Today in Digital Marketing - Meet "MER": Your Next Favourite Marketing Metric

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. 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.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, a clever way to change conversion values automatically, how to measure your campaigns with less and less data, the exodus of Facebook senior executives continues, and why this sound could be the future of radio.

Starting point is 00:01:18 It's Friday, August 20th, 2021. Happy National Radio Day, America. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 451. If you need to change the URL of a web page, that's easy to do from a technical point of view, but it may have a significant and negative effect on that page's Google listing. After all, if it's not at the old address, Google assumes you've deleted it. So most of us will use A301 redirect. This is a way to tell Google, hey, we've moved this page permanently, so here's the new address, and we don't plan to move it back. But how long is Google's memory? On the Friday Quiz, how long will Google retry old, redirected URLs? Will it only check once, make a note of it, then never visit the old URL again?

Starting point is 00:02:11 Will it check once a year? Will it try potentially for years, but at a slower frequency of checking? Or does it remain on the same schedule as it always was, forever, just in case it comes back? The answer to the Friday Quiz, later in today's episode. One of the strongest metrics we have in the various social ad platforms is conversion value. This lets us put a dollar figure on what a conversion is worth to us. If you're advertising a $20 book and you get a conversion, you can tell the platform to report that as $20 in value so we can calculate our ROAS,

Starting point is 00:02:51 return on ad spend. But it's not always that simple. Think about business-to-business prospects. That's not a sale with a dollar amount. That's a lead. So B2B marketers generally estimate what they think the value of that lead is. Most people use a calculation like this. Well, average customer lifetime value is a thousand bucks, and we turn 10% of those leads into customers, so that lead is worth $100. It's imperfect, of course, and ignores a lot of the smaller signals that might indicate a higher quality lead. Is a lead worth more when the customer is local? Maybe. Well, this week, Google gave us digital marketers a way to change that conversion or lead value on the fly using the same kind of rules that automate delivery of your campaigns.

Starting point is 00:03:41 Quoting Search Engine Journal.com, Conversion value rules will adjust the value of a given conversion based upon factors that impact lead quality and value. The rules allow advertisers to indicate instances when a conversion is worth more or less than the average conversion based upon various characteristics of the auction, such as location, device, and audiences. For instance, local businesses could indicate that a conversion is worth more to them if the lead is local. B2B companies could prioritize the B2B audiences in detailed demographics.

Starting point is 00:04:15 A retailer could increase the conversion value of customers, likely to have high lifetime value. Or let's say that the account is set up to value all conversions at $20. If mobile leads tend to convert to sales at a conversion rate 50% of that of desktop, a conversion rule could be in place to let Google know that mobile leads are only worth half the value of other leads. Then Google would use a $10 value for mobile searches while continuing to optimize all other searches for a $20 value, unquote. This is obviously a great new tool for us, especially in this world where it's getting harder to track ROI. You can set up these rules in the conversions settings of your Google ad account and select value rules on the left hand side. Much of the data that we're seeing in Facebook's Ads Manager, and to be fair, all of the Ads Managers, is well made up.

Starting point is 00:05:11 Educated guesses based on machine learning. It's guessing because lots of people have opted out of ad tracking on Apple devices. Not as many as we all thought would, but enough that it's having a pretty big impact on our ability to measure ROAS. This measurement gap is causing some marketers to develop new ways of measuring results, and one that's gaining traction is MER, the Marketing Efficiency Ratio. And really what this is doing is essentially saying, here's what we've spent and here's what we've made. Andrew Foxwell is a Facebook ads veteran of more than 10 years. He spoke with me this morning. And it allows us to back out of the Facebook

Starting point is 00:05:48 reported data because one of the things that's happening with Facebook ROAS, return on ad spend, is it is now in buckets of value. So you don't have an exact value. So you can't really trust ROAS as reported by Facebook at this time for opted out users. Basically, it gives up more of a buffer for you if you're running your ads for yourself or for the client to look at things more holistically and not be so obsessed with the ROAS that's coming directly from Facebook itself because it just can't be trusted at this point. Essentially, the easiest way to explain it is money in, money out. How much have we spent? How much have we made? And I would say that if you're looking at a brand that is average spending, that's a direct response brand that's average spending

