop the images in your ad campaigns automatically, maybe without you knowing it? And Google releases a shockingly good documentary about itself. It's Tuesday, December 1st, 2020. Happy Canadian National Day of Podcasting! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Just in time for the holiday buying season, however that ends up looking, Google is adding some new features to its ads platform. First, new visually immersive ad experiences for display ads. The change here is now there are two layouts available, the new one being a four by five vertical, so much better screen real estate for your creative on mobile. This is especially helpful when you throw lead extensions onto your ad, it pops up in a nice little window. They've also simplified the audience workflow and added stronger insights. You can now also set up audience exclusions during the campaign creation workflow. Google also provided a few tips for your holiday ads.

Starting point is 00:01:09 Obviously, high-quality images are best. They suggest at least five pieces of media. As far as budgeting, they recommend a daily budget of at least 10 times the value of your target cost-per-action bid. And they recommend waiting for at least 40 conversions before making changes to your campaign. In Facebook speak, by the way, we would call this the learning phase, although on Facebook that phase is 50 events in a seven-day period. And they say don't forget to give your campaigns time to scale. Wait two to three weeks before making any additional changes. This should give your campaign time to learn and adjust to deliver optimal performance. Another helpful change to the Google Ads platform is that they are expanding where they use automatic image improvements. Now, as much as

Starting point is 00:01:53 this sounds like they're adjusting things like contrast and sharpness and saturation, that's actually not at all what they mean by this. What they mean is that if you upload an image with a bunch of non-compliant text on it, like 40% off or text boxes with calls to action embedded in the actual image, they'll try to find the actual product in that shot and crop everything else out. This was originally just happening on shopping ads. It's now going to include buy on Google products. They say automatic because they'll do this on their own. First, your ad campaign will get denied. Then they'll try this. And if they think they were able to successfully crop it, they'll use this newly cropped image and restart your campaign. Another reason to

Starting point is 00:02:34 always be checking on your campaigns. However, you do have to opt in. If you'd like this feature turned on, you will find that opt in in the Merchant Center. The other day I reported on some big media coverage of the clusterfuck happening with the Facebook ads platform. Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, and others all called out the problems Facebook's been having with, well, everything. In the Bloomberg piece, one business owner they profiled mentioned that she got her issue fixed when she tweeted at the head of Facebook ads. He saw it and then manually reversed whatever ban she had. It sounds like a lot of people read that and tried tweeting him too. And so early this morning, he tweeted out, hello there, other Facebookers and I cannot reliably

Starting point is 00:03:16 assist you here on Facebook, Instagram ads or non-ads related issues. And I suggest you use in-product reporting tools and appeals flow. And then he linked the usual ad forms that we all know, which led, not surprisingly, to a whole whack of digital marketers responding. Here's a sample. Those avenues are fundamentally broken, Rob. That's the whole point. And it's pretty broken. Appeals go nowhere. Auto bans lead to more auto bans. And totally broken, in some cases, support isn't even an option. Literally no point of contact whatsoever. And finally, these options don't even work.

Starting point is 00:03:52 They haven't worked for months. When it comes to appeals, what is an advertiser to do when his ad account has been wrongly disabled? He's had an open ticket appeal for seven weeks. My business has been completely ruined thanks to Facebook. At what point should I lose all hope of reactivation? As of the recording of this episode, the head of Facebook ads has not replied. More forecasts starting to come out about how the next couple of years will look in the global ad market, a market pummeled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Starting point is 00:04:25 The industry group Wark, that's W-A-R-C, says they believe global ad spend will fall by $63 billion. That's more than 10% down and is twice as big a decline as seen during the Great Recession in 2009. A big chunk of that decline coming from traditional media, linear TV in particular. In fact, all traditional ad spending was down. TV, cinema, out of home, newspapers, magazines, radio,

