Today in Digital Marketing - (not provided)

Starting point is 00:00:01 Today, Google hates you. And to prove it, they've taken away one of the single most helpful parts of their ads dashboard. Meanwhile, LinkedIn adds some nice new features for people who administer their company's page. And, I swear I'm going to make this a daily feature, it's the Facebook ad platform bug of the day. Hold on to your hats, friends. This one's a doozy. It's Wednesday, September 2nd. Happy Indigenous Literacy Day, Australia.

Starting point is 00:00:31 I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Back in the old days of Google Analytics, some 4,000 years ago, you used to be able to see every single search term that brought people to your website. Every one. So you could tell where your opportunities were, and even which keywords converted better. And then they took that away. And all you'd see was the words not provided. You could still see a small sprinkling of keywords, just like you can today, but those are coming from Bing, or some other smaller engines. And really, it's only like 1% of all the searches. To be fair, Google didn't actually take them away.

Starting point is 00:01:05 They moved them to the ads report, which meant if you wanted that data, you'd need to run ad campaigns. But a lot of us did, so it wasn't a huge deal. We'd just find them in the ad reports. End of history lesson. Oh, hey, funny story. Google's taking them away from ad reports now, too. Yes, digital marketers this morning woke up to a new pop-up window in their Google Ads dashboard saying, quote,

Starting point is 00:01:31 We are updating the search terms report to only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users. As a result, you may see fewer terms in your report in the future, unquote. Well, f*** Well, so why? Why Google? Like, are you going to roll out a new Google Ads Plus subscription where we get to see those? Who knows? As you can imagine, it is not being received well on the Twitters. Trishan Naidoo, who's the digital marketing league at the Australian Football League, tweeted, quote, just another move in a recent string of changes to take control away from advertisers and reduce transparency.

Starting point is 00:02:11 We're heading down a dangerous path, I feel, unquote. One agency PPC manager named Rachel tweeted, quote, so we will be potentially paying for search terms that are irrelevant, but won't be privy to the keywords we need to add as negatives, unquote. Oh, by the way, it's actually worse than it sounds because Google confirmed that they might remove search terms even if those terms resulted in a click. As for when this starts, it's not entirely clear, but the text of Google's announcement referred to starting September 2020. So maybe it's already happening? Thanks for nothing, Google.

Starting point is 00:02:54 So while you won't be able to get a full 360-degree view of your ad campaign's search terms, Google has added a couple of new things to their ad platform. First, you'll now be able to optimize local campaigns for store visit indicators, like clicks on directions or calls. Until now, the only optimization you could do was a general store visits. Also, they are expanding sales filters for Black Friday sales on Google Shopping and making promotions in Google Shopping easier to use, quoting the company. You'll be able to support flash sales and last-minute discounts This will only be active in the U.S., by the way.

Starting point is 00:03:41 One last Google thing before we move on. Today, they said they will be adding to their prohibited content list in the coming weeks. Specifically, you will no longer be able to run ads that, quote, potentially profit from a sensitive event with significant cultural, social, or political impact, such as civil emergencies, natural disasters, public health emergencies, terrorism and related activities, conflict, and or mass acts of violence, unquote. Interestingly, in their examples, they specifically called out price gouging as something they'll ban and the promotion of any products which, quote, may be insufficient for the demand during a sensitive event.

Starting point is 00:04:19 Of course, this is all COVID related. And finally, they are also going to be banning ads which claim victims from certain countries were responsible or deserving of a global public health crisis. Honestly, who is running ads with that content? That's awful. And even more strangely, these new policies don't actually start until October 1st. This morning in this podcast's Slack community, a couple of folks reported another one of the usual Facebook bugs. A number of brands in the housing space were having their ads denied, saying they needed to send in photo ID if they wanted to run ads about social issues, elections or politics. Remember, they weren't in those spaces. The error message said, Your ad may be rejected if it mentions politicians, topics that could influence the outcome of an election or existing or proposed legislation. Unquote.

Starting point is 00:05:11 We actually have a client in the housing space. They are a major condo developer. They have rental properties. They run senior care homes. They got some of their ads denied today with this same notice. As I was writing this, another member of our Slack community got nailed with it too. But he's not in housing at all. His clients are in the meal delivery space and the telecom lead gen space. And poor David Herman, he manages millions of dollars of campaigns for clients. He reported on Twitter this morning that only his best performing ads were turned off.

Starting point is 00:05:41 And when he went to click the request refund button, Facebook spat back an error message saying, quote, sorry, it looks like something went wrong on our end. Please try again. And of course, there was no button to, you know, try it again. Anyway, Facebook is aware of this bug on their ads platform status page. They said we are currently experiencing an issue that is giving inaccurate issue electoral or political ad rejections for some advertisers. We are actively working to fix it. You can appeal these if you get hit by it by clicking the request review button on each affected ad page. Some people late this morning said they were starting to see some of their ads come back online.

Starting point is 00:06:20 So beware. Many digital marketers believe Facebook is simply not stable as an ad platform right now. What is stable? Our Slack community. See, if you were in it, you'd have learned about this bug way, way earlier. It's free to join. Just tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. LinkedIn this morning launched some new features for page admins. Thank you. see the total number of followers and a brief demographic profile of them as a group. Also, the events tab has been bulked up, shows the company's past and upcoming events. And the my company tab, which is designed for employees, now has milestone posts available for workers to share promotions, anniversaries, and likes. It will also show what content that employees posted

Starting point is 00:07:19 is trending on LinkedIn. The Microsoft-owned company says soon it will be adding tools for content curation and live broadcasting. Finally, for those of you who run Shopify stores, I found a pretty detailed guide to Shopify SEO. It is way too detailed to go into here, of course, but there is a link in today's episode notes if that's something you could use. Did you know a full list of sources used for each episode can be found in the episode's notes and a complete verbatim transcript for every show up on our website at todayindigital.com. As you may know, if you've been

Starting point is 00:08:00 listening for a while, last month we landed two fairly large clients here at my agency. We are having our kickoff brand briefing meeting with one of them tomorrow. So a couple of us are flying out to their offices, which means no show tomorrow. And so I'm Todd Maffin, and I will talk to you on Friday. You've always been right by my side Summer holidays Playing video games So mum would make us go outside And it's every day You've been a crazy

Today in Digital Marketing - (not provided)

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