Today in Digital Marketing - Welcome to 2021. May All Your CPMs be Below Benchmark.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Happy New Year, folks, and welcome back. Today, good news for Facebook group admins and, wait for it, probably bad news for us Facebook advertisers, of course. A huge acquisition in the podcast space. Google employees form a union. Why is the head of one of the world's largest e-commerce companies missing? And three myths about getting into YouTube's trending section busted. It's Monday, January 4th, 2021.

Starting point is 00:00:26 Happy National Journalist Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Facebook is rolling out its group engagement alerts tool more widely now. These alerts let group admins know when your group has a sudden spike in engagement. Sometimes that's a good thing, not always. More importantly, you can get alerts whenever someone posts content matching a specific term. That would be for bad words, of course, mostly. Some third-party social platforms already provide this. One interesting addition is you can now turn on an alert that watches for when someone edits a post that you previously approved. A big acquisition in the podcast space over the holidays,

Starting point is 00:01:12 the Wondery Network, mostly known for its true crime shows, has been bought by Amazon. Two companies didn't say what the price tag was, but analysts believe it was about $300 million. So what does Amazon plan to do with Wondery? Well, add it to their Amazon music platform for one. Basically the same idea as Spotify. Streaming, probably a few series will convert to exclusive.

Starting point is 00:01:31 Is this good news for media buyers? Sort of. Being in Amazon's circle means podcasts will show up as essentially a placement on the Amazon network, at least at some point. So far, people aren't seeing any dramatic changes in CPM since this podcast network buying spree started. Definitely something to watch, of course. Speaking of CPMs, by the way, seeing lots of people reporting that overall digital CPMs are down again, in some cases way down. This, of course, being because the holiday season is over. It happens every year. enjoy it while it lasts, friends. Another surprising development over the holidays, the head of Facebook ads has left the company,

Starting point is 00:02:13 and rather abruptly, too. Rob Leatherne announced on December 30th that he'd be leaving Facebook the next day. I wish Rob well, of course. He was somewhat responsive on Twitter and definitely handled one of Facebook's biggest challenges. But under his watch, the huge number of issues with Facebook ads never got any better. In fact, most people will probably tell you they got worse. And while, yes, the pandemic played a part in that,

Starting point is 00:02:36 you can't blame COVID for the behavior of the Facebook bots that were locking people out of their ad accounts left, right and center. It wasn't clear whether Leatherne walked off the plank or was pushed. He did say he was planning to, quote, work on consumer privacy beyond just ads and social media, unquote. You know, if I could get one thing for 2021, it would just be a functioning ads platform on Facebook. I just want it to work consistently, normally, and have responsive and actually helpful ad reps

Starting point is 00:03:04 rather than the glorified first-year sales reps that everyone who isn't spending $10 million a month gets. An interesting discussion out there in SEO forums today about a popular plugin that turned on automatic update and seemingly caused a lot of issues by doing so. The plugin in question is the all-in-one SEO plugin for WordPress. For some background, in a big update last year, WordPress added the ability for WordPress admins to opt into automatic updates. That meant that if a plugin published a patch or an update, your site would automatically update it rather than you manually having to do that. And while that sounds like a good idea, some people prefer to manage updates, or do choose to leave an old version in place even at the risk of security issues.

Starting point is 00:03:59 This is especially true of plugins like SEO Tools that have the power to change content, which is why a lot of people were upset that this all-in-one SEO plugin, that's its name, appears to have forced everyone who uses it to have automatic updates on, even for people that deliberately set it to the off position. One webmaster writing, quote, Multiple sites have updated without my permission, and while all auto-updates are disabled, your once-reliable plugin has destroyed hundreds of pages of social metadata on multiple sites and broken the layout. How dare you update my websites without my permission, unquote. So all that to say, if your brand uses WordPress as your web platform, maybe log into your plugins

Starting point is 00:04:39 admin page and check to make sure that the status of auto-updates is how you would like it. I spend a fair amount of time on YouTube. There's a few creators I follow. CoffeeZilla, TheLockPickingLawyer, FreakinReviews, and my nephew SushiGuy51. So I spend most of my time on the subscriptions feed. But there's also the homepage feed, where I suspect most eyeballs go. And there is a third feed that is also quite popular, trending. The trending section isn't really personalized. It's sort of a top 10 list that does not take your preferences or watch history into account.

