Today in Digital Marketing - Payment with the (Literal) Blink of an Eye
Episode Date: October 14, 2022YouTube pulls targeting options from conversion campaigns... Facebook kills off an ad placement... Netflix's ad tier details are finally out... Twitter's testing a way to keep you out of the f...eeds... and Apple wants your customers to be able to pay with a literal blink of an eye.If you like Today in Digital Marketing, you’ll LOVE Stacked Marketer: the free daily newsletter that gives marketers an edge on the competition in just 7 minutes a day. ✨ GO PREMIUM! ✨ ✓ Ad-free episodes ✓ Story links in show notes ✓ Deep-dive weekend editions ✓ Better audio quality ✓ Live event replays ✓ Audio chapters ✓ Earlier release time ✓ Exclusive marketing discounts ✓ and more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumfeed 📰 Get the Newsletter: Get It (daily or weekly)✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form📈 Reach Marketers: Book Ad • Classifieds🤝 Join our Slack: todayindigital.com/slack🙂 Share: Tweet About Us • Rate and Review 🎤 Follow: LinkedIn • TikTok • FB Page/Group👨🏻💼 Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok ------------------------------------🎒UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and Courses 👍 TOOLS WE RECOMMEND• Social media mgmt: Sprout Social and Agorapulse• Marketing tools: Appsumo• Podcast recording: Riverside.FM💡 MARKETING SPOTLIGHTIf you like Today in Digital Marketing, you’ll LOVE Stacked Marketer: the free daily newsletter that gives marketers an edge on the competition in just 7 minutes a day.Covering breaking news, tips and tricks, and insights for all major marketing channels like Google, Facebook, TikTok, native ads, SEO and more.Join 32k+ marketers who read it daily. Sign up free now! ------------------------------------ Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate Producer: Steph Gunn. Ad Coordination: RedCircle. Production Coordinator: Sarah Guild. Theme Composer: Mark Blevis. Music rights: Source AudioSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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It's Friday, October 14th. I'm Todd Maffin.
Today, YouTube pulls targeting options from conversion campaigns.
Facebook kills off an ad placement.
Netflix's ad tier details are finally out.
Twitter's testing a way to keep you out of the feeds.
And Apple wants your customers to be able to pay with a blink of an eye.
Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.
We start today with a small but
important change to Google ads that a few eagle-eyed marketers have noticed. A setting
that's no longer available when you're setting up a conversions campaign on YouTube. Until now,
you could target based on audiences like remarketing lists or based on content like
what videos people watched or what they searched for
on YouTube. But now when you're setting up a conversions campaign, that content targeting
option is gone. And you might be asking, God, why? Google's answer to that is really, we know best.
Jill Sasking-Gales is one of the industry's top Google ads trainers. She spoke with me this
morning. I was having some tech issues today, so my apologies for the crackly audio.
If you have both audiences and content targeting in a campaign, it treats those like an and relationship.
So it really limits the places you can serve because the person must meet these audiences and also be consuming certain kinds of content. So by taking that content ability away, it allows Google to show
your ads across many more videos that still fit your audience targeting, but may not fit the super
specific content targeting you wanted as well. And so of course, Google believes that by doing so,
you can drive more conversions. Wait a minute, have I had this backwards all this time?
I thought and targeting was a good thing. Like isn't the whole point of marketing to be really refined in
on your audience, right? Like if I want to reach British grandmothers over 80 who really like Chuck
Norris, that is an audience and content and query. I like and queries as a marketer, don't I?
You can still use and queries. You can use your ands with multiple audiences. So people who are interested, I don't know, in knitting and interested in Chuck Norris, fine.
But to also show on videos that have to do with Chuck Norris, that's the part that's being taken away.
Now, I will note this is only for YouTube conversion campaigns, which aren't a campaign type I use often.
If you're running a YouTube campaign optimizing for views, which is my preference for impressions,
you can still use content targeting.
It is just for the conversion-focused campaigns
that this feature is taken away.
