Today in Digital Marketing - Manual Placements: [__] Instagram Reels

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, that budget you're testing on TikTok? Be protected. Be Zen. Amazon says one thing, but does another. It's Thursday, June 17th, 2021. Happy Independence Day, Iceland. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. There's a new placement coming to your Facebook ads manager.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Reels. This morning, the company announced advertisers will soon be able to run their messaging alongside Facebook's answer to TikTok. The rollout has started now and will get to all ad accounts in all countries in the coming days. The ads are up to 30 seconds long and, like Reels themselves, they'll loop. People will be able to like them, comment on them, and save them. These ads will show up in between regular Reels, but Instagram wouldn't say how much saturation they'd give to the new format. In other words, how often users might see a Reels ad. With regard to buying, these work the same way the platform's other ads work.

Starting point is 00:01:31 It's an auction model. You'll do it through Ads Manager. They have been testing it in a few countries for a couple of months. But one thing I thought was noticeably absent from their announcement was any kind of mention of how those tests did. Usually when Facebook rolls out a new ad format, they've got some impressive case studies with their test partners. Nike got 50% more clicks or Disney saw 30% lower CPMs. None of that with this announcement, though. Read into that what you will. Quoting TechCrunch,

Starting point is 00:02:01 nor is it yet offering advertisers any creator tools or templates that could help them get started with Reels ads. Instead, Instagram likely assumes advertisers already have creative assets on hand or know how to make them because of Reel's ads to drive users to its built-in Instagram shops, though that seems like a natural next step as it attempts to tie the different parts of its app together. TechCrunch also noted that TikTok's ridiculously low CPMs have, predictably, started to tick up in the last couple of months. And on the premium ad side, the homepage takeover is now $1.4 million. They say it'll be $2 million by the end of the year. Both Instagram and TikTok apps now have more than a billion monthly active users globally. But those Instagram numbers represent all formats, feed, IGTV, stories, and reels. The company would not say how many people use reels specifically.

Starting point is 00:03:14 You spent hours on that report, fighting with your data tool, trying to break out real data from modeled data. And finally, you present the CEO with the numbers on your last campaign. Well, if new data from behavioral targeting platform Bango is to be believed, your CEO ain't impressed. The company polled more than 200 CEOs and, of that group, 55% said they thought digital marketing metrics were meaningless if they aren't directly associated with sales. Nearly two-thirds of CEOs also feel that too much marketing budget is wasted

Starting point is 00:03:46 on activities that don't deliver meaningful results. The Bango report argues that digital marketing has lost its way, with many marketers trying to disguise poor results behind a haze of meaningless metrics that aren't relevant to the C-suite. To address this issue, Bango's Bored to Death report suggests that marketers focus less on using social media to gain likes and followers and instead use it to collect insights on what customers actually buy.

Starting point is 00:04:14 Sounds like basic advice, and I'm sure every one of you who listen to this podcast already understands this, but it still shocks me how many of our fellow digital marketers and our clients and our agencies still focus on reactions rather than revenue? If you sell any physical product online,

Starting point is 00:04:34 there's a good chance some seller in China is undercutting you on Amazon and maybe doing it with the help of some fake reviews. So exactly how many reviews on Amazon are fake? For the first time, Amazon has shared some numbers, and they are astounding. In a blog post yesterday, the company said it stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews before they were ever seen by a customer. Quoting TechCrunch, 200 million is a lot no matter how you look at it, but it's really a lot when you consider that Amazon told CNBC that it analyzes over 10 million review submissions weekly, which adds up to somewhere north of 520 million submissions yearly. These two Amazon-provided numbers suggest that a third of all reviews submitted, at a minimum, are rejected as fake.

Starting point is 00:05:24 Hard numbers on Amazon's total reviews are hard to come by. ReviewMeta estimates that in 2020, Amazon hosted around 250 million reviews, of which they calculated about 9% were unnatural. But if over 500 million were submitted in 2020, and about 200 million of those were fake, that indicates a far larger total, unquote. In their blog post, Amazon said, we need coordinated assistance from consumer protection regulators around the world. Really, Amazon?

