Today in Digital Marketing - The Targeting Options Nobody Wanted to See

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, bad news for marketers targeting young people. Be protected. Be Zen. I mean, NFTs are real now? It's Tuesday, July 27th, 2021. Happy National Sleepyhead Day, Finland! I'm Todd Paffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. If you are a brand that uses the Facebook platform to market to young people, you may want to sit down for this. Today, Facebook announced, soon, it will only allow advertisers to target ads to people under 18, or older in certain countries, based on their age, gender, and location. That's it. Interest targeting, gone. Targeting based on other apps and sites, gone. Custom audiences, gone. Lookalikes, language targeting, connections targeting, all gone.

Starting point is 00:01:30 This will start August 23rd and will apply to Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Quoting Facebook, If you want to reach young people and older people, we recommend creating separate ad sets for each audience segment to optimize the use of our tools. For example, you can create a single campaign that includes two separate ad sets. You can create one ad set specifically for young people under the age of 18 that does not use any detailed targeting options. You create a different ad set for older people and use all the available targeting options, unquote. In a hilarious disconnect of logic and continued proof that Facebook's PR people live in a fantasy world inhabited by fairy princesses.

Starting point is 00:02:07 Their announcement today said, quote, this change is an example of how we're building for the next era of personalized experiences, unquote. By taking away the ability to personalize experiences? We have Ads Manager, Business Manager, Creative Hub, Creator Studio, Business Suite. Now, another addition to the completely clear and not at all confusing collection of Facebook marketing tools, Facebook Ad Strategies. They are inviting a handful of advertisers to try it out. Our agency happened to be in that test group. So here's what it seems to be, a dumbed-down version of Ads Manager.

Starting point is 00:02:49 Because, you know, that's what marketers have been clamoring for. It asks you to tell it what your Facebook page is. Then it gives you only one of three options. Are you e-commerce, services, or retail? You can lead a pixel, a website, a few events set up. How many events? Well, they won't say. I tried to connect a bunch of our clients' accounts and it wouldn't let us select any of their pixels,

Starting point is 00:03:08 only saying, this pixel has too few purchase or leads events to use ad strategies. It then asks things like, how often do you think each customer will make a purchase? Gives you a recommended budget, which oddly in our case had a note saying, we recommend a minimum budget

Starting point is 00:03:22 that's likely to produce 15 results in the first week. Which is weird, since the learning phase only exits at 50 events right now. Seems from there, you upload creative and press start. So, perhaps similar to Google's ironically named smart campaigns. Google this morning said it would be expanding the list of countries it applies a special fee to, a fee designed to offset the cost of complying with laws. They call it a regulatory operating cost, and it applies to ad impressions that reach a small list of countries.

Starting point is 00:03:59 Back in September, they slapped 5% on ads served in Turkey for this. This is different than passing along the digital services taxes of countries. They started doing this last year in the UK for 2% and in Austria for 5%. Now the list of countries where this regulatory fee is applied is growing. Ad impressions in France, Italy, India, and Spain will soon also have a 2% regulatory fee applied. Remember, this is based on where your ads are shown, not where your business is located. You will need to keep track of this yourself in terms of budget.

Starting point is 00:04:32 If you have a $1,000 budget for an ad campaign, you will be billed $1,020 if it's a 2% fee. Also, Google says, quote, it is possible for a campaign that doesn't explicitly target a particular country, for example, the United Kingdom, to show ads to users in the United Kingdom because your business might be in a location of interest for those users. Therefore, it's the advertiser's responsibility to ensure that your campaign target settings are correct and the ads are served in right now, you create a custom report. First, create a predefined distance report, then remove all the default rows, then add a country or territory row. If you find that your ads are served in an unintended country, you will need to explicitly exclude the country from your target setting. Pinterest is rolling out their e-commerce-enabled stories posts.

Starting point is 00:05:45 They call them Idea Pins. Now creators can tag products in Idea Pin videos, so they'll be able to earn money through affiliate commissions and brand partnerships, much like they do fairly easily on other platforms. Quoting TechCrunch, despite its general focus on turning product inspiration into clicks and purchases, Pinterest has been slow to embrace the creator community, which today is responsible for driving a significant amount of interest in new products

Starting point is 00:06:09 among online shoppers. Over the past several years, brands have increased their influencer marketing budgets from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $13.8 billion in 2021. However, Pinterest offered few tools for its creators to tap into that market until its debut of IdeaPins in 2021. However, Pinterest offered few tools for its creators to tap into that market until its debut of IdeaPins in May, unquote. Taking a page from TikTok, these videos can also include detailed pages where viewers can drill down into the content, like a recipe or how-to instructions for a craft project. As for that e-commerce integration, it's not as smooth as Instagram's, where a single tap lands the user on the product page. Here, users will have an extra tap.

