Today in Digital Marketing - Only Pay for Your Ad When Someone Visits Your Store

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, November 21st, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Happy World Philosophy Day. Today, a new pricing model comes out, paying per physical store visit. Facebook now has a bug status page for Ads Manager, and the page has a bug. A nifty little script that'll keep your Shopify inventory in line with your product ads. TripAdvisor is the latest to launch their own ad platform. And Google fixes recipes. Thank God. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. There are lots of ways to pay for digital ads out there by using the thousands of views, using CPM, by the click,

Starting point is 00:00:37 by the lead form completed. Wouldn't it be cool if you had a bricks and mortar store and you ran online ads, but only paid when someone who saw your ad actually came into your store? Well, that is what's behind a company called Ground Truth, and today they announced that they are almost ready to open up their new self-service ad platform. Similar to how Facebook could show your ad to people more likely to click to your website or more likely to watch your video or comment on your post, Ground Truth says it can optimize for physical store visits. It works just like every other digital ad system. You give it your credit card, upload a video or image and some copy, and tell it who you want to see the ad, including their location and even what the weather is like outside your store location. You can also target large audience buckets, like people who visit airports a lot or

Starting point is 00:01:25 gyms and so on. But I think the most interesting part of their model is they have a CPV pricing model. That's cost per visit, meaning you only pay for your ad when it results in an actual person seeing your ad and visiting your store because of it. They say they can reach two out of three smartphone users in the U.S. Their platform will be ready for your dollars next month. I found this on the web for can reach two out of three smartphone users in the U.S. and platform will be ready for your dollars next month. Check it out. Wasn't talking to you, Siri. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while now, you'll know that pretty much every day there is something broken on Facebook's ads platform.

Starting point is 00:02:06 My favorite error message of all time popped up for me a couple of months ago. It said, you have removed. That's literally all it said. It just popped up an error and it said, you have removed, with no other explanation. Well, now, after a little bit of polite and gentle peer pressure from advertisers, Facebook has a status page which you can check to see if their ads platform is having problems. It is at status.fb.com slash ads. It claims it will report on the ad creation or delivery or reporting if those are down. Only when I visited it this morning, it wasn't serving either of the two images on the simple page.

Starting point is 00:02:45 Yes, only at Facebook, where your tool saying what's broken is broken. Good news if you're in the travel and hospitality space. TripAdvisor has launched its own self-service ad platform. It's pretty basic right now, but, quoting Marketing Land, while the formats are graphical and include retargeting, the customer intent profile is more aligned with search marketing. It's designed to reach high intent, in-market travel customers, or those doing research on particular travel destinations. Process is not anything you haven't done before.

Starting point is 00:03:17 Name the campaign, tell it the audience you want, your budget, punch in a start and end date, and hit go. They do have a simple graphics tool on there if you don't want to create and upload your own image. And there's some A-B testing functionality as well. The pricing model is CPM, meaning you pay just to display your ads regardless of if anyone clicks on them. Another major ad platform has decided how they will handle ads in the upcoming American election. Google says it will limit audience targeting. For instance, you will not be able to target based on political affiliation. You can't upload any deepfake videos. And if you're running political ads, you won't be able to use its customer match function,

Starting point is 00:03:55 which normally lets you upload your email lists, target that way, something Facebook calls custom audiences and lookalike audiences. But you can still run political ads on Google, YouTube and the rest of Alphabet's placements. And you can still use basic targeting like age, gender and zip code. Things move fast around Black Friday. And if you are in the e-commerce business and sell real products, sometimes it can be hard to keep tabs on what physical inventory you've got. If word doesn't get to you that your widget is out of stock and you're still running those, hey, buy our widgets ads, that could waste a lot of your ad budget, not to mention piss off your customers. So the folks at searchengineland.com have created a cool little script that helps you fix that. The code is a Google ad script that runs every hour and will

Starting point is 00:04:40 pause your ads for you if they are linking to products that are out of stock on your Shopify store. Very cool. And you can find a link to that script in the description of this episode. Some panicked reports were circulating this morning around the web saying that Facebook is removing the ability for you to create geographic-based lookalike audiences, that now all you'll be able to do is create massive global lists. In fact, this is true. And you shouldn't care. Because, like I mentioned weeks ago when this first broke, you can still always restrict your audience's geography at the ad set level. So it

Starting point is 00:05:17 doesn't matter if the source file is global, you still have to tell your ad set what regions you want it to pick from. A couple of big upgrades on the Sprinklr platform, the social media tool used by some enterprise-level businesses, integrations with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Trustpilot integration, letting your engagement staff reply to ratings and reviews coming through their platform. Plus, and I thought this was really interesting, they've got an AI-powered compliance feature.

Starting point is 00:05:45 This looks over your outgoing text and visuals to determine whether what you're about to publish is on brand or not. So it's kind of like Sheila from Compliance, but less chatty. There's also a so-called smart bidding feature for ads, an enhanced competitor activity alert system, and notifications for when there are spikes in engagement, which usually means something very bad about your brand has gone viral. So if Sprinklr is your drug of choice, you may want to check with your rep to find out everything else that's new. Again, from the maybe this was always there and I just didn't notice it files,

Starting point is 00:06:19 I noticed today that when you're editing a video post on Facebook, you can now create a thumbnail from any frame of that video. Pretty sure the last time I checked it, it would only let you pick from a handful of frames plucked from your video, or you could upload a standalone image for it if you wanted to. This is a great tool, especially for those of you who boost posts. In other words, promote them using the Ad Wizard tool on your Facebook page. If the thumbnail it grabs has a lot of text on it, that's what Facebook uses to determine if there's too much text for its comfort, which usually results in less reach. Well now, cancel out of the boosted post window,

Starting point is 00:06:56 edit the post, and select a specific frame from your video that doesn't have any text, and set that ad back up again. Easy peasy. And that brings us to the lightning round. Looks like Google is testing new ad formats for car rentals. It'll let you compare prices from different companies once you give it a location, date, and car preference. Twitter has started experimenting with letting you schedule tweets from its web app, just like you can do on TweetDev or any third-party tool, of course. They're also rolling out their Hide Replies feature globally. Important to note, this does not literally hide replies. It does not prevent people from seeing

Starting point is 00:07:35 replies at all, like Facebook's version of Hide Comments sort of works. It just buries the offending reply under a second click. Still with Twitter, if you're locked out of your brand's Twitter account and you're stuck in a loop that keeps saying your password has already been reset, yes, it's a bug. Yes, they're working on it. No, it's not just you. Google says its Gmail app for smartphones will soon support AMP for email. That's the dynamic content feature that lets emails become more interactive. And finally, there's this. Google is testing a new preview feature for recipe results. It's actually a preview button that pops up the ingredients and steps. I, for one, welcome our new preview button overlords. I do

Starting point is 00:08:17 the cooking for our family, and honest to God, I have no idea how many times I have to scroll through 12 pages of just nonsense before I get to the damned how to cook it recipe instructions. I know it's about SEO. I get it. But honestly, I do not care about your grandma or your summer visits to the pond when you were a kid or the way you like how light looks so pretty when it comes out of a prism or whatever. Just how much goddamn cumin do I put in this thing? That's all I want to know. So, thank you, Google. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:08:53 If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in the podcast, just tweet it with the hashtag TIDM. You can follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com or in this show's description. I'm Todd Maffin. I will see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Only Pay for Your Ad When Someone Visits Your Store

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