Today in Digital Marketing - New Groupings, New Placements, and New Ads Platform

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Twitter changes its mind on blocking cause-related ads A nice update to Creator Studio for agencies or multiple-location brands A new placement looks like it’s coming to Facebook ad And a roundup of this week’s changes to the Facebook Ads manager The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. Find Tod here: Twitter • LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Web Site • Email [e-mail] --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Friday, November 15th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Happy King's Feast, Belgium. Today, Twitter changes its mind on blocking cause-related ads, a nice update to Creator Studio for agencies or multiple location brands, a new placement looks like it's coming to Facebook Ads, and a roundup of this week's changes to the Facebook Ads Manager. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing.

If you work in politics or really any kind of issues-based brand, you may have been disappointed with Twitter's announcement a couple of weeks ago that they simply wouldn't allow political ads at all. It seems like they are backing off that policy a little bit and say that they will allow some, quote, cause-based ads, but you'll still have restrictions on who you can target and whether or not you can buy those ads. Kurt Wagner from Bloomberg reports, the way I understand it, you can buy ads that discuss climate change or gun ownership, but only if you do so if the ad promotes discussion about the topic,

but is not intended to drive political, judicial, legislative, or regulatory outcomes. Will be a very fine line, I'm sure. Good news for agencies or national brands with multiple Facebook pages. Facebook's creator studio either got an important update, or it's always been there and I'm an idiot and didn't notice it until now. But anyway, you can now review insights across a number of pages at the same time. This is great news for agencies who may want a dashboard of all their clients' performance. Or if you're a national chain brand, you can group your Facebook and Instagram assets into,

I mean, really whatever grouping you want into regions or whatnot and look at it that way. The Creator Studio calls these collections. That said, as pretty as Creator Studio insights are, it does seem to be obsessively focused on video performance for some reason. If you want broader data, you will probably need to turn to a third-party tool for that. However, only a few can give you cross-channel performance in a single report. Sprout Social, which we use at our agency for reporting, can do that. But most can't. Is a new placement for Facebook ads coming?

I spotted Facebook testing a new implementation of viewing photos on mobile. Normally, when you tap a photo, you get the photo and the caption, and that's about it. But when I tried it yesterday, that photo came at the top of a flowing panel of other photos underneath. Facebook confirmed today it was running that test. Sort of looks like Instagram when you tap a photo from Explorer. You get the photo, but you can scroll down to see more. Facebook's done that for videos for a while now. Looks like this is setting up a new placement for us. Like many of these kinds of placements, though, it'll probably be, you know, okay for brand awareness and reach campaigns and not so good for conversions. Early next year, Walmart will roll out its own self-service ad platform. Yeah, Walmart.

They bought a cloud-based ad platform this past spring called Polymorph Labs. The platform will let you buy search ads and display ads without having to go through an ad rep. Plus, they say they'll have an API available in case you want to tap into programmatic campaigns. The platform is currently in testing with some consumer packaged goods brands. You can expect the launch sometime in the first quarter of 2020. I've been reporting for more than a week now here that returns on ad spend are down across the board. David Herman, who manages a lot of spend, tweeted some of his numbers today. So just for comparison, Snapchat, he's seeing a 2.1 times ROAS, Pinterest, 1.85.

And his Facebook ads are performing less than 1.3 times ROAS right now on his spending of about a quarter million bucks. So let's say it all together, friends. It's not just you. Some changes to the Facebook Ads Manager makes up today's lightning round. You can now select the Facebook in-stream video placement for campaigns using the traffic objective. More insights for the learning phase.

Now you can see how much you've spent for the learning phase. Now you can see how much you've spent during the learning phase across your account over the past 14 days. You'll find this in the account overview of Ads Manager. There are now dynamic ads for in-stream placement available. When you create a catalog sales campaign, you can show your ads to people who are watching videos on Facebook. They have increased the number of ad sets you can have in a campaign that uses CBO, that's campaign budget optimization. They've upped it to 200. But fair warning, when you publish a campaign with more than 70 ad sets, you will not be able to turn off CBO or edit the campaign bid strategy. And this is kind of cool. You can now add animated effects to your Instagram stories,

calls to action, which might help people notice it and get them to swipe up. Also to round out the lightning round, Hootsuite fixed an issue where comments failed to appear after pressing view comments on a post in a Facebook stream. Amazon is now the world's most valuable brand, gaining 20% to pass both Apple and Google. And Netflix is bringing Eddie Murphy back in a sequel to Beverly Hills Cop. I know this has nothing to do with digital marketing. I'm just really excited. And a special hello to those of you who are discovering this podcast for the first time today. I'm running a large ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram right now. In case you're curious, the top performing ad sets targeting looks like

this. People interested in podcasts and involved in digital marketing in some fashion, mostly identified through their job title, and are a friend of a fan of either the podcast, me or my agency. And finally, interest expansion is on. That's the top-performing ad set. So far, I'm getting a 33-cent cost per outbound click, which is great, a 2.77 CPM, which is not bad, and a 2.1% CTR, which I'm pretty happy with. Unfortunately, of course, there's no way to put my pixel

on every podcast app to know how many actual podcast subscriptions I'm getting, but if you are one of those, welcome. If you're looking for some weekend listening, the premium feed has a bunch of stuff. A full description of Facebook algorithmic repair, a deep dive into the TikTok algorithm, plus my exclusive interviews with Mitch Joel

on the future of digital agencies and Scott Stratton on why the so-called social funnel will fail. You can click the link in this episode's description or visit todayindigital.com and look for the button that says Premium Episodes. That's todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. I'm off to play Overwatch for four hours to get that cool Mercy skin.

Have a restful weekend, and I will see you all on Monday.