Today in Digital Marketing - Want Better Google Ads? Be Good. (And Spend a Lot.)

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, your Google Ads just got a lot better. As long as you've got 50 grand to spend. Pinterest sets up shop in the future. YouTube outlines its plans for live streamed commerce. Yelp offers some free advertising for local businesses. And I can't believe we're going to cover this. The connection between digital marketing and NFTs. It's Tuesday, November 16th, 2021. Happy International Day for Tolerance.

Starting point is 00:00:51 I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, Episode 505. Today's episode brought to you by CMOX. See if you have what it takes to be a high-paid, in-demand, fractional chief marketing officer. Go to becomecmo.com. Google says stay off Santa's naughty list and you can take advantage of more features on its ads platform. The big one? Customer Match, which is finally rolling out this week to more accounts, but only to policy-compliant accounts.

Starting point is 00:01:23 And the really good features are still held back for those who have spent a lot on ads. Customer Match is basically Facebook's version of custom audiences. Quoting Google, All policy-compliant accounts can use Customer Match and similar audiences for Customer Match to observe performance and exclude audiences from your campaigns. But advertisers with over $50,000 in lifetime spend and a 90-day history of policy compliance can use customer match and similar audiences for customer match to observe performance, reach and engage with audiences, change the bids for your audiences, and also exclude audiences from your campaigns. Here are just a few examples of how you can use these features in your own marketing strategy.

Starting point is 00:02:09 There's targeting, the targeting setting, which is how you recommend other relevant products and services that your customers might be interested in after they purchase from you. The observation setting, which provides a different experience for customers on your customer match lists that may be interested in something else you have to offer. Similar audiences. This is known on other platforms as lookalike audiences. Manual bid adjustments, which will let you bid higher for users that buy from you often. And exclusions, where you can exclude customers who've bought from you recently but may be unlikely to repurchase soon. There's still a bunch you can't do with customer match. Upload data on anyone

Starting point is 00:02:45 under 13. Make an ad that calls something out about them personally, like, I don't know, hello lesbian. Or using a customer list that targets an overly narrow or specific audience. For example, you can't combine a customer list with other targeting criteria on Google, like geographic limitations, if it will result in an ad that is targeted to a relatively small number of users. As for the improvements, a new upload preview tool has been added to Customer Match, so you can see any formatting issues and apply the fixes directly in the interface. Pinterest has launched its new in-house experimental products team, which they're calling 220,

Starting point is 00:03:28 quoting the announcement. Named after the address of the first Pinterest office, 220 is an incubator team made up of engineers, designers, and content and product experts dedicated to the rapid testing and launching of new ideas like Pinterest TV. Ideas came from across the company via make-a-thons, a submission portal called Idea Factory. 220 then goes to work researching, prototyping, and testing to identify features with traction. After experimentation, these incubation ideas are product-productionized

Starting point is 00:03:57 —come on, guys, that's not a word— at scale and handed off to the other teams within the company. Meta has one of these groups. If you've ever been in a mobile app store and the developer is named NPG, that's New Product Group, Meta's public-facing name for things that they're just trying out without wanting to attach the full brand to. Like NPG, Pinterest's new team will test new technologies and identify market trends to build the future of Pinterest's products.

Starting point is 00:04:45 Some news for those of you who market a local business. to build the future around a common theme. Yelp partners with each advertiser to curate a list of locally owned businesses to support a brand initiative in select markets. There is no cost for local businesses to participate in sponsored collections, which are currently available on the Yelp iOS app with an Android experience coming soon. And seasonal spotlight ads

Starting point is 00:05:03 are aimed at helping multi-location brands drive in-store traffic by communicating with Yelp's high intent audience about seasonal deals, promotions, and new products. By leveraging a carousel on the Yelp iOS app homepage, individual posts will appear from brands that allow consumers to learn more about the brand's holiday campaigns and other tentpole moments, unquote. Yelp also took the launch as an opportunity to tout the success of its first-party data attribution tool, which it calls Yelp Store Visits, which uses the company's first-party data to help advertisers understand how their ads are driving consumers to their locations. Quoting the company again,

