Today in Digital Marketing - Meta Removes Ad Targeting Option That Small Businesses Relied On

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, June 19th. Today, an important targeting option used by small and local businesses is now gone. Why Meta keeps pulling control from advertisers. Also, more details emerge about Apple's plans to limit ad tracking. More than a third of consumers think most online ads are AI generated. And can we trust any metrics from Twitter anymore? I'm Todd Mathen. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. And we start off today with another episode of... Nobody asks for this. It's Meta again. Should I just ask them to sponsor this segment? I don't know. Anyway, Meta continues to push its father knows best approach to your ad campaigns,

Starting point is 00:00:44 removing yet another lever you had to best approach to your ad campaigns, removing yet another lever you had to narrow down to your specific audience. And this one will most definitely have an impact on small and local businesses. Until this week, when you set up a meta ad campaign and got to the location targeting part of your ad set, you had the option to target only people who lived there, or only people who had recently been there but weren't residents, or both. This was an important control for businesses that had local markets, plumbers, dentists, HVAC repair companies, the kind of business that really only wanted to spend its money on people who lived there, not people visiting family or passing through or just being a tourist. But now, yes, Meta has removed this ability and replaced it with a single catch-all called

Starting point is 00:01:33 People Living In or Recently In This Location. A pop-up box explains, quote, All location targeting will now reach people living in or recently in the locations you select. won't have to. Who was saying this was a chore? Many businesses wanted to select a type, needed to, to make sure their ad dollars weren't wasted on people who'll never buy from them, but now won't be able to. It is hard to not see the hypocrisy here. It seems almost every news release Meta puts out about its ad platform contains some language about how much they care about small and local businesses, with headlines like, How Meta is Helping Small Businesses Thrive This Holiday Season.

Starting point is 00:02:22 The ability to target only local consumers might have been the single most important targeting lever small and neighborhood businesses had. How is removing that helping them? We reached out to Meta for comment. They opened our email a couple of times but did not reply by deadline. But here's what they probably would have said. They'd tell you that machine learning is making audience targeting an obsolete endeavor, that their AI models are so good, they have high confidence in the inferred data of who is a resident and who is a tourist. But you don't have to have a PhD in marketing science to know that inferred data will never be as good as clicking a button that says target residents only, no matter how good their AI is.

Starting point is 00:03:07 Tomorrow, our meta ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell, will be here with more on this. That will be exclusively on the Premium podcast, which you can sign up to by tapping Go Premium in the show notes. If you have noticed a drop in your website traffic, this could be why. Facebook's content discovery algorithm underwent a change in May, and Gizmodo this week reports that is leading to a significant decrease in website traffic. Sources say the decline in clicks from Facebook began in February and continued to worsen in the following months, with substantial acceleration in May. It is particularly noticeable on news and media sites, which of course rely heavily on visits from social media for their business. A new report from social media management provider EchoBox found that traffic from Facebook dropped by 50% compared

Starting point is 00:03:58 to the previous summer. The editor-in-chief of Insider.com said that the drop from Facebook is a major factor contributing to the decline in traffic at his company's sites, which recently faced layoffs and a strike. Quote, traffic is down, subs are down, video views are down. That was true two weeks ago and has been true for months. So I'm not talking about the impact of a strike. I'm talking about a changing reading and watching environment where Facebook is no longer sharing links, unquote. Another source told Yuzmoto that content performance varies significantly based on the subject matter. Meta not only determines the visibility and reach

Starting point is 00:04:37 of news, but also influences what kind of news shows up in consumers' feeds. Last month, the company threatened to block news links on Facebook and Instagram in California and Canada due to proposed bills that would require tech platforms to pay publishers for news content. While news hasn't been completely blocked in either jurisdiction, the report suggests Meta could be suppressing news content in other ways. We have some new details now on a story we reported on recently, that of Apple's Safari browser soon to remove UTM tracking from links. UTMs are those parameters at the end of a URL and are used to track ad campaigns, audiences used, and even sometimes unique user IDs. Now, it seems it's the latter that will be removed, unique user IDs, and perhaps not,

