Today in Digital Marketing - We're All Just Sims In Mark Zuckerberg's Eyes

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

On today’s show: This year, people expect LESS from your brand on social media! Facebook adds "Learning Limited" column to reporting Reddit gets a big update in its ads offerings Google will let you customize how you appear in snippets How's your site ranking since yesterday's Google dance? Probably just fine. And what’s the future of Facebook ads? We may have gotten a peek this morning. Agorapulse adds bulk editing RevealBot now supports Facebook's custom metrics Great article about TikTok in the New Yorker magazine Have you checked out Facebook Ads' Inspect tool? You should. Here’s what you missed… today, in digital marketing. Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. More about Tod: Twitter @todmaffin • My Agency • Facebook Page • Web Site --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Wednesday, September 25th. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, Reddit gets a big update in its ads offering, Google will now let you customize how you appear in snippets, and what is the future of Facebook advertising? We may have gotten a peek this morning. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Some interesting findings in the 2019 State of Conversational Marketing study. It was put out by chatbot maker Drift. So obviously they have a horse in this race. You can find the whole thing on their blog at drift.com slash blog. But one chart stood out to me this morning, and that's the number of people who expect to get a response from a brand within five minutes on social media. And that number has gone down in the last year. In 2018, fully 40% of consumers expected to get a reply from a brand within five minutes on their social media page. This year, only 31% expect that.

The study polled almost 1,100 adults in the U.S., balanced by age and gender. A small but important change to the Facebook ads manager rolled out today. They are updating the delivery column to make things a little simpler, dropping the error column. But most importantly, they'll be adding a learning limited notification. As Facebook reps are telling some of its big spenders, quote, we see that advertisers often spend too much of their budget during the learning phase when results are less stable

and CPAs are often worse, unquote. So now, ad sets that failed to exit the learning phase after seven days will now have the status learning limited. This actually went into effect yesterday for about 10% of ad accounts. The rest of us will be getting it over the coming weeks. Well, are you one of the brave brands or agencies that dips their toe occasionally into Reddit? Reddit has announced some new ways to advertise on their platform. First, a mobile landing page with video.

Now, this works just like Facebook's version. You tap the feed video. It keeps playing up top while the landing page loads below. Interestingly, Reddit has turned this on for all campaign objectives that use video. And there are now more options for video dimensions. Now in addition to 16x9 and 4x3, you can use 1x1 square and 4x5 vertical. That's actually pretty important, as, at least at our agency, we find 1x1 square videos outperform every other video dimension,

and often by a lot. Reddit has been pretty reliable in upgrading the ads platform, especially now that its redesign is mostly done. On yesterday's show, I mentioned that Google rolled out one of its big index updates. So how is it affecting the position of websites out there? A Twitter poll being run by self-described search geek Barry Schwartz is finding most people, 69%, haven't noticed any change in their Google listing position. 18% said their brand's website has gone up, and 13% said it's gone down.

Most search experts say the volatility of this big update doesn't seem to be nearly as big as previous ones. Remember, these index updates often take a couple of days to shake out, so maybe next week run a check on your site's index performance in Google Search Console. And speaking of Google, your brand website might be showing up in what Google calls its snippets section. You've probably seen this.

It's where Google grabs a chunk of text from websites and posts it under a question. Say you type in, how much water should I drink? The top website is the Mayo Clinic, but above that listing is a little snippet with the answer, in this case, taken from text on the website healthline.com. But is that good or bad news for Healthline? Sure, they're above the organically

top listing, but the question's now been answered, so the user doesn't really need to click over to the Healthline site. Either way, until now, you haven't even been able to customize how your brand appears, if you are lucky enough or unfortunate enough to appear in those snippets. And now you can, a little bit. You can adjust the formatting, essentially through metadata. And that will kick in in mid-October. So here's something to keep an eye on. You may know that Facebook a while ago bought VR headset maker Oculus. And they've created a few apps like Rooms and Spaces where you could chat, take VR selfies with friends, that sort of thing. Well, Facebook this morning announced it's working on a new platform called Facebook Horizon.

Think of it like a virtual reality Second Life, if you remember that, or The Sims, where real people are the players. So why the focus on VR? I mean, Facebook doesn't build these out of the goodness of their heart. We marketers can probably expect virtual reality to be a placement at some point in the ads manager. We're talking virtual billboards for brands. Maybe even online stores you can walk into and look at products from all angles in 3D, just like you could do, I guess still can do, in Second Life. TechCrunch's Josh Constein thinks, like Apple's App Store, Facebook could take a cut of revenue

that you make in your virtual stores. If you have an Oculus and you want to get a sneak peek of what's to come, you can join the beta at oculus.com slash facebookhorizon. Okay, a few product updates in the lightning round today. For those of you who use Agora Pulse, this afternoon they announced they've added bulk actions to the platform. Now you can label, assign, approve and delete several pieces of content at once. Revealbot has updated its platform to be able to report Facebook's new custom metrics. What's a custom metric?

Well, through the power of math, you can create formulas that will give you numbers Facebook doesn't provide on its own, like for instance, return on ad spend for lead ads. It's a nice little update for a pretty solid tool. The New Yorker magazine has got a great read about TikTok, in case you're in that, God, we really should test that camp. You can find the article on the New York magazine site. It's called How TikTok Holds Our Attention. And you may have had this for a while, but it sounds like it's just rolling out for a bunch of people.

The inspect tool in Facebook's ad manager. It only works at the ad set level, mind you, not ads or campaigns. But you can see a chart of things like audience overlap, auction competition, and all the usual goal-related metrics. Very nice touch. Also, it'll visually show you where the learning phase happened and where you made changes to your campaign. Well, if you're listening to this on the web and you haven't yet subscribed, be sure to do that. Today in Digital Marketing is published every weekday. You can find direct one-click links for your podcast app at bit.ly slash todayindigital. And that is what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by engageq.com. I'm Todd Maffin.

I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.ご視聴ありがとうございました