Starting point is 00:06:48 They'll go first to the seller's product pin, then to a shopping page. This product tagging tool is rolling out to business accounts in the US and the UK, other countries coming in the coming months. As for brand partnership disclosures, that tool is still in beta, but it works the way other platforms do. The creator tags the brand, the brand approves the tag, and the pin will get a paid partnership label. That's more widely available now for some creators in the following countries. The US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile,aches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen.

Starting point is 00:07:53 Instagram is testing a radical change to its Explore tab. Currently, the Explore tab is a grid of content the algorithm thinks you'll like. The test, which I can only assume is codenamed Project Clone TikTok, presents the content full screen once you tap something and lets you swipe up and down to navigate. Yeah, it's basically jamming the Reels format and navigation into all Explore content. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, a big advantage that TikTok holds over Instagram at this stage is in content discovery and highlighting personally relevant, entertaining public posts to each user based on their engagement behaviors, which are then fed to them via their For You page, the default home feed in the app, as opposed to your following feed. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has even acknowledged TikTok's lead on this element, noting that right now, TikTok is better than Instagram at providing reliable entertainment. Instagram is not as good at this because Instagram is still

Starting point is 00:08:49 largely confined by who you already follow and the content that they create, which appears in your home feed and within stories. That limits the amount of great engaging content that Instagram's algorithm can show you, unquote. It is still a test, but I don't think you need to be Karnak the Magnificent to deduce they'll keep it. Everything is vertical video now. As a digital marketer, this should be another sign to you that if you are not producing short vertical videos for your brand, you may soon be being passed by. Also, apparently part of Project Clone TikTok, Instagram Today announced that starting today, reels can now be up to 60 seconds long, up from the previous 30.

Starting point is 00:09:29 This had been in testing for a couple of months now. Also announced today, some changes to the accounts of young people. Users under the age of 16 will be pushed to switch their Instagram account to private. And Instagram says they've improved the filtering of unwanted messages from adults. This won't be mandatory. Teens can keep their accounts public if they want. Now, where did I see this same thing? Oh yeah, TikTok did it too.

Starting point is 00:09:54 Last January. If you market a podcast, you may have noticed a big dip in your listenership last month. We did. We had a record May, more than 60,000 downloads, then, have noticed a big dip in your listenership last month. We did. We had a record May, more than 60,000 downloads, then strangely a drop in June. Now we may know why. PodTrack says it noticed a slowdown in the year-over-year growth rate of downloads since the beginning of last month. The reason? Apparently a huge bug with Apple's popular podcast app. Turns out it wasn't auto-downloading new episodes. PodNews says podcasters they spoke to reported a 27% drop in Apple downloads month over month.

Starting point is 00:10:35 Yes, this only applies to Apple's podcast app, but that app is responsible for more than 40% of all downloads. PodNews says this may have resulted in a drop of 11% in June that translates to a $7.7 million loss in ad revenue. A fix was apparently rolled out a week ago today, so hopefully we'll all see increases in August. Shopify says they'll now let you sell non-fungible tokens on its platform. If you haven't been hanging out with dude bros from San Francisco lately,

Starting point is 00:11:09 these NFTs are digital assets that represent real-world objects like art, music, and in-game pieces and videos. Until now, Shopify merchants had to sell NFTs on a third-party marketplace. One of the first to sell via Shopify was the Chicago Bulls basketball team. I'll be honest, I read their whole site like a million times. It's still not clear to me what exactly people got for buying this. I think it's a video file of a championship ring along with some stats. Don't get too excited, though. So far, only a handful of merchants can sell NFTs. The company did not say when they would open this up more widely. Amazon has shot down rumors that it would start accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment this year.

Starting point is 00:11:56 A UK newspaper yesterday claimed Amazon was considering introducing its own cryptocurrency as well in 2022. You can't blame people for wondering. Last week, the company posted a job listing for a digital currency and blockchain product lead. As a result, Bitcoin's price jumped by more than 20% yesterday to a six-week high of more than $40,000. It was only a couple of months ago when Apple posted a job listing for a business development manager specializing in alternative payments such as cryptocurrency. This Friday at 1 o'clock Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern, 9 p.m. London time, another listener Zoom. These are free for everyone to attend. We may have a guest expert or may just be a happy hour of all of us chatting.

Starting point is 00:12:43 Mark it in your calendar. This Friday, 1 p.m. Pacific. And the Zoom link to join us is b.link slash listenerzoom. And that link is in the episode description as well. Started exercising yesterday. Went for a big walk. Also did Apple Fitness+. I've got a one-month trial on that. Kind of see how that goes. I'm sore as hell.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Also, I didn't get to sleep till 4.30 this morning. I don't know whether it's just that I'm out of shape or bad night now that I'm past 50 years old. But anyway, talk to you tomorrow. Bye.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Targeting Options Nobody Wanted to See

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