Today in Digital Marketing - Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Wednesday, November 6th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin. Be protected. Be Zen. Ads are in Google Images now because, of course, they are. And the stupid marketing blunder of the day is by an Instagram influencer. I know you'd love to hear about those, you horrible person, you. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. So I'm in a bunch of online marketing Facebook groups, and from time to time, someone will jump in saying their Facebook account was hacked. And the hacker started running a ton of shitty ads, which of course the hacky is going to pay for. So first, obviously use two factor authentication on your Facebook account. But also watch out for this apparently new scam. Some hackers are not only starting up ads with

Starting point is 00:01:17 your money, but also using automated rules to restart the ads if you gain access and turn their ads off. Which is awful, but you have to hand it to them. Pretty clever. Anyway, hopefully it won't happen to you, but if it does, check your automated rules first. If your brand uses Sprinklr as its social media engagement platform, you may want to know that they have added live chat to their suite of services. It will offer real-time chatting with people who are on your brand's website, either on desktop or mobile. It can reply automatically like a chatbot or send it off to a customer service rep. And it has all the usual stuff you would expect, canned responses, analytics, that sort of thing. A nice addition if you use Sprinklr.

Starting point is 00:02:07 Some interesting reports from API nerds who are reporting that Facebook's new marketing API actually contains the ability to do your own ad recall lift tests. Right now, every advertiser, including you, can run brand awareness ads on Facebook, where the result metric is ad recall. But the numbers you get back are only estimates based on an average recall model. If you want actual recall lift numbers, that is to say, if you want to know precisely how many people remember your brand two days after seeing your ad, you have to spend a ton of money. Only large budgets qualify for the actual testing, where they put literally a survey in the news feeds of people who saw your ad asking, hey, do you remember seeing an ad for XYZ brand recently?

Starting point is 00:02:49 Well, now apparently that testing is in the API. So in theory, you can run your own recall tests without a huge budget. But of course, you will need programmers and a way into that API. Every month, more and more social platforms are releasing their own trends report. Twitter started this years ago. Pinterest reported this week that eyeshadow, soup, and, God help us all, corduroy were trending on its site in October. Snapchat breaks its monthly topics into geography and overall topic and honestly is not particularly helpful. They say Halloween and the various national days like National Coming Out Day and National Girlfriend Day were trending last month.

Starting point is 00:03:34 All right, just in time for Black Friday and the holiday season, YouTube has launched shopping ads. These show up both in people's home feed and in search results. These ads look a little bit like Facebook carousel ads. They're a series of cards that show up under a video. And soon, Google says they will let you create YouTube site link extensions, just like on regular Google ads, that point users to specific landing pages on your website. They tested this with 30 advertisers

Starting point is 00:04:00 and found a 23% jump in conversions for those who used site links, which honestly to me sounds a little weird, maybe high even. A jump in clicks or traffic, of course, I would expect to see, but having that carry through to purchase? Well, whatever. Also, showcase shopping ads, which group related products together, can now be set up on Google Images. All right, here's a funny case of policy getting in the way of common sense.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Google recently demonetized a mobile podcast app because, you ready for this? Because podcasts about sex exist in the world. Seriously. The app was called Podcast Addict, and the revenue that they made from in-app ads were cut off by Google because people can download adult-themed podcasts. I mean, by that logic, shouldn't Chrome and the whole Google Index be demonetized because Pornhub exists? Anyway, eventually, after the app made a bit of hay out of the matter and the media picked up on it, Google relented. Which brings us to the stupid marketing move of the day meet julia slonska she's an instagram influencer and model in poland and she thought hey here's an idea as a way of

Starting point is 00:05:16 getting more followers i'm gonna get drunk and then hammer the nose off this statue in the park. This 200-year-old, historically relevant statue in broad daylight and posted to YouTube. Well, she got the views, more than 100,000. She also lost a big acting role that she had with a Polish bank. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Which brings us to the stupid lightning round. An analytics bug at Facebook means you will not be able to see any organic video metrics for the period of October 25th to 28th. They're just gone.

Starting point is 00:05:56 If you got a message saying you could no longer do an interactive poll on Instagram stories, not to worry, that seems to have been a bug. And Promo.com, a really solid app that we use here at my agency that helps you make short marketing videos. They have added a couple of new text styles. So check that out if you use Promo. Well, that is it for today. Hey, if you have Alexa, you can add this to your flash briefing every day. Just search for Today in Digital Marketing on the Skill Store. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of I'm Todd Maffin. I will see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

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