Today in Digital Marketing - Is It Possible? Facebook Ads Do Nothing?!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, is it true? Have we been blinded all along and never realized that Facebook ads actually do nothing? Plus, going digital for a very in-person marketing tactic? A new ads platform will test the balance between effective targeting and user privacy. And how much money would Donald Trump make on Twitter if he were a social media influencer? It's Thursday, January 14th, 2021. Happy Orthodox New Year. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:31 And we start with a quiz. What percentage of people who search Google for products they can buy online click on an ad first? Is it 80%, 60%, 40%, or 20%? That's people who click a Google ad when searching for products. I'll have the answer at the end of today's episode. Is it possible that Facebook advertising, despite its depth of targeting options, does almost nothing when it comes to increasing sales?

Starting point is 00:01:06 Some new data from Forrester says it studied the numbers from 43 public companies that boycotted Facebook last summer. Only seven saw their revenue drop in the third quarter. The other 36, again, despite not advertising on the Facebook platform, their revenue went up. We sometimes have blinders on, I think, that the single solution to a marketing issue, like we need to fill a pipeline faster, is to throw media spend at it. And that's not always the solution. Time and time again, we're shown that sometimes even old school methods like email newsletters or referral programs or even contests are perfectly capable of moving the needle. The study author told Retail Dive, quote,

Starting point is 00:01:48 The fact that they did okay and there was literally no negative impact, they did no worse than their worst timeframes, suggests to me that the incremental lift from Facebook ads is very, very limited, unquote. Last year, Facebook made about $70 billion in ad revenue. Facebook and Google together control more than 60% of the digital ad market. You can't set up kiosks in stores because of COVID. You can't do blind taste tests. So what do you do to promote your food brand? You go digital, of course. And since

Starting point is 00:02:26 it's still the golden child, you go to Zoom. That was the strategy recently of an American brand of nut-based milk called Milkademia. They paid a half dozen actors to join them on a Zoom session with the unmarked box the company had shipped to them. And without telling them the name of the product or even the name of their company, invited them to take a sip of the drink. It's good. It's like smooth. Yeah, that's good.

Starting point is 00:02:52 It's creamy. I really like this. Media Post noted that the ad doesn't disclose their paid actors, but Milkadamia says they were paid like you'd pay a focus group participant. They truly didn't know why they'd been asked to join the Zoom call at first.

Starting point is 00:03:05 Interesting solution to a big problem. With the recent missteps in messaging around the changes to WhatsApp's privacy policy, many competing messaging apps are gaining a whole hell of a lot of new users. When you've got a sudden increase in usage and server costs and customer service costs, you've got to sudden increase in usage and server costs and customer service costs. You've got to make money somehow. And so one of the largest alternatives says it will launch an ad platform soon. The app in question, Telegram. It's getting close to a half billion users and has depleted the resources of its founder, which had been personally bankrolling it until now. It says its forthcoming ad platform will be one that is, quote, user-friendly and respects privacy, unquote.

Starting point is 00:03:46 And that'll be interesting, to say the least, to see how they implement an ad platform that respects privacy. After all, the most effective ad platforms are those that use a ton of user data for targeting. If I know you're in the market for a car because a data provider captured that interest somewhere in your decision cycle, that's going to be a lot more valuable to me than just hitting a broad demographic of 25 to 44-year-olds. The founder wrote today, our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds.

Starting point is 00:04:17 In many markets, the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own ad platform for public one-to-many channels, unquote. To be clear, they don't see ads coming in private one-to-one chats or in group chats, and this probably won't start until a year from now anyway, but it does sound like there'll be one more ad platform in the mix. If every influencer has a value and every tweet can be monetized,

Starting point is 00:04:56 how much was American President Donald Trump's Twitter value before he was banned from the platform? Well, influencer marketing agency Clear says it thinks it knows the answer. It looked at both reach and engagement to get a number, and that number, about $2.2 million. They say that's what Trump would have had to have spent to get the same results if he'd have bought that exposure in the digital ad market. They say in the 30 days prior to being deplatformed, he was averaging 18 and a half tweets a day. He had 88 million followers. By the way, that's about 13 million more than the 75 million votes he received in this past election. Digital channels continue to react to Trump's

Starting point is 00:05:31 incitement to violence at the U.S. Capitol. YouTube yesterday says it banned Trump from uploading to his account for one week and Snapchat banned him permanently. All right, some small items to wrap up. Sprout Social's mobile app has been updated, so you can now find specific messages in the inbox using the author's name. Same function has been added to searching reviews. YouTube

Starting point is 00:05:55 has added a new reporting metric that will show performance of a video within the first 24 hours after publishing. And Hootsuite is dealing with a bug today with its Assignments Manager, where new contents handled by automated rules are missing. Oh, and the answer to today's quiz. What percentage of people who search Google

Starting point is 00:06:14 for products they can buy online click on an ad first? The answer? Only 20%. This number from Search Metrics, 32% click on an organic result first. So what, you ask, do the remaining 48% click if they're not clicking on an ad or an organic result? Actually, they're not clicking anything.

Starting point is 00:06:35 Either they back out or use a zero-click answer that Google provides in a knowledge box. My thanks to Fran Warrior in France who reviewed this podcast saying, I started listening when I started my career as a PPC freelancer in September. Been listening to it every day since. Love the content and jokes. Thank you so much, Fran Warrior. If you'd like a shout out, just rate and review this podcast. There's a link in the episode notes that makes that a simple one-click process. Okay, early episode today because of some client meetings. Talk to you tomorrow. And we're still proud. Oh, I thank you for it. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots.

Starting point is 00:07:36 So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca.

Today in Digital Marketing - Is It Possible? Facebook Ads Do Nothing?!

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