Starting point is 00:05:16 So everyone in your country sees the same trending list as you do in the same order. And over the holidays, YouTube talked about the three most common myths about getting your brand's content to surface in that feed. Quoting from searchenginejournal.com, myth one, preferential treatment. There's a myth that in order to show up on YouTube trending, you either have to pay someone or know someone who works for the company. This isn't true. YouTube doesn't accept payment for placement in trending or have any favoritism when considering the eligibility of appearing in YouTube trending.

Starting point is 00:05:50 What YouTube does consider when curating videos for trending is how quickly the video is generating views, where the views are coming from, including off YouTube, the age of the video, and how the video performs compared to recent uploads from the same channel. Myth two, and still quoting from searchenginejournal.com here, exclusive to big creators. It's a commonly held belief amongst creators that trending only services late night talk show hosts

Starting point is 00:06:17 or large YouTube creators. That's not true. In fact, YouTube even ensures at least half of the videos on trending are from homegrown creators. In addition, YouTube even ensures at least half of the videos on trending are from homegrown creators. In addition, YouTube trending has sections for creator on the rise and artist on the rise, which showcases a smaller channel for the whole day. And myth three, there's a perfect time to publish. Theories around the formula behind YouTube trending lead creators to believe there's a right time to publish to improve one's chances of getting featured. That's not true. The list is updated every 15 minutes,

Starting point is 00:06:50 which means every 15 minutes there's another chance to appear in trending. Workers at Google's parent company, Alphabet, have formed a union. The Alphabet Workers Union is part of the Communications Workers Union, and it's open to direct employees and workers at subsidies. It's just in the U.S. and Canada for now. The cost of the membership is 1% of wages. In an inaugural tweet, the union said, quote, The past few years at Google have been tumultuous.

Starting point is 00:07:19 Secret military AI projects, multi-million dollar payouts to execs who sexually harassed our co-workers, profiting from hate speech, and more. Union says so far its members were responsible for the cancellation of those alleged military projects and the adoption of a $15 minimum wage for contractors. If you are in the e-commerce space, you've no doubt heard about the Chinese giant Alibaba, basically a wholesale site that is popular with dropshippers. Some troubling media reports say its founder, billionaire Jack Ma, has been missing for more than two months. He even failed to show up for a taping of his business reality show. And here's the concerning part.

Starting point is 00:08:07 His disappearance coincided with the date he gave a speech criticizing the Chinese government for stifling innovation. Jack Ma was one of the world's biggest donors of face masks at the start of the pandemic, and his foundation focuses on education, female leadership, and the environment. His last tweet was on October 10th of last year.

Starting point is 00:08:33 And four small items to round things out. First, yes, a lot of the internet crashed today. Slack was down for a lot of people. Notion was down. You might recall that's the platform we here at the agency adopted for all our clients' records. Fun fact, Notion does not have an offline mode, so when they're down, they're down. Second, Todoist, which we also use here, was also down. It's back up now.

Starting point is 00:08:55 If you use their app, that is to say their Mac app or PC app, you may need to log out of it and then log back in to get it working. Third, Microsoft has added new metrics to its Webmaster Tools reports. They are crawl requests, crawl errors, and indexed pages. And fourth, here's yet another reason why you should be moving at least some of your content creation to the short-form vertical video format. Google is now testing showing TikTok and Instagram videos in search results. And not just intermixed. I'm talking a row of their own at the very top. It is very prominent looking. I have a feeling 2021 will get a lot more vertical. One small change to the podcast this year.

Starting point is 00:09:39 I have stopped live streaming the production of it. I had fun last month doing it. But it did mean I had to put on pants. And if we're still going to be in lockdowns, well, you know, it was fun. And thank you to those of you who joined me. My wife and I had a restful holiday. I was a little out of sorts, actually.

Starting point is 00:10:00 You know, this past year, despite the pandemic, I've really come to enjoy the routine of the workday, try and update meetings with our team, review the podcast script, tweak it a little to shit on Facebook some more, client calls, writing ad strategies, and so on. A couple of days over the holidays, I wasn't really sure what to do with myself. Against my better judgment, I reinstalled Overwatch. You may recall that I rage quit it last month. I'm trying to get into Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

Starting point is 00:10:24 I'm also trying to force myself into Planet Coaster because it did seem like a game that I could get into, like Cities Skylines, but I don't know. Not jiving on either quite yet. Anyway, glad to be back with you. Welcome to 2021. Cross your fingers. Let's hope that all our CPM rates remain low

Starting point is 00:10:40 and we can get through this pandemic stuff. I will talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Welcome to 2021. May All Your CPMs be Below Benchmark.

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