Today in Digital Marketing - Oh god. Not the coffee machines.

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Facebook’s latest change could mean you won’t be able to see conversion data on your campaigns… Apple’s latest acquisition is all about those sweet sweet podcast advertising dollars… Platforms with inflammatory content are hurting the performance of your ad campaigns… and hackers have found a way in to the single most important weapon in a digital marketer’s arsenal.Not subscribed yet? Get direct subscribe links at TodayInDigital.com HELP SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Our Slack community: TodayInDigital.com/slack • Produced by: engageQ.com • Advertising: TodayInDigital.com/ads • Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com • Email list: TodayInDigital.com/email • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin  • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin  • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com  • TikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin Source links and full transcripts at TodayInDigital.com Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Facebook's latest change could mean Be protected. Be Zen. are hurting the performance of your ad campaigns. And hackers have found a way in to the single most important weapon in a digital marketer's arsenal. It's Monday, September 28th, 2020. Happy Dominion Day, New Zealand. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital,

and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. I started my career as a radio journalist. I spent a decade as the technology reporter for Canada's public broadcaster. So normally, I would not report on something where I couldn't get confirmation from the source. But I'm going to today, because that source is apparently Facebook, andday click attribution the week of October 5th or maybe 12th. More on that in a moment. So let's back up a little bit here. An attribution window is the period of time during which an ad gets credit for some kind of consumer action.

Most of the time that action is buying something, so a conversion. So if you sell widgets and someone clicks on your ad but doesn't buy anything, and then four days later goes to your website and buys that widget, the ad platform, like Facebook, would record that purchase as having come from that ad. By default, most Facebook campaign attribution windows are seven-day click and one-day view, meaning as long as someone clicked the ad, the campaign will get credit for the conversion if they buy from you in the next seven days. Or if they don't click, but they view your ad only,

that window shrinks to one day. That's one-day view. So if they only saw your ad, but bought it three days later, your campaign would not get credit for the sale. But you've usually been able to increase those windows to 28 days. Apparently, soon, the max will be seven days. Why? Well, because web browsers are increasingly clamping down on ad tracking, so Facebook says this is just more in line with the limited data you're getting anyway.

I say apparently because, again, I can't find anything on Facebook's site to confirm this. Even their help pages still refer to 28 days as the max. But the report was circulating around Twitter this morning, along with screenshots of an email that Facebook sent to a handful of advertisers. One person noted that some companies have seven-day free trials, and so their attribution window has to be larger than seven days to even see those conversions from trial to paid. After this change, those conversions won't be counted as part of that campaign,

which is a big deal if you think about it. If you market a mobile app with a seven-day trial, you just won't know which campaigns are earning more users making the leap to being a paid customer. You won't know which creative works better, what audience segment performs better, nothing. Apparently the email Facebook is sending says this happens on October 5th.

Other versions of the email say October 12th. And so while we are bemoaning Facebook's inability to communicate clearly, an update now on the story that I reported on last week that they are introducing a new Facebook business suite, which is meant to replace Business Manager. And if you've been checking Business Manager a few times to see if you had that update, which I did,

you probably didn't. And that's because, it turns out, what they were actually talking about was their mobile app called Pages. When you launch Pages, it should ask you now if you want to change to Business Suite, and then the whole app changes and becomes something a little closer to the web interface. Their news release, though, says the web interface that we know as Business Manager will change too, but honestly, as with everything Facebook these days, who the hell knows?

Apple has made an interesting acquisition that may change the way consumers listen to podcasts and podcast ads. The company is Scout FM. Well, was Scout FM. They basically shut down and were consumed by the Apple Borg as soon as the deal was done. But Scout's tech creates sort of like radio stations based on your podcast interests. As you add podcasts to your feed, Scout would go find episodes with similar content from other podcasts and line up those episodes too. So what's Apple's endgame here? Think about it. Right now, if you want to advertise on a podcast, you give that money to the podcast producer, and they put an ad in the middle of the show.

With this new tech, though, Apple can insert ads in the middle of episodes, right? Like between each episode. And who gets that money? Apple. After all, the ads aren't inside a podcast. They're only between them. Apple's been on a buying spree lately. In the last little while, it's picked up payments company MobiWave, weather app DarkSky, and virtual reality content broadcasting company NextVR. The social media tool Agora Pulse has announced its pricing for its new Power Reports.

This is an add-on package that brings more things like consolidated reporting. It's tier-based pricing. The more you pay for the basic package now, the more the reports will cost. But it's basically an additional 25% of your current plan. It's an interesting shift, I think, in the third-party social media platform space. Back in the day when Hootsuite was one of the only tools out there, they had sort of a miserable pricing structure for reports. You bought packages of points, and you could spend those points on certain reports.

So the really detailed reports cost more points than the smaller one. Even individual sections in reports cost points. That kind of nickel and diming was probably at least a little bit behind the next wave of tools, where they offered everything as a single package. One price, and you got it all. Reporting, engagement, publishing, listening, and so on. But lately, platforms have been doing this kind of add-on service offering. For instance, Sprout Social's main platform is pretty comprehensive, but if you want enhanced reporting tools, like the ability

to choose exactly which metrics are reported or compare different periods than just the previous matching date range, you've got to pony up for the add-on. And unlike Agorapulse's pricing, you won't find the cost on their website. You've got to talk to a rep, who in our case had to talk to some other people internally, kind of like how the car salesman's got to talk to the boys in the finance office first to see what they can do for you. They came down a little on pricing for us, but required us to move to an annual contract for that discount. That said, Sprout Social's upgraded reporting package is among the strongest in the industry. Don't forget, they bought Simply Measured a few years ago.

