Today in Digital Marketing - This Script Will Fix Your Most Common Google Ads Mistakes

Starting point is 00:00:01 It is Friday, October 11th, 2019. Happy National Women's Day, Bolivia. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, this little script may save you thousands of dollars in mistaken Google Ads spending. One of the strongest brand video hosting platforms just got a little stronger. Don't worry, that weird error that Facebook's ads platform was giving you today wasn't just you. And is Instagram's new app for young people bombing? Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. If you have looked for a place to host your brand's videos

Starting point is 00:00:32 online, you probably had three on your list. YouTube with its obvious SEO benefits, Vimeo with the ability to password protect videos, and Wistia with really strong analytics. Well now, Wistia is going freemium with a free version of its channels product. On that free plan, you get to use one customizable brand channel and a basic A-B testing tool. Wistia also upgraded some other stuff, a new lead generation product that lets you collect email addresses. You can create Facebook custom audience buckets from viewer data now, and they've added a subscribe forates button.

Starting point is 00:01:06 I've always been super impressed with the analytics capabilities of Wistia. They track a lot more than the other guys. Definitely worth a look if you haven't been over there lately. Yeah, I think we've all been there. You set up a Google Ads campaign when you're a little distracted on a Friday, head home for the weekend, and on Monday, come back to a whole lot of pain. Pain that you inflicted on yourself because you forgot to toggle one stupid little switch or check one stupid little box. This afternoon, Marketingland wrote about a cool new script that checks some of those little stupid things for you to make sure

Starting point is 00:01:39 you don't end up with a nasty surprise. Quoting the article, it runs three separate checks, Worldwide Target targeting checker, the script will flag any campaigns that don't have location targeting applied, keyword bid upper limit checker, specify a max CPC limit and the script will report any keywords which have bids set higher than that CPC, and bid modifier upper limit checker. This will check for any troublesome bid modifiers for location, device, and ad scheduling to make sure that you are not pushing bids up too The script is on GitHub, so you'll need to be a little nerdy to take advantage of it. You'll find the link in the article on marketingland.com. The article is called, Are Small Errors Like Worldwide Targeting Draining Your Budget? like worldwide targeting draining your budget. PricewaterhouseCoopers has released its 2019

Starting point is 00:02:28 holiday outlook report. It has a whole bunch of juicy findings in there for us marketers. There are a lot of important numbers here. So I'm going to go a little slowly here quoting retail dive. 54% of survey respondents said they plan to shop online and 46% plan to shop in-store during the 2019 holiday season. A notable shift from 2015 when 58% of shoppers purchased goods in-store and 42% did online, unquote. So basically reversed in four years. Quoting again, the in-store shopping experience isn't dead among younger shoppers. PwC's research also found that 60% of young shoppers will go out of their way for a superior shopping experience. Another day, another big glitch on the back end of Facebook's ads platform. I swear I'm just going to start a recurring segment called It's Not Just You.

Starting point is 00:03:22 This time, for some advertisers, Facebook is barfing out an error message at the ad set level that says, the specified targeting spec is not valid because the field ID is not a valid target spec field. Okay, whatever. Someone on Twitter posted a screenshot of their chat with a Facebook ads rep who said, quote, this is a known issue affecting most of our advertisers.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Instagram's latest app Threads, which it hopes will reach deeper into the younger demographic, is off to a, well, a disappointing start. According to analytics firm Apptopia, only 220,000 people have downloaded Thread since it launched a week ago. That includes both Android and iOS. And it includes countries all over the world. But maybe it's not so bad.

Starting point is 00:04:13 Let's put this in comparison. Thread's got 220,000 downloads in its first week. Remember, in its first week, Instagram's IGTV app only got 1.5 million downloads. Yeah, forget that one. What about the standalone Boomerang app? I mean, who uses that? Am I right? First week, it only got 2.8 million.

Starting point is 00:04:37 Okay. I think it's time for the lightning round. Twitter has launched a new app for the Mac, except it only runs on the very latest OS, and it's pretty much a direct port of its iPad app, and it looks just awful. Does Twitter employ, like, any UI people? Facebook, meanwhile, is rolling out its new desktop UI to more people in beta test, and it appears to include a dark mode, but not an automatic dark mode that Mac's new operating system allows.

Starting point is 00:05:05 You'll have to manually switch from light to dark each time, at least so far. And Microsoft is adding a new key on their recently released keyboards, and it is an emoji key. Press it, and up pops a little emoji select window. Finally, I hope the sound quality is a little better and a little less echoey. I got some better soundproofing in my studio and I think it's working, but it looks completely ridiculous. Check out my Instagram if you want to see it. You'll find a link in this episode's description or at the bottom of todayindigital.com. Also, there's a link to the premium episodes. There is a 45-minute deep dive into the TikTok algorithm. And new this week, an interview I did with my buddy Scott Stratton.

Starting point is 00:05:46 We talk about the problem with last action attribution, low-tech solutions to ad tracking, and why the so-called social funnel will fail. You will find a link to the premium episodes in the description here or on todayindigital.com. And that is what you missed today in digital marketing. By the way, Monday is Canadian Thanksgiving. I'm in Canada, so no show on Monday.

Starting point is 00:06:11 I will be recovering from a turkey hangover and healing up Genjis who decide, hey, I'm going to run to the other end of the map and spam heal me. See you Tuesday.

Today in Digital Marketing - This Script Will Fix Your Most Common Google Ads Mistakes

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