Starting point is 00:06:42 $40,000 to $50,000 per month. An MER ratio that you're looking at for the most part would be something like a 3 or 4x. Andrew, by the way, has a number of fantastic courses into everything from scaling a campaign the right way to optimizing your Facebook ad account. And he just launched a membership program with lots of great value. Check it all out at foxwelldigital.com. Our full conversation covered which metrics on Facebook we can trust now, a deep dive into the new

Starting point is 00:07:11 and all-important conversions API, and much more. Premium newsletter members are getting that full conversation tomorrow, so watch your email. If you'd like to become a premium member, just tap the link in this episode's notes to get a free seven-day trial.

Starting point is 00:07:46 Do you have business insurance? me a member. Just tap the link in this episode's notes to get a free seven-day trial. at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. A new radio station launched today. Yo, yo. Yo, guys. This is your girl, DJ Const. It's DJ Happy Beats. Hey, it's me, Heinz. Hey, y'all. But there was something unique about it. All those TikTok songs. Living rent-free inside your head. And to the sake of it. Play on a new SiriusXM channel, TikTok Radio. The Sirius satellite and streaming network this morning launched TikTok Radio, a 24-7 station devoted to the trending music on the platform.

Starting point is 00:08:25 And it is a real radio station, if not terrestrial, with real DJs, TikTok influencers, popular musicians, and they say some of the most popular creators on the app, including Bella Porch and Dixie D'Amalio, will pop in occasionally and do takeovers. Shows include the TikTok Radio Trending 10, a weekly countdown of the top 10 songs trending in the TikTok community, and For You, with live DJs remixing popular songs. This isn't the first crossover. The Sirius-owned Pandora music platform put out a limited-run series and playlist devoted to TikTok earlier. Some changes coming to Twitter DMs. First, you will be able to soon share a tweet

Starting point is 00:09:09 across multiple chats at once, up to 20. And they're changing the way DMs are shown. They'll now be grouped by date, so a little less timestamp clutter in the threads. A couple of other smaller UI tweaks as well. These changes start rolling out today on their mobile apps. Another significant loss in the ranks of Facebook's senior executives. This time, their head of platform partnerships is taking on a similar role at Snapchat. His name, and I'm sorry for the butchering of this, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, maybe. And he's been tapped to oversee the app's augmented reality efforts. He spent nine years at Facebook. One last Facebook note, the company's head of security policy today said they had launched new tools for its users in Afghanistan,

Starting point is 00:09:58 including the ability to hide friends lists and quickly lock down accounts. Oh, and as for the quiz, how long will Google retry old redirected URLs? Google search engineer John Mueller answered this in a tweet this week saying, quote, We have a long memory. I suspect we'll keep retrying these for years on and off. In general, we significantly slow down crawling of things like that, but slow crawling of many URLs is still some crawling. It doesn't cause issues with the rest of the site's SEO, unquote.

Starting point is 00:10:36 So not to panic if you're checking your logs and see Google still smacking its head up against those old file names. This is as planned. By the way, Google's official advice is to keep redirects in place indefinitely if you can, or at the very least, for a full year. Sponsor the Friday Quiz yourself

Starting point is 00:10:55 for a whole month for less than $100. Visit todayindigital.com slash ads, or tap the link in today's episode notes. Well, my wife is gone for a full week. This might be the longest that we've been apart in 10 years. So, you know what that means. Chinese food every night.

Starting point is 00:11:18 She hates it. I love it. Until I eat some, then I hate it again. But then the next night, I love it again. You know how it is. It's going to be joyous. I'll say that much. Oh, and because she's not around,

Starting point is 00:11:29 I'll be able to yell even more at my Overwatch team, which in itself is very therapeutic. Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital, production support and fact-checking by Sarah Guild. Theme composer Mark Blevis is the smell of fresh rain hitting hot pavement. Podcast music licensing

Starting point is 00:11:52 by Source Audio. I'm Todd Mathen. Have a restful weekend, friends, and I'll talk to you on Monday. Don't stop at the sun at the sun all night let your time be a gun It's the season for new styles, Wee! Wee! Wee! Wee! It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten.

Starting point is 00:12:34 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. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meet "MER": Your Next Favourite Marketing Metric

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