Today in Digital Marketing - The Problem with Facebook’s Email to (Some) Advertisers

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Facebook says the price of ads are about to drop…. Some updates from LinkedIn’s new live events platform that marketers will love… Sprout Social adds integration with Glassdoor… and the digital ad industry gets another spanking from the European Union.Join our Slack community! TodayInDigital.com/slackNot subscribed yet? Subscribe links at TodayInDigital.com HELP SPREAD THE WORD:Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publishReview Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST:Produced by: engageQ.com Advertising: RedCircle.com/brands and TodayInDigital.com/adsClassified Ads: TodayInDigital.com/classifieds Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com Email list: TodayInDigital.com/email Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA:Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffinTod’s agency: engageQ.comTikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffiTwitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (game livestreaming)Source links and full transcripts at TodayInDigital.com Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Facebook says the price of ads are about to drop. Some updates from LinkedIn's new live events platform that marketers will love. Sprout Social adds integration with Glassdoor. And the digital ad industry gets another spanking from the European Union. It's Tuesday, October 20th, 2020. Happy World Statistics Day. Warning, high snark levels ahead. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Facebook today announced that CPM rates are expected to decrease next month. And by announced,

I mean that their sales reps picked a handful of big budget advertisers at random, emailed this to them, and then those people then leaked the email on Twitter. Which is how Facebook makes these kinds of announcements. I wish I were kidding here. The email read, quote, Immediately after polls close on November 3rd, we will not allow social issue, electoral, or political ads on the platform. We may see a fluctuation in performance once we remove those advertisers from the auction. I also want to note that this may be a possible opportunity to scale before the holiday, as we will likely see CPM's decrease in cost during this

time. Currently, no date has been expressed as to when we will allow these advertisers back on the platform, unquote. Okay, lots to unpack here. First, it's not clear exactly why Facebook thinks CPMs will fall. Yes, CPMs are directly tied to supply and demand. If there are fewer advertisers, the rates generally go down. But Facebook itself has said in the whole picture, political ads don't actually account for much spend. Second, this rep hasn't made the obvious connection that even if CPMs do fall, they should only fall if you're targeting Americans. If you're in Canada and you market to Canadians,

there really shouldn't be any significant change in demand for targets. Third, and this is troubling, the category they're going to turn off is social issue, electoral, or political ads. While you might not think your ad campaign is about a social issue, Facebook frequently makes these mistakes and will disable campaigns that its AI bots mistakenly believe are about a social issue. Are you a recycling depot? That's a social issue.

Do you sell renewable energy products? Obviously political. This happens all the time. And fourth, Facebook has a bad habit of applying American jurisdiction to all countries. If it's not legal in the U.S. but is legal in another country, well, tough for you. Cannabis is a great example here. In the U.S., it's illegal federally. In Canada, it's fully legal, federally, provincially. Hell, we have cannabis stores here that are literally

run by the government. But can you advertise Canadian cannabis products on Facebook to Canadians? No, you cannot. And so, if you run social issue or political ads in another country, will they stop all those too? Past history suggests they very well might. And worse, they won't say, or haven't decided, when they'll let them run again. So, maybe CPMs will fall? If you're targeting Americans? Maybe not.

I think the real reason Facebook is saying this can be found in the email where it says this may be a possible opportunity to scale before the holiday. In other words, hey buy more ads. And I don't know if anyone from Facebook listens to this podcast but if you do like would it kill

you people to set up a blog to tell all advertisers about this stuff? Hell, I'll go halfsies with you on a MailChimp account. My favorite tweet response to this was from independent Facebook ads consultant Andrew Foxwell, who said Facebook is all like, no, it's not political spending. Reps are like, yeah, it might be political spending. Facebook's like, hey, we're going to keep breaking stuff in the meantime. Cool. Also, DTC advertiser David Herman reported today that the breakdown of dynamic creative no longer shows which variation performed best.

Because, you know, like, why would we need that kind of information anyway? What are you guys, like, digital marketers or something? Virtual events are becoming a much bigger part of our world now, ever since COVID, and today LinkedIn announced a number of updates to their still fairly new live events platform, which apparently is called LinkedIn Events with LinkedIn Live.

