Today in Digital Marketing - The 2024 Guide to Meta Ad Attribution Windows

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

Understanding Attribution — 7DC, 1DV... which do you use now? Also: What post type on LinkedIn will get you more engagement. Snapchat bolsters its agency program. And the new retail media network with more purchase data than you can imagine.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereGO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.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.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Friday, April 5th. Today, understanding attribution. 7DC, 1DV, which should we be using now? Also, what post type on LinkedIn will get you more engagement? Snapchat bolsters its agency program. And the new retail media network with more purchase data than you can imagine. And here's a first spoilers ahead for the video game Bioshock. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Well, every Friday we check in with our Meta Ads correspondent, Andrew Foxwell. Andrew has visibility to $300 million in Meta Ads spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. If meta ads are not relevant to what you do, if you're a premium member, just tap the next story in your chapters list, or if you're not, skip to the 8 minute 25 second mark. And Andrew, it might be a bit of a boring topic, but I think an important one for marketers

and people who buy meta ads, which are attribution windows. We've got all sorts of different ways of constructing this big changes happened with Apple that forced us to sort of change the way these appear. What are the best practices this year, 2024, in terms of attribution windows in meta ads? It definitely depends always. But I think it's important to point out that there's been a lot of discussion about this like what are you optimizing for and seven day click the too long didn't read is seven day click actually is usually going to bring more quality clicks and therefore quality visitors and therefore quality conversions um so if you're already on seven day click one day view, which is the auto,

you can actually go through and check your one day view metrics across all active campaigns in the last 90 days to see what impact one day view has on the account. Meta takes a lot of credit with one day view, and it's not bad. You know, certainly like you want to know some of that. But one day view is modeled. And so if it's a lot of your account data, that can skew things. And if you have more than 25 to 30% of view through when you're using the seven day click one day view,

then sticking with just a seven day click can be a much better thing to do in terms of quality visitors. The results likely are going to actually look worse in Facebook. But if you're using a third party tool, they should start to look better over time. Your CPMs will also increase initially, but it's because it kind of creates a drop in what they call the value drop in the delivery auction. But over time, actually, it does deliver better results. Yeah. You say modeled, we should probably explain modeled means sort of, I mean, a friendly way of putting it is meta's best guess at something. Often, you know, especially with the changes to iOS a couple of years ago now, the meta

platform's not getting that data as fast as it used to. And so it sort of does its best guess at what it thinks that the number should be. That's improved. That modeling has improved. Even when it first came out, it was terrible. Where do you find modeling, not just with attribution, but sort of as a whole, these days on the meta platform? Is it good enough to rely on? Yeah, you know, it definitely is better than it used to be by a significant margin.

The issue is, if you're someone that are if you see a lot of like, I saw an account the other day, it was 50% of it was one day, it was like view through conversions. And if meta is sort of hypothesizing and modeling 50% of them, that can be misleading, in my opinion. I'm not saying it doesn't have any impact, but I think you are better off doing a seven day click while knowing that there will be an impact of some, like some view throughs that come through that. But optimizing for that's not necessarily a good thing.

So, so where, like, where is it in terms of how do I trust it? I would say that it's something to use as like a secondary signal, but it's not something I want to lead with. You know, you can, there are people that have gone off of using a third-party tool and they're just going to look at what Meta says and they're going to use, you know,

seven-day click, one-day view, and they're going to say, look, if it's modeled, that's okay. It seems to match up relatively close to what we have. And if that's true and that works for you and you feel like it makes sense, then great. For me, I always like to know, even if the model data has improved in the accuracy, I always like to know and optimize for more quality as much as I can and not be dependent

upon this modeled piece. It's just over time, we've tested seven-day click enough that I have more confidence in that than I do on the one-day view coming from modeled. So, it depends on the brand, of course. If it's low, if it's a low amount of modeled stuff coming, you know, then that's okay. And I think you can leave that in, like low being sub 20% or something like that. But in most cases, that's not the case. You said something interesting that hadn't occurred to me before.

You mentioned that the attribution window is part of optimization, unless I misheard you. I had assumed that the attribution window was just strictly a reporting function. Are you saying that, and maybe this has been well-known in the industry and I'm just an idiot, but are you saying that your choice of attribution window when you set up the campaign is used as one of the optimizing features of that

campaign? In other words, if you have two different optimization windows, let's say for two different campaigns, that it will go out and seek different people based on the different attribution windows? Yeah. Why? That doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Yes. Yeah, so it's like, it does that because it's finding people.

So it's just like a bid. Like if you did an auto bid, it's going to find the most people because you're like, yeah, whoever you want to find. And in this one, what it's saying is, seven people that are going to bid

for a seven-day click. Obviously, you're doing the targeting. You look at it as a whole circle. And seven-day click is a more narrow group of people within that that are like more quality people that are more, you know, they have intention to click. They click more often.

They look around. They spend time on sites when they're clicking around. Oh, okay. So it's going to go find people that will trigger inside that window. I didn't realize that was part of the optimization. Yes, it is part of the optimization. Now, the degree to which Meta talks about this being a big part of it isn't a lot because they want people to be using their defaults to be the biggest that it can be, right? And they want you to believe that the model data

is trustworthy and everything else. So they don't talk about this a ton. And if you try to find documentation, it's like trying to throw darts at a wall. It's difficult, but you, but the reality of it is, yes, you will be trying to find, you know, more people, which is why over time, the CPM generally will rise if you switch to seven day click, because it's finding people that are a smaller group of people. But if your audience is big enough, generally, you know, and like, you know, you're not trying to do all these small little retargeting things like we used to do, then utilizing a seven day click is actually going to be a little like dip and then go back over time to be better. So especially in reference to new customer CPA, which is a big part of what a lot of us track now in direct response,

