Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's New "Verified" Plans Could Cost You $1,000 a Month

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, May 8th. Today, Meta's new subscription plans are out, and I sure hope you like being disappointed. Shopify's stock plunges after a quarterly loss. Amazon extends an olive branch to sellers. And a soul-destroying look at the Google Ad Platform's bizarre discrepancies. And a quick programming note for those of you here on the free feed. Our premium podcast, which has no ads, is on sale this week only. Tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash half off.

Starting point is 00:00:33 Many years ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told everyone that Facebook would be free for everyone forever. No takesies backies. Then a little while later, that position changed a little. It became, there will always be a free version of Facebook you can access. A subtle difference, but one that opened the door to a subscription service. Meta cracked that door open last year by charging businesses for a blue checkmark and some vague promises about better support and higher search rankings. Now, that door is being flung wide open.

Starting point is 00:01:05 The company this week announcing its meta-verified subscription plan for brands will soon cost up to $1,000 a month, depending on the tier you buy and how many accounts you want covered. For now, they're priced with some introductory discounts, and those tiers are standard, that's the original tier, at $15 a month,

Starting point is 00:01:23 and then three new plans, plus at $45 a month lets you add more addresses and profiles on your brand page, as well as the ability to put external links in your reels. Though that package is limited to two links per month. It also claims to put you higher in search results. Premium at $120 a month adds two additional reels links, plus some themes in your DMs with customers and some employee impersonation protection. And max at $350 a month, again, these are the introductory

Starting point is 00:01:53 prices, for that you get six links in Reels per month. Plus, they say they'll have a meta expert do a review of your profile twice a year to help you with your content strategy. To me, that latter perk is actually the weakest of them all. Anyone who's had to sit through a call from a meta-expert under the guise of helping them with their ad strategy knows that these people, while probably well-meaning, really don't know anything about ad strategy. They probably know less about the ins and outs of the ads manager than you do. And their advice is usually so simple as to be laughable, like spend more or just do what the recommendations say. But as I mentioned,

Starting point is 00:02:32 those prices are listed as introductory offers. The non-sale prices are considerably steeper, $500 a month for the top package, and presumably that's gonna be the renewal price. And this is per profile, not per account. So those prices are for one Facebook page or one Instagram page. If you want both, that'll be $1,000 a month after this signup offer. Lomenda says if you buy both at the same time, they'll take 20% off. Until now, the paid checkmark program has only been officially

Starting point is 00:03:03 available to brands in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Some accounts in the U.S. and other countries are part of a small test group. Starting today, though, businesses in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Peru, France, and Italy will also be in. Shopify shares dropped dramatically this morning by almost 20% after the e-commerce platform posted a net loss in the first quarter of this year. That took about $20 billion out of its market cap and canceled out all the gains it had made in the last year. In actual dollars, the net loss was $273 million. Compare that to the same quarter the previous year, where the company made $68 million in profit, and you can see why investors got spooked. Especially given that overall revenue was actually up 23% in the last quarter to almost $2 billion.

Starting point is 00:03:57 Quoting Business Insider, the losses marked a surprise fall for Shopify after last year reclaiming some of the gains it made during the pandemic online shopping after hitting a low around October of 2022. The company has also undergone a number of rounds of layoffs with a significant 20% cut made to its workforce in May last year. Every other Wednesday, we check in with our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskin-Gales. Jill spent six years at Google Ads and now runs the Inside Google Ads training program for practitioners. Jill, I noticed Google is hiring an accelerated growth team in Canada for the first time. I feel like this is like the 30th different internal team name that I've heard from Google.

Starting point is 00:04:45 You worked in sales there. Can you walk us through the different types of Google reps that we might encounter and the different sales teams? Yes, there are a lot of different sales teams, all divided based on how much you spend as part of it, but also how fast you're growing, what industry you're in, etc. So really, I think the best way to think about the Google Ads sales team is as of right now, at least, I'm sure a reorg will be imminent at any moment. But as of right now, there are two parts of the sales organization,

Starting point is 00:05:15 the big spenders and everyone else. And so the big spenders is called large customer sales, LCS, that's where I worked. And what classifies you as a big spender really varies by country. Like, for example, to be an LCS customer in the U.S., you'd be spending a lot more than if you're an LCS customer in Canada. And then the everything else organization is called Google Customer Solutions, or GCS. And then within GCS, there's tons of different teams. So like the largest clients in GCS are in an organization called MMS, mid-market sales. And the accelerated growth team is another part of GCS where they try to identify clients that have the potential to spend a lot

Starting point is 00:06:02 more. However, Google's algorithms determine that. And then they'll reach out to you to offer personalized support for three to six months to help you spend more, but ideally also help you make more from Google ads. So these are just some of the many different sales teams that fall under that GCS umbrella. You know, earlier today, we talked about Meta's new verification plans that are coming out, the top tier of which includes something called a profile expert or a meta expert on profiles. And, you know, in the past, these meta experts have always been, I don't know, fairly junior. They don't really understand the platform. Do we see those types of people on the Google side as well?