And for those who run conversion campaigns,
this shouldn't come as a surprise.
There are a lot of different YouTube settings
that you aren't allowed to change for conversion campaigns.
For example, you must opt into YouTube partner sites in a
YouTube conversion campaign. So showing ads on other video playing websites, whereas for other
kinds of YouTube campaigns, you can opt out of that. And I guess most people consider YouTube
to be more of a top of funnel approach than conversions. Exactly. It can be mid funnel.
I'm not going to say it can't drive conversions, but I prefer to use it as an audience building
tool.
And then you can remarket to people on YouTube.
And of course, remarketing is an audience.
So you could have a YouTube remarketing campaign run on conversions.
No problem, even with this change.
I know I'm grumpy about this, but like it's it just seems like yet another push toward
the black box that marketers don't know anything.
Trust the artificial intelligence and machine learning,
it will control your ad campaign.
It definitely fits that Google ethos,
which I experienced when I worked at Google as well.
There's just a belief there that given the time and the data,
machine learning knows best.
And just like Performance Max forces you onto inventory
you may not have chosen, like the Display Network,
similarly, a YouTube conversion campaign can now show across any inventory on YouTube or partner sites, not just limited to some super specific channels or topics the advertiser may have chosen.
And if I'm correct, generally, you're bullish on Performance Max campaigns, aren't you?
For e-commerce, yes. For Legion, there are a lot of challenges. But for e-commerce, I'm definitely very bullish on Performance Max.
I have heard that before, that B2B applications and Performance Max are not necessarily a good match. a lead, get partway down your funnel, but not complete the purchase. When you have a complete
purchase, complete conversion tracking information, Performance Max can work wonders. But without it,
there are a lot of spam problems. So because of that, I've seen a lot of B2B and lead gen
advertisers have poor results with PMAX. You have a great Google Ads training program. Do you go
into B2B marketing with Google Ads at all? We definitely do. And actually, our next monthly
meet, which is happening in just over a week, the topic of that whole live session with me will be all about
B2B strategies in Google Ads. Jill Saskengale spent six years at Google helping some of the
world's top brands. Today, her training program called Inside Google Ads is a great investment.
If you're in that space, you can learn more about it at our affiliate link at b.link slash gatraining.
Well, Google isn't the only one paring down options in their ads manager.
You will notice one fewer ad placements
on Meta's platform soon, Instant Articles.
This is their take on the AMP format,
a quick-loading mobile page that had your brand's content,
but it was hosted on Facebook
servers. It was introduced back in 2015 to lure news publishers to the platform, originally built
to solve slow loading times. It and its AMP cousin have fallen into favor recently. Google
discontinued it a year or so ago. This is somewhat to do with privacy and somewhat about the fact
that most websites are perfectly capable of displaying a mobile-friendly look now. Sources talking to Axiom say the tech
giant will discontinue instant article support in mid-April of 2023. And why? According to a
Meta spokesperson, the format is underutilized. Quote, currently less than 3% of what people
around the world see in Facebook's feeds are posts with links to news articles. And as we said Quote, Well, it's finally happening.
After years of its anti-advertising stance, Netflix finally broke.
Yesterday, the streaming giant officially announced its ad-supported tier will launch next month,
cutting it very close to the holiday season.
The new plan is called Basic with Ads.
It will be available on November 3rd in 12 markets, including the U.S., and will cost $6.99.
That's cheaper than Disney Plus and Hulu, whose ad tiers cost $7.99. That's cheaper than Disney Plus and Hulu,
whose ad tiers cost $7.99 per month.
The company detailed partnerships
to help brands track campaign metrics,
including DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and Nielsen.
The Nielsen digital ad rating service
will be used in the US sometime next year
and eventually be reported through Nielsen One Ads.
According to executives,
the other tools should be available in the first quarter of 2023.
At launch, ads will be 15 and 30 seconds and will play as pre- and mid-roll units.
The tier will serve on average four to five minutes of ads per hour,
and in exchange for watching ads, consumers will have access to a variety of programming.
