Today in Digital Marketing - The Facebook Aftermath: How Your Ad Campaigns Are Affected

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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. Today, one day later, and marketers are picking up the pieces from the massive Facebook outage.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Also, how did Google handle it when Facebook's website dropped off the face of the earth? How much will you make in salary next year? The best places to get SEO customers? And Instagram finally kills off its most confusing feature. It's Tuesday, October 5th, 2021. Happy World Teachers Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageU Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 477. We start, of course, with the aftermath of the great Facebook crash. First, the effects on organic posts. So far, easy peasy, not seeing a ton of complaints in this

Starting point is 00:01:43 space. Some third-party platforms, though, appear to be having connection issues since the outage. A handful of Sprout social users are reporting in that tool's Slack that they can't edit scheduled posts. Our agency is a Sprout social client, and we had one of our clients' Facebook pages disconnect. Even though we're fully authorized on Facebook's side, Sprout isn't reconnecting it. On the ads side, a few things to know. First, while Facebook confirmed last night what was obvious to most, your ad campaigns did not run during the outage

Starting point is 00:02:13 because, well, it was an outage. Zero impressions means zero dollars spent. But that's where things might get a little complicated today and in the hours ahead. Facebook's distribution algorithm may indeed move your campaigns to accelerated delivery in an attempt to catch up with that lost time. So it's worth double-checking your campaigns and making sure the spend is spending the way you want and expect. Don't forget you can do a breakdown of ad impressions shown per hour if you want.

Starting point is 00:02:45 That's under Breakdown, Delivery, and Time of Day in Facebook's Ads Manager. As for Facebook itself, as you can imagine, the platform outage spooked investors, and the stock tanked Monday, ending the day down almost 5%. That's tens of billions in market cap. It's unlikely the Zuck will care too much. Facebook's stock has done very well this year, reaching a $1 trillion market cap in July. And what did Facebook's competitors think of the day?

Starting point is 00:03:14 They loved it, of course. Telegram, which competes with Facebook's WhatsApp, said they added a staggering 70 million users yesterday alone. It was their biggest increase in user registration ever. So that's you, that's Facebook. But how does Google handle it when one of the world's biggest websites disappears from the internet? After all, for normal websites, they would just drop it out of the search index, wouldn't they? Turns out, no. Not immediately.

Starting point is 00:03:47 Google's John Mueller yesterday explained how they handle site outages. First, when they notice a site is down, they will slow Googlebot's crawl rate, and it won't visit the site as frequently. Mueller says they do this to help the site out, in case the outage is due to an overload of requests. If the site is still reachable after about two days, that is when they will start dropping URLs from the index. Technically speaking, there's no ranking change. So even if your site does go down for, say, four days, you'll still retain the same rank

Starting point is 00:04:16 as you did prior to the outage. Once your site comes back online and Google notices the pages are there again, pops them back into the index, then after a bit, resumes the regular indexing. A year ago, Google introduced the new Google Analytics, called it GA4. Since then, they've introduced features like improved advertising reporting and support for user consent choices. Now they're launching additional capabilities, including an improved search integration and attribution they say is smarter than their previous version. First, with the new Search Console integration, you'll be able to understand the role that organic search plays

Starting point is 00:04:56 in driving traffic to and engagement on your site relative to other marketing channels like search ads or email or social. They are also introducing data-driven attribution without minimum threshold requirements to Google Analytics 4 properties. These models can help give you a better understanding of how all your marketing activities collectively influence your conversions so you don't over- or undervalue a single channel. Unlike last-click attribution, where 100% of the credit goes to the final interaction,

Starting point is 00:05:28 data-driven attribution distributes credit to each marketing touchpoint based on how much impact the touchpoint had on driving a conversion. That will be available in attribution reports in the coming weeks. And an expansion of, God help us, conversion modeling,

Starting point is 00:05:46 or as it's known outside our industry, educated guesses. This is where platforms guess at how many conversions you got because some of that data isn't getting to us anymore. Thanks for nothing, Tim Cook. Quoting Google, conversion modeling is now used in attribution reports, the conversions report, and explorations to identify where conversions have come from and allocate them to the right Google and non-Google channels, like search ads, email, or paid social. Second, behavioral modeling will soon be supported in reporting. Behavioral modeling uses rigorously tested and validated machine learning to fill gaps in behavioral data like daily active users or average

Starting point is 00:06:25 revenue per user. This allows you to conduct uninterrupted measurement across devices and platforms and answer questions like, how many new users did I acquire from my last campaign? Or, which steps in my funnel have the highest user drop-off rates? Unquote. Obviously, Google wants you to switch your Pixel to the new Google Analytics 4 property, and they continue to bulk new features in there to convince you. $170,000. That's what a corporate chief marketing officer in the U.S. can be expected to make next year, according to research from Robert Half. The recently released study also gave median salary ranges for a whole lot of positions in our industry, including marketing, advertising, and PR positions.

