Today in Digital Marketing - Introducing the All-New Advantage+™ Podcast®!

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Meta announces changes to ads manager that are more confusing than helpful... Is the sheen wearing off TikTok marketing? Online crypto ads come under the microscope.... Another SEO plugin has a sitemap duplication issue... Shopify has some nice updates for e-commerce merchants... Go Premium! No ads, more stories, audio chapters, and extended weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumGet each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links) — b.link/pod-newsletterADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia (TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit) 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- Twitch: https://twitch.tv/todmaffin  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.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur 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. Today, Meta announces changes to Ads Manager at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. has some nice updates for e-commerce merchants. And on the Premium Podcast, with no ads, more stories, and expert Deep Dive Weekend episodes, tap the link in the show notes for more, the new Instagram feeds are rolling out today. How will this affect your brand's reach on the platform? It's Wednesday, March 23rd.

I'm Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Today's episode is sponsored by Vendasta.com. Build your agency with the tools you need and the hassles you don't. Visit Vendasta.com slash superhero to book a demo and learn more. The folks working on Meta's ad platform announced yesterday they've been working hard fixing the many bugs and improving the stability of Ads Manager. I'm just kidding. Apparently, though, they spent months working on renaming their ad products.

I'm not kidding here. Yesterday, Meta said it would start referring to any of its machine learning ad tools as being part of a new umbrella portfolio called Advantage. So say goodbye to lookalikes. They'll now be called Advantage lookalikes. Detailed targeting will start showing up as Advantage detailed targeting. Honestly, is this what the meta people do all day? Like, do any of them actually use their own ads manager? I feel like they'd have different priorities if they did.

There are literally no changes to lookalikes or targeting other than adding this word in front of them. And for people who are not confused by the renaming, Meta's added a secondary name for another group of ad products, Advantage Plus. I promise this is not satire. Here's how they describe that. Quote, products marked Advantage Plus will allow you to automate an entire campaign flow from end to end or an entire core step of your manual campaign setup, such as placements or creative, unquote. And so look out for what used to be called

automated app ads will now be called Advantage Plus app campaigns. What we all know as automatic placements will be called Advantage Plus automatic placements. You'll also see Advantage Plus creative, which we all know is dynamic experiences, and Advantage Plus shopping campaigns will be coming soon. Reaction on Twitter yesterday, I think it's fair to say, was universally bad. DTC buyer David Herman said, oh my gosh, this company is a train wreck. Just so, so, so sad to see it come to this mess. And Corey Dobbin noted that Advantage Plus is now basically a surprise me button in ads manager. So yeah, happy Wednesday. TikTok may have captured the attention of marketers but is the sheen wearing off already a new study from digiday seems to show that quoting their report of the platform's appeal

among the 86 agency executives surveyed in february that actually spend client budgets on tick tock fewer than 20 say they're confident it works, far behind the social platforms that have dominated digital marketing for years now. In general, agencies and their brand clients, 145 of whom were polled in February, direct a fairly small amount of media to non-meta-owned social channels like TikTok, along with Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. The majority said they either spend a very small part of their budget on these channels, or none at all, which comes as somewhat of a surprise, given the attention paid to them by the consuming public. Still, the fact that all these channels, save Reddit,

register at among advertisers spending a large portion or very large portion indicates their futures are bright as marketing options. Attention, dude bros. The days of advertising your scammy crypto schemes with reckless abandon may be finally coming to an end. This week, the British Advertising Standard Authority sent an enforcement notice to more than 50 companies that run ads for crypto. The notice says those companies should not encourage people to buy crypto with credit cards and also not ask people to buy crypto with their pensions. Let's just pause for a moment to soak in how exploitative that industry must have gotten for a national regulator to actually have to send a letter asking people to stop convincing seniors

to spend what's left of their retirement money on some dumbass meme coin. As Media Post reported today, it's not just the Brits. Quote, in Australia, regulators sued Meta over scam celebrity crypto ads spread on Facebook. Singapore last year banned social media ads for crypto. Spain said it will require influencers to notify regulators about crypto posts. And India also set guidelines for crypto advertising, which go into effect April 1st. However, there seems to be little regulatory action so far in the US. In December, Facebook reversed its ban on crypto ads, remarking that the market

had, quote, matured. Meta had announced plans for a currency and digital wallet, but scaled back those ambitions significantly last year. So far, the Biden administration has taken tentative steps to monitor cryptocurrencies. Earlier this month, President Biden signed an executive order calling on the government to examine risks and benefits of cryptocurrencies. What is going on with SEO plugins this week? Yesterday, we reported on a bug with the popular WordPress plugin Yoast, which was creating duplicate sitemaps, possibly confusing Google, possibly impacting ranking. Today, we learned of another one, RankMath, also a WordPress plugin. And this particular bug might be worse in that reports say it doesn't just create duplicates,

it could create infinite copies of a sitemap. But just to confuse things, these infinite copies appear to be ghost copies that don't actually exist. Just to back up a little, a sitemap is a file on your web server that isn't shown to humans, but is kind of a table of contents for your website that search engines look at from time to time to find out what web pages your site has and where they are. Having your pages listed in a sitemap doesn't guarantee inclusion in a search engine, but it can help, especially if you have pages that are buried deep or not linked internally.

