Today in Digital Marketing - The Secret Recipes of Social Algorithms

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

YouTube joins the list of platforms leaking their own secret recipes... the myth of Facebook's 50-event Learning Phase... Are Twitter Fleets on their way back?... And Amazon bans hundreds of merchants. We're looking for an Associate Producer! Check TodayInDigital.com/job• Get a Free 7-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter GET YOUR WORD OUT:• Ads as low as $20! See https://todayindigital.com/ads• Be a guest expert: https://b.link/pod-expert JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!- Slack: https://todayindigital.com/slack- Discord: https://todayindigital.com/discord- Reddit: https://todayindigital.com/reddit ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)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, YouTube joins the list of platforms leaking their own secret recipes, the myth of Facebook's 50 event learning phase, our Twitter fleets on their way back, and Amazon bans hundreds of merchants. Why? You'll find out today, Monday, September 20th, 2021. Happy Federal Election Day, Canada. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 471. His name is Joe Leadington.

He's 67 years old, a retired American teacher, lives in the same house he grew up in, just outside Corbin, a little town in Kentucky. Joe will probably be the first to tell you he's of no particular consequence. Unlike his uncle, a man named Harlan Sanders, though you might know him as Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. He wasn't a real colonel, that was an honorary title the state governor gave him. But Sanders was the real guy, with the real restaurant. And as a kid, Joe would do chores for him. Sometimes prep cook, sometimes janitor. He made 25 cents a day. Back in 2016, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune was dispatched to Corbin to do a puff piece about the origins of KFC. Joe agreed to meet the reporter in the original restaurant and leaf through some old papers handed down by his family. At one point, as he's flipping through some pages,

the reporter says, hang on, go back there. And there on the last page of the colonel's wife's will is a list of ingredients, 11 ingredients. All herbs and spices. Could this be the secret eleven herbs and spices that KFC protects so well that they claim they have protected in a 700-pound safe underground? Well, sure is, said Joe proudly, explaining that he used to make the mixture himself. The reporter quickly ended the interview and raced back to file the story, a story which published that list. The next day, Joe called the reporter back. He sounded different.

Now, he wasn't so sure. After all, he's only had that scrapbook for four years. After all, the writing doesn't seem like his uncle's. After all, that was a long time ago and, you know, my memory. There's no proof KFC called Joe and asked him to walk it back. But they have been awfully protective about that recipe. In the early 2000s, when a couple bought Harlan's Old House, found a similar recipe and went public with it, KFC sued them.

Food brands go to elaborate lengths to protect their recipes. So too do social media platforms, except we call their recipes algorithms. Until recently, the ingredients to that code have been kept away from the public. We get general information like engagement increases reach and negative signals decrease it, but we rarely get a detailed look at the inner workings.

That's been changing lately, mostly because these platforms are trying to prove that their systems don't reward misinformation, negative social behavior, and the likes. Late last week, in a long blog post, YouTube joined the ever-growing list of brands willing to share a bit more of what makes up their recipe, in particular, their recommendation engine, the part that picks which videos will be recommended to you after you watch one video. Here is a summary for those of you wanting to rank higher in those recommendations. First, they confirmed what we've all known for some time, that their algorithm is based on machine

learning, so it's less a list of elements the code strictly looks for, and more a self-evolving engine. Clicking videos certainly helps, but watching videos helps more. And the longer a user watches a video, the stronger a signal it sends that this user is interested, not only in the topic, but also how that topic is presented. Quoting the company, if a tennis fan watched 20 minutes of Wimbledon highlight clips and only a few seconds of match analysis video,

we can safely assume they found watching those highlights more valuable. Unquote. Then they conduct mini-surveys in the YouTube feed. If you're a regular user, you've probably seen a couple of these surveys pop up asking how satisfying you found the content. Only videos that got four or five stars are counted by the algorithm. Actually, in his post, YouTube says it does a survey for every single video. It's just that the vast majority of those surveys are done internally by machine learning

on an estimation model of a user's profile. And finally, shares count for a lot, likes for a bit, and dislikes count against the video in terms of whether it'll be recommended to others. Certainly none of these should come as a huge surprise, but it is more detail than we've gotten before. As for the recipe Joe Leadington found, when reached for comment, KFC said, quote, lots of people through the years have claimed to discover or figure out the recipe, but no one's ever been right, unquote. Well, the Tribune tested it and found Joe's version completely indistinguishable from the chicken sold at KFC outlets. Of those 11 herbs and spices, the real secret appears to be a disproportionate amount of white pepper. Today's premium newsletter has

the complete recipe. All that said, we can't always trust what the social platforms tell us. They do have ulterior motives, like, for instance, protecting the secrecy of their algorithmic recipes. In those cases, we turn to people in the field who use the platforms day in and day out. I think one of the smartest people in the Facebook ad space is Andrew Foxwell. In addition to having managed large budget campaigns for many clients, he also does top-tier training

on the ads platform. Over the weekend, he put out an outstanding blog post, which if you do any Facebook ads, you should read. It's at foxweldigital.com slash blog, and his piece is called Common Facebook Advertising Advice That We Disagree With. In the piece, he covers a whole bunch of stuff, whether CBOs or ABOs are working, the effect of combining prospecting and retargeting in a single campaign, a really useful naming convention, and whether you should use automatic placements, which, and this came as a surprise to me,