Starting point is 00:06:46 Absolutely. You can go look at any of these job descriptions at Google. They're all hiring right now, depending what city you're in. And you don't need to have Google Ads experience to be a Google Ads sales representative, whether in large customer sales or in Google customer solutions. Some of these jobs, like an account strategist in Google customer solutions, you need these jobs, like an account strategist in Google customer solutions, you need two years of work experience, maybe some marketing experience, maybe some sales experience,

Starting point is 00:07:12 but the Google ads experience comes on the job. And it's similar in large customer sales as well. So I think that's a really important thing. I know people love to hate on their Google reps just like they like to hate on their meta reps, but it's important to keep in mind these are sales people and what they're selling happens to be Google ads. They're not Google ads experts who happen to be selling it to you. Yeah, it's difficult because the wording

Starting point is 00:07:34 they use is expert. And then you get them on the phone and they're like, well, just just put more variations into the system. And that should do it. Okay, bye. Yeah, I was just on the call with a Google ads coaching client. And she got one of these emails, you know, hi, I'm your new account strategist, let's hop on a call. And like, lo and behold, the guy told her spend more money and launch PMAX. This isn't a very small account, the only one search and all kinds of stuff that was not relevant. And you know, I don't fault this particular rep for that. It's just that's the system they're designed to sell you on stuff. And it's really just the larger a client you are and the more you spend, if you're part of that MMS or maybe that LCS, large customer sales team, then you may be working with someone who knows your business in more detail and can help you with more customized solutions.

Starting point is 00:08:20 But it's a very small portion of all Google Ads advertisers who will get that level of support. Before I let you go, you had a great post on LinkedIn this morning about a bunch of crazy discrepancies in Google's ads manager, like headline length, for instance. Is it like all over the map? It's crazy. I am going through the Google Ads Help Center and reading every article because that's what I do for fun. And so today I was writing about how in Google ads, there are five different character requirements for headlines, depending where that headline is. So for example, in search or in PMAX, a headline can have up to 30 characters, but in demand gen, it can have up to 40 characters. But if you're running the headline as an asset,

Starting point is 00:09:01 not within a specific campaign, it can only have 25 characters. But if it's in a certain kind of video campaign, it can have 30 characters. But in other kinds of video campaigns, only 15 characters. Yeah, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. So the good news is I checked descriptions are always up to 90 characters. So those are consistent. But headlines are all over the place. So yeah, if you find this stuff as entertaining as I do, go ahead and follow me on LinkedIn. I've got lots more like this to share. For the masochistic among us. Jill, thanks. Thanks. That's Jill Saskengale. She is our Google Ads correspondent. She's here every second

Starting point is 00:09:39 Wednesday. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link at b.link slash GA training. And you can watch our full unedited interview. There is a link to it in today's newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Meta has started rolling out a new set of generative AI tools for advertisers, expanding on the features introduced last October. These new tools will, for the first time, let brands create full image variations,

Starting point is 00:10:14 including different backgrounds and angles, and some enhanced AI-generated ad copy. The big news, of course, is the image gen. In the past, you've been able to add some backgrounds, crop images to different dimensions, have the AI play with the brightness, that sort of thing. All that was more polished AI than truly generative AI. Now, though, advertisers will be able to upload reference images of their products and get AI generated variations of their products, not only in different scenery in the background, but also adjustments to the product's image itself. And yes, this definitely has the potential to be abused by advertisers looking to trick consumers. Meta says it's got some guardrails in place to prevent this. You'll also be able to add more flexible text overlays to AI images and new versions of ad

Starting point is 00:11:02 headlines and primary texts. These features have started to roll out. Meta says it could take to the end of the year to get to all ad accounts. Amazon is giving third-party sellers a bit of a break in the form of a pushback of the launch of the new product supply fee. Quoting Retail Dive, quote, The fee applies to standard-sized products with less than 28 days of inventory relative to historic demand. While the fee is already in place,

Starting point is 00:11:32 Amazon started crediting sellers back in April if they incurred the charge as a way to help them adjust. Originally, those credits were going to end April 30th, but Amazon has extended the credit period to last until May 14th, unquote. This fee was announced back in December. Amazon said it needed the money to cover the costs of improving delivery speeds and in-stock levels under its new regional fulfillment model. As for sellers which have a little less control, it might be a little hard for them to get around these things. Amazon has a couple of olive branches. First, the fee will not apply to products that have sold fewer than 20 units in the previous week. And any charges incurred because of excessive inbounding and processing times on Amazon's end will be refunded. And Amazon will also provide a small exception window for products that get

Starting point is 00:12:22 featured as lightning deals or best deals during the upcoming Prime Day in July. And that fee pause will stick around for four weeks. There are many marketers who aren't comfortable in full-size ads managers, like the behemoths that Meta and Google offer. Those platforms have all tried to capture those people too. Meta with its post boosts, Google with its ironically named smart campaigns. And now YouTube is offering advertisers a quicker way to get into the ad game. It's rolling out a promotions tab within YouTube Studio itself. This has been around for a small test group for a while. It is now getting out to more people. You do not get a lot of options here.

Starting point is 00:13:05 Campaign optimization is either more engagement or more views. It should be available to you if your brand's channel has met the requirements for advanced features and you've got more than a thousand subscribers. This is a pretty simple way to get a few dollars behind an organic video that was getting more eyeballs than usual. It should be available now to all qualifying accounts on desktop, and they are still working on the mobile app version. Two more days left in our sale of the premium podcast. It is half off.

Starting point is 00:13:35 We rarely put it on sale. It'll remove all ads from the show. You get my course on how to build a small freelance agency and a whole bunch more. Tap the link at the top of the show notes, or you can go to todayindigital.com slash half off. It is by the month. You don't have to subscribe annually.

Starting point is 00:13:50 You don't have to make a commitment. You can go month to month if you want to try it out. All right, thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Meta's New "Verified" Plans Could Cost You $1,000 a Month

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