Starting point is 00:07:10 The median starting salary for a corporate vice president of marketing is forecast to be $151,000 in 2022. And the median starting salary for a marketing manager should be $81,000 and change. This is base salary only. It doesn't include bonuses, incentives, stock participation options, and stuff like that. There is a link to the full report

Starting point is 00:07:32 in today's premium newsletter. The full report includes projections for a lot more positions, including the ability to specify a particular city's salary ranges. 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. The Instagram app, I think we can all agree, is a Frankenstein-likes-dog's-breakfast of UI decisions,

Starting point is 00:08:17 all of which show what management decisions look like when they're made in sheer panic. The app was good at first. Then Snapchat came along, and after the company turned down Zuckerberg's $3 billion offer to buy them, Zuck told his engineers to make a Snapchat clone and bolt it onto Instagram. And that's how we got Instagram Stories. Instagram Reels? A panicked response to TikTok eating away at market share?

Starting point is 00:08:46 Even YouTube was enough of a threat for Instagram to paste a kind of clone of that platform into the app. They called it IGTV. IGTV itself was always a mess. It wasn't supported well in the API. It didn't have any kind of creative culture of its own. And even after giving it a dedicated icon in the app, nobody really knew what to do with it. Other than to cross post their YouTube videos, of course. They even made a standalone app for it. Early last year, they dropped the IGTV button from the UI. Now they are dropping it entirely and will combine long form video uploaded to the app and regular Instagram videos into, you guessed it, another new format. This time, it's called Instagram Video. Videos can be up to 60 minutes long. Oh, and live videos will be in there too. There will be a new video tab on account profiles,

Starting point is 00:09:38 but they say those cross-posted TikTok videos, oh excuse me, reels, won't be part of that mix. They will continue to live on in their own tab. I'll snark aside, for our purposes as marketers, this is actually good news. For one, we don't have to explain to our clients or bosses what IGTV is. Also, consolidating videos into a single placement is probably more effective in the long run for our media buys. Apparently, they'll be called in-stream video ads, much like their Facebook cousins. Oddly, though, if you plan to boost a video from your brand's account, you will still be limited to videos that max out at 60 seconds. These changes are rolling out globally starting today across both iOS and Android. A new study from Search Engine Journal has detailed how digital agencies get their best SEO clients. And it was a big study. More than 2,800 agency people and freelancers participated.

Starting point is 00:10:38 At the top, of course, is the agency's website. 45% of people said that was their best marketing channel. Then Google search was reported by 28%. Having a dedicated sales team just under it at 27% and Google ads at 24%. Today's premium newsletter has the complete list. Spoiler alert, in last place, in other words, the least effective marketing channel, speaking at conferences. Facebook just cannot decide if it likes cross posts or it doesn't. If you cross post a TikTok video to Reels, Instagram will smack that reach way back. You can no longer share a WhatsApp message to more than five people. Which is why it's weird to see them actually encouraging cross posts now in groups.

Starting point is 00:11:29 This did exist before for marketplace items. When you posted an item for sale in marketplace, it would often show you a list of for sale groups you're a member of and offer to post it there too. But now Facebook is testing letting people share into multiple Facebook groups at once. Facebook itself has not commented on the test, which is being spotted by a lot of people. But if you manage a Facebook group for your brand or client, you may want to get ready for a lot more moderation work ahead. And two small Google items to wrap up. First, Google reminded us in a blog post today that it plans to follow through on its promise to force two-factor authentication on for 150 million accounts by the end of this year. Most security experts say two-factor by text message is okay if you must. Though it's sometimes possible for hackers to convince your cell company to transfer your number to them, leaving you exposed. A separate Authenticator app is really what most of us should be using.

Starting point is 00:12:30 Google has one called Google Authenticator. Microsoft has one. There's one called Authy, A-U-T-H-Y, that is well thought of. And the highest two-factor method is a physical key, like a YubiKey. And finally, Google says they will no longer permit advertisements that promote high fat, high sugar, or high salt food and beverages. But this will only apply to ads targeting kids in the UK and the EU.

Starting point is 00:12:56 The policy change applies only to shopping ads as well. It does not affect those free product listings or Google search results. Well, I'm trying a new thing on my TikTok account. I'm doing lives again, answering your digital marketing questions. And I'm doing it more regularly because I'm doing it on my treadmill. As you may know from following this podcast, I've been on a bit of a fitness terror lately and used to be doing walks every day.

Starting point is 00:13:23 But, you know, I'm in B.C. It's starting to get quite cold and rainy and miserable out. So I have a treadmill and now I am doing my lives, answering your questions about SEO and digital marketing and Facebook ads and the crash and whatever you like on the TikTok account while I am on the treadmill. So please forgive the sweat. But, you know, if you want to join me uh i can't tell you when i do it because it's kind of random but it's usually after about seven pacific anywhere from seven pacific until

Starting point is 00:13:50 about 10 o'clock at night pacific time anyway the tiktok account again is today in digital or you can follow me on my regular personal account which is todd maffitt talk to you tomorrow i'm gonna teach myself to walk I'm gonna take myself a walk

Today in Digital Marketing - The Facebook Aftermath: How Your Ad Campaigns Are Affected

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.