This Week in Digital Marketing - October 1, 2021

Kicking off October on the right foot! We’ve got the latest digital marketing news and updates to not only share with you, but also put into play where necessary for all of our clients (this could be you!).

Facebook changes business options in reaction to iOS updates
If you’re a social media marketer, you may know that Facebook isn’t a fan of Apple’s recent privacy changes. The social media giant recently announced some updates and new features to help business owners advertise on the platform in light of the loss of data from Apple. 

“The social networking giant has repeatedly argued that Apple’s changes would impact small businesses that relied on Facebook ads to reach their customers. But it was not successful in getting any of Apple’s changes halted. Instead, the market is shifting to a new era focused more on user privacy, where personalization and targeting are more of an opt-in experience,” said Sarah Perez for TechCrunch. New features include the following:

• Expanded click-to-chat options from ads.
• Start a WhatsApp chat from an Instagram profile.
• Lead gen directly from Instagram.
• File Manager to allow businesses to manage content within Facebook Business Suite.
• New post testing options.

Why we care: Facebook is expanding its advertising options, trying to make its Business Suite easier for businesses of all sizes to use, and developing other ways for businesses and customers to connect.

When you ‘Ask app not to track,’ some iPhone apps keep snooping anyway
iPhones now have the option for users to reject app tracking with a pop-up that says, “Ask app not to track.” However, data from Lockdown Privacy indicates that “App Tracking Transparency made no difference in the total number of active third-party trackers, and had a minimal impact on the total number of third-party tracking connection attempts.”

They go further: “Detailed personal or device data was being sent to trackers in almost all cases. ATT was functionally useless in stopping third-party tracking, even when users explicitly choose ‘Ask App Not To Track’.” 

As a user my first reaction is, say what?! As a marketer my reaction is, ok well where is that data going then? Some people believe Apple is working on its own ad options BTS. But social media advertisers are still suffering: “The changes Apple made in iOS 14.5 … is causing tumult for advertisers who rely on Facebook to sustain their businesses. Performance marketers… are particularly struggling,” wrote Alex Kantrowitz for CNBC.

Google Ads announces machine learning-based data-driven attribution models in new privacy landscape
“In a move away from last-click, data-driven attribution [DDA] will soon be the default attribution model for all new Google Ads conversion actions,” tweeted Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin on Monday morning. As Google works toward a more privacy-focused search experience for users, it’s also adjusting the available attribution models for advertisers.

DDA works by looking at all the touchpoints, like clicks and video engagements, on your Search (including Shopping), YouTube and Display ads in Google Ads to compare the paths of customers who converted with ones who didn’t. The model then identifies patterns among those interactions that lead to conversations. Over the coming months, Google Ads will be migrating existing conversion actions to DDA for many advertisers over the coming months, Marvin said.

Why we care: Attribution has long been an issue for marketers. This conundrum is especially salient as FLoC threatens to take away even more data from search advertisers — leaving them cobbling together data on their own. Google Ad’s machine learning attribution model seems to be Google’s solution to this lack of data. “Privacy-centric, DDA trains on real conversion paths & uses machine learning to measure and model conversion credits across touchpoints, even when cookies are missing,” added Marvin.

Additionally, DDA was previously only available to accounts with enough conversions in their recent history. Now, all accounts can run it and it’s replacing last-click as the default.

Many advertisers have claimed that the lack of data and reliance on machine learning makes their jobs harder (how can we optimize when we don’t know exactly what is causing success or failure?). This is another case where they will have to just trust the information that Google Ads is giving them without seeing the inside of the process. However, if done well, it could help many advertisers better understand which campaigns and ads are contributing to overall success throughout the funnel.

5 CRO TIps to Convert E-CommerceSites

1. Make sure that you have multiple payment options - A lot of e-commerce purchases are made from a mobile device. They might skip the purchase if they need to go find their credit card.
2. Look for qualitative feedback: As about their experience
3. Always have upsells and downsells
4. Look out for where bottlenecks are
5. Pay attention to your image quality

Google Ads launches new budget report
Google Ads is launching a new budget report to visualize monthly campaign spend behavior, the company announced Thursday.

What the budget report shows. The budget report shows daily spend, your campaign’s monthly spending limit (solid grey line), your monthly spend forecast (dotted blue line), cost to date (solid blue line) and any budget changes you’ve made during that particular month.

Why we care: This new report can help advertisers understand how editing their budget can impact the campaign’s spending limits, how past changes to average daily budget can affect performance and spend limits, and how much they’re projected to pay at the end of month. That information can then be used to improve their planning.

That’s a wrap for this week! We’ll be back next week with the latest and greatest in digital marketing. For a consultation, contact us!