Today in Digital Marketing - When the Ad Platform Bids Against You

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, why is one of the world's largest brands Be protected. Be Zen. TikTok's latest numbers may all but force you onto the platform. And the best SEO advice? Go bold or go home. It's Monday, November 15th, 2021. Happy National Philanthropy... Philanthropy? Happy National Giving Things to People Day, United States. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 504.

Starting point is 00:01:02 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. And we start today off with some new shopping features announced by Facebook. The new features include shops in groups, product recommendations,

Starting point is 00:01:22 and a test of live shopping for creators. Quoting the announcement, the shops in groups feature enables admins of Facebook groups to create an online store on their associated Facebook page. It's up to the admins where this money goes. With product recommendations in groups, users can show products that members recommend and purchase from shops on Facebook. Top product recommendations from groups will appear within users' news feeds. Facebook is testing live shopping for creators to make it easier for creators to partner with brands and highlight their favorite products. Creators and brands can now cross-stream on both their pages instead of sending their fans to another page to watch them sell a product.

Starting point is 00:02:09 In case you're noticing your CPMs climbing lately, of course it could be from Q4 competition, but not from your direct competitors. If you market mobile apps, it might be coming from your main business partner. According to an article in Forbes, Apple is secretly buying Google ads for high-value apps to collect millions of dollars in subscription revenue. Several publishers claim Apple has been placing ads without the app developer's consent for at least two years, and Google won't remove them.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Quoting the piece, Impacted businesses include major brands such as dating apps like Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Bumble, HBO, Masterclass, and Babbel. The ads don't disclose that they're from Apple and would, to most observers, simply look like ads from the brands and app publishers themselves

Starting point is 00:02:59 that happen to go right to the App Store. They do, however, have similar tracking links with near identical parameters that indicate one agency is likely placing all of them. Unquote. I mean, Apple advertising your business is a good thing though, right? Wrong. As a result, companies are missing out on potential revenue and advertising costs for

Starting point is 00:03:21 their campaigns are increasing. Quoting the article again. Some subscriptions are worth hundreds of dollars a year. Apple's cost to run an ad might be 5 to 10 bucks for each successful sign-up, and the revenue can easily be $50 or more. When people buy access to a service via a subscription in an iOS app, they are essentially Apple's customers. For privacy reasons, Apple does not provide much information about them to the apps or businesses that run the apps.

Starting point is 00:03:48 In addition, when multiple parties bid on the same ad slots, prices rise, unquote. Apple's strategy may not be right, but it isn't necessarily wrong, either. Because here's what Google's ad policies say. Advertisers may use other companies' trademarks if their ads are primarily dedicated to selling, or clearly facilitating the sale of, products or services, components, replacement parts, or compatible products or services corresponding to the trademarks. Unquote. And a little more for the Apple haters among you.

Starting point is 00:04:26 An investor in Snap, Inc. is suing the company, alleging that Snapchat downplayed the risk of Apple's new iOS update and how Apple's new privacy policy threatens advertising revenue. Quoting the lawsuit, Snap relies on user data for its advertising business. Following Apple's June 2020 announcement, Snap continuously downplayed and misled investors regarding the impact of Apple's new data privacy features would have on its business. The lawsuit seeks damages for a 25% stock drop in October, and it comes just three weeks

Starting point is 00:05:00 after Snap shares plunged 25% as a result of tracking restrictions on iOS devices, the company has declined to comment. Bold is better. In Google ranking factors, that is. Google search engineer John Mueller confirming in a recent SEO office hour hangout that bolding important text in a paragraph can help your site's search engine optimization. So usually we do try to understand what the content is about on a web page. And we look at different things to try to figure out what is actually being emphasized here. And that includes things like headings on a page, but it also includes things

Starting point is 00:05:43 like what is actually bolded or emphasized within the text on the page. So to some extent, that does have a little bit of extra value there in that it's a clear sign that actually you think this page or this paragraph is about this topic here. And usually that aligns with what we think the page is about anyway, so it doesn't change that much. Mueller also clarifies that the value of bolded text is relative to the rest of the content on the page, so, you know, don't go bolding your entire website. Stick to bolding a handful of the most valuable sentences or words within your page.

Starting point is 00:06:25 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 00:06:44 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Google has announced that advertisers can make any video campaign more shoppable without having to create a separate TrueView for shopping campaign. Quoting the company, We are evolving TrueView for shopping and scaling its best feature, product feeds, to more video campaign types. With this update, you can now link product feeds to your awareness and consideration video campaigns and make them shoppable too.

Starting point is 00:07:33 With this creative add-on, you can show browsable product imagery below your video ads that inspire users to make a purchase and drive more clicks and conversions. So how does it work? When a viewer watches a video ad of yours, the panel below it expands to show your products in portrait mode. By clicking on an image, the user is taken to the product landing page. Very quickly, if you have a Google Shopping campaign in Google Ads, be sure to check your ads to make sure they were not affected by a bug that spiked cost per clicks over the weekend. The bug occurred between 6 p.m. Pacific time this past Friday and 3 a.m. Pacific time on Saturday. We're talking about November 12th and 13th there. It appears that Google has confirmed that if you use shopping campaigns with smart bidding, you will receive a refund for overspend that may have occurred.

Starting point is 00:08:17 And that refund should get to you by December 3rd. A new report from App Annie suggests that TikTok users will surpass 1.5 billion by 2022. Quoting the report, TikTok's global rise could be carving out time away from video streaming providers and attracting significant advertising dollars due to their wide reach and deep user engagement. So, stating the obvious here, if you haven't thought about TikTok for your marketing efforts in 2022, it might be time. Another quick plug for the Slack community, which remember, we are transitioning to a paid community in the coming weeks. If you're in there now, you will be grandfathered in. You will not have to pay,

Starting point is 00:09:16 but everyone who comes in after that date will be paying. So here's the address. Todayindigital.com slash Slack. I'd encourage you to join and get in now while the getting is good. Or you can just tap the link in this episode's notes. We have like 750 800 people in there chatting, getting advice, posting jobs, it's it's getting busy. Lots of really good resources in there. So do join today in digital.com slash slack or tap the link in the episode notes. All right, talk to you tomorrow. Yeah, but I don't need no needy one.

Starting point is 00:09:48 I can't be no Nino now. See the needle drop. Can I get the right one? 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.

Starting point is 00:10:10 Here's the truth. When you work, you can focus on solving small problems. As a result, you deserve small rewards. But if you could instead focus on solving bigger problems in those same hours, your income increases with your impact. Hey, I'm Casey Stanton and I train marketing consultants and agency owners to become fractional chief marketing officers so they can ascend to the top role in a company, find new work for their agencies, and push their clients to record revenue and growth. Our fractional CMOs are paid to do the fun stuff. Marketing strategy. If you want a full pipeline of great prospects with a simple and clear way to sell and service them as a fractional chief marketing

Starting point is 00:10:50 officer, go to becomecmo.com. If you have more than three years of marketing experience, see if you have what it takes to be a successful fractional CMO at becomecmo.com.

Today in Digital Marketing - When the Ad Platform Bids Against You

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