Today in Digital Marketing - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?...

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, the world's richest man will soon own Twitter outright. An update on why Performance Max campaigns aren't reaching their intended audience. The secret to Google's algorithm will be unveiled publicly soon. Scammers are posing as meta to hack your brand's Facebook page, while link spammers up their SEO game. It is Monday, April 25th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Oh my God! Okay, it's happening.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Everybody stay calm. What's the procedure, everyone? What's the procedure? Stay f***ing calm! Yes, it's happening. Twitter announced this afternoon that Elon Musk would buy the company outright in a deal costing $44 billion. Lots is unclear, not the least of which is why Twitter's board of director conceded to

Starting point is 00:00:44 the offer, especially considering it instituted a poison pill measure just last week, a move usually designed to resist buyouts and takeovers. One analyst thinks he knows why. I mean, I think the board gave up. Brent Thill is a tech analyst. He spoke to CNBC earlier this afternoon. I mean, honestly, this tells you how bad this is, really, in my perspective. And they had no out. You know, they knew they could have probably fundamentally turned this around and maybe it would have taken a couple of years to get turned around. Obviously, he targeted the management team and said, hey, look, I don't have conviction in this team.

Starting point is 00:01:19 There was Jack Dorsey saying, you know, really negative things about his own board, which, you know, I just think it just shows you there's been there's a ton of turmoil. Ed Ludlow from Bloomberg News reports this afternoon that Twitter froze all product changes until at least Friday. And then after that, any new changes will require the sign off of a VP. Apparently, the company worried some engineer will mess with Twitter's code on the way out the door. In previous interviews, Musk hasn't seemed all that interested in the business side of the company, other than saying that Twitter should rely less on advertising, which is a little bit of a weird stance to take, considering that 90% of its revenue last year came from that.

Starting point is 00:01:57 Instead, he's more focused on his belief that Twitter doesn't permit free speech. He has publicly toyed with the idea of putting Twitter's source code out into the public domain. After the deal was announced, Musk tweeted out that his plans also include, quote, authenticating all humans, unquote, which sounds eerily terrifying. So there you have it. Now the world's richest man owns one of the world's largest means of communication. What could possibly go wrong? A small update on a story we broke Friday, that being Google's much-ballyhooed Performance Max campaigns apparently delivering mass amounts of impressions to countries that were not on the campaign target list. A Google spokesperson today told us that

Starting point is 00:02:46 A, that's how it's supposed to work, and B, they might be changing it. Just to back up a little, Performance Max is an AI-based campaign format that tries to use machine learning to determine the right audience for your ads based on your objectives. So when you say,

Starting point is 00:03:01 I want my ads to go to Canadians, not only will it put it in front of residents of Canada, but also past tourists, relatives of Canadians who live elsewhere, basically everyone who Google thinks might be interested in Canada. That's a lot of wasted money if the product you sell is truly only for Canadians. Google Ads pro Jills Haskin-Gales, who herself worked at Google Ads for six years, found 60% of traffic from one of her clients' Performance Max campaigns was coming from India and Pakistan, even though she had specified Google only. In fact, the ads platform itself reported that almost all of the impressions were going to Canada. It was when she checked with Google Analytics that she discovered the issue. We reached out to Google for clarification, and ads liaison Ginny Marvin today told us, quote,

Starting point is 00:03:50 Performance Max campaigns may reach users outside targeted areas, but who've shown interest in those areas. You can exclude locations, and we'll have more on location targeting soon, unquote. And that is true. You can exclude countries. But if you want only one country, let's say Canada, does that mean we all have to now manually exclude every other country on the planet? We asked that of her a couple of times, and she wouldn't say that. Or maybe she did, in a roundabout way. Quoting her again, You can exclude locations where your ads have been matched either individually or in bulk.

Starting point is 00:04:28 You can see those locations in the matched locations view, unquote. So, it seems that is the workaround for those campaigns. If you really only want people in a specific country to see your ads, you need to exclude every other country in the world. Manually. And in case you want to exclude every other country in the world manually. And in case you want to do that, we have placed a list of every country in the world on our website. It's at todayindigital.com slash every country in the world.

Starting point is 00:04:59 So while Elon Musk might soon take Twitter's algorithm and publish it publicly, what about other platforms? Who will let us see those algorithms? Apparently, the Europeans will. Under new European Union legislation, Google, Meta, and other tech giants will have to explain their algorithms. As a result of hours of negotiations over the weekend, the bloc reached an agreement on the terms of the Digital Services Act, which will require big tech companies to take more responsibility for the content appearing on their platforms. These obligations

Starting point is 00:05:30 include algorithm transparency, consisting of the algorithms used for recommending content or products to its users. The list of obligations also contains removing illegal content and goods faster, taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation, targeted ads based on religion, sexual orientation, and ethnicity being prohibited, and minors won't be able to be targeted either, among other laws. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 6%

Starting point is 00:05:57 of a company's annual revenue. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. If your brand has a Facebook page, beware.

