Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's Ads: ✨ New! ✨ Improved! ✨ Not Nearly as Discriminatory!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, was Meta's special ad categories broken all this time? LinkedIn adds new engagement tools. Facebook works on fixing its fake review problem. Google cuts back a lifeline for people who do SEO. And confirms a big Google Ads comparison bug. It's Tuesday, June 21st. I'm Todd Mathen. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:24 We start with a slightly confusing announcement from Meta today about the special ad categories. These are ads in the housing, employment, and credit sectors. For more than three years now, if you run ads about those topics, you are limited to some very broad targeting. For instance, you're not able to target by age, gender, or race. But today's announcement, part of a settlement with the American Housing Regulator, says Meta will start using machine learning that will, quote, work to ensure the age, gender, and estimated race or ethnicity of a housing ad's overall audience matches the age, gender, and estimated race or ethnicity mix of the population eligible to see that ad, unquote.

Starting point is 00:01:06 They call this the variance reduction system, and it's not at all clear how this affects digital marketers who place ads on their platform. After all, remember, you can't target by age, gender, or race at all. Best I can tell, this is an admission from Meta that even though you might have selected a broad audience, since that's all you can do, the ad platform would still veer away from less privileged groups, perhaps relying on other AI findings that groups like, say, Hispanics or older women don't spend as much. I'm only guessing here because the announcement was short on details. We reached out to Meta for clarification and got a statement from the company that basically repeated what was in their announcement, but also added, quote, we are still in the process of building out this method and we'll have more to share in the coming months, unquote. Brett Fish is principal at Scopo Marketing in Portland, Oregon. They are a Meta business partner agency. And he joins me now. Brett, what do you make of this? It used to be kind of the Wild West where if you had a house for sale, you could target people with the exact income and the

Starting point is 00:02:07 exact radius that you wanted. There were some issues with fairness and privacy around that, so they made those changes. And what it sounds like this update does is now you have to target a broad audience. You can't be so specific. But when you're using a broad audience like that, the delivery of that ad could still be skewed toward a certain income demographic, a certain possibly ethnicity or age or something like that. And it sounds like working with the housing department, what they've come to is that they're going to use AI to ensure that your ad delivers to the same demographic breakdown of the audience you're targeting. So for example, if 20% of that broad audience is age 60 plus, your ad delivery will now be 20% to age 60 plus as well.

Starting point is 00:02:52 So there won't be any skewing within that audience. Yeah. You know what I don't understand is why they need AI for that. Like, why wouldn't they just tell their system to ignore the other signals that are making it skew toward higher performing cohorts. Yeah. And I think that's a good point because I think the whole thing comes back to the platform and how it works, right? So when you choose an objective for your campaign, let's just say it's traffic, Facebook's going to optimize the delivery of that ad to users who are most likely to take that action, not necessarily taking into account any of their demographic information, just like who's most likely to click on this ad

Starting point is 00:03:29 and go visit your landing page and achieve that traffic objective that you're optimizing for. And so what I think, I think maybe inadvertently what was happening was that's how the ads are. So if you ran a conversion ad or a traffic ad, yes, you'd have to go to a general audience. You couldn't micro-target it anymore. But within that audience, maybe it was still optimizing toward certain users of a certain it kind of work around it in that way. Your ad delivery now, regardless of what you're optimizing for, is going to go to that same proportional breakdown within your audience. That's what it sounds like to me. You can find Brett's agency at ScopoMarketing.com. That's S-C-O-P-O-Marketing.com.

Starting point is 00:04:18 One thing that is clear as part of all of this, Meta plans to shut down special ad audiences, an anemic version of lookalike audiences, which stripped out age, gender, and race when considering who to put into a lookalike that you create. Meta says once this rolls out to housing ads, they plan to extend it to the other special ad categories like employment and credit. Yesterday, we reported that some Google advertisers were seeing emails from the platform informing them that they needed to have five reviews present in their business profiles to

Starting point is 00:04:53 be able to run ads. Google confirmed that it applies to companies within the local services category, but didn't offer a lot of details. Today, we learned that, at least for now, it's only a portion of companies within local services. Specifically, real estate agents and brokers, personal injury lawyers, HVAC providers, house cleaners, tree service providers, and roofing contractors. But some businesses will be exempt from this new rule and will be able to run ads even if they only have a single review. In that group are child care, family lawyers, and general contractors. Interestingly, financial planners don't even need to have a single review to run ads. This affects only U.S.-based businesses for the time being, and this new rule starts June 30th. Businesses in the new five-review minimum category must have those reviews on their their profile by then or else their ad account will be put on ice.

