Today in Digital Marketing - The Magic Frequency is 5.5. Tell No-one. 🤫

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, how many ad impressions are too many? Will we all need to learn Apple SEO soon? Agorapulse and Google Ads both make some nice tweaks to their platforms. And the new metric that we all needed for 2020 is here, rage clicks. It's Wednesday, October 28th, 2020. Happy National Engineers Day, Venezuela. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:27 Big episode today, and we start with one of the biggest things that can tank any digital marketing campaign. That is ad fatigue. That's when your target market has seen your ad so many times that it's just starting to piss them off. And one of the metrics you can use to understand if you're nearing ad fatigue is frequency. Frequency will tell you the average number of times each person saw your ad. If performance begins to drop as your frequency numbers rise, well, that's probably ad fatigue.

Starting point is 00:00:58 So what is a good frequency then anyway? Three ad impressions per person? 30? In my early days as a marketer 25 years ago, the number everyone talked about was 27. The number was actually nine. You needed nine impressions to get someone to take action. But the thought, at least back then, was that people would miss two out of three ads. So you need three sets of nine ads to make it, thus 27 impressions. Honestly, in retrospect, I think that was mostly nonsense. But now, we actually have some data. Facebook today releasing a study of more than 2,400 campaigns to determine at what point ad engagement starts to decline based on repeated exposure. Quoting social media today,

Starting point is 00:01:43 Facebook found that more impressions does correlate with better action intent and ad recall rates, although there is a limit. While the exact number of impressions can vary, the key insight is that there is indeed typically a point of diminishing returns. So how much is too much? In Facebook's finding, after five or six impressions, the results start to taper off, even for ads with good creative. But as noted, that's also relative to the ad itself. A good engaging ad will see better performance than an average one, unquote. Don't forget, Facebook's ad platform has some pretty solid automation. I mean, when the platform is working, that is.

Starting point is 00:02:23 You can set up a rule to turn campaigns off when they hit a frequency of, say, 10. Or don't turn it off, but decrease the budget, or just send you a notification. Anyway, apparently five or six is the magical number, at least from Facebook. While you're digging around your latest campaign's metrics there, don't forget to spend some time on your actual website. There are lots of ways to get easy data, like Google Analytics. Sometimes they're really helpful ones, though, like heat mapping or session replay, where you get to see the history of where someone's mouse moved and where they clicked. Those ones are often on the pricey side.

Starting point is 00:02:58 This morning, Microsoft released an analytics tool that does all that and more, and they have made it free. It's called Clarity. It's apparently GDPR compliant, and there are no traffic caps. So even if your website gets a million visitors a day, your brand can use it for free. Microsoft says the code that you need to add to your website to make it work won't have any impact on speed. That's not true, of course. Any additional code or processing will impact speed. What they probably mean here is that your web visitors shouldn't notice any slowdown. If you've never seen a session playback before, it's really quite fascinating. It's like you're looking over the shoulder of a focus group participant. You get to see where they clicked,

Starting point is 00:03:36 like you actually literally get to see their mouse move around. Even if they didn't click on a button, you get to see where they clicked. You know, even if they just clicked on white space on your page. It shows when they scrolled up or down and to what point. And then you can filter the results by country, operating system, lots more. My favorite filter in this new Microsoft Clarity system, show me sessions where there were rage clicks. And what is a rage click? Rage clicks are when the user rapidly clicks or taps in the same small area. There are some metrics that Google Analytics won't give you as well, like how many of those users were clicking on non-existent links. You can add

Starting point is 00:04:10 this to your site now, or if you want to kick the tires, they have a demo with live data. It's all at clarity.microsoft.com. About two and a half years ago, Apple hired a guy named John Gianandrea. That in itself isn't a big deal. Apple's hiring people all the time. What got people's attention was John's previous job, the head of search at Google. At the time, Apple said they were hiring him so that he could work on Siri, to which pretty much everyone in the industry said, yeah, yeah, right. Well, now we may be seeing in the industry said, yeah, yeah, right. Well, now we

Starting point is 00:04:45 may be seeing what the long game is for Apple. The Financial Times reporting yesterday that parts of the latest iPhone operating system can return search results without using Google. Apparently, this secretive project was given a lot more urgency when the U.S. government last week launched a lawsuit against Google, partly over payments that Google makes to Apple to be the iPhone's default search engine. Also, SEO people have noticed that a crawler called Applebot has been poking around sites lately. One consultant said Applebot has shown up, quote, a ridiculous number of times, unquote, on his client's websites in recent weeks. So should we all start optimizing for Apple SEO soon?