Starting point is 00:05:54 Aren't you the company that lobbied against the Inform Act? An act that would have identified sellers with bad intent? An act that ended up failing? Indeed, as TechCrunch notes, quote, nowhere in the post does Amazon detail any new steps it will take to deter these bad actors or crack down on the pervasive gaming of the system for which it sets the rules. It will continue to enhance its detection tools, streamline processes for partnerships, and work hard at keeping scammers accountable. In other words,

Starting point is 00:06:26 it will keep doing exactly what it's been doing this whole time, which is what put it in this position in the first place, unquote. Amazon is expected to earn more than $386 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales this year. To put that in perspective, its closest competitor in terms of e-commerce sales is Walmart, and they're forecast to make $67 billion. Remember, Amazon, $386 billion. In fact, Amazon is expected to close out the year with more sales than the rest of the top 10 American retailers combined. The fastest growing e-commerce market last year was Argentina, which more than doubled in the last year, followed by Canada, where the market grew 75%.

Starting point is 00:07:06 It's not just TikTok. Facebook is also scrambling to jump on another hot trend, podcasts. Reports say they will start rolling out their podcast product next week. That functionality will also let listeners create clips from their favorite shows, though apparently podcast owners will be able to turn that off if they like. The Verge says hosts will be able to link their show's RSS feed up to Facebook, which will then populate the page's feed with episodes. Apparently it'll roll out in stages. Only a few page owners will get access next week.

Starting point is 00:07:37 The new terms and conditions for podcasts does have some language that lets Facebook create derivative works. There's not really any detail on exactly how they would use that, although, you know, we might guess that it's kind of standard to allow things like those clips. This is one of a number of audio features being added. Yesterday, they ran a somewhat buggy test of their Clubhouse clone, and they're also working on something called Soundbytes, which is basically an embeddable audio player in the news feed, sort of like how the SoundCloud integration works.

Starting point is 00:08:04 Side note, 20 bucks says the SoundCloud integration works. Side note, 20 bucks says that SoundCloud integration will suddenly stop working once this rolls out. So far, no word on how Facebook plans to monetize the format, though you can certainly expect there to be some kind of ad placement. YouTube continues to work on its TikTok clone, which it calls Shorts. There's a new setting in YouTube Studio that will let brand managers stop people from using the audio from the brand's videos in Shorts remixes. This kind of remixing is part of the culture of this vertical video trend. Part of TikTok's popularity rests on its stitch and duet features, but even there you can prevent people from doing either.

Starting point is 00:08:44 YouTube will also let you block all forms of repurposing from your shorts video in bulk. That said, quoting socialmediatoday.com, YouTube is hoping to make remixing a key element of shorts engagement, as it is already on TikTok, with YouTube having an exponentially larger content library for users to choose from to create their own creative shorts clips. But obviously, a lot of creators have concerns about such and don't want their clips spliced into much smaller, potentially mocking samples. As such, YouTube's added this new control option, which provides more capacity to help YouTubers manage the usage of their clips, unquote.

Starting point is 00:09:20 Also, they've added Shorts Analytics to the main YouTube mobile app. Previously, those numbers were only available in YouTube Studio. And finally, some good news. A study from People Per Hour analyzed data from 15,000 freelancers on its platform and has found that the most in-demand freelancing jobs are in digital marketing. Web developers make up 21% of the demand, followed by content writers, graphic designers, and SEO specialists. So if you're not following me on TikTok,

Starting point is 00:09:58 you are missing the daily summary of this daily summary. Every day after we put out the podcast, I upload a 60-second review of the main stories in the show. I also live stream the voicing of this podcast. So it might be nice to add to your TikTok following feed.

Starting point is 00:10:13 My account there is at digitalmarketingsecrets. I do have a personal account there too, just under my name, at Todd Maffin, which you're welcome to follow too, but it's really just videos of my dog. Talk to you tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:10:29 Sis-boom-bah. Sis-boom-bah. Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes. Hey, break it down. MC, turn it around. Thank you.

Today in Digital Marketing - Manual Placements: [__] Instagram Reels

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