Starting point is 00:06:30 A scam has been going on, actually for a while now, where scammers pose as a meta policy enforcement department and sends phishing messages in an attempt to steal people's Facebook login information. According to screenshots posted by one digital agency, the email comes from the name Restriction Alert, or sometimes it's Restriction Details, stuff like that. It is a scam. Do not take action. Do not pass go, collect $200, or else hackers will take over your account. The email looks legit because they use a Facebook message and a Facebook post as a landing page, which then redirects users to another site.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Often there are no other posts on these pages, no cover photo, and the post you are given a link to is not available on their main page. Incidentally, one of our clients fell victim to this. The email claimed they had violated copyright and had 24 hours to file an appeal or their page would be removed. Our client clicked the link, which took them to a very convincing but fake Facebook login page. They dutifully put in their password. And yes, our client did have two-factor authentication on. So how did the hackers get around that? Easy, because the fake login page

Starting point is 00:07:36 asked for that six-digit code, which our client, thinking they were on Facebook's site, went and got from their authentication app, typed it in, and within seconds, literally seconds, the hackers at the other end, who we found out later were located in Croatia, went right into the account. Our client got off comparatively easy. The hacker duplicated the name of someone in Business Manager with admin privileges, so they could get back in if they wanted, and then duplicated an ad campaign our client was running,

Starting point is 00:08:05 left the name so it wouldn't look weird, but changed everything else to a large budget ad hawking some crypto bullshit. Luckily, we have some fine-tuned alerts here, and we were able to alert our client within about a dollar of that account spending, but some accounts have been locked up completely and thousands of dollars spent. And by the way, if anyone from Meta listens to our podcast, can I suggest a very, very simple fix to this? Just have a setting in Business Manager that says, email me a confirmation anytime someone not from my country

Starting point is 00:08:34 tries to log into my account. Anyway, in the event that you have fallen victim to the scam and your account is compromised, your only real option is to report it to the site facebook.com slash hacked. One person did that, reported the fake phishing pages to Facebook. You know where we're going with this, don't you? And got a message back saying, in part, quote, our technology reviewed your report, and ultimately, we decided not to take the content down. Thank you for helping keep Facebook safe. So while some hackers are posing as meta,

Starting point is 00:09:14 link spammers are creating AI-generated lawyers to send fake DMCA requests. These scammers use AI to create fake lawyer profiles that send emails to request links to sites for the use of content or images. This according to the Next Web. The email is sometimes given a subject line of DMCA copyright infringement notice. Once stated that their client, quote, is happy for their image to be used and shared across the internet. However, proper image credit is due for past and ongoing usage, unquote. There is a seven-day deadline to add the image credit to the offending page with a link to their client's homepage.

Starting point is 00:09:48 Otherwise, they will be, quote, required to take legal action, unquote. The email ends with references to the DMCA, a professional signature, and the signature, at least, appears to be legitimate. What doesn't look legitimate is the lawyer. On their website, you can see an image of the lawyer who sent the email into the About Us section. That's where things get fishy. It's pretty clear the image was generated by a generative adversarial network. GANs tend to create irregularities that are easily detectable, like missing or mismatched earrings, out-of-place hair and facial hair and missing eyebrows. Google has added nine new policies to its three strike system that punishes advertisers who violate rules.

Starting point is 00:10:33 The company says it will begin implementing the strike based system on June 21st with a gradual ramp up over the course of three months. Ads on any of the following nine could result in a strike. Compensated sexual acts. Honestly, was that even allowed in the first place? But okay. Mail order brides, clickbait, misleading ad design, bail bond services, call directories, including forwarding services, credit repair services, binary options for the financial markets and personal loans. If you receive a warning or a strike, you will be notified via email as well as in your ad account.

Starting point is 00:11:14 Accounts can receive a maximum of one warning and three strikes per policy violation. Instagram is testing a new way for your brand to customize its profile with pinned posts. If this sounds familiar, yes, they ripped this off from TikTok too. In this case, pinned posts allows users to choose which three posts are first on a grid. Using this tool, social media marketers can feature special offers for best performing posts. The platform is also testing an edit grid option that would allow content marketers to completely rearrange their profile gallery. Something that I think we've all wanted for a while. The full rollout hasn't been announced for either feature.

Starting point is 00:11:53 And here's a feature from Meta's other platform that absolutely nobody asked for. Facebook users have noticed a new pop-up in the app telling them that they can now add music to their comments. It's probably only useful for marketers who represent musicians, maybe as a way to interact with your audience on posts. By selecting a portion of the track, you can give context to your comments, promote new artists and music, make comedic references, and so on.

Starting point is 00:12:20 I, for one, am glad they are working on important projects like this and not monkeying around with, I don't know, security nonsense. And finally, in NFTs are still a scam news. A hacker appears to have stolen millions of dollars worth of NFTs after compromising the official Instagram account for the Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most popular NFT collections. The hacker posted a phishing link that promoted an airdrop, which is basically a free giveaway. When people clicked the connect your wallet link, the hacker just transferred tokens out of users' crypto wallets. And because transfers are public on the blockchain, it's known that the hacker's wallet contained 134 of these images, some of which are worth six figures each. As for the hack itself, administrators for the compromised Instagram account say they're baffled.

Starting point is 00:13:09 They had two-factor authentication on and followed all best practices. Don't forget the premium version of this podcast is just like this one, but with no ads, access to deep dive weekend episodes, replays of our live events, better audio quality, story links in the show notes, audio chapters that let you jump between stories and more. Get 50% off your first month by going to todayindigital.com slash premium feed or tap the link in the show notes. See you tomorrow. Money can't buy your love You got mine and I'm giving it for free Money don't know Money can't buy your love Can't buy your real love But you got mine

Today in Digital Marketing - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?...

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