Today in Digital Marketing - Integration Test Podcast Feed #1

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, a big bug with a popular Facebook ad placement Be protected. Be Zen. for someone at HBO Max. It's Friday, June 18th, 2021. Happy International Picnic Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageU Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. If you are running carousel ads in Instagram stories, you should probably stop.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Earlier this morning, a member of our Slack community reported that one of her clients' ads started breaking a couple of weeks back. Specifically, Instagram would only show the first image of the carousel. She says Facebook has been investigating this for two weeks now with no conclusive answer, nor any refund of those broken ads. I checked this with a group of senior media buyers that I'm in another Slack community with, and they're seeing it too. One said, quote, Yes, we have a brick-and-mortar client who stopped running these as well for the same reason. They would display fine in Ads Manager, but once served would just be blank or would skip past the next two slides to the next piece of content.

Starting point is 00:01:38 Another one, quote, Yes, that's what carousel ads do in stories now. They used to be broken in a worse way. The image would change, but the link would always be to the first card's link. And another one, quote, A client sent us a few screenshots of his Facebook carousel ads in the wild without any images in the ads. Just nothing there, unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:00 Facebook, of course, has said nothing publicly about this. If only they had access to some kind of website where they could post these things. Actually, to be fair, they do. Last year, Facebook grudgingly put up an ad status page which reports when the platform is having problems, but it's never been particularly reliable. Today, for instance, it's got some vague note about an issue that may be impacting ad delivery. But that's only been there for the last four days. This issue apparently has been going on for weeks now.

Starting point is 00:02:31 And also, what issue exactly, Facebook? Would it kill you to provide some details? Anyway, all that to say, if you're running carousels inside stories, you may want to pause them for the time being. Fast response. That's the very top-level summary of new research into what consumers expect from brands on social media. The study by Sprout Social polled 1,000 consumers and 1,000 marketers,

Starting point is 00:02:58 and the result is their latest Social Index Report, which looks at trends in social media marketing and where brands might be falling short in their use of social. When asked what action a brand can take to get consumers to buy from them over a competitor, the top answer was respond to customer service questions in a timely manner. That was more important for older consumers than younger. In fact, when you pull out the 18 to 23 year olds, that's actually in second place. Number one for those people is demonstrate an understanding of what I want and need.

Starting point is 00:03:35 Interestingly, when asked how important engaging with them on social media was, almost all age groups put that at the bottom of the top five. Again, it was those pesky young'uns who messed up the data. They ranked social engagement a bit higher and put create educational content about your product or service at the bottom. There is a link to the study in today's premium newsletter. And remember, the newsletter is free on Fridays. If you're not signed up yet, just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in today's episode notes. Snapchat has enabled some developer tools to let brands integrate their own mini apps into spotlight clips. Spotlight, of course, being Snapchat's answer to TikTok. This means if you have a mobile app for your brand, you can add this code library that will let people create a short video inside your app, then automatically drop it into their Snapchat

Starting point is 00:04:24 spotlight feed. This is kind of similar to how design tool Canva plugs into a lot of social media tools like Agorapulse these days. Once in Spotlight, there'll be a little backlink to the brand app that created it originally and users will be able to tap that to see other videos that came from that app. If you want to see how this works, it's in a bunch of apps right now like Light Tricks, Splice, Powder, and Pinata Farms. Quick, does Google provide different results on desktop than it does on mobile?

Starting point is 00:04:57 The answer is yes, it does. Why? Google's John Mueller says there are lots of reasons. Once a content is indexed, the ranking side is still kind of completely separate. And it's normal that desktop and mobile rankings are different. Sometimes that's with regards to things like speed. Sometimes that's with regards to things like mobile friendliness. Sometimes that's also with regards to the different elements that are shown in the search results page.

Starting point is 00:05:26 So for example, if you're searching on your phone, then maybe you want more local information because you're on the go. Whereas if you're searching on a desktop, maybe you want more images or more videos shown in the search results. So we tend to show a different mix of different search results types.

Starting point is 00:05:51 And because of that, it can happen that the ranking or the visibility of individual pages differs between mobile and desktop. And that's essentially normal. That's a part of how we do ranking. It's not something where I would say it would be tied to the technical aspect of indexing the content. Put another way, if you get traffic from a disproportionate number of desktop users, this is you B2B marketers, be sure that whatever SEO tracking tool you're using is also giving you numbers on desktop searches too. Some improvements to Google My Business Profiles to tell you about. The company today releasing new services listings, booking options,

Starting point is 00:06:30 and an easier way to get real-time product catalog data uploaded to their shopping platform. The booking stuff is interesting if you take appointments, so you can now enable online bookings direct from Google Search. You first have to have an account with some kind of appointment booking or reservation platform. But once you hook that up, users will be able to book right from their main Google Search where they found you. Restaurants can now add specific menu items to their business profile. And the product catalog improvement actually comes with an integration with their pointy tool, which, among other things, can pull inventory status from your in-store barcode scanners.

Starting point is 00:07:05 If you're in the U.S., you should be able to sign up for Pointy now. The easiest way to get to your business profile on Google is to be logged in with the Google account associated with your business. Then just type My Business into Google Search. Twitter now lets you download the audio from a Spaces call. Call? Meeting? Show? What are we calling these things now? This might be a quick way to get a podcast off the ground, or maybe supplement your podcast with bonus content.

Starting point is 00:07:33 It's not the easiest process to download, as it's bundled into the account-wide data download section that Twitter offers. Right now, you have to download everything from your account. Then you'll find the Spaces audio inside that zip file in a folder called Data. One warning, that audio is deleted after 30 days, so make sure you grab it while you can. They also said more is coming, including Space Scheduling, a new Spaces tab in the mobile app. I'm actually really excited about that. Discovery has always been a bit of an issue with Spaces so so far and also coming a way to listen to it on desktop. And finally, in case you had a

Starting point is 00:08:13 bad week, at least be grateful you're not whoever is behind the keyboard at HBO Max. Yesterday, someone there hit send on an email blast with the subject line, integration test email number one, and the text read, this template is used by integration tests only. I actually found out about this through my weather app, which is called Carrot. And Carrot is a great app, by the way. It's absolutely worth the download. It has a really wicked sense of humor. That app had the entire text of that goof instead of my actual local forecast.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Remember, as I mentioned, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too. It has images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and even newsletter exclusive content. And as I mentioned, there's a free tier which comes out every Friday. The newsletter comes out about an hour before every podcast drops. So just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. And that'll be it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital.

Starting point is 00:09:20 Production support and fact-checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll talk to you on Monday. 10-4. 10-4.

Starting point is 00:09:40 How do a big guy and a little guy split 14 bucks?

Today in Digital Marketing - Integration Test Podcast Feed #1

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