Starting point is 00:04:50 every one of those had their worst performance in Wark's 40-year history of reporting. The group says it could take two or more years for ad spend to recover. Although it could have been worse, Wark says the spending on the U.S. election actually helped buffer some of that loss. This is actually a revised forecast. They first ran the numbers back in May. They were expecting an 8% drop there. So obviously this second or third wave is still causing some concerns over ad spend. There is one format they say will see an increase in spending, only one, and that is online video. Spend there expected to jump by almost 8%. Overall, spending is expected to rise by only

Starting point is 00:05:31 6.5% next year, which would cover only a bit more than half of this year's total losses. So this is brilliant. Some genius has created a very simple Mac app for the new Zoom meeting world we're all in now. Have you ever joined a meeting only to see your face pop up in the meeting and you think, Oh God, oh God, my hair. Why didn't I check this before I joined? Well, now you can with a free Mac app called Hand Mirror. It just sits up top in the Mac menu bar. It's simple.

Starting point is 00:06:04 It's helpful, but honestly the best part about this app, and I know that you folks will appreciate this, is the copywriting on the product page. It's written kind of like a frequently asked questions list. First question, yeah but why? And the answer, you know when you have to join a Zoom call but you want to check your face first or make sure nothing too embarrassing is in frame, and so you open Photo Booth or something? But that's like five keyboard presses at best. Maybe a one-click thing might save you half a second or something.

Starting point is 00:06:36 And then the next question is, why not just open Photo Booth instead? And the answer, are you even reading this? Opening Photo Booth was exactly what I was doing. But I would use Spotlight, and sometimes it would open Photos instead. Or I would open Photo Booth so much that if I just typed P-H-O-T in Spotlight, it would default to Photo Booth and not Photos. And that's nice, but not what I want. If I type P-H-O-T and hit return, I would expect Photos and not Photo Booth. So that was getting annoying, unquote.

Starting point is 00:07:06 And the product page has the best testimonials ever, including one of my favorite apps of all time. It is so good and still crashes on launch. Finally, there's a great documentary up on YouTube now. It's actually about Google and it's made by Google. Now, normally, these company produced videos are fairly boring and full of PR speak, but this one is refreshingly surprising and even quite funny. Like this moment, where they introduce Google's head of search ranking. This is Ben Gomes. Well, the correct pronunciation is Gomez. This is Ben Gomez.

Starting point is 00:07:43 But I say Gomes. This is Ben Gomes. He knows a few things about search. I think my favorite part in their one-hour documentary is their interview with the guy whose job it is to find the mistakes that Google makes. And the name of the man who's been collecting Google's dumbest search mistakes for the last 14 years? Senior software engineer, Eric Lehman. Eric, I'll take one marker. Over the years I've been gathering some of my favorite

Starting point is 00:08:14 bloopers to walk you through some of those. So how far from the coast is Cambridge, Massachusetts? Side note, Cambridge is on the coast, the East Coast, so the answer should be zero miles. It's actually a little over 3,000 miles. Google calculated it from the West Coast. How many calories in 330 tons of butter? So this caused an overflow error, and we said about minus 2 billion.

Starting point is 00:08:49 Mm-hmm. What color is green? That's a tough one. They show a screenshot of a Google spat out as the answer. Blue? Sure. For the search meat nutrition facts, we brought up all kinds of detailed information. I think it's quite good.

Starting point is 00:09:05 The query's a little ambiguous because it doesn't say what kind of meat. And so the system chose roasted muskrat. Yeah. Avogadro's number is a sort of important constant in chemistry. It's also apparently the name of a restaurant. And so we've given a lot of chemistry students their phone number. Honestly, this is a great documentary and it does cover a whole bunch of stuff that would be valuable to you as a digital marketer. Rankings, spam, BERT, machine learning, data centers, quality writers. It's called Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers, and you'll find it at g.co slash searchmovie.

Starting point is 00:09:49 Busy day at the agency, so that's it for today. I will say goodbye, and I'll talk to you tomorrow. what you're looking for and what you find a difference sometimes but we gotta just find a way to cross the finish line

Today in Digital Marketing - In Google’s World, Green Is Blue

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