Today in Digital Marketing - Why Do 87% of Ad Accounts Have Fraudulent Clicks?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Pinterest's new ad product could save you a lot of time setting up campaigns. Some shocking numbers on how many ad clicks are just straight-up fake. YouTube's answer to TikTok videos, TikTok's answer to Q&A videos, and this tiny change to Google Sheets may be the reason your office's data nerd is smiling a lot today. Tuesday, January 19th, 2021. Happy National Popcorn Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. The day has arrived, friends. Facebook has made those big changes to its ads platform we've been talking about for, God, it seems like

Starting point is 00:00:38 months now. All this to get ahead of Apple's plan to let users decide if they want apps like the Facebook app to track them for advertising purposes. Most people will say no to that, of course, so Facebook and other apps are warning that you will see everything from reduced audience sizes to fewer conversions being tracked. Some people on Twitter this morning posting screenshots of a kind of walkthrough wizard that Facebook has on some ad accounts today, letting you change some settings. Others report Facebook has changed the conversion window without a heads up, some big changes to ROAS, and at least one person saying they've lost all reporting from before today on several accounts. We here at our agency did an audit this morning of all our clients' ad accounts and

Starting point is 00:01:19 didn't find anything unexpected. In fact, if anything, our blended ROAS has ticked up a little on most accounts. But if you do any advertising on the Facebook platform, it is definitely worth popping into your ad account today and double-checking things. Also, you may want to consider using UTM parameters in your ad campaigns if you're not already so that even if you're not getting all that tracking through Facebook, you can still see people's progress through your funnel in Google Analytics. Pinterest today launched dynamic creative ads on its marketing platform. According to the company, advertisers can now generate multiple versions of new pins from uploaded assets or a product feed where they can automatically import product data,

Starting point is 00:02:01 price, location, availability, etc. Parts of the pins will dynamically display creative elements like product images, pricing, etc. So very much like Facebook's implementation of dynamic creative. Another way it's similar, Pinterest too will be affected by these iOS 14 tracking changes. Socialmediatoday.com reports that 85% of Pinterest's 442 million users access the site using their app. An app which, on iOS 14 someday soon, will pop up that nasty message asking users if they really want Pinterest to track their behavior. Of course, there's still web tracking using their pixel, but that only collects web data, not app data. That said, Pinterest is a huge player in some e-commerce

Starting point is 00:02:44 verticals, so this dynamic creative option will definitely be welcome to some digital marketers. Speaking of dynamic creative, you may know that Facebook's API does not pass comments on dynamic creative ads to third-party platforms. That means if you use that format for your ad campaigns, you won't see any questions or comments in your tool of choice. Last week, we talked about these platforms and their varying levels of disclosure on this. Now, most platforms don't tell their customers that they can't pull in these comments. In our investigation last week, we reported that even though Sprout Social does have a document, a really good document actually, of what message types they do and do not support, they failed to report that they don't surface comments on ads if the campaign was set up using placement asset customization. Even a week after we drew this to their attention,

Starting point is 00:03:34 all they promised was that they would share our feedback with their documentation team. Well, just to follow up on that, Sprout Social has now added that to their document. It's an interesting gap though, considering Sprout is one of the more robust social platforms out there. And at least two competing platforms, Agorapulse and Sprinklr, say, yeah, placement, asset customization, those comments are in the API and they support it. One bit of good news, earlier this month, Sprout added the ability to see messages that come in from your brand's Google business profile. But, oddly, even though they support that message type now, it too is missing from their list of supported message types. And you have to request access to it in your social account setting page. It's not available by default.

Starting point is 00:04:18 We have requested that access, and we'll let you know how that process works. More than one out of ten clicks you get on your search ads, like those you place on Google, are fraudulent. That's one of the findings of a large research paper out this week from PPC Protect. Their data set was almost a billion ad clicks. And while that might seem high to you, 10%, it's a lot better than display ads, of which 36% of clicks were fraudulent or invalid in 2020. What is a fraudulent click? It's usually one of two things. Either it's just a bot programmed to click ads over and over again because they might be getting a small chunk of revenue for each click,

Starting point is 00:04:56 or it's a human being clicking the ads of a competitor to increase their marketing costs. That kind of thing. Connected TV ads were in second place with 17% of all clicks being fraudulent. The research found only 13% of accounts they reviewed had little to no fraudulent activity. As with most of these studies, though, take this one with a grain of salt. In this particular case, PPC Protect sells a click fraud detection service. So, you know, it's not like they don't have a dog in this race. Their service costs $70 US to protect $10,000 of ad spend a month. The way it works is it's kind of like a link shortener.

Starting point is 00:05:32 You actually use their link for your ad campaign. And when people click it, it first runs through a check of bad actors and fishy behavior. If it finds some, it blacklists them. The rest, it passes through normally. YouTube has detailed how it plans to report metrics on its Shorts product. Shorts are YouTube's answer to TikTok videos. So far, only users in India are able to create the full featured versions, but you can make a simple one by sharing a vertical video less than a minute and using the hashtag Shorts in either the title or description.

Starting point is 00:06:06 They appear, like this format seems to appear everywhere these days, in a featured row in the app, and it's pretty solid real estate. Lots of eyeballs there. Once it rolls out fully, YouTube says shorts views will be reported within your regular view count data in your analytics. To dig them out, you may want to look for traffic source type card in the section called Reach.

Starting point is 00:06:25 This is all in the analytics section of the YouTube studio, of course. You can also see how many people swiped up to see a full video and how many clicks it got. Well, taps, I guess. And you may be wondering, if people start watching my brand's shorts clips instead of our regular videos, that'll mean there's less overall view time, right? That's bad, right? YouTube's answer, yes and no. Quoting the company, if you do have a lot of shorts, your average view duration could go down because, of course, videos are shorter. This shouldn't hurt your channel's

Starting point is 00:06:59 performance in any way. It's just an attribute of the video, unquote. Also, you won't see any revenue per thousand metrics for the shorts because so far YouTube has not monetized the format. So with everyone like YouTube and Twitter and Instagram copying the huge success that TikTok has had with its video format, no surprise that TikTok is trying hard to stay ahead of the curve. This week, it launched a new Q&A option, which lets users ask questions that creators can answer in a future video. Honestly, this has been happening just fine already on the platform. It's quite common to see a TikTok video where a creator has called out a question in the comments section. There's even a way to show that comment on screen. But this format, I suppose, may get more of those going. Not every creator

Starting point is 00:07:44 has this as it's still rolling out, but do expect this to get around to everyone pretty soon. And two small updates to wrap things up. A small update to Agorapulse's mobile app was pushed out yesterday. You can now change the ratio, zoom, and crop your images in the app. They've also killed a few bugs, including some issues with the time picker format in Publishing Composer. And for you data nerds out there, Google is rolling out a range name box to its online spreadsheet. It'll be located to the left of the formula bar, and it makes it easier to move around. Previously, active cells were only indicated by a blue outline. Now you can use a

Starting point is 00:08:22 range name box to jump directly to coordinates and named ranges in a sheet. More than 250 digital marketers just like you are in our Slack community. Inside you will find exclusive deep dive episodes that you will not hear on the regular show. Jobs get posted in there. People use it to get advice, all sorts of stuff. It's free to join. Just tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. And that's it for today, Tuesday. Good luck, America. Tomorrow, we will be thinking about you. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you want. Be whatever I do. You can be whatever you want.

Today in Digital Marketing - Why Do 87% of Ad Accounts Have Fraudulent Clicks?

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