The Industries Jungle Canopy and Dark Body of Water
TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:
Google may be changing your campaign without your permission.
YouTube may soon place ads on your brand’s videos, also without your permission.
You can buy TV ads through a portal now.
Facebook apparently has a new Relaxed Moderation flag for brand assets.
And the top trending colour for 2021 reads like a bad LSD trip.
Below is the transcription from this episode
It’s Wednesday, November 18th 2020.
Happy Republic Day, Latvia!
I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, Today in Digital Marketing.
Google Ads
So, this would suck — imagine starting your day with a quick check on your Google Ads performance and discover that your campaign’s keywords were overspending by 50% of your target budget. You check your keywords and — hey, that’s weird… I didn’t put that keyword in there. And this one — I didn’t give it that keyword. So you check the Change History to see who on your team has been monkeying with your campaign and there’s no change listed.
Well, this is happening to marketers as we speak — and the entity which is pushing keywords into your campaign? Google Ads itself.
Turns out, almost two years ago, Google launched a program that would insert keywords into your campaign if Google algorithm thinks you’ll get better results from them. So a lot of people did. Then, nothing much happened.
Until this month when it seems Google suddenly turned that feature off. One guy that SearchEngineLand.com interviewed said his client’s account opted in to the “Maximum impact” setting in this program. This account was marketing tax preparation services, and Google added the bizarre keywords of “taxes space com.” What the hell kind of keyword is that?
Turns out this client of his opted into that program when it was in beta two years ago, and I guess didn’t realize that it would literally add keywords in. But then, in a DIFFERENT client’s account, it turns out some of the keywords were manually added by a Google rep. A rep that neither this guy nor his client has ever has heard of. Google says it’s looking into it.
Oh, and it’s not just keywords. Google can change your extensions, bidding, targeting, and more.
So - how do you double-check this? First, unless you’re 100% sure you did NOT opt into this, go to your campaigns and check your keywords. Make sure they’re the ones you intend to have there.
Then, there is actually a settings checkbox for this. Here’s how to find it. First, be sure your on the All Campaigns tab on the far left. Then click Settings. Then Account Settings. And in there you’ll find an item called Ad Suggestions. There is a very good chance you have “Automatically apply ad suggestions after 14 days” checked. Turn that off.
YouTube Will Place Ads In Your Videos
Meanwhile, while Google is adding keywords to your campaign you didn’t ask for, over at YouTube, they announced today they’ll be putting ads on your videos — ads that you didn’t ask for. In fact, maybe even on videos you specifically set as Do Not Monetize.
The company this morning emailing people of an update to its Terms of Service which says YouTube can now start inserting ads into your videos — regardless of whether you’re part of its Partner Program or have turned monetization off.
“In other words,” said SocialMediaToday.com “If you chose not to put ads in your YouTube video, YouTube's probably going to do it anyway - but you won't gain any subsequent revenue from those ads unless you sign up to the partner program.”
And to even be in that, you first have to live in a region where it’s even available, then have more than 4, watch hours in the last 12 months. Oh, and have more than a thousand subscribers.
I suspect this is going to be a problem for a lot of brand managers, who’ve used YouTube as their video hosting platform. Many people upload their videos to YouTube, then embed that video on their own company website.
Now, there’s a potential upside for us digital marketers as this could very well increase the available inventory. More inventory with the same demand usually translates to lower CPMs.
These changes are in effect today for the U.S., and will come to other countries by the middle of next year.
Buy TV Ads Self-Service
One of the best developments of that came with the birth of digital marketing was the self-service ad platform. Before those, placing ads meant suffering through a three-martini lunch with Jim, the guy from sales, and then booking a run of radio or newspaper ads.
Now, of course, we can do pretty much everything online — Facebook campaigns, Google ads, radio ads on Spotify. But there’s been one gap all this time — television.
Television has, with a few exceptions, mostly kept to the old-school method of booking ad space. And that’s because the budgets involved are often 5 or 6 or 7 figures and who the hell would do that on their credit card through a web browser.
Well that is changing. And while you might not be placing your Superbowl campaigns through a mobile app any time soon, you CAN now book television ads through a self-service platform. That’s the good news. The bad news is that those ads will only appear on Amazon’s Fire TV.
The company this morning announced its new self-service platform for Fire TV. In addition to video ads, you also can get a placement in a sponsored tile on the home screen.
There’s interest-based targeting and a real-time analytics side as well.
