Today in Digital Marketing - You Kids Get Out of My Brand-Safe Feed!

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

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Today, keeping the nasties away from your spanky new TikTok ad campaign, PMAX gets some notable upgrades, Sprout Social's new update might mean an increase in your bill, and Hootsuite's OWL makes a change for... the cuter? It's Tuesday, July 12th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. TikTok has added a nice touch for brand managers who are a little on the risk averse side, a new inventory filter that keeps ad content away from potentially offensive videos. If you opt to use it, you'll find it in the TikTok ads manager, and it gives you three buckets to choose from. They're not particularly well-defined, but here they are. The first one is called Full. This will keep your brand's ads away from content that, while it might not officially violate TikTok standards, might still be on the edge of what people find acceptable. This includes videos that glamorize

the depiction of mature themes. Then there's Standard. This is a bit of a step down. It will let through a handful of videos that depict mature themes and a bucket called limited. And if you choose this, your ads will only appear next to content that does not contain any mature themes. To be clear, we are talking about keeping your ads away from this kind of content, not your organic videos. TikTok says when it was testing earlier, it was getting safe delivery rates of between 95 and 99%.

This new inventory filter is now available to advertisers in 25 countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK, and the US. We reported last week on some leaked screenshots from Google's ads manager indicating more control over Performance Max campaigns appeared to be on the way. Today, Google confirmed that is indeed happening. Here's what's new. First, optimization score. This is now launched for Performance Max campaigns.

This is their own internal metric tied to their AI-based campaign recommendations, some of which are useful, others a little too basic to be helpful. Number two, seasonality adjustments as a bid strategy is now up and running in PMAX campaigns. Google does warn that you should really only use this if you foresee major changes to conversion rates

that are sudden or atypical. So for instance, sales events that last shorter than a week. Longer run changes are already accounted for in smart bidding. Number three, data exclusions. You would use these to prevent unintended issues with conversion tracking from affecting your PMAX campaign's bid strategies. This basically tells the smart bidding system to ignore data from dates where you encountered issues with your conversion tracking that changed or impacted the accuracy of either your reported conversions or the conversion value, when would you use this?

If you had a website outage or a tagging issue. Four, advanced location targeting controls. This is what we reported on last week. New options will let you be more precise with your geographical targeting in Performance Max campaigns. In your campaign settings under location options, you'll now find the ability to target based on physical presence or presence or interest. There's a couple of smaller items as well, including some more detail on things like product status and your top moving products. With Google's ad platform continuing to change at breakneck speeds, it's sometimes a little hard to keep up with it all.

Not just the specific UI changes, but also the broader industry trends. A new conference has sprung up and you can attend it in your pajamas if you want. It's called PPC Zone. It's put on by our resident Google Ads expert, Jill Saskengales, who joins me now from her office in Toronto. Hello. Hello, Todd. Thanks for having me. Of course. So tell me about PPC Zone. PPC Zone is a brand new event that I've launched in the PPC industry, really with the goal of elevating new perspectives and insights, whether it's Google ads, Facebook ads, another ad platform, or even the topic of this week's event, Beyond the Platforms,

How to Have a Successful Career in PPC. I really wanted to make sure we're hearing from some different voices, some diverse voices, and that anyone around the world can attend, as you said, in their pajamas. And is this like a YouTube Live? Is it a separate platform? How is it conducted? And is it free?

It is free. It is live streamed on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. And you can go to ppc.zone to get the links to all those places. The recordings are also available afterwards. So I intentionally am planning this every single month. We're going to have three speakers live on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You can watch live, you can watch it later. And after each of the three speakers shares their perspective, there'll be a live panel where if you are there, you can ask questions. And then for people who aren't very like me, don't spend a ton of time on YouTube anymore,

thanks for nothing TikTok, you have a podcast available as well with it. Is that right? That is right. I am also releasing each event as a series of podcast episodes so you can catch up later. I'm still navigating the way the podcasts work, getting into all the various podcast apps. But if you go to ppc.zone, you can also subscribe to the PPC Zone podcast to catch up later. And if for some reason you can't find it in your app, Jill says go to ppc.zone. There is an RSS feed there that you can plug in manually until all the podcast platforms get their directories together. Jill, your inaugural event is Thursday. You have three speakers. What topics are they

covering? Yes. So the topic for this event is PPC beyond the platforms, really about how to be successful in our industry beyond just keeping up with the latest changes. So we have Sarah Steeman, who's talking about returning to PPC in a time of change. She's worked in the industry for many years, but took six years away from her career and then came back. So you can imagine what it's like to come back to this industry after six years away. She'll be sharing her perspective on that. Doug Thomas will be talking about ethics in PPC advertising, something I know that's top of mind for a lot of us. And then Armina Fareed will be talking about stakeholder management in