Andrew says he and his team usually do use. One chunk was about the much-ballyhooed learning phase. Quoting from his piece, in our experience, it is not as big as it's cracked up to be. A campaign or ad set doesn't have to have 50 conversions to be successful. For smaller accounts, 50 conversions a week isn't possible. Yes, the more data the campaign,

ad set, ad, and pixel has, the better, but the magic 50 number is not the holy water of printing money in your ad account. If you can, aim to get 10 or 20 conversions per week per campaign. Or if even that is too much, try to set your budget to where you can get even one conversion a day. To do that, set the daily budget at 10 or 20% higher than the account's average order value, unquote. It really is one

of the best pieces on Facebook ads I've read in a month. Again, you can find it at foxwelldigital.com slash blog. And the piece is called Common Facebook Advertising Advice That We Disagree With. 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, if you were one of the six people to miss Twitter fleets, their version of the vertical stories format, I have some good news for you. They're coming back. Well, sort of. Reverse engineering Twitter's code has found that much of fleets' visual trinkets, like stickers and text, could soon be making it to the regular app. It also shows they're planning a new tweet format, the straight text visual, which is basically your tweet centered with larger text against a colored background. They look very similar to Facebook's version that that platform rolled out years ago.

But will anybody care? asked socialmediatoday.com. Quote, Fleets didn't see massive take-up, so it's not like they're saving the key features from a previously popular edition. But Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey did note that Fleets had sparked more activity from a broader range of users, and with full-screen visual platforms like TikTok changing user habits, maybe by providing more options like this in Tweets, it could facilitate new usage. And the tools have already been developed. Twitter already has the fleet's framework done.

Given this, incorporating these elements would mean that all of the fleet development time doesn't end up entirely going to waste, unquote. It should be noted Twitter did acquire Chroma Stories last year, which provided an easy way to use vertical templates to create more compelling visuals. Nothing from Twitter officially yet, but given that this is indeed brewing in their backend code, it's likely on the way. The omni-channel ad platform MediaOcean has integrated TikTok into its optimization tool

formerly known as Scope by 4C, quoting Marketing Dive, MediaOcean's partnership with TikTok offers another sign that the social video app is reaching fresh levels of maturity as users sign up in droves and brands race to reach those eyeballs. The deal arrives as the ad market continues to rebound following a brutal 2020, with much of the resurgent spend directed at digital and social channels. The news marks another step in MediaOcean's years-long efforts

to develop a stronger omni-channel focus. The privately-owned firm in July acquired ad server FlashTalking in a deal reportedly valued at $500 million, with an eye on bolstering its capabilities in emerging spaces like connected TV. Also in TikTok news, reports today say the app will soon let you pin up to three videos to the top of your profile, in case you want to add an introduction or trailer videos there. Amazon has permanently banned more than 600 merchants after saying the brands repeatedly violated their policies against offering incentives for positive reviews.

Among the big-name sellers, Aukey, that's A-U-K-E-Y, Kotech, and RavPower. Amazon says last year they preemptively removed more than 200 million fake reviews before they made it to the platform. And this past June they asked for the help of social media platforms in the battle, saying places like Facebook groups make it easy for people to congregate and share tips to game the system. Both Amazon and Google are under investigation in the UK over how serious they've been at combating fake reviews. Also, the Inside e-commerce newsletter today reported Amazon

has increased the number of sponsored ads it places at the top of the search results from two to six in recent months. Amazon search advertising's cost per click rose from 86 cents in August 2020 to $1.27 as of last month. Amazon doesn't reveal its advertising revenue, which makes up the bulk of its other category. Sales in that category called other grew by 87% year-over-year in Q2 to $7.9 billion. Amazon controls 10.7% of the U.S. digital advertising market, trailing only Google at just under 29%, and Facebook at around 25.5%.

There may be one thing missing from your brand's blog posts that is holding you back in Google's listings. A byline. A byline is the part of the article that identifies the post's author. You know, by Todd Maffin. Google has used bylines in its EAT algorithm update, often called EAT, to understand how trustworthy a source is. That's the T in EAT. The others are expertise and authoritativeness. On Twitter, someone asked John Mueller from Google, hypothetically, if bylines are so important, would Google recommend including them even if giving away the author's identity would put that person in danger? In other words,

if they get death threats? John responded, quote, it is not a requirement to add author names, but it is a good practice. If you can't do it for all content, so be it. If you can't do it for any content, and it's all basically trust us, then I don't know how users are supposed to deal with that. Well, it has been busy in our Slack community of digital marketers, which you can join for free just today. There was talk about finding benchmarks for paid media, recommendations on good reporting tools. Someone may have found a new bug in the Facebook ads manager. And we are all sharing the one piece of advice that we would give our younger selves

if we could go back to our first day in digital marketing. My favorite so far, quit. Get a job in sales first, then come back to marketing and be an absolute rock star. There are more than 500 of us in there, and it is completely free. You can join in one click by going to todayindigital.com slash slack or tapping the link in today's episode notes. Talk to you tomorrow.

It's nice to feel so good about a meal.