Today in Digital Marketing - ﹤rel=best_podcast_ever＞

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, how this weekend's Google change could get you tossed out of the search listings. Facebook clarifies the time period used for modeled conversions. New tools for connected TV ads. And goodbye, Target ROAS. We hardly knew you. It's Monday, July 26th, 2021. Happy Cargill Victory Day, India. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. One of the funniest footnotes in Facebook's ads manager is that one that now shows up in the conversions field. It says, and I'm paraphrasing here, yeah, some of these numbers might just be made up. Hashtag sorry, not sorry. It's all because of Apple's changes to iOS 14.5, of course. And this is Facebook reminding you that it's using the age-old practice of educated guessing.

Starting point is 00:01:10 They call it conversion modeling to show you your campaign results when Apple doesn't send them the data. Late last week, they updated some previous guidance related to conversion time reporting for those modeled conversions. This is a bit nerdy, so apologies if Facebook ads aren't your jam, but I do think it's pretty important. So, quote, our conversion modeling solutions rely on aggregated and delayed data from different sources. To estimate conversions, we are unable to count directly due to various factors, including cross-site tracking limitations. As a result, reporting of modeled conversions may be delayed by 24 to 48 hours. Due to this delay, we are unable to estimate and backfill data to report on true conversion time. For example, if a conversion happened on June 1st but comes

Starting point is 00:02:00 through our modeling pipelines on June 3rd due to the delay, we will report that conversion under June 3rd. This means that conversion modeling will not enable us to report the conversion as having occurred on June 1st. We do not attribute modeled conversions to previous days. Note that for conversions that we can observe directly, non-iOS 14.5 plus conversions and iOS 14.5 plus opted-in conversions, we do report on true conversion time. So, TLDR, all our numbers are accurate, unless they're not. But for sure, they happened on the day we report. Unless they didn't.

Starting point is 00:02:41 More nerdy media buying stuff. This time, Google, in the coming weeks, the bid strategies Target CPA and Target ROAS are going away. Instead, Google says you should use the updated bid strategies by setting optional targets. What's that, you say? Well, now you will see the following. When you select your new search campaign bid strategies,

Starting point is 00:03:01 maximized conversions will have an optional target CPA. Maximized conversion value will have an optional target ROAS. Just to be clear, there's no actual change to bidding behavior here. Today's premium newsletter has a table that details the performance goal, the old bid strategy, and the new one. It makes it a lot more clear, of course. You can also turn on the column called bid strategy type to see if a target CPA or ROAS has been specified. If you've still got a campaign running, either using target CPA or target ROAS, those will still run just fine. They do plan to turn them off completely sometime next year, but say they'll give us all notice. There were some rumblings over the weekend of a possible Google search algorithm update.

Starting point is 00:03:47 There's little doubt one happened, only because Google updates its search algo a couple of times a day. We rarely get any confirmation or insight into the changes on these tiny updates, but this time people believe the timing of a blog post that Google published might give us a hint as to what's new. Google's blog post reiterated their policy about sponsored content and in more firm language than they've done in the past. So, if you publish content on your blog or website, which has been paid for in any way, this is for you. Quoting Google, Affiliate links on pages such as product reviews or shopping guides

Starting point is 00:04:21 are a common way for blogs and publishers to monetize their traffic. In general, using affiliate links to monetize a website is fine. We ask sites participating in affiliate programs to qualify those links with REL equals sponsored in the code, regardless of whether these links were created manually or dynamically. When we find sites failing to qualify affiliate links appropriately, we may issue manual actions to prevent these links from affecting search, and our systems might also take algorithmic actions. Both may affect how we see a site in search. Another common way sites can monetize is by accepting sponsored and guest posts from other sites.

Starting point is 00:05:00 These are articles written by or in the name of one site and published on a different site. We strongly recommend that site owners apply the appropriate rel="sponsored value to these links as well. When we detect sites engaging in either publishing or acquiring links with excessive sponsored and guest posting without proper link tags, algorithmic and manual actions may be applied similar to affiliate links, unquote. So there you go. Make sure you're adding that REL equals sponsored tag. And if your CMS system can't do that for you, you may need to do it manually or else potentially see your blog disappear from Google entirely. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:05:50 No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Quoting social media today, Pinterest has been developing its own stories like option over the past year, which it rebranded to idea pins back in May. The format enables pinners to put together sequences of short video clips, which users can then tap through with each clip being 60 seconds in length and discoverable via a top row of profile bubbles within the app. It's still too early to say how effective IdeaPins can be in your pin strategy and how much traffic they're driving overall for brands. But more data is always better. And as noted, Pinterest has also added a range of other insights over the past year, including conversion insights, monthly views and improved pin trends. Connected TV is becoming more of a thing. That's stuff like YouTube on television, Roku, Hulu, and the likes.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Google today announced three new features to its display and video 360 tools. First, they plan to integrate new CTV contextual signals, so you'll be able to pick inventory by genre, length, or live stream content. Here's an example from Google. Quote, let's say you want to associate your ad message to some of the highly anticipated sports events of the summer, Here's an example from Google. that your ad served against content that is suitable for your brand, unquote. Second, they will be introducing sales lift measurement for CTV ads using Nielsen Catalina solutions in the US. This will help you match ad impressions to offline sales. It will report estimated percentage of sales lift and total incremental sales numbers.

Starting point is 00:07:59 The data will be available right in the display NVIDIA 360 interface, so you won't need any pixels or spending hours crunching log file data. And finally, they're adding some new features to their audio mixer tool, including new dynamic ad creation, so you can build tailored audio ads at scale. You'll use various segmentation rules like location or audience to create customized ads,

Starting point is 00:08:20 all from a single audio creative. Again, quoting Google here. For example, you can create a back-to-school audio campaign that has customized offers for different markets. Once you record the audio asset, you can use the dynamic audio tool to create additional custom assets with local in-store promotions based on where the ads will run, unquote. Both the audio mixer and dynamic production tool will also be available in the recently announced Ads Creative Studio. Well, this Friday at 1 o'clock Pacific, that's 4 p.m. Eastern, 9 p.m. London time.

Starting point is 00:08:56 Another listener Zoom. These are free for everyone to attend. We may have a guest expert or it may just be a happy hour of all of us chatting. Mark it in your calendar this Friday, 1 p.m. Pacific time. And the Zoom link to join us is b.link slash listener Zoom. And that link is in the episode description as well. Talk to you tomorrow. I am the all-knowing, all-rapping, it's like the rock of my life.

Today in Digital Marketing - ﹤rel=best_podcast_ever＞

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