Today in Digital Marketing - Why Irish Eyes Aren't Smiling

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

The Facebook bugs continue... Why TikTok wants to compete with Amazon... A change to Google Shopping... and why social platforms may make Irish eyes stop smiling.• Get a Free 14-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter GET YOUR WORD OUT:• Ads as low as $20! See https://todayindigital.com/ads• Be a guest expert: https://b.link/pod-expert JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!- Slack: https://todayindigital.com/slack- Discord: https://todayindigital.com/discord- Reddit: https://todayindigital.com/reddit ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). 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

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, the Facebook bugs continue, Be protected. Be Zen. October 8th, 2021. Happy Entrepreneurs' Day, Estonia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 480. We start with some breaking news. Facebook this afternoon reporting it is experiencing another outage, though this one appears to be more limited than the great crash earlier in the week. Shockingly, Facebook, a company revered internationally for its Nobel Prize winning commitment to honesty and transparency, did not say exactly what was broken.

On the user side, some people reporting that Instagram refreshes are getting errors. On the ad side, I'm seeing reports that Facebook isn't spending anything on ads, like there's no distribution at all. Other people are seeing it come in spikes. Some people weren't able to upload videos to the business manager. This all seems to have happened around 12 p.m. Pacific time today. At our deadline, it appeared to be settling back into place. But to be safe, pull out that bottle of gin from your desk and go check your campaigns. Well, you have heard the advice. Video is everything. But how much is everything, exactly? Today's Friday Quiz.

How much of a conversion lift can you expect on landing pages with video compared to pages without? A 10% lift? 50% lift? No change at all? Or will adding video to a landing page actually hurt your conversion rate? A 10% lift? 50% lift? No change at all? Or will adding video to a landing page actually hurt your conversion rate? The answer, later in the episode. If you ever looked closely at a receipt from Google or Apple or Facebook,

you may have noticed they list their corporate offices as being in Ireland. When I think everyone knows they're based in the US, of course. Why Ireland? Avoiding taxes. For decades, Ireland's low corporate tax rate has attracted many large companies. More than 800 American companies, in fact, are masquerading as Irish. Here's how the pieces usually fit together. Companies will create a separate subsidiary, register that entity in Ireland, then license their intellectual property to the subsidiary on which it pays royalties under the lower tax rate. It's not all on paper, though. The American Chamber of Commerce Ireland says 180,000 people are employed there thanks to these

schemes. That may change soon, though. Yesterday, the government of Naira announced it would join an international agreement that sets the minimum corporate tax rate at 15%. Currently, it's 12.5%. That may not seem like a big increase, but with the dollar values usually involved here, that's billions. It's expected it will take effect in 2023. TikTok is adding six certified sound partners, which can help brands create custom audio for their videos. This is in addition to their commercial music library, a collection of 150,000 pre-cleared royalty-free tracks. TikTok's new sound partners will offer solutions within two subspecialties, custom sound and subscription sound. Custom sound partners, including Karm, Massive Music, and The Elements, will be able to create tracks aimed at sparking community engagement.

Subscription sound partners will offer monthly, yearly, or project-based licensing plans. Partners in this category include Epidemic Sound, Song Trader, and United Masters. Social Media Today says, It was a welcome addition, especially given that many brands try to go it on their own with what their executives think is cool and trending. Quoting their piece today, That does also come with a level of risk. If you end up using the wrong audio in an attempt to create your own trend,

you could fall into how-do-you-do-fellow-kids territory, which could see your brand lambasted expect you to watch, at least not completely. The organic foods advocacy group Organic Voices has created three videos, which it calls the world's most skippable ads. One of them is a woman in a studio kitchen, adding chemicals into a bowl of flour and stirring. How about a teensy bit of methanoxam? Or perhaps an itty bit of resmethrin?

And stir. You may also be adding a dash of oxyfluorophane and possibly a pinch of sulfur dioxide. Maybe a sprinkle of trifloxystrobin. It's 45 minutes long, but the main one clocks in at 6 hours and 47 minutes long.

It's called the world's most skippable cake decorating Video and shows a cake artist hand decorating 31 separate cake tops with the names of more than 700 chemicals. The group says those are the most common chemicals found in conventional food processing and manufacturing. And the final, called the World's Most Skippable ASMR Video, is this.

Peroxide. calcium, propionate, sterol, 2-lactylate. These chemicals sound nice right now, but they're not. Skip them and go organic. 45 minutes of that. The campaign is running on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Facebook has confirmed what we reported yesterday, that part of their Pixel platform was broken after the big crash earlier this week.

