Facebook Ads will prioritize counting accounts over people
When you run ads, you want to know how many unique people the ad reached, not accounts. Unfortunately, Facebook has just made this nearly impossible.
Previously, Instagram and Facebook accounts that belonged to the same person were reported as 1 person.
Facebook used various criteria to determine if the 2 accounts belong to the same person, such as using the same email address on both platforms, or using the same device.
Now, unless a person has explicitly linked Facebook and Instagram accounts in their Account Center, they will be considered as two separate people.
Few people probably do this: Facebook introduced Account Center a year ago, and made it globally available on November 18, 2020. What percentage of Facebook and Instagram users now use this feature and link their accounts? Nobody knows, but it’s probably in the low double digits.
Knowledge is power: If you notice that you’re suddenly reaching more people in a few weeks, you’re not reaching more people; you’re reaching more accounts. So adjust your plans appropriately.
ADVERTISING
Yelp and DoorDash launch new ad formats for local businesses
When we think about local business ads, most of us think about one word: Google.
Fortunately, comparatively smaller (but huge in their categories) platforms like Yelp and DoorDash have launched several ads features in an attempt to challenge Google’s dominance.
Yelp has introduced “Themed ads”, which allow you to highlight various “themes” that separate you from the competition in your ads. One theme is “fast responding”, which means that you respond to request-a-quote projects in less than two hours. Yelp will continue to add additional themes over time.
DoorDash launched its ad network, allowing restaurants and other food and beverage businesses to reach people on the DoorDash marketplace. Unlike with other ad networks, businesses will only pay for orders placed through their ad, not for clicks or impressions. Performance-based advertising, right there!
Early adopters have an edge: If you’re a marketing agency that works with local businesses, give these platforms a shot. When the business owners contact you a month later and ask “where is this surge of orders is coming from?”, you can tell them to thank us 😉
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SEO
How to use surveys to persuade clients to invest in SEO
Modern SEO requires investments in activities that are hard to measure: improving a site’s UX, adding E-A-T signals to a site, and improving content quality.
Almost every business would benefit from these initiatives. However, since they are not measurable, it’s hard to get your clients or management to dedicate resources to them.
What’s the solution?
A little tactic that Tom Critchlow suggests in this piece is using surveys.
In the first example, he realized that his client’s website had key weaknesses around UX and E-A-T for their high-value pages.
So they used Panda Surveys to persuade executives to invest. The Panda Survey basically consists of replicating the 10 questions Google asks in its quality rating guidelines. This video can give you a better idea.
They surveyed a hundred people and generated a chart that eventually persuaded executives to invest in improving E-A-T signals.
In the second example, the website needed to invest in content quality.
Therefore, they re-wrote a single page according to new guidelines. They then surveyed readers about the new version.
They found out that:
- 80% of participants thought the new page was easier to read
- 83% of participants thought the new page was more useful
That is enough for an executive to give the okay to improve the quality of the content.
Comparison is key: If you decide to run surveys to persuade clients, the key is in showcasing the gap.
Either the gap between your client and their competitors. Or between the “before and after” your improvements. The comparison is necessary to provide context.
Bottom line? Small user surveys are relatively cheap, but they might help executives understand what their website is lacking and why it’s necessary to allocate resources on a defined project.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
One-and-done solution to reach the inbox more often and fight spoofing
We’re big on email. We’re big on deliverability. We think we wrote a pretty darn good guide about it.
One of the common issues we’ve seen with email marketers is that they don’t authenticate their domains.
What is domain authentication? It’s a way to provide verifiable information about the origin of the message, or in other words, to prove you (the domain owner) sent the email and not someone else.
Why is it useful? Two reasons:
- Deliverability. Most inbox providers prefer authenticated emails, so your chances of avoiding the spam folder increase significantly. It can also help with reaching the Primary tab in Gmail (but doesn’t guarantee it).
- Protection against malicious emailers. When authenticating your domain, you can tell the receiving server to reject unauthenticated emails. This way, nobody can spoof your domain.
How do you authenticate a domain? There are 4 things you need to set up to be fully authenticated: DKIM, SPF, DMARC and BIMI.
- First, you should set up DKIM. It’s probably the easiest.
- Then, SPF is next because you also need it for DMARC right after.
- Third on the list is DMARC with a “reject” or “quarantine” policy because that’s needed for BIMI.
- Lastly, set up BIMI to have the domain authenticated and also get a nice profile picture in some inboxes so you can stand out in the crowd of emails.
If you enjoyed this tip, give the Twitter thread some love!
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
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GOOGLE: Ad automation. Some of us love it, while some hate it. In any case, understanding how it works is useful. Google has published an interactive guide that explains how its ad automation works and how you can make it more effective for you.
CONTENT MARKETING: If you love using Canva to create photos, you might soon enjoy using it to create videos as well. The company released “Canva Video”, and the good news is that it’s included in their free tier.
INSTAGRAM: Your third-party ad management tool may soon get more superpowers; the Instagram Marketing API has added Reels Ads Placements.
GOOGLE: If you run Google Ads and weren’t able to read our September issues, here’s a good recap of the changes during last month.
ADVERTISING: It’s not just you; more and more marketers are looking at how to leverage first-party data as a result of the coming death of cookies and Apple’s ATT update.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
A sundial has the fewest moving parts of any timepiece. Which has the most?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Please don’t call the aliens ‘aliens’
At least, that’s what Demi Lovato says. In an interview with Pedestrians, Lovato said that “we have to stop calling them aliens because aliens is a derogatory term for anything.” Okay…
What should we call them instead? “ E.T.s”, according to Lovato.
Some internet users disagree. They claim that the term “extraterrestrials” is also rude apparently, because it defines the aliens in terms of their relation to Earth.
So what exactly do we call these creatures-we’re-not-sure-they-exist? After scouring the web and scrolling through endless debates, we found the best term: Space friends.