Today in Digital Marketing - What’s Working Now in Facebook Ads

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

A major Supreme Court ruling will have effects on the digital marketing space, Pinterest goes B2B, TikTok is rolling out a web-based editor for marketers who prefer working on desktop, has Spotify overtaken Apple in the podcast war? And YouTube says it’s okay to swear now.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, a major Supreme Court ruling will have effects on the digital marketing space. Pinterest goes B2B? TikTok is ruling out a web-based editor for marketers who prefer working on desktop. Has Spotify overtaken Apple in the podcast war? And YouTube says it's okay to swear now. It's Monday, April 5th, 2021. Happy Family Day, South Africa. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital,

and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. You don't have to be a genius to see that everything is mobile now. People surf the web on their phones, use mobile apps, check out their favorite social media feeds. Fewer and fewer people are using desktop computers. This means, of course, that revenue from those mobile apps is on the rise, and some apps are cashing in. Which brings us to the quiz. Which app held the number one spot for consumer spend during the first quarter of this year? In other words, which app made the most amount of money from in-app purchases over the last three months?

Stick around until the end for the answer. I promise it's not what you think it is. Analysts say a major decision by the U.S. Supreme Court this morning will protect the API ecosystem that countless digital marketing tools rely on. The case was between Google and Oracle. In short, Google took some code from Sun Microsystems called the Java API and used that code to create its own software. Oracle bought Sun in 2010, then sued Google, who argued that its implementation of the code was covered under fair use.

This morning, six out of eight Supreme Court justices agreed, saying, quote, Google's copying of the Java API, which included only those lines of codes that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material as a matter of law, unquote. Google said, quote, The decision gives legal certainty to the next generation of developers whose new products and services will benefit consumers. Andrew Foxwell, one of the best in the Facebook ads business, published a short blog post today detailing the five things that have been working lately in Facebook ads. Andrew has kindly given me permission to quote liberally here. So quote, one switching from campaign based optimization to ad set based optimization. We're big fans of CBO,

but recently we've noticed that Facebook's algorithm has been having some issues when distributing budgets across multiple ad sets. We get that Facebook's machine learning is smart, but sometimes it really feels like it's taken a vacation day or week, and thus we've taken budgeting into our own hands. Start with your mid and bottom funnels and top of funnel audiences where delivery just seems lopsided. Two, patience. With all of the attribution changes that have been going into effect on Facebook, we've been trying to look at nothing shorter than a seven-day window, and then also comparing to a 14-day and 30-day window for context. 3. Instagram reels creative as regular ad placements.

It makes perfect sense. Vertical video that's engaging in the first 3 seconds, quick enough that the viewer doesn't get bored, and especially if your customer is in a younger demographic, they're already engaging with this type of content. 4. Shorter seed data lookalikes. Instead of building lookalikes from 180-day purchases, we've seen success from 7-day purchase lookalikes or even 14- or 30-day lookalikes because, let's be honest, the 180

days ago you is not the you that you are today. And five, out-of-the-box interest targeting, i.e. those that aren't the first thing that come to mind when thinking about your product. For example, we audited an account recently that had a self-care skincare product. However, instead of targeting things like face or skincare, we saw they were having success with things like Netflix, Spotify, Target, and Starbucks because their target demographic is 20 to 34 year olds who are interested in all of those things. Unquote. There are a lot of people claiming to be Facebook ads experts. Andrew Foxwell, though, is one of the few I trust with this kind of stuff. He has a number of excellent training programs on everything from testing to account recovery. You'll find his

website at foxwelldigital.com. Yes, Pinterest has launched its first ever B2B ad campaign. But no, they're not trying to compete with LinkedIn. This ad campaign is to get them business, not get your business services company business. With 459 million monthly active users, Pinterest figures this is as good a time as any to push its ads business. And most people in the space I know say, Pinterest is a surprisingly good performer these days. CPMs might not be the cheapest, but the campaigns perform better than most people expect.