One other nice touch — Fire TV ads are cost-per-click, so you pay only when viewers click or tap on your ads.
Update to GMB Messages Bug
The last few days I’ve been reporting on a nasty bug that’s been affecting Google My Business accounts — specifically the messaging function. If that’s happening to you, one fellow in our Slack community offered some advice.
Jay Hall, who is the Chief Strategist at Sync Digital Solutions, says “We have had that GMB messaging bug for over a year on several accounts. It's intermittent. Google told me on several occasions that this is isolated and there is no timeline for a fix. But we did find that if we send ourselves a message before clicking to go through it forces both to show. I don't know if that will work for everyone but worth a try.”
So that’s a workaround that might help.
Jay also mentioned that their team had a call with a Facebook rep. Facebook reps are usually one of two things: Recruits fresh out of college whose job it is to convince you to spend more, or reps who “would love to help you with that issue but that’s handled by a different team.”
Well Jay reported that his call was actually productive.
Quoting Jay here: “A few things we got solved: They gave us ad credits because of downtime. Restored a couple of our pages. Worked through some problems we were having with budgeting. And here's the most shocking ... after discovering that all of a PPE company's competitors were getting ads through while our client wasn't, without any needling or elbow drops at all, they pushed everything through and said the account is "flagged for relaxed moderation".
Wait, what? Flagged for relaxed moderation? Well, that’s a new one to me and, might just be a straight-up lie, but who knows.
As for HOW Jay and his team got access to such a helpful person? He says: “Daily poking the Zuckerbear with reports, challenges, review requests, and emails.”
And so, sounds like the squeaky wheel does get a bit of grease after all.
Jay is one of 200 super-smart digital marketers in this podcast’s Slack community. There are SEO experts, Google ad pros, social media content managers, marketing VPs… and you should be in there too. Just go to TodayInDigital.com/slack or tap the link in this episode’s notes.
Downvoting on Twitter
Twitter is apparently thinking about adding a dislike button or some kind of downvoting system. This was hinted at by the company’s head of product yesterday.
To be clear, Twitter experiments with new things a lot and just as often as not DOESN’T ever launch them. But, as Mashable reported: “Hearing it straight from the horse's mouth suggests a dislike button of some kind may very well be an actual thing coming to Twitter.”
Colour Trends for 2021
In the digital marketing world, you can only be sure of two things:
One: Facebook will ban one of your pages or ad account arbitrarily.
And two: Companies will start rolling out their 2021 Forecast news releases as a way of inserting themselves into the news cycle.
That second truism is starting now. And Shutterstock is first out of the gate with their forecast of trending colours. Actually, a lot of sites do this now — Pantone does it, I think Pinterest tried their hand at it.
But anyway Shutterstock says they looked at all the colours in all the photos uploaded and they see three big trending colours on the way.
First, something they call “Set Sail Champagne” Which they describe as Pastel Orange, because that’s nicer sounding than what it actually looks like which is that beige colour that was big on interior walls in the 90s.
“Fortuna Gold” - a slightly dark yellow
“Tidewater Green” - a slightly dark teal
My favourite parts of these colour trends are the descriptions of the colours. Listen to this one, of Tidewater Green, and tell me they weren’t stoned when they wrote this:
“Like the sun rising, the seasons changing, and the earth spinning on its axis, the ebb and flow of ocean tides is constant. Tidewater Green is a reminder that change is a given. This deep, molten teal presents with both yellow and blue tints, adding to its dynamic power. At once a thick jungle canopy and a dark body of water, the beauty of Tidewater Green lies in its fluid nature.”
Uh, okay. I mean, it’s literally just a dark teal, no need to get excited.
They also have helpfully provided region-specific colour trends:
In the US, apparently bright purple will be the hot colour next year.
Predictably, Canada get beige
Australia will have a light purple
And the UK - kind of a muted red.
By the way, I’m going to start something new — I will be live streaming the production of the podcast every day for a week or two. You’ll be able to watch me in the voicing booth make all the mistakes I edit out, and then mixing the actual thing in the studio.
Why? I dunno. We all work from home now. It’s a little lonely. So come join me and mock my poor editing skills live.
The URL is twitch.tv/todmaffin. That’s twitch.tv/todmaffin. I usually start around 11am Pacific. Maybe noon. Maybe 1pm. It varies based on what’s happening with the agency, but I hope to see you!
Okay, that’s it. Talk to you tomorrow.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.