Today in Digital Marketing - Oh, You're Gonna Get CBO, Buster!

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, November 5th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Happy World Tsunami Awareness Day. Today, Instagram is locking brands out of their accounts, again. Facebook plans to limit how many ads you can run at one time. Some nice tips on getting more YouTube views using its new timestamp feature. And here's why you should get a bit of historical context before you launch a

Starting point is 00:00:25 promotion named after an actual massacre. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Weren't we just here last month? Instagram last month blocked a whole whack of accounts in error, like fully blocked. You couldn't post manually. You couldn't post via a third-party tool. It only seemed to happen if you used specific third-party tools like Buffer and others. Tools which, for the record, are official marketing partners of Instagram. Nevertheless, Instagram blocked accounts saying they'd used an artificial engagement tool. That got fixed after a frustrating week or two. And now it seems to be happening again. This time to customers of Sprout Social. I reported this about

Starting point is 00:01:06 a week ago when it wasn't really clear what was happening. Now we have a little more insight into what platforms are getting hit. Sprout Social, of course, is also an official partner. And some people in that company's agency Facebook group say literally the only third party tool they have hooked up to their brand's Instagram account is Sprout Social. Still, no official word from either Sprout Social or Instagram on what the hell is going on, and more importantly, when these affected brands can get their accounts back. Looks like, as promised, Facebook is beginning to transition ad accounts to CBO, that's campaign-based optimization, and only that. Previously, and for many accounts still today, Facebook lets you choose between campaign-based optimization or optimization at the ad set level, giving you more control.

Starting point is 00:01:53 A while back, they said that they would be doing away with this and switching everyone to optimizations only at the campaign level. Why they won't let us pick which level we want to use is a mystery to me. Well, now, some digital marketers are reporting the big changeover is underway, which is weird because Facebook said this would happen February. Not now. Not right before Black Friday, for God's sakes. Some people report that when they've tried CBO on large budget spends, like a million or more, that they lose a lot of control. Like, for instance, being able to scale up a specific ad set that's overperforming. Others say CBO has improved their results. Honestly,

Starting point is 00:02:30 it's a mixed bag, but you may want to check to see if you have been switched over to CBO if you're running any important campaigns soon. And another weird ad decision from Facebook, they've announced that they are going to be putting a limit on the number of ads a page can run at the same time. They say they'll have more to say about that decision in the new year, but they do seem serious about this. They'll be recoding their API to be able to spit out how many ads your page is running and what your limit is, which makes me think that maybe different pages will have different limits. Will this be based on ad quality? Like, the better your ads seem to resonate with people, the more ads you can run? We just don't know. One huge thing we also don't know, will this also apply to dynamic ads?

Starting point is 00:03:16 Those are ads that are created automatically by pulling information from a product catalog database. Dynamic campaigns often have hundreds or thousands of ads running from the same campaign. And what about split testing? I mean, the whole point of split testing is to run a lot of ads to see which performs best. Very strange. No details yet. I guess we'll know more in the new year.

Starting point is 00:03:41 If you sell things online, you may be interested to know that e-commerce platform Shopify is adding a huge new thing, email campaigns right within Shopify. So no more need to go through MailChimp or whatever and connect them via APIs. They will launch this in the early part of the new year. This is part of the company's Shopify marketing platform where they're trying to keep as many of the tools that merchants use regularly within the Shopify site. They say it will launch with analytics and a variety of email templates to get you started. Want to increase your brand's views on YouTube? The new timestamp view might help. This shows a video search result on mobile, not just with the video, but also with a list of timestamp shortcuts to specific

Starting point is 00:04:25 moments within that video. They look sort of like ad extensions on Google Ads, if you're familiar with those. And they can provide a nice layer of promotion if you're able to link to specific products in the video or, you know, key things that you want to advertise in there. So how do you get your video to have these time-stamped extras appear in video search? Search Engine Journal says here's how. First, the video must be in English. And then put the timestamps you want in the description of the video.

Starting point is 00:04:53 Be sure that they are linked to those moments in the video. The format doesn't seem to matter. This doesn't guarantee that you'll get to show up in the new format, but at least it puts your video in contention. There's also a bit more, and the article on Search Engine Journal is worth a read. It's called How to Make the Most of Video Timestamp Results in Google Search. Twitter's VP of Design previewed some features that they are thinking about rolling out next year on the platform. They include the ability for brands and people to prevent others from retweeting content.

Starting point is 00:05:24 Not sure why you'd want to do this if you're a brand, for brands and people to prevent others from retweeting content. Not sure why you'd want to do this if you're a brand, and it probably wouldn't keep people from screenshotting your tweet and posting that as a kind of manual retweet. Also on the list, a don't allow people to at mention me without my permission function. After nine months of waiting, Google has finally launched the new PageSpeed report in Search Console. The new report is a lot smarter than the previous one.

Starting point is 00:05:49 It now groups specific web pages into fast, moderate, and slow, instead of just having a site-wide ranking. PageSpeed is one of the single most important factors in having your website rank highly in Google. If you use a cheap and or slow web hosting provider, just having a slow site can be negatively affecting your search engine position. You will find this new report in your website's Google Search Console. If all of this is new to you, by the way, just Google the phrase Search Console and set yourself up. It is free and well worth it. And the marketing oops of the day today comes from McDonald's, who thought that it would be a great idea to brand one of their Halloween ice cream sundaes as Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Starting point is 00:06:34 You know, the day in 1972 when British soldiers killed 13 unarmed people in Northern Ireland. People, Wikipedia, it's free. Look that shit up before you design a marketing campaign around it. That promotion has been cancelled. Which brings us to the lightning round. Instagram is now running ads for its platform in TikTok. Ballsy. Meanwhile, TikTok now has a number of apps that can post directly to their platform, including Adobe Premiere Rush and Filmic Pro, and the New York Times reports that YouTube engineers are trying to build out video editing tools similar to TikTok within the YouTube app. Some digital marketers reporting that they can no longer go further back than 30 days on their Facebook pixel data.

Starting point is 00:07:21 If that's happening to you too, you can still see the data in your analytics section, which maybe I guess is what they're trying to push us all to. Do not freak out if your online sales numbers are taking a hit this week. Do not forget this is expected behavior leading into American Thanksgiving. And Microsoft search engine Bing is tightening up some rules and will now penalize links that use subdomain leasing and manipulative cross-site linking, which I know you do not do, right? Well, that's it for today. If you value a short and ad-free daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast wherever you listen to it.

Starting point is 00:08:00 It really does help. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. I will see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Oh, You're Gonna Get CBO, Buster!

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