not just the overall ROAS and things, which is good too, but especially in reference to finding new folks for prospecting campaigns. Very interesting. As usual, you lead us through the weeds with great aplomb, as they might say. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you. Andrew Foxwell is our meta ads correspondent. You can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training at b.link slash Foxwell or his Slack community of senior meta ad buyers at b.link slash founders. Both of those are affiliate links, and you can find those links at the bottom

of our show notes. Social Insider has some new data on LinkedIn's best performing organic post types. This comes from content published on the Social Insider platform, but that's a pretty big data set. First, overall, the engagement rate spiked 44% last year compared to the previous year. That engagement rate, as measured against impressions, was 3.85%. In terms of specific formats, multi-image posts generated the most engagement and by a pretty healthy margin. Quoting social Media Today, post carousels anymore. So multi-image posts based on this data is the best alternative, followed by document posts, images, and video, unquote. As per the other platforms, link posts are way down the list of engaging formats. I only mention this because it's still the format that

many brands default to when they're trying to share news or announcements. And it makes sense. No social media platform wants you to be taking users off their site, so they deliberately downrank links in the algorithm. If the engagement you're trying to get is shares specifically, video posts generate the most sharing on LinkedIn. On average, each post gets three shares, but video posts will get you more. This seems to be the case regardless of how many followers your page has. We have a link to the full study in today's email newsletter, which is free to subscribe to. Just tap the link at the top of the show notes or go to

todayindigital.com slash newsletter. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. or marketing. Quoting Snapchat, advanced partners will receive unique benefits throughout the year, including personalized training and enablement sessions, dedicated support, and additional tools and resources. We're also making it easier for our partners to buy, manage, and measure on Snapchat by rolling out several new features to simplify collaboration, unquote. Those things, by the way,

include bulk invoice downloads and better campaign management. They're also improving asset sharing across different brands. Some agencies are already in the new advanced program, including VaynerMedia, WPromote, Horizon Media, Kepler, and PMG. Despite seeing some increase in revenue, Snapchat's growth so far this year has been more slow and steady than spectacular. This has led the social media company to make some tough decisions, including cutting staff and streamlining projects

in an effort to better its financial health. Another large retail chain is launching its own ad network, but this time it's a bank. Chase has launched Chase Media Solutions, and as far as anyone can tell, it's the first media platform led by a financial institution. The platform lets brands send promotions to Chase's 80 million customers. This was expected after Chase acquired the digital ad platform Fig in 2022, and some industry watchers say there's one big reason banks may end up being a huge player in the retail ad space. Quoting Martek, quote, Chase's advantage is transactional,

first-party data, which allow brands and agencies to target based on purchase history. Retail media networks have that data too, but only within their specific stores and owned channels. Chase customers have purchase histories across retailers and other businesses they buy from. Unquote. If you've seen your brand's Instagram engagement drop lately, it's likely because, for whatever reason, the algorithm isn't showing your content to people who follow your account. So, Instagram is fixing that and will now show all your content to everyone who follows you. Nah, I'm just kidding. What they have done, though, is added a new sticker that you can

add to your posts, which, when tapped, will pop up the per account notification panel to let users turn on notifications for your posts, stories, reels, and live streams. Instagram's head Adam Massari reminded brands this week that just because a user wants to see all your content doesn't mean that Instagram will let them. Quote, nobody reaches all their followers when they post primarily for two reasons. One, a lot of your followers won't open the app that day. And two, those who do log in have far more posts to see than they have time to spend and don't scroll down far enough to get every post, unquote.

This is a bit disingenuous, of course, since there are actually three reasons. The biggest being that it's not in Meta's financial interest to show all your content to all the people who follow you. After all, if they did, you wouldn't need to run ads to reach them. Quoting social media today, quote, the logic here seems to contradict Instagram's push to insert more AI-based recommendations from profiles that you don't follow into your feed. If there are far more posts in your feed than you can possibly see each day

already, adding in additional recommendations is only going to make that worse, right? In any event, the point is that your followers are not necessarily going to catch all of your updates, and this will provide another means to ensure that you're maximizing reach to your most engaged fans by giving them the option to opt into alerts for specific content types. And finally, the once ad-free world of streaming video services is almost entirely gone now. Only Apple TV is still ad-free, and they give that another month or two max before they start running ads there too. We've even seen these platforms have ad placements for when people have paused their program. Placements which, let's face it, as marketers, are kind of genius.

But now, enter the world of pause ads on hardware. Roku has a recently revealed patent that will show an ad whenever anything plugged into your TV's HDMI port is paused. Which could mean, if you're using an Apple TV box to watch Apple TV content, even though Apple hasn't put any ads there, your HDMI port will. But it's not just TV sticks and boxes that are plugged into those things. DVD players are. Even gaming consoles connect via HDMI. Can you imagine spending

60 hours in the brilliant game of Bioshock? You finally get to the end. Meet Andrew Ryan. You think you have memories. A family. An airplane. A crash. Was airplane, a crash.

Was there really a family? I have type 2 diabetes, but I manage it well. It's a little pill with a big story to tell. It's actually even more Machiavellian since the patent mentions text recognition to try to figure out what you're watching at that moment, and then try to find an appropriate ad to play, which, in the case of Bioshock, would be hilariously ironic, given the game's theme of capitalism gone amok. Of course, it's just a patent. It might not go anywhere. But, like Andrew Ryan himself said, if I were a betting man. On Monday, a deep dive into shrinkflation from the marketer's perspective.

Nobody wants to have to do it, but if you must, turns out there's a right way and a wrong way. I will speak to the author of a new research paper on the topic. That will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamik First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Mappin. Have a restful weekend, friends.

I'll see you on Monday.