From the company's statement, quote, users were not able to view their Pixel info in Events Manager. This issue only affected the loading of Pixel info from Events Manager and did not affect the functionality of the Pixel. Add delivery, billing and reporting were not impacted, unquote. I should report that's at odds with many anecdotal reports I saw earlier in the week saying that the Pixel's functionality was indeed broken. Regardless, Facebook says it's been fixed, claim it wasn't related to the global outage. Rather, and who other than Facebook could possibly be as ballsy as this? They said, nah, it was all totally planned, guys. Yeah, they say this was just part of how they decided to sunset the previous marketing API.

Come on, Facebook. Do you really want us to believe that you're planning for sunsetting? Perhaps the single most important advertising tool on your platform was to make pixels not function for two days? Oh, and they also went out of their way to say no refunds will be available for this issue because, quote, ad delivery was not impacted, unquote. This, too, is refuted by anecdotal reports from advertisers. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes.

You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A. 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. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is said to be gearing up to launch an international shopping platform. I don't mean just e-commerce abilities in-app. They already launched mobile payment service in January. No, they plan to compete directly with AliExpress and Amazon. The company didn't confirm this, but Business Insider says it's making the call after seeing dozens of recent job postings about the technology from the company. We also don't know if this will be a separate website or integrated into TikTok.

I suspect good money is on both. Late yesterday, Google announced you only now need one feed to distribute your products to Google Merchant Center, regardless of how many countries you support. Until now, you had to send them a feed to show in one of two country groups. Now they're essentially merging country groups into one global list. Also, quoting seroundtable.com, if you are using the shipping attribute to target additional countries, your products may start showing in additional countries.

In addition to allowing you to specify shipping costs at an individual product level, the shipping attribute also allows you to specify countries where individual products should be shown. Some merchants currently have configured shipping attribute settings for one or more products, indicating they want to show them in countries in both Group A and Group B. If this applies to your product data, with the upcoming change, those products will start showing in countries across both groups, when previously they only showed in one of the groups. If these products are included in a shopping campaign in Google Ads, this may impact your campaign traffic. If you don't want your products to show in these countries, please update your shipping attribute information and or location targeting in Google Ads. Unquote. your shipping attribute information and or location targeting in Google Ads, unquote. A nice change is coming to your brand's future YouTube live streams.

Soon, they'll be providing automatic live captions to all channels, meaning people can read what's being spoken at about the same time the words are said. Until now, this is only in beta for a handful of larger channels. You will be able to disable it if you want in the live control room, but that'll be on a per stream basis, not channel wide. Also, this is only in English for now. And there's a new admin role called the subtitle role. People assigned this level will be able to delegate the creation of captions or subtitles to someone they trust. And back to the Friday quiz. How much of a conversion lift can you expect on landing pages with video compared to pages without? Your options were a 10% lift, a 50% lift, no change at all,

or adding video on the landing page could hurt your conversion rate? Answer? The latter. Recent research from Unbounce finds landing pages with embedded video actually had a lower median conversion rate compared with pages with no video. Landing pages where video was used in the background recorded only a marginally higher median conversion rate. The report was based on an analysis of 35,000 form and click landing pages hosted at Unbounce.

And finally, some clever programmer has made an interesting tool called Unfollow Everything. It lets users essentially delete their Facebook news feed by, well, unfollowing everything in one click. In a recent article for Slate, the developer said, quote, I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near miraculous. I'd lost nothing since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly, but I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content.

The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically. Overnight, my Facebook addiction became manageable, unquote. He says the tool is being used by Swiss researchers to study how the newsfeed affects people's happiness. And I'll, oh, oh, sorry, I've just been passed an update here. Ah, Facebook has now kicked this developer off Facebook entirely. They've also sent him a cease and desist, forced him to delete his app.

They've removed his developer account, deleted his personal Instagram account. Reporting from The Verge says this is a lifetime ban. And while I can't independently confirm this, it is possible Facebook may have also kicked his dog. Two weeks from today, we will be doing a special live hour-long session on using Google Ads to lift your Black Friday sales. We will have Jill Saskengales with us, a former Google employee, and knows everything about this. It's going to be really, really, really packed with information.

So if you're planning Black Friday sales and planning to use Google, you will not want to miss this. This will be exclusive to Premium Newsletter members. However, here's the good news. We've extended our free trial to two weeks. You can try us for two weeks. Get in on this and then leave if you want to. You can tap the link in the episode notes to start that two-week free trial or just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Well, that'll do it for the week. And of course, since it is Thanksgiving on Monday, we are taking Monday off. What's that you say, Americans?

It's not Thanksgiving on Monday? Well, you're celebrating it on the wrong day. That's what's going on. At least it's celebrated here in Canada on Monday. So no episode on Monday. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Sunemu first nation on beautiful Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Sarah guild theme composer.

Mark Blevins is that cool beating effect. You get on a car after you select the premium car wash with that protectant podcast, music licensing by source audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I will talk to you on Tuesday. We like to you on Tuesday.

It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back