Today in Digital Marketing - #Mel_Is_Having_A_Very_Bad_Day

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, we are starting to understand just how many keywords are being dropped from Google Ads reports. Facebook launches a whole new platform for managing your business. I know, I know. YouTube makes one of the most significant upgrades to its targeting in its history. And an update from the digital marketer in our Slack community, who's been locked out of her Facebook account for weeks now, and how what happened to her could easily happen to you. It's Thursday, September 17th, 2020.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Happy Australian Citizenship Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. At the start of this month, Google suddenly announced that they'd be dropping search term visibility in Google Ads reports if those keywords didn't get a lot of hits. That means that if there are a handful of long-tail keywords that are dragging your campaign's overall results down, you'll never know what those keywords were. Naturally, digital marketers around the world were upset.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Google said, relax, it won't be many, just the ones that really didn't get much traction at all. It's been about two weeks now since that rollout, enough time for people to look at their own numbers and see if Google's claim holds up. I'm guessing you know where this is going. Will Reynolds from Seer Interactive tweeted that they went from 98% visibility of those keywords

Starting point is 00:01:20 down to 78% literally overnight. He tweeted, quote, this is tens of thousands of queries we would have mined for inefficient spend that we now do not have access to. Who pays for that? Advertisers, unquote. Well, the folks at the PPC tool called Optimizer

Starting point is 00:01:39 have written some code that you can paste into your own Google Ads account and see how many keywords Google has dropped from your report. There's a link to it in the transcript of today's show, which is at todayindigital.com. When they ran the script on ad accounts they manage, they found a few rather surprising things. First, the script detected that Google had actually been secretly filtering out a bunch of keywords well in advance of their announcement. And when that announcement happened on September 2nd,

Starting point is 00:02:09 rather than introducing a new restriction, really what they did was significantly increase the cutoff threshold, making more keywords fall into that black hole. Also, despite Google's claims that this won't have a big impact on most advertisers, Optimizer actually found, quote, a pronounced decrease in visibility into queries driving clicks and cost, unquote. Now, there's not much you can really do about it. I mean, that script isn't going to resurface those missing terms. But if you'd like to know if you're no longer seeing 3% of those terms or 30%, that script can help.

Starting point is 00:02:45 Again, you'll find a link to it in the transcript of this show, which you'll find it today in digital.com. Also, for more than a month now, publishing brands, that's news sites mostly, have noticed that traffic from Google Discover has been way down. SE Roundtable used the phrase dropped off the cliff. Some people believe this had to do with a glitch that happened about the same time in Google search, but it hasn't gotten any better. Quoting seroundtable.com, their Google Discover-based traffic literally went from a nice amount of traffic to zero traffic on August 10th. It has been over a month and there is no real improvement yet, unquote. Google says

Starting point is 00:03:27 it's still looking into it. Well, you're not going to like the first sentence of this story, but here goes anyway. Just when you think you figured out Facebook business manager, I told you, you wouldn't like it. Yes, just when you think you've figured out the dog's breakfast that is business manager comes word from Facebook that they are changing it all up. Again. Actually, more than changing, apparently replacing. This morning, the company saying, forget business manager. Now we have Facebook business suite.

Starting point is 00:04:03 Apparently, it brings Instagram functionality a little bit more into the scene. You can post, message, get insights, do some basic advertising, all the usual. And if I may, for a moment, speaking on behalf of all Facebook advertisers, I don't think any of us need a new business manager or ads manager. We just need a functioning one. They're going to be foisting it on the smaller businesses first, leaving bigger companies to next year to roll them in. Also, it requires connecting your Facebook and Instagram

Starting point is 00:04:29 business accounts together. I probably don't have to tell you that when you do major things like this on Facebook's platform, things frequently go wrong. And once they're wrong, there's really nobody there to escalate that issue to, to get it fixed. And then there's this confusing little bit at the bottom of their announcement. Quote, note that this product is not currently meant for those using ads manager for advertising. What? I'm sorry, what? Facebook, the only way to advertise on your platform is through ads manager. Do you not know this? So if we use ads manager, we can't use – oh, my God.