Anyway, back to Agora Pulse, you can still try their enhanced reporting out until September 30th for free. If you haven't made the move to the paid version by October 27th, you will lose access to any customized reports that you created with the tool. Full disclosure, we use and pay for Sprout here at our agency. Agora Pulse has given us a complimentary media review account, which we do not use for our client work. A new study from Double Verify says where you choose to place your media budget matters,

and in more ways than you may think. 55% of the 10,000 consumers polled said they are less likely to use or would never use a brand if the promotion appeared alongside fake or inflammatory news. To be clear, we are not talking about the ad campaign being fake or inflammatory, just the platform where your ad appears. If that ad appears on a trusted news site, 67% said they'd be more likely to look at it. I think the big finding, though, is how much time people are spending

engaging with social media content since the beginning of the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic? Just over three hours a day on average. Now, one minute shy of seven hours a day. YouTube in particular saw a 43% jump in consumer time spent. Yelp is upgrading its ads platform. There are now campaign objectives, so you can specify if you'd prefer phone calls or website visits or messages. You can also let Yelp's platform optimize for what it finds is the best ROI. You can now use negative keywords to block your ad from appearing on searches you aren't interested in, just like you do on Google ads. For instance, a painter that only does interior paint can assure that their ads don't appear in searches for exterior painter.

And there's now an audience estimator that shows what your estimated reach will be based on the campaign settings you've applied. Yelp also says it plans to launch a leads visualization tool and an ad impression heat map that lets you see where your consumers who have seen your ads are concentrated. Those two coming later in the year. Bad news, friends, and I hope you're sitting down here. Hackers have now found a way into

the single most important technology in a digital marketer's world, their coffee machine. Yes, security researchers at Avast have found a flaw in connected coffee makers that lets them take control of the machines. They were able to force the grinder to run, turn the warming plate off and on, and even start a brew cycle. And why would you even have a connected coffee maker in the first place? Well, you could tell it to start brewing a cup when you press a button on an app or maybe connect it to some middleware to turn off the machine when you leave the house. Okay, there are reasons,

but it gets worse. Apparently, those researchers were able to completely lock out the user, letting them, in theory, demand a Bitcoin ransom to turn the coffee machine back on again. I am not making this up. This is more academic than practical, of course. If they demand $1,000, you just go buy another coffee maker. It's not like you're going to lose valuable brewing data. The real play here, though, believe it or not, might be that hijacking the device would give them control

over the microprocessors in the machine, which they would then tell to start mining cryptocurrency. Yes, if you won't pay them a Bitcoin ransom, well, damn it, they'll just make their Bitcoin off your machine. Again, more academic than practical, the processing power of a coffee machine isn't powerful enough to make any more than a few pennies. Don't worry, it is unlikely to happen to you.

This hack relies on the coffee machine being in the startup mode, where it's scanning around for Wi-Fi networks to connect to. It usually only happens for two or three minutes in the lifespan of one of these machines. But I will tell you this, my heart skipped a beat or two when I read that this was even possible. Last week, I warned you that I would be moving this podcast's feed.

If you're hearing this now, it worked, and I didn't break it. In case you're wondering about the technical part, my previous platform, Anchor, now has a redirect. So basically in their backend, you give it the URL of your new platform's RSS feed. And in this case, Anchor will redirect it. Of course, in time, I expect I'll probably need to change the URLs in all the app platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify or Overcast. Or maybe they just detect the redirect and automatically start looking at the new feed instead of always hitting the old feed and getting redirected each time. Does anyone know for sure? Can you tell me?

Anyway, I have moved to a platform called Red Circle. Why? Two reasons. Reason number one, CSVs. Red Circle provides CSV exports of my listener data. Anchor never did. In fact, all you could get was a web page listing every episode and its download count.

So you had to scrape the web page and then paste it manually into a spreadsheet and then clean it all up. It was a nightmare. I am a digital marketer. I need data in spreadsheets to make me feel better about myself. Reason number two, monetization. Don't worry,

don't worry. I'm not going to jam lots of ads here. We're going to go slowly, you and I. Actually, the monetization tech I'm more interested in than ads is that Red Circle has a way to insert paid premium episodes into unique RSS feeds. One of the things I'm planning to do in the next year is to have long form weekend additions with experts in the social algorithms, ad campaign pros, and so on. I tried this on Patreon when I first started and it did get a decent number of paid subscribers, but they had to add a second feed manually to their app. This tech, apparently, once you subscribe, you just start getting the premium episodes in the same feed you're subscribed to.

And when you stop paying, those episodes stop appearing in your feed. I don't know how they're pulling this off, but it sounds really cool. So the plan for now is to just chill for a bit, make sure the feed changeover went well, everything's stable, and I might try out their dynamic ad insertion stuff. But I will take you along for the journey behind the scenes, telling you everything about how it works, what rates I'm getting, how much the platform takes, and all that.

My new MacBook Pro arrived Friday afternoon. Yes, it's amazing. 32 gigs of memory, so now I can have Twitch up on my laptop monitor while I work on my main secondary monitor. I could do that before, but every hour or so I had to shut Chrome down and then start it up again.

I guess it was just chewing up too much memory. But now, no problem. Handles it all like a champ. I don't like how much you have to pay for Apple stuff, but I'll say this. They're still far more stable than my Windows 10 laptop. Anyway, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. Todos a gozar, todo el mundo a bailar, todos a bailar, todo el mundo a gozar Levantando todas las manos es tiempo de festejar y bailando con tu pareja gozando hasta madrugada