Today in Digital Marketing - Is Facebook’s Biggest API Gap Closing?

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

Social media community managers rejoice! One of the biggest gaps in Facebook’s API is closing. Also, Twitter says don’t panic about Apple’s ad tracking changes. Amazon’s revenue from ad sales are much bigger than you ever thought. Adobe makes common PDF actions free. And this week in "What’s Instagram Copying Now?"About the Podcast:Enjoying the Show? Rate/Review Us!Join Our Free Slack CommunityMore: Ads / Classifieds • Transcripts • Leave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchMore Info on the Stories Covered:Twitter and IDFAAmazon QuarterliesGoogle QuarterliesGoogle My Business and Co-Working SpacesWeb Stories UpdateAdobe PDF ChangesTwo New Podcasts a MinuteInstagram Stories - Swipe UpToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. 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

Today, social media community managers rejoice. One of the biggest gaps in Facebook's API is closing. Also, Twitter says don't panic about Apple's ad tracking changes. Amazon's revenue from ad sales are a lot bigger than you ever thought. Adobe makes common PDF actions free. And this week, in What's Instagram Copying Now? It's Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021. Happy Heroes Day, Mozambique.

I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Love them or hate them, you can't deny that Facebook groups are a powerful way to communicate with people. The algorithm still prioritizes groups over brand pages, and there are much stronger moderation controls. So then why have so few brands and agencies

embraced groups as part of their social strategy? I can't speak for other brands and agencies, but I'll tell you why we've recommended our clients not use groups. Moderation. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof. Oh, it's not that you can't moderate comments and posts. You can. You just have to do it on Facebook's site. Because until now, it's not been in the API. Which means third-party tools you actually use for your social media community management, like Hootsuite, Agorapulse, Sprinklr, Copilot, all those, can't do anything beyond publish content to groups. And yes, you heard me right. Until now.

We used Sprout Social here at our agency and noticed yesterday some new text on their channel onboarding screen. It read, Manage incoming messages in Facebook groups coming soon. A Sprout rep told me later that yes, it's happening

and we'll roll out on their platform sometime this quarter. This is a big deal, could very well put a lot of brands into the group space. If and when Sprout or the other platforms start rolling this out, you'll hear about it here first. Google is doing a webinar about it, Facebook is running hate ads in newspapers about it,

and now Twitter has come out with its own thoughts on Apple's forthcoming IDFA update. The TLDR, gosh, there's a lot of four-letter acronyms today. The TLDR, unless you are marketing a mobile app, you should be okay. Quoting the company, we have taken steps to support Apple's proprietary attribution solution, which enables click install reporting aggregated at the campaign or ad group level. We believe that IDFA will largely impact app install and app re-engagement products. We do not believe any immediate action is needed at this time for advertisers who leverage products other than our app installs products. For example, if you are an advertiser that leverages website, video, and awareness products, no action is needed as of now. We will continue to share updates if this changes. Now the quarterlies are trickling out and with it some interesting data around the digital

ad market. For one, Amazon's advertising revenue grew 64% in Q4 year over year, which means for the first time, revenue from ads is now higher than their subscription services, yes, including Amazon Prime. Ad revenue also grew faster than any other income category, including their cloud service, AWS, including even their primary e-commerce operations. An ROI genome report recently found Amazon ads have about a 20% higher ROI than a brand's average marketing ROI. Obviously, that's for select B2C categories only. So with those good numbers, they're diving in even deeper.

Quoting MarketingDive.com, to make the platform a more appealing destination for advertisers, the company is using a deep learning model to show more relevant sponsored products and improve the relevancy of ads shown on the product detail pages and has seen rapid adoption of video creative formats for sponsored brands. These developments can help Amazon keep pace with other advertising platforms and retailers that are bolstering their own ad networks like Walmart. Also reporting this week was Google.

More record numbers there. 23% up in Q4 ad revenue. The shining star, YouTube, which on its own garnered 46% more ad dollars than the previous Q4. Perhaps more relevant to our work as digital marketers, YouTube says it now reaches more 18 to 49 year olds than all linear TV networks combined. And this stat, which is so mind boggling that I would love to know the methodology employed here, but the company claims 70% of its users reported buying something from a brand after seeing it on YouTube. And yes, COVID affected ad spending. Remember, in Q2, they reported their first ad sales decline in the company's 26-year history.