Starting point is 00:05:14 As usual, Facebook's never really clear about it. I mean I think what they mean here, I think, is that the ads functionality in this new business suite is more like boosting stuff. So don't look for anything full-featured in it. But honestly, as with everything Facebook these days, who the hell knows? Oh, by the way, while we're kicking Facebook around a little bit, you may have noticed your ad campaigns weren't running this morning or you were having difficulty creating or editing your ads. Yes, their ads platform suffered another one of what they call

Starting point is 00:05:41 a quote, major disruption today. At the time I recorded this, they announced they were recovering from the outage. All right, let's turn to some good digital marketing news for a change. And for that, we turn to YouTube, which has added a couple of new things to their ads platform. First, more targeting options with what they call dynamic lineups, which will let you advertise by topic based on video's content. Quoting YouTube,

Starting point is 00:06:10 it uses Google's machine learning to better understand each channel on YouTube, including analysis of video imagery, sound, speech, and text. This allows us to create lineups that are scalable across content based on specific topics, cultural moments, or popularity, unquote. This is actually a big deal because until now, YouTube's topical targeting has been really broad. So now, instead of just the lifestyle category into pretty much everything fell,

Starting point is 00:06:38 you'll be able to drill down into something like home and garden or home improvement. They also announced a more comprehensive integration with Nielsen that will let marketers plan against TV demographics and give overall better insight. If you're following the TikTok drama, overnight we learned some new things about the deal to sell off the American chunk of it.

Starting point is 00:06:59 Apparently, last night the U.S. Treasury Department asked for big changes to some security clauses in the contract between TikTok and Oracle. We've now learned it's not a full takeover. In fact, Oracle is only expected to own 20% after it's all said and done. What's not clear is if that's 20% of a new split-off U.S.-only TikTok or of the whole global TikTok. And Walmart, which had been partnering with Microsoft for its bid, which was rejected, has now jumped teams and is part of the Oracle deal. Apparently, they see huge opportunity on the e-commerce side. Finally, we've also learned there will be a new entity called TikTok Global, and it will file for an IPO next year in the US.

Starting point is 00:07:46 Well, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I have been keeping you up to date on the plight of one digital marketer in the U.S. who happens to be in our Slack group. Her name is Melanie Smith. She's a data scientist with a digital agency. And for weeks now, poor Melanie and her colleagues have been locked out of the Facebook account

Starting point is 00:08:03 they use to work on their clients' assets. Like, completely locked out. They can't do anything there. If they try to go to business manager, they get an error page. Well, we have an update. And Melanie joins me now with the big news. Hi, Melanie. Hi, Todd. Okay, so last I heard this all started because you guys actually created a gray account to use with your client stuff. Yeah, it was like team at OMD.com. And Facebook didn't like that. So I was on Facebook for about five minutes before I went to another page. And it was like, your account has been disabled. It took five minutes from when you created that account? Yep. I was talking to my team and I said, you know, I'm on Facebook, guys. I can confirm that we have access. Five minutes later, our account's been disabled, guys.

Starting point is 00:08:56 All right. So that was like three weeks ago. And today you posted in Slack that you're back in. How did you manage that? Yeah. So my project manager finally stepped in this week. She emailed our rep yesterday and said, you know, we've been working with you guys on this issue since August 26. You just yesterday sent us a link to a form to fill out, and that's not an acceptable resolution at this point.

Starting point is 00:09:28 I think that finally made it click with our rep that this is a serious issue. He needs to escalate and kind of do whatever he can to understand and resolve the issue. Our rep didn't really have any visibility into what the specific issue was. And so not having that understanding and not having that knowledge kind of prevented him from really helping us. Yeah, I honestly don't think they even read those forms. But hey, you're back in. I'm so happy for you. I know that's stressful as hell. So Melanie, thank you so much for updating us. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. And I guess the lesson here is what we've been telling our clients forever. Don't use a gray account to administer your Facebook assets.

Starting point is 00:10:13 In our interview earlier this morning, Mel told me that the Facebook rep couldn't say if this was a permanent fix or just temporary and did say there was a chance that the same issue would keep happening if they didn't use their personal accounts. But at least they're back in business. A good ending for sure. So that's it for today. Our theme is by Mark Blevitt's music license. Wait, stop everything. Stop. Hold up. We have an update.

Starting point is 00:10:39 So I talked to Mel this morning. Literally an hour later, account locked out again. Mel told me when they reached out to their Facebook rep, his reply was, that's unfortunate. Well, if you want to follow along the glorious schadenfreude and misery that is Mel Smith's life, join our Slack community at todayindigital.com or

Starting point is 00:10:57 click the link in this episode's notes. I swear to God, I'm about to create a channel called Mel is Having a Bad Day. Okay, for real now, that's it. I'm Todd Maffin. More news from the world of digital marketing tomorrow. Assuming any of us can get into our accounts, that is. Talk to you then.

Starting point is 00:11:13 It's a brand new feeling on a brand new day. Nothing you can say or do can take us away. Cause the waves have flown in from yesterday It's a brand new feeling on a brand new, brand new day

Today in Digital Marketing - #Mel_Is_Having_A_Very_Bad_Day

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