PPC. You know what I like about this is often these events are sort of these long drawn out, every speaker gets an hour. These speakers get like what, seven, eight minutes or something really short, right? Yes, that's it. The whole event is 45 minutes. So each speaker gets seven minutes and their remit is just to make sure they're sharing something useful or valuable for fellow PPC practitioners. So they each get seven minutes. We do a 15 minute panel and then everyone is on their way until the next month. So this one is all minutes, we do a 15 minute panel, and then everyone is on their way until the next month. So this one is all about PPC beyond the platforms. And actually, August event, we also have our speaker lineup that will be all about e commerce and preparing

for the holidays with PPC. PPC.zone is the address to go to. It is this Thursday. Jill also has a fantastic training program for Google Ads, which you can learn more about at jill.ca. That's j-y-l-l dot c-a. Jill, thanks. Good luck on Thursday. Thanks so much, Todd. Talk to you soon. 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 dot 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. All right, over to the Google Analytics side of things. Yesterday, they released some new dimensions and metrics to GA4. First, bounce rate. That's the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. In

other words, bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. One important thing to note is that they calculate bounce rate differently in GA4 than they do in the current slash previous universal analytics. It is a little convoluted, but in case you care, we've made you a short link that will take you all the way to the gory details. You will find that short link at b.link slash ga4bounce. Second, they have added new dimensions that surface the UTM content and UTM term parameter values in Explorations, Reporting, and the Audience Builder. Both parameters have a user-scoped and session-scoped dimension. And there are some new conversion rate metrics. Specifically, user conversion rate is the percentage of users who triggered any conversion

event. And session conversion rate is the percentage of sessions in which any conversion event was triggered. One last Google thing before we move on. If you're using Google Business Profiles posts, those are those little blurbs you can publish to your profile for things like sale updates or store notices. Apparently, they will unpublish themselves after six months. The company this week is sending out email notifications to people who have used the feature.

It's not clear if this is something new or they're just reminding people. This is actually an improvement. Back a few years ago, those posts would expire after just seven days. So I guess if you want to keep something alive past six months, set a recurring task in your calendar to repost it. Heads up, if you use Sprout Social, you may soon see an additional charge for something that has been free until now. Right from the time Sprout first launched, they would charge you, of course, for your brand's business profiles, but users could add a couple of their personal accounts at no cost.

LinkedIn, for instance, you could have on board for basic use. Part of the reason they didn't charge is that at the time, there was very limited API functionality for personal profiles. So you couldn't do nearly as much with them through a third party tool as you could with your business page. That API has since expanded. Sprout Social has taken advantage of that expansion, added some new functionality, enough that they believe it's time to start charging for those. So if you have any available profiles in your plan, your LinkedIn personal profile will automatically fill any available spots with no additional charge. But if your connected personal profiles result in going over the number of

profiles allowed in your plan, you will be charged for each additional profile. You can, of course, disconnect your personal profile and you won't be charged for anything. Full disclosure, our agency is a Sprout Social customer. Last year, Pinterest implemented a ban on all weight loss ads. They said at the time it was an attempt to promote body positivity within its app. Now we have some data on how that changed things. According to numbers from Pinterest, searches for weight loss went down by 20% comparing this past May to last year's July. There were some other changes too, although I would file these in the correlation not causation category. Searches for how to change your mindset increased by 50%. Positive self-affirmation searches increased by five times. And searches involving phrases like loving myself increased by 36%. Quoting

socialmediatoday.com, these would also be somewhat influenced by broader societal trends, but it is interesting to consider the impact that Pinterest ban on weight loss content could be having on engagement and interaction trends within the app. Could seeing fewer ads that shame users for their size then lead to a more positive environment where people can feel more comfortable exploring new trends and behaviors? The results here suggest that this could well be the case, which is interesting to consider

in terms of broader social media trends where airbrushed, heavily edited, highly staged depictions have become the norm for many users. And finally, the social media platform Hootsuite rebranded a bit today. It is still called Hootsuite. Its logo is still an owl. But now that owl looks a little more, I don't know, cartoony looking. And the color scheme has changed to black and orange.

Or, as the news release called it, saffron. So it finally came. I've been dreading this moment. The bill, the power bill, post-hot tub, not as bad as I thought. Actually, lower than our average across all the months. Now that includes winter months, of course. Compared to

the summer months or the last two months, over last year, 20% up. So not as bad as I thought. I'll probably have to turn off some of my fancy lights, but, uh, you know, it is worth it.

I'll tell you that much anyway. All right. That's it for today. See you tomorrow. I'm a night owl, baby. As I think you know. I'm a night owl, baby.

As I think you know.