That appears to be gone now. Amazing what a few months will do. Whether you're just launching your business or you're a small boutique agency or something, you might be working from a co-working space. Co-working spaces have a lot of benefits, but until now, there's been one big drawback. Google hasn't allowed most businesses operating within co-working spaces to have their own Google My Business profile. And sure, lots of companies have gotten around this,

but officially, it's been a bit of a challenge. Now, Google's added a couple of guidelines that, if followed, will get you your own profile. Basically, if your business is based in a shared office, to qualify for a GMB profile, your business must, one, have its own clear signage, two, you must accept customers there, and three, the location must be staffed during business hours. That'll be good news once we're all allowed to work together again.

By the way, there does seem to be a small bug this week in Google My Business profiles. Some digital marketers reporting their complete your business profile box is stuck at 85% and even adding everything it wants does not get it up to 100%. Google is aware of the issue and is working on it. If you do any level of B2C marketing,

you may have experimented with vertical stories. Hell, you might be doing nothing but stories. And chances are that work has appeared on other platforms, Instagram, Snapchat, and the likes. Those are great platforms for discovery and big audiences, but they come at a cost.

You need to adhere to the policies of that platform. Maybe what you sell is in one of those iffy categories, like cannabis or adult toys. Luckily, there is another place for your stories, one that isn't reliant on your adherence to any other platform policies, and it's a spot most digital marketers are not using. They're called web stories, and they live on your website. People using mobile devices can swipe through vertical media

just like they're used to on the other apps. Google has developed one of the most widely used versions of this, People using mobile devices can swipe through vertical media just like they're used to on the other apps. Google has developed one of the most widely used versions of this, a plug-in for WordPress. And this week, they released an update with some new features. First, your own stories feed can now be monetized if you want. You basically just turn that on in the plug-in settings. Of course, this means your visitors will get ads occasionally between your stories. There's a new page layouts section and new text animations. Google says coming soon, they will add things like Ken Burns-style animations and a timeline that will let you control easing and delays with more granularity.

And in case you're wondering, yes, content in those web stories on your website will count for ranking in Google's index, with one exception. Google will not rank your stories if you are only using them as clickbait or teasers and require people to visit your main site to read the full content. Adobe has put some of its PDF functionality onto the web and outside the paywall. You can now convert from Word to PDF, compress a file or e-sign a PDF on their website and without their monthly extortion fee. Oh, I'm sorry, I read that wrong. Subscription fee.

You can also password protect a PDF, split a PDF into two, or merge multiple PDFs in the browser. No need for the app now. And Adobe has also jumped on the.new domain trend as well. You can now go to pdf.new to create a new PDF. You'll still need a paid subscription for the other fancy stuff like editing, redacting, or using OCR. And two small items to wrap up. First, new data from Chartable shows more than 885,000 new podcasts launched last year.

When you do the math, that's almost two new podcasts every minute. Education podcasts were the top category. The Internet Advertising Bureau says despite the pandemic, podcast ad revenues are expected to come in 15% higher in 2020. And finally, Instagram confirmed today that it is testing a new method to navigate from one story to the other. Currently, as you probably know, you tap on the right side of the screen. The new method they're working on? Swiping up. Yeah, it's almost as if they're copying the idea from TikTok. But Instagram would never copy a competitor, would they?

And don't forget, I am building out a Twitter list of followers of this podcast. So if you're listening right now and want to be on that list, just tweet the hashtag Today in Digital. That's all you need to tweet if you want. You can also comment on the show with that hashtag or give us some feedback. But if you just want to be added to the list, just tweet hashtag Today in Digital. And my extended conversation with John Loomer about how the forthcoming iOS changes will affect digital marketing campaigns is available right now for free in our Slack community. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in this episode's notes. And now here it is, your moment of digital marketing zen. It certainly is a big bun.

It's a very big bun. Big fluffy bun. It's a very big fluffy bun. Where's the beat? Listen up, little girl with the big smile. Yeah, you little one with the big style. All day long with your heart on your sleeve. A bit humdrum but not so naive

You got a world of life within your palm And everybody knows that doesn't last too long Make of this time the best that you will too And never underestimate what you can do