Today in Digital Marketing - 🎵 The Whole World’s a Blur When You Waste Time With Me

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

And you thought the GDPR was bad. Wait until you hear what Europe just told Facebook to do. The most downloaded social media app last month was the most beleaguered. Adding the latest label to your brand’s Google listing may be more about politics than promotion. And the data’s in — if you want your Brand Awareness campaign to work, show your ads to more young people. JOIN OUR SLACK COMMUNITY! • Click: TodayInDigital.com/slack SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: engageQ.com • Advertising: TodayInDigital.com/ads • Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • TikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin Source links are in the transcript (visit TodayInDigital.com and click today’s episode). --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur 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, and you thought the GDPR was bad. Be protected. Be Zen. Thank you. Details now on Facebook's rather surprise announcement late yesterday that they will soon limit the number of ads a brand can run at any one time. Essentially, there are four buckets, each broken down by how much your ad spend is. The more you spend, the more concurrent ad slots you'll get. And it's not average spend over a year. How they'll measure it is they'll look at your spend each month over the last 12 months,

and the month where you spent the most is what they'll be measuring. In other words, your highest spending single month in the last 12 months. And so here are those limits. Pages that spent less than $100,000, again, in their highest spending single month in the last 12 months, will get 250 concurrent ads. Then a spend of $100,000 to $1 million will get 1,000 ads. $1 million to $10 million gets 5,000 ads. And finally, more than $10 million in their highest spend month in the last year, those pages will get 20,000 ads that they can run at the same time.

This, of course, isn't really an issue for most small to medium-sized businesses. Those that spent less than $100,000 in a month will still get 250 ads, which they can run at the same time, which is way more than the vast majority run. Even groups at the other end of the spectrum are probably fine. As Social Media Today noted, quote, spent nearly $20 million on more than 218,000 different Facebook ads over the course of 2019. But when you average it out, it's actually probably not even a problem in that case, as the campaign would still be able to run 20,000 ads at any one time.

First, we had the spam legislation, then the European GDPR, then the California Privacy Act. Seems every time we sneeze, legislators are trying to make the lives of us digital marketers a little bit more complex. It's not going to get any better. The Wall Street Journal reporting this week that a European Union privacy regulator has ordered Facebook to stop keeping data about European users on American servers. The report says, while this is more about concerns over American surveillance practices, of course, advertising data will get caught up in this as well. In the end, if this kind of trend keeps going, we really will see the balkanization of the Internet.

Think about the forthcoming sale of TikTok. It's not all of TikTok that the American government is forcing a sale of. It's only part of it, the part that operates in the U.S. And a few other countries would go along for the ride, like Australia and New Zealand, and maybe Canada. But that will create two TikToks, each with its own content, each hosted on its own servers, and in our world, each with its own ad platform and data pool. If you want to run ads in the US and the UK, you'll be setting your campaigns up in two different places, each ad platform adding or changing features independent of the other. And you'll have to manually combine your results if you want a global look at your metrics.

In short, it's going to suck. And although this European order is only what media are reporting as preliminary, it's pretty clear that this could very well be the direction in which our industry is headed. Watch this space. Well, despite the forthcoming sale of part of TikTok, the app was once again the single most downloaded non-gaming app last month. 63 million installs. That's a 1.6% increase year over year. In terms of downloads, the top countries were Indonesia and Brazil.

Which is interesting, says socialmediatoday.com, quote, because up until now, India, the U.S., and Turkey have been TikTok's biggest markets. The numbers here show that the app is still catching on in more regions, which is keeping it atop the download charts despite the ban in India and the noted uncertainty in the U.S. As of today, TikTok has 10 more days left to sell off the U.S. app or face restrictions in the U.S. With some 689 million monthly active users, many analysts say it could very well be the next billion-user platform, if, of course, it can stick-handle this Trump ban and re-enter the Indian market.

For the record, in number two position for app downloads, Zoom, and then, in order, Facebook, Facebook, and Facebook. Well, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which, of course, is all Facebook. Google My Business has added yet another attribute. Those are those little labels that show up when people view your brand's profile on Google Maps or in search.

You can indicate things like free Wi-Fi or LGBT-friendly or black-owned. But whether you want to add these new attributes now available may depend more on the political climate of your market than on what your business actually provides. Those new attributes are appointment required, mask required, staff get temperature checks, staff wear masks, or temperature check required. So even if your business does do these, making the decision to add this to your profile may be a harder decision than it seems.

Here in Canada, for instance, where the vast majority of people have no problem wearing masks, it's probably a no-brainer. But in the US, it might be a different call. Either way, you can find those attributes now under the health and safety section of your Google My Business profile.

Remember, not all attributes are available to all business categories, so it is entirely possible that you won't even see these. Among the many campaign objectives we have available to us on the various self-serve digital ad platforms, one is used much less than the others. The ad recall objective. It's sometimes called brand awareness on some platforms, but the overall goal is the same. Try to get the people who saw your ad to remember your brand a couple of days after seeing your ad. On Facebook, for most budgets, you're going to get an estimate based on some machine learning and past benchmarks that they've got. Although with a large enough budget, Facebook will actually poll a sample of people who did see your ad and ask if they remembered it. But do you know which age

range is more likely to remember your brand after seeing it? A new study says Gen Z, that's consumers aged 13 to 24, are more likely to recall advertising than older generations, even when they spend less time watching skippable content. 55% of them could remember a brand's skippable video ad even if they only watched two seconds of it. 55%. That's ahead of millennials at 46% and us poor Gen Xers clocking in at a measly 26% of recall. Meaning if you market to a younger group, ad recall or brand awareness may be worth testing. The study was paid for by Snapchat, which of course is invested largely in that young market,

so it's not like they're not without bias. Their study also said that Gen Z also showed higher rates of brand preference. 65% said brands helped them to express themselves. Only 40% of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers said the same. A nice upgrade for those of you who run shopping campaigns in Google Ads. The Performance Planner tool now supports shopping campaigns and smart shopping campaigns.

And so you can now plan your campaign using Performance Planner to adjust your budget and campaign settings, manage your budget across multiple accounts and campaigns, And finally, a couple of bugs out and about in our world. Hootsuite is having some problems with its composer today, specifically attaching media to your post. They're working on it. And Reddit was having some problems processing comments and votes. That got fixed early this afternoon,

but their database is still catching up. 114. That's how many digital marketing professionals are now in our Slack community, which you can join for free. Inside, you'll get access to exclusive content, like a comprehensive deep dive into the TikTok organic content algorithm, and my full-length interview with an expert from Brandify talking about consumer behavior trends that they've noticed with the thousands of Google My Business profiles under their management,

you will only get this long-form exclusive content in our Slack community, which, again, is completely free. Go to todayindigital.com slash Slack, or tap the link in this episode's notes. On the show tomorrow, does adding an emoji to your newsletter subject line get you more or fewer opens? Plus, how much does word count on your brand's web pages affect your company's ranking in Google and the SEO you're not trying to rank for yet, voice SEO? I'm Todd Maffin. More news from the ever-changing world of digital marketing tomorrow. Talk to you then. Dream that one day I'll be sat here with you In this town that we live there ain't much else to do

But waste time away in the shade of a tree And our whole world's a blur when you waste time with me Come back to me