Side note, there is a growing belief that Pinterest stories, which they call story pins, are actually killing it out there. Story pins are not publicly out yet for most accounts. You have to request access, but they gave me access when I asked for it. And if they'll give it to me, they'll give it to anyone. According to the company, quote, while users are ready to act, they're also open-minded and undecided. 97% of searches on Pinterest are unbranded, but eight in 10 pinners say they've made a purchase based on a brand they found here, unquote. Their new campaign is called Be There Next, and it's launching campaign is called Be There Next, and it's launching in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Canada, and Australia this week.

Also, and perhaps a bit more relevant to all of us, they're launching a new business access ad account management process, which they say will give digital marketers more options in managing their ad accounts. If you've ever wanted to try running a TikTok campaign but just couldn't wrap your head around the mobile video editor, the company has now launched a web-based video editor. It includes most of the mobile workflow, including style elements, popular music, fonts, colors, and more. You can add custom subtitles, crop your assets, and edit scenes. It's found under the Create a Video menu now on your TikTok ads dashboard or from the Ad Creation menu when you're setting up a campaign.

We don't have it yet in our agency's TikTok account, so it's probably still rolling out. And if you're stuck for inspiration, remember, they have the top-performing ads from around the world featured in the Top Ads section of the Creator Center part of their platform. An interesting report says that Spotify has overtaken Apple in the podcast wars. Apple has long dominated downloads since they launched it in iTunes version 4.7, which, if I can brag for a moment, when Steve Jobs showed a screenshot of iTunes showing the top 10 podcasts in the world, mine was at number nine. Yes, there probably were only about 20 podcasts in the world back then,

but still. Podcast hosting platform Buzzsprout, though, says their numbers show Spotify now commands 29.4% of downloads, just sneaking past Apple with 29.3%. They say it's not that Spotify went up as much as the way they recorded Apple's numbers changed. A Buzzsprout executive said, quote, There are a large group of downloads that were using something called Apple Core Media on iPhones. Until October 2020, we included these plays as being Apple podcasts. But after digging into the data, we determined it was this apparent misidentification of an Apple API, it's hard to know how the other platform providers calculate this.

I looked at my own downloads over the last week and 19,000 came from Apple. Second place was Overcast with less than 4,000. Spotify was 2,700. Either way, Spotify is certainly pushing hard. They bought Gimlet Media and Anchor a couple of years ago. They've since bought Parcast, The Ringer, and Megaphone and signed exclusive content deals with Joe Rogan, Michelle Obama, and others. And as for the quiz, which mobile app was number one in terms of consumer spend in the last quarter? YouTube. New data from App Annie shows that 2021 so far

has broken records for app spend in general, and YouTube took the biggest chunk of that. And what are people buying in the YouTube app? More than you might think. Of course you can sign up for YouTube Premium through the app, although please don't do that because the app stores will artificially increase the price. It's much cheaper if you buy it directly from YouTube's website. People also buy monthly subscriptions to a specific channel to give them various perks.

There's also Super Chat, which lets a viewer's message appear highlighted during a livestream, and Super Stickers, which are a form of currency the livestream's creator can cash in for money. In second place was TikTok. That position didn't change. But it was Tinder that moved from number one down to number three, rounding out the top five Disney Plus and Tencent video. As far as the top position for monthly active users in Q1, the top four were all from Facebook. Speaking of YouTube, the company today loosened its restrictions on some kinds of content

that were previously labeled not friendly for advertisers. Creators can now monetize videos that could, quote, include violent interactions with law enforcement, recreational drugs, and drug-related content or sensitive events, unquote. It will also now allow adult themes delivered through humor. And you can now sneak moderate profanity into the first few seconds of your video without running afoul of brand safety triggers. And what you ask is moderate? I'm about to say some swear words, so parents, you know what to do.

YouTube says, shit and bitch are now fine. See? Look how much we've progressed as a society. I think I'm about to hit 25,000 followers on TikTok Which is bizarre So follow me there The account handle is So I'm Digital Marketing Secrets over on TikTok

And I'll talk to you tomorrow We go all the way over and turn around. We go side to side and touch the ground. And up and down and round and round we go.