Starting point is 00:05:39 Cost-per-click ad budgets from national and mid-market clients leveraging Yelp Store Visits increased by more than five times from the third quarter of 2019 to the third quarter of 2021. So they're measuring two years over years for some reason, while the average number of accounts has more than doubled. I'm often asked on my TikTok lives what the big trends I see for the next few months are, and my answer is always the same, or at least has been in the last few months. Augmented reality and live-streamed commerce. All of the platforms are racing to build the latter, especially YouTube, which today announced some deals with big-name influencers

Starting point is 00:06:16 to sell merch on their streams. And also, for us digital marketing people, this. Quote, Our ultimate goal is to build a platform that allows anyone with a mobile device and a product to easily host a live shopping stream. This. personalized shopping. We'll continue learning through these events and experimenting with new formats. Our goal is to create a fun and compelling shopping experience for our viewers that addresses the growing demand for social e-commerce while strengthening the unique relationship YouTube creators have with their fans, unquote. A link to their full announcement and video is in today's premium newsletter. Do you have business insurance?

Starting point is 00:07:10 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.

Starting point is 00:07:30 Well, with holiday sales expected to surge this year, businesses really should get their Google Business Profile up to date so their information is accurate and detailed to assist shoppers in their search. SearchEngineJournal.com has a great piece up today with eight things, the things you should do with your Google Business Profile this holiday season search. SearchEngineJournal.com has a great piece up today with eight things that it thinks you should do with your Google Business Profile this holiday season to improve your local rankings and visibility. Here are three of those from the article. First, set special hours. If your business hours extend or differ from your regular hours during the holiday season, we recommend setting

Starting point is 00:07:59 special hours in your Google Business Profile. Use the More Hours link if your business plans to provide specific services at different times during the holiday season. Also, update your images. Bright Local has found that businesses with more Google Business Profile photos get more clicks, phone calls, and driving direction requests. Businesses with more than 100 images got 520% more calls than the average business, while those with just one image got 71% fewer. Having many high-quality images not only correlates to more conversions, but can also provide

Starting point is 00:08:35 the visual stimulation needed for a customer to consider your brand. And publish your own holiday FAQ, frequently asked questions. Drafting responses to frequently asked questions and publishing those to your business profile is a great way to address common questions your customers might have. Preemptively answering popular questions your customers have will also ease the burden on your support team, allowing them to focus their efforts elsewhere and on different platforms, unquote. The outline is quite thorough on searchenginejournal.com. It's titled Eight Google Business Profile Updates to Make for the Holidays.

Starting point is 00:09:07 And of course, there's a direct link in today's premium newsletter. All right, here we are. Non-fungible tokens. How do they affect marketing? We certainly have seen everyone from McDonald's to Burger King to all sorts of brands try their hand at it. And an interesting piece in Marketing Dive today posits that the format of NFTs could serve as an invaluable experiment if this metaverse thing ever takes off. Even though general consumers may not accept them, the concept of an NFT appears here to stay. There is still a risk with NFTs, since 45% of US adults have not even heard of them yet.

Starting point is 00:09:46 28% don't understand the concept behind them. And 0.0000001% – okay, that's just me – wishes they would just go away. NFTs really fall into one of two categories these days, what are essentially stunt drops, or actual meaningful intellectual property management that could be linked to other content. Negative points with the NFTs are prone to fraud. The financial barrier is too steep for most consumers. And how do we put this gently? A lack of substance.

Starting point is 00:10:16 Anyway, the piece in Marketing Dive today suggests that while short-term NFTs may seem a little gimmicky to marketers, if this whole metaverse thing takes off, we may all start need to be paying attention to them soon enough. And finally, the Microsoft Audience Network has expanded into 18 new markets. The Audience Network is their term for all non-search ads. The countries added are Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Venezuela, in addition to their existing markets, which were in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France, and Germany. Hit my career high in Overwatch last night by pocketing an 11-year-old Reinhardt.

Starting point is 00:11:06 I'm not proud of it, but you know, you take the gains where you can. Talk to you tomorrow. Attention agency owners and marketing consultants. The new iOS updates aren't the only thing changing in today's marketing landscape. The role of the marketer is getting disrupted by high quality talent across the globe, forcing your prices to decrease. If you've seen your marketing rates stagnate or decrease in the last two years, you need to do something new.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Want Better Google Ads? Be Good. (And Spend a Lot.)

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