As for Rank Math, what seemed to be happening at first was that it was creating multiple sitemaps, each with a different number at the end. This isn't uncommon when you've got a lot of pages, but it shouldn't be just copying the same file and putting a new number there. And the developers behind the plugin say, actually, it was never doing that. It turns out, this bug might be the way WordPress servers handle file retrieval, sending the user's browser a special code saying, I sent this file with no errors. Even if you try to search for a sitemap with a huge number at the end, one that, you know, doesn't exist, WordPress might send that everything is cool response rather than a file not found message. So these infinite duplicates may not actually exist on the server, except when you specifically

ask for one. And even then they don't actually exist. But WordPress acts like it does. With me so far? The problem then is really with the search engines. If they get that everything is cool response, will they think there's a sitemap there? It's a little complicated, and if you care about getting into the weeds of this, there is a great piece up to date on searchenginejournal.com called Rank Math WordPress Plugin Duplicate Sitemap Bug. There comes a time in every established digital agency owner's business journey when growth hits a slump.

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Well, that was quick. The podcast ads platform Chartable, now part of Spotify, is dropping support for its industry leading smart ads product. They were only acquired by Spotify a few weeks ago, and they're already under orders to get in line. Spotify also bought the advertising measurement service PodSites, and Chartable says advertisers that wish to continue running attribution after June 30th of this year should onboard onto Podsites. Chartable will continue to accept bookings for the new Smart Ads campaigns through April 21st.

And June 30th will be the last day that new impressions tagged with Smart Ads will be measurable. The company says they'll continue to support Smart Ads reporting an attribution through each advertiser's look-back window. If you use their service, they say expect a call soon from their teams to help you move over to what they call the new PodSites transition opportunity. Also important, these updates only impact advertiser products, and all charitable publisher products will remain available. Shopify has launched a new link-in-bio tool called LinkPop that allows creators and followers to quickly get to promoted products and buy them, according to the company's announcement. Creators on social media platforms like Instagram can add the LinkPop link to their bio, and in one click, their followers are taken to a storefront powered by Shopify. Once users click on the link, they are taken to a curated selection of products

and can purchase directly on LinkPop without having to leave the social media app they're on. This way, consumers don't have to search for products in another environment, and marketers will have a better idea the impact the creator had on the sale, unquote. Yeah, I think everyone in the space saw this coming. These LinkedIn bio services are everywhere these days, and it only makes sense for Shopify to have its own and hook some metrics up to it. Also this week, Shopify added a new predictive spend tier feature that lets you categorize customers' spending according to three potential categories or tiers,

high, medium, or low. And they've also added automated email campaigns. That comes with a handful of email templates and lets you map out your own workflow for creating and scheduling emails. And you can now send up to 10,000 emails for free per month using the Shopify email service. Three small LinkedIn updates to bring you up to speed on. First, they are making their newsletters product more widely available. Members who opt in will receive notifications on platform and via email when new editions are published. Second, LinkedIn has revamped its campaign manager,

that's what it calls its ads manager, to mirror the the lifecycle of a typical campaign on its platform. Plan, advertise, test, analyze. Also, campaign manager now offers quicker access to account settings and asset management, as well as the ability to toggle between multiple accounts. And finally, they've added the ability to export the company engagement report as a CSV file. That file can then be used to analyze accounts, share data with other people who don't use LinkedIn Campaign Manager, like executives and sales teams and so on. The report provides metrics like engagement level, number of members targeted, the number of ad campaigns that served impressions, ad engagement, organic engagement, and total website visits as measured by the LinkedIn pixel.

So I'm sorry if I'm snarky today. I mean, yes, the whole meta advantage thing got under my skin. Because does anyone actually understand how they're prioritizing their product development? I think what really actually kind of got me, A, I switched to decaf again. Don't ever do that. And B, we're having some like weird issues with Stripe, which is where the money from the premium newsletter and the premium podcast feed come from. It used to be that Stripe would just simply convert U.S. dollars to Canadian dollars,

since we are in Canada and have a Canadian dollar bank account. We just convert it at the exchange rate and pop it into our account. Now, apparently, they're just holding our money. Didn't tell us they were doing this, by the way. They're just holding our money and demanding that we now have a U.S. dollar account. It's not a big deal, I suppose. I just have to go to the bank today. And I don't like leaving the house because, you know, I'm lazy. Anyway, on the show tomorrow, the head of

Twitter's marketing in Canada joins me to talk about their new study that has identified three big trends. We also will talk about how you can use those trends. And I will ask her the question we all want. When is that edit button coming? That's on the show tomorrow. Talk to you then. I ain't no bitch to get you rich Well, I'm breaking my back Down and down you go I hope you know that we are through It's the season for new styles

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