Starting point is 00:05:27 Maybe. Let's not forget that Apple has no debt and $81 billion of cash just sitting in their bank account. Agora Pulse has made a small upgrade to its publishing tools. Now you can add alt text to your social posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The original intention of alt text was to describe an image so that people with sight impairment can use screen readers to describe what's on the screen. Nasty SEO people turned that into just another field they could pump with keywords.

Starting point is 00:06:00 So, you know, knock that off. You get up to 120 characters for your alt tag on Agorapulse. Coming in what the head of product calls the next few weeks, apparently some good news about an integration with Google My Business profiles. A couple of nice additions to Google's ad platform today. First, real-time alerts. So if your campaign has any critical issues, you will now receive an alert while you are setting it up. These are issues that could prevent your campaign

Starting point is 00:06:30 from running at its full potential, like an invalid website address or a location overlap. Also, you can now pick up where you left off. Draft campaigns will save your progress automatically. And you can now create a campaign from the overview page to help you build campaigns faster. Once you finish creating your campaign, you can then see if your ad has been disapproved on the overview page. These updates are available now for search campaigns and will expand to other campaign types in the coming months. While Facebook and Google certainly get a lot of coverage when we're talking about digital marketing stuff, spare a thought for the forgotten, lonely grandfather of the digital world, digital displays. They're still a thing.

Starting point is 00:07:14 Depending on their use, they can be quite a powerful addition to your digital program. And one company going all in is the cleverly named Restaurant Brands International. They own Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes. The company this week said it plans to overhaul the digital screens at more than 10,000 of their drive-thrus to provide stronger marketing of their products. And what an overhaul this will be. These new screens will use predictive models

Starting point is 00:07:40 to try to suggest what you're likely to order when you drive up, pushing specific upsells based on what the customer is adding to their order. Also, the products promoted on those screens will change depending on the time of day and the weather. So, you know, like a hot spring day, it would promote iced coffee. But if the weather turns cold the next day, those screen areas will suggest hot drinks instead. Also, trending items in the area around that restaurant. The boards will also let customers order and pay at the same time. 15 Tim Hortons in Canada are testing it right now. An interesting Twitter chat this morning between an SEO specialist and a guy who works at Microsoft's

Starting point is 00:08:22 Bing. In the chat, we learned that employees there at Microsoft are likely going to be working from home until next summer at the least. The SEO guy, Barry Schwartz, asked how COVID is affecting the progress of their work. And Bing's Frederick Debut said, if anything, he and his team are working harder and longer hours. Quote, my relationship with meetings has changed forever. Random five-minute hallway discussions turned into 30-minute meetings. I have days full of back-to-backs, but anytime I have a two-plus hour break without meetings, I start to feel lonely, unquote. He also reported that the blurring of work-life boundaries is causing some strain. So if you're feeling that too, and I think

Starting point is 00:09:03 we all are in some way, know at least that you are not alone. And finally, a small change to Google Docs to tell you about. They are changing the default editing mode for Microsoft Office files in Google Drive on the web. So now when you double click on an Office file, it will open directly in Office editing mode. I only report this because lots of marketing agencies and brands use Google's work platform, and probably most of them are exchanging documents with clients and partners who use Microsoft's formats. In the past, double-clicking on one of those Office documents would open a preview of that Office document, from which users could choose whether to open in Office editing mode or download the file. You can still use preview mode by right-clicking the file now and clicking

Starting point is 00:09:49 preview, but now, by default, it will convert it to a Google Doc and will let you start editing it, which I think actually is what people assumed would happen anyway. An ads specialist in the UK, the owner of a digital agency in Canada, a freelance digital marketer in Oregon, another one in Mexico, a CRM consultant in Chicago, and the Guinness World Record holder for fire eating who has created reverse parades and driveway circuses because of COVID. All these people and more joined our Slack community in the last two weeks alone. Why aren't you there yet?

Starting point is 00:10:25 There's a channel dedicated to noob questions. There's a channel where I'm posting job opportunities in the digital marketing world. There are exclusive long-form episodes about the social algorithms that are only available in our Slack. I'm telling you, you are missing out. There's a link in this episode's notes that takes you right to it. Or you can go to todayindigital.com slash slack. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Magic Frequency is 5.5. Tell No-one. 🤫

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