Today in Digital Marketing - Is the End Near for Facebook’s Audience Network?

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today is the end near Be protected. Be Zen. buy to one of the world's longest-running marketing taglines. It's Wednesday, August 26, 2020. Happy tomato-throwing festival day, Spain. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Facebook this week unveiled a new artificial intelligence project it's been working on.

Starting point is 00:01:02 So what will it do? Maybe finally fix the chronic problem of ad accounts being arbitrarily blocked? Maybe give digital marketers more than last-click attribution? Nope. Their new AI will make up dance moves. In a year when thousands of advertisers were locked out of their ad accounts by AI, Facebook committed the resources

Starting point is 00:01:22 of who knows how many engineers to the global problem of not enough dance moves. Quoting from Facebook, the system analyzes a music track from nearly any genre and just moments later cooks up some synchronized moves. The system's code works by detecting quantifiable similarities in a song at two different points in time, then searching for similar mathematical patterns in a giant matrix of dance move sequences. I know you're asking, why? And the answer is TikTok. If you've been on TikTok, you'll know that many, not all, but many videos are mostly of younger people doing a short choreographed dance. A song clip will get popular, someone will make up a dance routine to go along with it,

Starting point is 00:02:07 and somehow that spreads so that lots of people are doing that exact routine, or as close as they can get anyway. So maybe Facebook here is trying to give people help with coming up with a dance routine? Maybe? But as socialmediatoday.com noted, quote, creative elements like this have never been Facebook's strong suit. Facebook's AR masks and filters, for example, are more technically advanced than those available on Snapchat. But Snapchat is the platform that's seen continued success with viral trends via its AR creation tools to outside creators in the hopes of catching on to the next big trend before it emerges, its own internal creative approaches have never been overly great outside of functional developments, unquote.

Starting point is 00:03:01 While we are on the TikTok, Google Discover is now showcasing short vertical videos in its real estate. Discover, if you're not familiar with this, it shows up to the left of most Android home screens or in the Google app, which you can also download on iPhones. It's sort of a curated news feed of stories and YouTube videos that thinks you'll be interested in. It does reach hundreds of millions of people a month. These short videos are not TikTok videos, of course, and they seem to be different than the AMP-formatted stories that we saw being tested a couple of months ago. It's not clear how widely this will roll out or how it connects to the same format

Starting point is 00:03:34 you can see in the YouTube mobile app. Google is also rumored to be working on its own TikTok competitor called Shorts. If you are still wondering why all these apps are obsessed with TikTok, the company this week revealed its actual user counts for the first time.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Until now, all we had were analyst estimates or App Store download counts. TikTok says 15% of all Americans watch TikTok videos every day. 15%. That's 50 million people. Some big changes are on the way for Facebook's audience network.

Starting point is 00:04:15 Audience network, sometimes known as its acronym FAN, is a big database of websites and mobile apps which will show Facebook ads. I would say that most digital marketers who spend a lot of time in Facebook's ads ecosystem will tell you that audience network is one of the poorest performing placements. It's fine if your goal is a whole lot of eyeballs, but beyond that, you won't get many clicks or certainly conversions. That said, a lot of marketers do use audience network, even if they don't mean to. That's because not only is audience network selected when automatic placements are on,

Starting point is 00:04:46 Facebook will even pop up a little box recommending that you should turn it on if you have manually turned it off. Anyway, expect the quality of audience network to get worse. But don't blame Facebook. Blame Apple. With the new iPhone operating system coming in the fall, developers like Facebook will be required to show a warning label to users before collecting IDFA information.

Starting point is 00:05:12 IDFA is short for Identification for Advertisers. It's basically a unique code that identifies a specific device. You can see how this will play out, of course. iPhone users will suddenly get a pop-up box that basically says, would you like to share your information with advertisers? How many do you think will be saying, oh my god, yes, please, I've been waiting for this moment? No, not many. Facebook, in fact, is so scared about the brand damage that a pop-up box like that may cause

Starting point is 00:05:41 that they just straight up won't collect any IDFA from users of the new operating system. A change that Bloomberg says will, quote, drastically hinder the social network's targeted advertising business, unquote. Facebook agrees, saying the change will severely impact audience network. They say audience network revenue could drop by as much as 50%. Another large retail chain has decided to go it alone and launch its own digital ads platform. The American pharmacy chain CVS now has a media network of its own to sell ad space directly to marketers. Of course, they're probably expecting consumer brands will want to be in there. The ad platform does have a lot of placements, from banner ads on their websites, of course, to ads that run on screens in-store, to their social media channels, online video, and so on. The real value here, of course, is that closed

Starting point is 00:06:34 loop. Customers walk into a store, see an ad, and buy the product. With this kind of platform, CVS knows when that ad ran in the store and if a customer bought that product because they have the purchase data right there. This lets them offer metrics that are way further down the funnel than things like ad recall. They can offer numbers on sales lift and growth of new buyers. Some effects on digital marketing caused by the pandemic lockdown we probably could have predicted. For instance, it was no surprise that the number of people asking Google Maps for driving directions were down. Phone calls, on the other hand, were up. Visits to websites were up.

Starting point is 00:07:18 And now that things are slowly getting back to normal, we are indeed seeing a rise in consumers going back to physical stores. But one study from Brandify has found that this rise in bricks and mortar business so far has not been accompanied by a decline in phone calls or website visits. Generally speaking, I think we can kind of infer from the data that consumers are in a high information need mode still. Damian Rawlinson works at Brandify. They manage Google My Business listings for multi-location brands across 16 verticals. He spoke with me on Monday. Meaning they still need to know, is this business open?

