Today in Digital Marketing - You Suck (and 20 Other Reasons Facebook Isn't Showing Your Content)

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, there are 21 reasons why your Facebook post at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. And a new social media testing tool might help your content get wider reach on Facebook. It's Thursday, September 23rd, 2021. Happy Bisexual Pride Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, Episode 474. Social media community managers pay close attention to content algorithms, or at least they should,

Starting point is 00:01:08 because those algorithms determine what makes it to the news feed, the For You feed, and so on. Every now and then, these social platforms give us a summary of what kind of content they promote to the top feeds. Today, Facebook did the opposite. No, they didn't take that information away. They told us in more detail what they demote. In other words, what kind of content will get stashed away, never to be surfaced to your

Starting point is 00:01:31 followers. Today's premium newsletter has the full list of the 21 types of bad content, along with direct links to Facebook's detail about that content. But here are a few. There are, of course, the usual that you'd expect. Pages they predict are spammy, fact-checked misinformation, and so on. But there are some more. First, Facebook confirmed in this report that they continue to demote posts that ask for specific types of engagement. In other words, like if you agree, or comment with the word me if you want to buy this. Shares, comments, tags, likes, or other reactions, all on the naughty list. The only type of engagement you can ask for without getting demoted is a specific call to action,

Starting point is 00:02:20 like seeking help to find a missing person or sharing a petition. Also, if you're linking to a blog post on your website and that post or article doesn't have a byline or a directory of editorial staff somewhere on your site, you will also have that content demoted. And if you do link to your site and it has error messages or looks bad on mobile or the text size is too difficult to read, all of those will also get that content demoted. There are lots of reasons CPMs can climb. Increased competition, especially at quarter ends like we're at now. But add a new one to the list. Apple. New research from ad tech startup Moloco has found that the average cost of conversions for e-commerce marketers surged 200 percent for tracked users and 155 percent for non-tracked users during a six month measurement period.

Starting point is 00:03:15 An executive at the firm said Apple's decision to restrict tracking had a seismic effect on the media buying space. The main reason? Targeting is more imprecise now, which translates into higher costs to acquire a particular user. Quoting Marketing Dive, the higher costs for e-commerce marketers come at a time when they're vying for consumer attention amid a boom in online shopping since the pandemic's onset last year. E-commerce sales rose 9.1% from a year earlier. That strength expected to continue into the holiday season, rising as much as 15% from 2020, unquote. Milako's report recommends marketers diversify their sources of traffic to find better paths to sales.

Starting point is 00:04:10 TikTok has been focusing pretty heavily on e-commerce lately, taking advantage of the TikTok made-me-buy-it phenomenon. And this week, the company shared some new insights to help digital marketers upscale their e-commerce efforts. Imbued deeply in the recommendations is an ethos of entertainment, reminding marketers that the platform's best ads are aligned with entertaining videos, saying, quote, people are less satisfied with much of the advertising they see online. They're looking for ad experiences that are genuinely entertaining, especially when it comes to commerce marketing. Around one third of people want commerce to be

Starting point is 00:04:42 more entertaining, unquote. This is partly why the company's main positioning statement around its ads platform is, don't make ads, make TikToks. It also rightly pointed out that discovery of new products is so much easier for consumers on TikTok than, say, on Instagram, since Instagram mostly requires you to already follow the brand for it to appear in the main feed. And TikTok's feed defaults to suggested new content with a sprinkling of accounts you follow thrown in. And as anyone who's been on TikTok can tell you, it is very good, eerily good, at figuring out what you'll want to see. Their report also talks about remix culture and influencer partnerships.

Starting point is 00:05:24 You can find a link to it in today's premium newsletter or track it down on their blog. Look for the piece called Community Commerce, How TikTok is Revolutionizing the Shopping Journey and Making Products Sell Out. My first job in digital marketing was 25 years ago. I like to think I've learned a lot since then, but there are many things that have completely slipped by me, things I know are probably important, that I just haven't needed or wanted to dive deeply into them.

Starting point is 00:05:55 Google Tag Manager is one of those things. I generally understand what it does. I know I probably need it, but honestly, I'd rather just hire someone to put that all together for me. That said, I do know when something in that space is important, even if I don't know precisely how it works. Such is the case with today's announcement from Google that they are updating server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager. I'm sure this is important. I'm not sure how, so I'm basically going to read you a bit of what Google announced,

Starting point is 00:06:21 in case those of you who dream of GTM containers can use the information. So, quoting Google, server-side tagging now works with any cloud or service provider that supports Docker, an open-source platform for developing and running applications. We've also integrated server-side tagging into more Google products and services to help you move more tags off your website and achieve better site performance. With these improvements, we're moving server-side tagging out of beta and making it generally available to all customers in Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360. Server-side tagging now supports Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform products, including Campaign Manager 360, Display and Video 360, and Search Ads 360.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Previously, you had to continue using a client-side tag for each marketing product you use and keep them all running directly on your site. Now, when customers interact with your site, a single client-side tag can activate multiple tags for these products directly in your server's container. That means you'll have fewer tags on your site, which can help improve your site's page load time. Andrew Foxwell has a new course out on optimizing and scaling Facebook ad campaigns

