Today in Digital Marketing - Meta Hates Bots. (Except Those It Creates.)

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, June 28th. Today, your Facebook ads might cost more soon, but there is a way out. Google's search ranking apparently considers how busy your business is. WordPress admins get a new and peculiar tag insert. And the endgame of civilization has arrived. Netta's Influencer Bots.

Starting point is 00:00:22 Did anyone ask for this? I'm Todd Mathen. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Marketers, brace yourself. A new 30% tax is about to be applied to your Facebook and Instagram ads, but there is a way to avoid it. The tax is Apple's fees for spending money on its iOS devices. Apple collects 30% for those fees.

Starting point is 00:00:45 Some companies have absorbed this, but more are passing this along to customers. Earlier this year, Meta decided to do the latter in the US. Now it's expanding that worldwide. Again, you'd only pay this extra fee if you're paying for an ad or a boosted post in the Facebook or Instagram mobile apps. If you want to avoid this,

Starting point is 00:01:03 just crank up a laptop or desktop and buy it there. That will of course work for most people, but solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, side hustles, a lot of them do their business almost entirely on their phones. For them, this will have an impact. Quoting the director of privacy and fairness policy at Meta, quote, the 30% Apple tax gives them

Starting point is 00:01:24 an unfair advantage over competitors, making it hard for them to compete on pricing. None of this strikes me as a good outcome for users or fair dealing with competitors. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Regulators worldwide are siding with app developers and consumers who stand to benefit from more choices

Starting point is 00:01:41 and lower fees, unquote. If your restaurant isn't ranking as high in Google search as you'd like, try changing up your menu. A new report suggests menu item names is likely a ranking factor, along with how busy you are. SEO agency Reputation Arm reports it discovered that adding a menu item to the Google business profile of a client improved the ranking of that item when someone searched for it. That, of course, makes sense. Google, after all, tries to match words searched for with words delivered. This also means you may want to consider renaming some of your menu items to be, well, less clever. Quoting SE Roundtable's coverage of this, quote,

Starting point is 00:02:29 in the example provided, she replaced Caesar Kitchen with Caesar Salad in the menu. On June 7th, the rankings were 71. On June 8th, the business profile was ranking in the first position. The agency owner told me she repeated this for other businesses and saw similar results, unquote. Also, and I don't think I expected this, apparently busyness also factors in. The busier Google thinks a location is, the more of an algorithmic boost it gets.

Starting point is 00:02:56 This is, of course, just anecdotal evidence, which is to say not really evidence at all, but you could definitely make an argument for its logic, and the menu items thing might be something you'd want to try out. It could soon be easier to add Google's pixels to your brand's WordPress site, if you don't take the whole thing down in the process, that is. Some people are noticing the Google Ads platform is prompting some admins to put new WordPress-specific conversion codes onto their sites. Oddly, this doesn't connect to WordPress through a plugin. Rather, Google system gives website admins screenshots of a WordPress backend and shows them

Starting point is 00:03:32 step-by-step how to paste the new code into the header PHP file. And while it's true this would work, it's kind of a brute force method of doing things. Some lower level admins might not have access to that file editor. And messing around with your PHP files can be a little dicey. Accidentally delete a semicolon in your header file, and you could effectively bring your whole site down. Ask me how I know. Anyway, this appears to have just started out in testing and has not been fully rolled out yet. And that'll bring us to another episode of Nobody Asked For This. And we all knew this was coming. Fans of major Instagram influencers will soon be able to chat one-on-one with them in DMs. Only, of course, it's not the influencer themselves. It's their AI representative trained on that person's personality and mannerisms.

Starting point is 00:04:25 Creators can also train their bots using their social media presence to make them more lifelike. This started in testing this week in the U.S. with some Instagram influencers. Meta says it'll make sure that users know they're not interacting with real people and that its main purpose is to answer fact-based questions. But as the always astute Andrew Hutchinson from Social Media Today noted, quote, the bigger question I have is why? Why would people want to engage with a bot when they're not actually engaging with a human at all? Really, there doesn't seem to be any value in having AI bots that simulate actual humans, especially within apps that are geared around authentic connection. It seems like a step away from the core use of social

Starting point is 00:05:06 and into something else, a platform where bots end up engaging with bots and real humans are sidelined in favor of automated engagement. Haven't users been complaining about bots for years? Hasn't inauthentic interaction always been a problem on social apps? But now we're not only encouraging it,

Starting point is 00:05:25 but directly using it to replace humans, unquote. All right, Monday is a holiday here in Canada. It is our National Day, which we unoriginally call Canada Day. But I will be back anyway with the conversation I had today with our Meta Ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell. Here's a clip. Andrew, I don't know if there's a right way to put this. We do some meta ads at our agency. So let me just ask it bluntly.

Starting point is 00:05:53 Has June been a shit show for you as well? Yeah, it's been really, really tough. I mean, I think it's been an error like every day, every other day. It's been issues with ad serving the newest one that came up um really we started to see it on tuesday was uh that if you had an ad on instagram you would click through to it and it would bring you to the facebook login page which is terrifying too because like sometimes when that happens it means that your account's been hacked correct yeah so i mean it's terrifying for a whole bunch of reasons.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Brands spending money without knowing it. You know, it's just been a month. I mean, it's been really tough this year. I don't think there's been a week or let's just say a two week period that there hasn't been some sort of issue. Our full conversation goes into what you can actually do if there are bugs, whether filling in that form works. There is kind of a secret to that form which I didn't think of and Andrew will share with you on Monday. We also talk

Starting point is 00:06:52 a bit about whether the old days of 50 ads in 50 ad sets is back. That's coming your way on Monday. That will do it for this week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Stunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis at Coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll be back here to shop for jackets and boots so when you do always make sure you get cash back from racketing and it's not just clothing and shoes you can get cash

Starting point is 00:07:35 back from over 750 stores on electronics holiday travel home decor and more it's super easy and before you buy anything always go 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 dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta Hates Bots. (Except Those It Creates.)

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