Come on, stop. Anyway, here are the new upgrades. Some new organic discovery features like personalized event recommendations in your audience's My Network tab and a new weekly Events Digest email. Also, when you post an event from your page, LinkedIn automatically notifies your followers who are most likely to attend. Based on various criteria, including their interests, this will be rolling out in the next few weeks. You can now include a free registration form for your event and collect the names and emails of people who signed up. You can also download the list from your event page,

upload the list to your CRM, share it with your sales teams, that kind of thing. You can also run sponsored content single image ads now alongside your organic posts to promote your event. And, and I actually think this is the best, you can retarget prior event registrants now. All you have to do is create a custom target audience and campaign manager based on those who have RSVP'd to any of your LinkedIn events. Sorry, your LinkedIn events with LinkedIn live events. They say they're working on more stuff, including advanced event analytics and a new event ads format. LinkedIn made this announcement on their corporate blog, which is only accessible to anyone with a computer.

Okay, I'll stop now. I mentioned Andrew Foxwell earlier. If you sell anything online, a great podcast to have in your app is his e-commerce influence podcast. And earlier today, they put out a really solid episode about how to revamp your Facebook ad performance in Q4. They cover how user behavior is changing the current state of Facebook, using bid overrides to manage volatile Facebook ad performance, and how long you need to run campaigns to maximize performance. Here's a short clip. And then I think the third thing is, is if you haven't thought about your mid funnel a lot, think about that one that we really utilize a lot as we do video on top funnel for conversions. And then we'll remarket off of a 50 percent or 25 percent view in mid funnel. And that's a really nice way

that's not dependent on the pixel for building those audiences. And so that's an opportunity for you to just look at that mid funnel. Have you been targeting your engagers? Are you engaging, targeting only people, you know, everybody in the last 365 days might be too much.

So, you know, what kind of things? I rarely see email built into the mid funnel either. People that are on the email list or have opened an email that haven't purchased. Target those people. Build out that mid funnel more. Make that more robust. Again, that's the e-commerce influence podcast, which you'll find. Well, you know how to find podcasts.

A couple of nice platform updates to bring you up to speed on. Sprout Social today added Glassdoor to their engagement tool set. Glassdoor is a site where people rate their employers. This new integration will let you see reviews as they come in, reply to them, escalate to your team, all the usual stuff. I suppose you can also apply Sprout's regular automations like tag content with specific words. This automation is only available in Sprout's advanced plan, which is 250 bucks a month. I do love Sprout Social. We use them here at our agency, but this automation of theirs is a little bit light. You can't auto hide or auto delete comments based on their content,

something that Agorapulse can do. Speaking of Agorapulse, they've added support for seeing comments on dynamic ads. They say there's an API restriction that prevents them from dropping these comments into your regular inbox stream, at least Instagram versions of those. So you'll have to open the ad natively in the Instagram mobile app to respond. To see all your ads, go to the published tab of the publishing lists section of your dashboard. Pure dynamic posts will appear in the dynamic ad posts drop down option under type posts. And Hootsuite this morning said they were having problems with their Amplify product, specifically trouble receiving mobile and email notifications for posts. They are working on it.

There may be some trouble brewing for digital ads in Europe this week. As you probably know, the privacy regulations in Europe are more string As you probably know, the privacy regulations in Europe are more stringent than other parts of the world. And when the GDPR came into effect, the ad industry responded by developing something they called the TCF, the Transparency and Consent Framework. You probably know this from those irritating banners at the bottom of every website telling you that there'll be cookies ahead. Now, Europe's data supervisor says that framework isn't enough. Quoting TechCrunch, the framework fails to meet the required legal standards of data protection, according to the EU data supervisor. The

investigation follows complaints against the use of personal data in the real-time bidding component of programmatic advertising, which contend that a system of high-velocity personal data trading is inherently incompatible with data security requirements baked into EU law. Unquote. The ad industry group that created this cookie banner solution is the IAB Europe. The IAB is one of the main advertising industry groups around the world, but the EU says the AIB hasn't done enough. It hasn't appointed a data protection officer.

It doesn't have a register of its own internal data processing activities. Apparently even its own privacy policy wasn't good enough. For its part, the IAB said it respectfully disagrees. The fellow who filed the original complaint that led to this finding works for a civil liberties group. He told TechCrunch, quote, the TCF was an attempt by the tracking industry

to put a veneer of quasi-legality over the massive data breach at the heart of the behavioral advertising and tracking industry, and the Belgian DPA is now peeling that veneer off and exposing the illegality. So far, the only enforcement action from the EU has been several mildly worded blog posts. Watch this space. Today in our Slack community, I posted some more in our exclusive

content channel. This one, a study about podcast listenership and marketing. There are also full length exclusive episodes with experts in the TikTok algorithm, Google My Business, profile management, content marketing, and lots more. You will only find these in our Slack community. Tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash Slack to join. It is free. That's it for now. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.