Starting point is 00:07:34 in this post iOS 14 world. Reading from the course description here from strategy and high level thought processes to tactical implementation, including reporting dashboards, optimization, testing, the phases of scaling, creative needed to scale, and more, this course also comes with a bonus module on how to scale profitably in Q4, complete with a projection worksheet to help you plan for the best Black Friday and Christmas season yet. More than four and a half hours worth of content

Starting point is 00:08:04 broken up into easily digestible modules Some of the topics include horizontal versus vertical scaling, budget allocation, how scaling methodology has changed post iOS 14 and what's still the same, and some of the more technical points like AEM, CAPI, ATT, and so on. You can find out more about the course at b.link slash after Apple. I have paid for and taken several of Andrew's courses. They are at the top tier of my training list. That link again is b.link slash after Apple. That is an affiliate link. Andrew did not pay for this mention.

Starting point is 00:08:49 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.

Starting point is 00:09:21 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. A really nice addition to LinkedIn, a new event registration trigger in the lead generation forms integration for Zapier.

Starting point is 00:09:57 Zapier is middleware that will connect your LinkedIn leads form with whatever third-party tools you want to send that data to, a CRM, Google Doc, email list, whatever, according to the company. For example, you could create an automation flow that automatically adds a webinar registrant in Zoom every time someone signs up for your event. Or you could add all lead gen form responses to a Google Sheet for easy sorting and retargeting.

Starting point is 00:10:20 LinkedIn's lead generation forms enable you to capture key details on interested users, including their name, contact info, company name, seniority, job title, and location. The details are automatically populated into your form as per the data on the user's LinkedIn profile, making it an easy way to gather audience insights, which you can then add into your own audience database, unquote. You can learn more at business.linkedin.com slash marketing solutions. That's hyphenated slash blog. Facebook is planning to launch some improved organic post testing in Creator Studio. It'll have a new layout, some new post options, and more tips about posting strategy. Early screenshots show you'll be able to test different post formats, including text, link, and image posts. Social Media Today reported

Starting point is 00:11:11 on it first, quote, for each test, you can choose a key metric to measure, either comments, shares, reactions, people reached, or link clicks. Based on this, you can then formulate a test to optimize for your focus response, with each post variant then shown to a sample selection of your audience to measure how they'll react. You can also compare all elements of your post creative, including titles and thumbnails, while you can compare image link and text posts against each other. While video can only be tested on a like for like video for video basis. You can run your test for up to 24 hours, which would then enable you to repost or boost the most effective version, while also again providing valuable insights into audience preferences for future planning, unquote. So yes, sort of the same as Facebook's ad experiments in Ad Manager, though here you're not paying to run the post. Also, one nice touch, users will not see

Starting point is 00:12:00 the sample more than once. So if someone sees your test post, they will not see the final version you end up going with. It seems like the tool is either still in beta or it's rolling out very slowly. But you can check to see if you have it in Creator Studio and looking for create post tests in the create post section. It is Latin and Hispanic Heritage Month in the U.S. and Snapchat has some data on how its users plan to recognize the event as well as what they expect to see from brands. Quoting the company, The Snapchat generation is distinctly diverse and socially conscious,

Starting point is 00:12:37 making this month an especially important time for our community. Indeed, nearly half of the users surveyed indicated that they plan to observe Hispanic Heritage Month with get-togethers, Latin food, and learning about Latin and Hispanic heritage high on the agenda. More than half of Snapchatters want brands to avoid stereotypes and cultural appropriation, indicating a need for brands to carefully consider the content they share or promote, unquote. You can read their full overview at forbusiness.snapchat.com slash blog. And finally, Google has updated its coronavirus policy. Now you can run ads for at-home COVID-19 test kits, only kits that are authorized by the American FDA, or your local governing body will be allowed.

Starting point is 00:13:32 Alex is the founder of Health and Nutrition Brands. Anna is the manager of a landscape construction business in Ohio. Aman is a Google Ads specialist in New Zealand. Ahmed works as a digital marketing specialist in Canada. And those are just the people whose first name starts with the letter A. All of them and more joined our Slack community in the last 24 hours alone. Why so many this week? Because we plan to make that Slack community a paid membership in the coming month or two. But if you get in now, you will be grandfathered in for free for life. So do join us. Tap the link in the episode notes

Starting point is 00:14:05 or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. On the show tomorrow is that related posts section on your company blog, bringing your Google listing down and a major announcement about this very podcast. That's tomorrow. Talk to you then. Chapter 2

Starting point is 00:14:29 Took place in space Past the moon I've got the smile on my face That's when Lord Gorgasaur pours the straws out They fall down Love's all in the small room

Today in Digital Marketing - You Suck (and 20 Other Reasons Facebook Isn't Showing Your Content)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.