A variety, but not everything.
A limited number of movies and TV shows won't be available due to licensing restrictions.
Another downfall, video quality at the ad tier is capped at 720 versus 1080.
As for advertising controls for us marketers,
Netflix will offer what they call, quote,
broad targeting capabilities based on country and genre.
Signups for the ad supported tier, though, must provide their date of birth and gender.
So hopefully we'll have some future targeting options.
You'll also be able to prevent your ads from appearing on content that is inconsistent with your brand.
Things like sex violence and nudity.
If you're looking to incorporate Netflix into your media budget, get in line.
The company says it is nearly sold out of ad inventory. Netflix's CPO noted that the platform
is maintaining a light ad load along with tight frequency caps. Executives declined to share ad
rates, though we have seen rumors of CPMs hitting $65. The executive suggested that the relatively
bare-bones features reflect the tier
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Twitter is working on a Don't At Me feature
which lets you control who can mention your brand.
The platform is currently testing
two audience control options for your tweet.
The first is a new allow others to mention you toggle
that lets you stop people from mentioning your handle entirely.
It is likely this toggle will deactivate any mention
similar to Twitter's new unmentioned feature.
With unmentioned, your handle link is deactivated within a thread
once you leave the conversation.
The user can still mention your handle,
but it will not link back to your profile and you will not be notified.
Presumably, if you use the new toggle to prevent others from mentioning you entirely,
users can still at your handle in tweets, but it would no longer be an active mention.
The second one is an option that will let you limit mentions to only those who follow
your brand or business.
First, it was Touch ID, then Face ID. Next up, Eyeball ID. Apple's AR headset will reportedly use iris scanning technology for logins and, notably, payments on e-commerce sites. In other
words, consumers will be able to pay for your products in the blink of an eye,
literally.
The Verge reports from sources that say the eye scanning makes it easier for multiple
people to use the headset with their own accounts.
As The Verge pointed out, it would also help Apple differentiate itself from its main competitor,
the MetaQuest Pro.
The Quest Pro features inward-facing cameras that track eye and face motion, though
it doesn't use them for authentication, at least not yet. Apple is also reportedly planning
to use downward-facing cameras to capture users' legs, something that Meta is struggling
with. And for more on that, we head to the lightning round.
Yesterday, we reported how proud Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was that his spanky new VR
headset could show your legs.
Now it seems that might have been a slight exaggeration.
Okay, basically just a straight out lie.
A Meta spokesperson today confirmed the legs were not actually rendered in real time during the demo,
but rather a pre-made preview that came from motion capture.
It's not clear if Meta actually has a working demo of the feature, suggesting
there is a lot of legwork to be done. Facebook appears to be working on a new
invite collaborator reels option, which would let you invite another business or influencer to your
brand's reel. Once posted, the video content would show up on both your brand's profile and the
collaborator. This is a feature which is already available on Instagram.
Cards Against Humanity's latest marketing stunt wants you to dig through a jar of Clamomaze.
That's clam-flavored mayonnaise exclusively sold at Target.
This is apparently made with real clams.
Contains 30 Cards Against Humanity cards,
with a chance to win prizes like merch, pearls,
a Toyota Camry, and more.
Look, I'm from Canada where people voluntarily drink clam juice for brunch,
so, actually, this doesn't sound so bad.
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Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital
on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island.
Our associate producer is Steph Gunn.
Production coordinator, Sarah Guild.
Podcast music licensing by Source Audio.
Ad coordination by Red Circle.
And not many people know this, but our theme composer, Mark Blevis, has one of the world's largest collections of small primates, like baboons and orangutans.
And honestly, it is hard to even have a Zoom call with him.
He's so distracted by these things.
On our call this morning, I finally, I lost my temper, and I said, why can't you do it?
Why can't you set your monkey free?
Always giving in to it.
Do you love the monkey, or do you love me?
I'm Todd Maffin.
Shockingly, there is no stat holiday here this weekend.
So uncharacteristically, I will see you Monday.
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