Starting point is 00:05:27 after all, the campaign tracking data. First, it appears this functionality will happen in private browsing mode, and the tracking parameters it will remove will be user IDs to prevent cross-website tracking. When browsing or copying a link, Safari will detect these user parameters and remove them while keeping the rest of the URL intact. That's important for marketers, as, at least from what we've seen so far, other tracking codes like campaign IDs will continue to work as usual. That said, individual user tracking is, of course, an important part of a marketing campaign, and Apple documents appear to suggest users will be able to delete this user-level data in their regular browser windows as well, though that would be a checkbox they'd have to turn on. The feature, called Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection, extends to links shared in messages as well as mail apps. Users will have the option

Starting point is 00:06:21 to disable the feature. iOS 17 is set to be released in September. 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. A new study reveals that one in three UK consumers believe that more than half of all online advertisements are generated by AI. Due to the rise in convincing fake ads

Starting point is 00:07:07 created by AI tools like ChatGPT and image generators, the study warns of an increase in malvertising, where malware is embedded into online or social media ads. The research also showed a lack of awareness among consumers regarding the risks associated with clicking on fake ads. 70% of respondents were unaware that clicking on a brand logo can lead to malware infections, despite the rise of impersonated brands. While the majority are also unaware that clicking on social media ads, pop-ups, and banners can be risky. The study also found that consumer trust varies depending on the site. Among social platforms, Facebook and Instagram are perceived as more trustworthy, with one in five trusting them not to have malvertising. A quarter of respondents trust ads on Amazon and Google.

Starting point is 00:08:06 While the current average rate of malicious ads stands at about one out of 100, the study suggests this could rise as AI tools become more widely available. LinkedIn is killing off some posting tools for B2B marketers. As of next week, the professional network will phase out carousel posts, profile videos, which let users add a short video clip linked to their profile image, and the ability to embed clickable links within the image or video of your post. The removal of carousel posts is the weirdest and certainly the most significant change. There is a workaround. If you want to post a non-ad carousel, you'll share a PDF and then use each page as a frame for your quasi-carousel post. All three features will be gone by June 26th.

Starting point is 00:08:54 No address, no problem. Domino's Pizza can now hunt customers down wherever they are with new Google Pin Drop tech. A new feature called Pinpoint Delivery lets customers drop a pin on the Domino's app to identify their precise location. With the integration of Google Maps, the app then determines the nearest pickup spot for the driver. Considering factors like parking availability, customers will have four minutes to collect their order. So now, Domino's can deliver pizza to spots without an address like parks, beaches, and crop circles. And finally, you might remember that one of Elon

Starting point is 00:09:35 Musk's changes to Twitter was to include the view count of each tweet and make that metric public, sort of like how you can see how many views any TikTok video got. And one tweet seems to have racked up quite the impressive view count. So impressive, in fact, it's probably not real. It reads, quote, without Googling, name a famous historic battle, unquote. And it shows more than a billion views. That's one out of every eight people on the planet. Actually, it's more.

Starting point is 00:10:05 There are 8 billion people on Earth, 6 billion of which are over 13, 3.8 billion of those have access to the Internet, and 3.2 billion live in countries where Twitter is not banned, which means that Twitter says one out of every three people on Earth with the ability to be on Twitter saw it. But Twitter, of course, doesn't have 3.2 billion users. It has about 450 million users who are on at least once a month. Let me do the math on this. Four is six minus three. Okay, so every Twitter user saw that tweet twice?

Starting point is 00:10:43 Did anyone here see that tweet? Also a little fishy, this magical tweet heard around the world has only a couple thousand retweets and fewer than 20,000 likes. But hey, maybe it was from a celebrity. No, it was from some random user named Sarah. At the beginning of this year, she had 8,000 followers. She has about 11,000 now. She has paid for the blue checkmark, if that means anything. As of this afternoon, she had 8,000 followers. She has about 11,000 now. She has paid for the blue checkmark, if that means anything. As of this afternoon, she seems to be trying to regain the mysterious and let's face it, probably completely inaccurate reach numbers. Her most recent tweet, quiche, yes or no. At our deadline, it had fewer than a thousand views.

Starting point is 00:11:22 So there you go. Twitter metrics. Get what you pay for, I guess. A couple of hundred people are on our LinkedIn newsletter. It's free. It's called The Top Story. It'll send you our top digital marketing story each day directly to your inbox

Starting point is 00:11:41 and your LinkedIn feed. You can sign up for that at todayindigital.com slash top story. And our Slack community, it is also free. Go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in the show notes. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Well, your eyes, they look like the sun on the ocean. You look amazing to me. Sometimes it feels like I can't help but show it. The Ocean.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta Removes Ad Targeting Option That Small Businesses Relied On

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