Starting point is 00:05:52 LinkedIn is improving its engagement options, first with comment and reply options on event pages. Soon in the comments tab of a LinkedIn event, you will be able to engage with attendees before, during, and after the session. You will also be able to reply to specific comments in stream and invite people to the conversation by mentioning them in your comment. The feature is in the process of being rolled out. LinkedIn is also rolling out a new way to repost content. When you tap on the share prompt, you will see a new repost option, allowing you to share without adding a comment, which is currently your only option. Comments and reactions from that rep comment, which is currently your only option. Comments and reactions from that repost will be counted toward your original post. Similar to Facebook's sharing feature, your post will show the number of reposts and who shared it with their network. The platform is also adding a new funny reaction to its emoji

Starting point is 00:06:38 response options on posts. On top of the new engagement tools, the professional network recently launched a new content marketing development course. All LinkedIn users have access to this. It's the LinkedIn Marketing Labs certification course called Content and Creative Design. It's made up of three units, building an organic presence with LinkedIn pages, creative design for LinkedIn, and building a full funnel content marketing strategy. Full certification will take a couple of hours to complete and the course is available online for free. Do you have business insurance?

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Starting point is 00:07:35 Be protected, be Zen. Meta's quest to become TikTok continues. Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced the company will be rolling out new monetization tools on Facebook and Instagram to lure creators to its platforms, including new subscriber-only Facebook groups, Facebook Stars for all eligible creators, a new Reels play bonus program to monetize Reels, NFTs will be going to Instagram, they actually announced this a while ago. And a creator marketplace for brands on Instagram. Just like TikTok's creator marketplace, Meta's version will be a platform where brands and advertisers can discover creators for their marketing campaigns and pay them for content. According to Zuckerberg, Meta is currently testing the marketplace. And once a brand finds a

Starting point is 00:08:21 creator they want to work with, they can send them a project with details, including deliverables and payment information. And within Instagram DMs, expect to see a new folder called Partnership Messaging. As Zuckerberg works on luring creators back to meta's platforms, Facebook is trying to fix its fake review problem. Yesterday, the social media giant announced a new community feedback policy in the US to protect brands and businesses from fake bad reviews meant to get refunds or freebies from businesses. The new guidelines are also intended to address incentivized reviews on the platform. Meta defines this as a business partner or seller providing something of value, you know, like a monetary payment or a free gift or even a refund in exchange for reviews. Other reviews subject to removal include irrelevance to the business, containing graphic inappropriate content or spam, the usual.

Starting point is 00:09:16 Meta noted that repeat offenders could have their account suspended or banned. The policy will be enforced by, you guessed it, AI bots. Oh, and apparently some human reviewers in the back line, similar to how they enforce their ad and commerce policies. The person who left feedback can request another review if they believe Meta's decision to remove it was incorrect. Some bad news for people who work in search engine optimization. A lifeline for many SEO-related questions is getting cut back as more changes are coming to Google's popular SEO Office Hours Hangouts. Previously, Google search advocate John Mueller would answer questions live from folks during these Office Hours Hangouts, which would then be posted on YouTube. Recently, Mueller stopped doing these Hangouts live and instead started taking pre-submitted questions. The time length of these sessions dropped from an hour to 30 minutes.

Starting point is 00:10:11 Now he says, instead of weekly, these sessions will be held only once a month. And finally today, if you're having trouble comparing performance across specific periods of time with Google Ads, here's why. A bug has been discovered in the date comparison reporting tool in the Performance Max product listing tab. Bug was spotted, shared by a couple of advertisers on Twitter. Google is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.

Starting point is 00:10:43 So update on the neck and back pain. So I'm not convinced it's a hot tub anymore. Originally, I thought that the hot tub was making my wife and I just far too relaxed. And then therefore, we weren't moving in bed when we were sleeping. And that's what was causing it. I don't think that's the issue. I hope it's not the issue anyway. My wife seems to believe it's my video gaming.

Starting point is 00:11:03 And she may have a point. When I play video games I'm kind of looking constantly to the right Because that's where the monitor is So it could be something like that It could also just be old age I mean I'm 52 now I know that's not old old

Starting point is 00:11:15 But it is middle aged See you tomorrow If I can find my Walker.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's Ads: ✨ New! ✨ Improved! ✨ Not Nearly as Discriminatory!

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