Starting point is 00:07:57 Have its hours changed? Is it upholding health and safety regulations? Because some places enforce mask wearing and others don't really do that great a job. And so consumers are concerned about that. Can I order for curbside pickup? I mean, all the different questions that consumers have in this still pretty uncertain period. What we're seeing is that those questions continue. The intent to transact business is a lot higher than it normally is. So we look at the rate of searches versus the rate of actions within Google My Business as a measurement that's kind of like click-through rate for advertising. And it's about 41% greater likelihood to act

Starting point is 00:08:40 than in previous pre-COVID times. So you put that together and it kind of suggests that consumers are doing a lot of pre-work before they venture out to a business, including calling them and visiting their website so that they can be sure when they go and complete that transaction that it has a strong likelihood of the item being in stock or the service being available and so on.

Starting point is 00:09:03 We covered a lot of ground in the full interview, which you can listen to unedited right now in our Slack community. It's free to join. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in the episode's notes. You'll find the interview in the channel called Exclusive Content. Also, by the way, tomorrow, that's Thursday this week, Brandify is doing a webinar covering topics like how consumer engagement with Google My Business has changed. And they're showing off some strategies that they recommend to acquire more conversions and more customers from your Google My Business profile.

Starting point is 00:09:37 There's a link to register in the episode notes. If you had to put money on the next digital marketing tactic to get a lot of use, you might want to consider putting some money down on content marketing, especially after hearing about some recent research from the Association of National Advertisers and the Content Council. The proportion of major advertisers they say are strongly committed to content marketing has doubled over just the past two years. The study polled 126 senior marketers from the U.S. and Canada who work for brands with average revenue of about $8 billion.

Starting point is 00:10:14 So we're talking big brands here. 52% said their brand is now strongly committed to content marketing. That's up from just 26% who said the same two years ago. Even more impressive, 78% expect their firm's commitment to content marketing to be stronger two years from now. As for who's doing that work, about two-thirds say they will keep that work in-house, though that number has been falling a touch. You've heard me talk about how Google considers the speed of your website to be a factor in how high you rank. And I've run across really the coolest little app I've seen in a while.

Starting point is 00:10:55 It connects with your Google Drive account and will automatically drop your core web vitals into a spreadsheet. And not just yours, but your competitors too. The applet is the spreadsheet. And not just yours, but your competitors too. The applet is the spreadsheet. There's no actual app, no website to visit, no recurring subscriptions. You literally just put the URLs in some cells and press a button and it will have Google put those numbers in there. Core Web Vitals is one metric that Google uses to determine how friendly your site is. It measures how fast your website loads, how soon someone can interact with it,

Starting point is 00:11:25 and how much your layout jumps around. Another nice little thing, it will let you visualize the change in those metrics over time using sparklines. But best of all, once you set it up, which honestly only takes like 10 seconds, it will keep updating every day. There's a link in the notes

Starting point is 00:11:42 if you'd like to try it out for yourself. Google has updated its AdSense reporting platform. Think of AdSense as the other side of the ads ecosystem. Instead of Google Ads, where we digital marketers buy ads, AdSense is where the publishers of websites that show our ads go to see how much money they've made. Most users of AdSense are small websites trying to eke out a bit of extra monetization through a handful of banner spots, but those spots are up for us to buy

Starting point is 00:12:11 through the regular ads platform. Among the changes there, the interface has been redesigned to make it easier to select date ranges, filters, and breakdowns. Charts are more closely integrated with data tables. It all works better on mobile and is more contextual help on some of the metrics.

Starting point is 00:12:30 64 years. That is how long KFC has been using its marketing tagline. You know it, don't you? It is a finger-lickin' day. It's a finger-lickin' good day. Good times together seem to... It's a great taglineickin' day. It's a finger-lickin' good day. Good times together seem to... Great tagline. Unless, of course, the planet is in the middle of a global pandemic.

Starting point is 00:12:51 Then, not so great. And so, KFC is pulling that tagline. Not forever, mind you. They say they'll bring it back when the time is right. And they're actually doing an ad campaign that shows them pulling it. The ads show their tagline blurred out on ad campaigns throughout the years, from outdoor media right to their chicken buckets. This is the first time the company has done a single marketing campaign execution in every market in which it operates.

Starting point is 00:13:20 Well, my apologies for being absent from your podcast feed yesterday. My wife actually suddenly took quite ill, so I took the day off to help out there. She is feeling much better today. Thank goodness. Thank you for your kind notes, by the way, in Slack and on Twitter. You know, sometimes when you stand in this little echoey booth here of mine that converted, you know, bedroom closet, I think sometimes I forget that real people actually listen to the show. I mean, I see the numbers. I know that we're past 1,000 downloads an episode now, which is great.

Starting point is 00:13:47 But sometimes I forget that real people are listening. And so those of you, especially in Slack, who sent some nice comments, I really appreciate it. It's nice to know that human beings are behind this little microphone here. If you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed the show. And if you're getting value from this daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. There must be something about your fatal kiss.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Cause I can't wait till tomorrow. There must be something about your fatal kiss. Cause I can't wait till tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Is the End Near for Facebook’s Audience Network?

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