Apr 2, 2024 ∞

Looking forward to playing with this new reporting feature from Meta (because I’m a data nerd).

With the Engaged Customers Audience Segment, you can define your engaged customers using custom audiences, which provides reporting breakdowns specifically for this audience.

Meta now offers a new segment to analyze results in Ads Manager. Just go to the Breakdown menu and choose “Demographics by Audience Segments.” From there, you’ll see separate rows for New Customers, Existing Customers, and Engaged Customers

Cracking open the lid of the black box ever so slightly.

I’m a believer in the AI/algorithm-driven targeting but learning more about what audiences it finds success with can be helpful to fold back into other efforts.

via Search Engine Land

Mar 29, 2024 ∞

Friday Bits & Bytes | 032924

Why Marketers need to embrace the funny when it comes to podcasting

While there’s no sure-fire formula to being funny, brands that lean into comedic ads find the effort has a good success rate.

A funny ad is a sticky ad

Marketing (and business) doesn’t have to be that serious, have some fun. It may even make your work better.

If only there were a “holiday” coming up that would let you safely try humor for your brand…

Here are 2:

Ways in Which US Internet Users Are Informed About a Product or Service, by Age, Nov 2023 (% of respondents)

Channels Where US Internet Users Start Their Online Shopping Journeys, 2022 & 2023 (% of respondents)

Over two-thirds (67%) of US 16-to 24-year-olds say they’ve learned about a product or service through a social media video that organically entered their feed

But

Social media is just one part of the discovery mix. Online marketplaces or search engines are the top places where US consumers start their shopping journey

Outside of impulse purchases, discovery and shopping are two different phases.

Are Lookalikes Still Relevant?

I get that lookalikes are technically a bit more specific, in theory. You could find people similar to your paying customers, for example. I wonder if advertisers simply don’t trust the newer options as much as the tried and true lookalikes.

I’m just not convinced that lookalikes are any better than these other methods. I’ve mostly abandoned them completely as a result.

I am now very interested in this question. Mostly because I’m interested in what’s working on Meta.

And because I just made a bunch of lookalikes earlier today for an upcoming campaign. Wonder if that was time wasted…

Mar 20, 2024 ∞

What We Can Learn from Bad CEO Quotes

The CEOs of Kellogg and Wendy’s recently caused a bit of public outcry.

From the Kellogg end:

We’ve got to reach the consumer where they are, so we’re advertising about cereal for dinner. If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable.

Meanwhile, at Wendy’s:

Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings

(That’s fancy talk for surge pricing.)

Shockingly, customers (or at least social media users) didn’t love these statements.

But those customers (and social media users) weren’t the target audiences. These were said for Wall Street—intended to juice stock prices, not excite customer bases.

Just like with supply chains a couple years ago, inflation and interest rates and market prices are hot topics right now. Which means a wider audience for statements like these—wider than the CEOs may be used to.

Contrast these statements with this approach from a CEO used to being in the public eye:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)

You can be sure this was intended to double as a call to investors about the quality and positioning of Meta’s VR product compared to Apple. Just like how “internal” memos at tech giants are written with the understanding that they’ll be leaked and become very much external memos.

So, uh, why am I quoting CEOs?

These statements (and the ensuing backlash) highlight that words and messaging matter.

People feeling the pinch of the highest food prices in 30 years don’t want to hear a CEO making millions of dollars a year say that people should eat his company’s cereal for dinner because it’s affordable.

Thanks to Uber and similar services employing surge pricing, “surge” or “dynamic” pricing feels negative because it usually means more expensive. I’ll quote Tyler Cowen because he covers everything I would have said:

I predict this will fail. For one thing, “we will have discounts for Tuesdays at 3 p.m.” would have been better marketing. Furthermore, many Wendy’s buyers are not wealthy, and they care a good deal about predictable prices.

(They even botched the walk back.)

Once you say something in public, you can’t guarantee which audience(s) receive it. The larger you become (in notoriety, headcount, etc) the fewer private communication channels you have.

Your content matters. And that content is a combination of words and tone.

Respect your customers. Choose your words. Earn trust & don’t burn it.

Mar 18, 2024 ∞

Monday Marketing Links | 031824

Cookie Deprecation is Coming - Should Advertisers be Worried?

Apple blocked third party cookies for 100% of traffic back in 2020, and most brands see almost half of their traffic from Safari (!!!) So that impact has already been felt for a while now.
…
as long as you’re using ad platforms platforms (Google, Meta, TikTok, Email/SMS) and aren’t super reliant on display networks, there likely won’t be a major impact.
…
building out a CDP, beefing up first-party data capture, etc. Those are considered best practices anyway, and will become even more beneficial with all of the privacy changes on the horizon and beyond.

Cookies crumbled a while ago, Chrome phasing out third-party cookies is just the final nail in the crumb filled coffin.

Survey: Retailers should focus on loyalty, brand awareness

The vast majority of retailers believe that their customer experience is at or better than their peers, but new data says otherwise.
…
The top three strategic outcomes experienced retailers should be focused on, according to IDC and SAP, are improving customer loyalty (59%), improving brand awareness (50%), and empowering employees with the right data and tools (43%) to improve the customer experience.

Everyone thinks they’re above average, but that’s not how average works. And there’s usually room for improvement regardless.

Customer experience is a moat. The better the experience, the bigger the moat.

Big Tech accounts for nearly two-thirds of the US digital ad market

Big Tech (Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft) will attract nearly two-thirds of US digital ad dollars this year

That’s more than double its share since we began tracking it in 2008.

LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform

boost the time people are spending on the platform, the company is breaking into a totally new area: gaming.
…
tapping into the same wave of puzzle-mania that helped simple games like Wordle find viral success
…
one idea LinkedIn appears to be experimenting with involves player scores being organised by places of work, with companies getting “ranked” by those scores.

Taking a page out of the old Facebook playbook and reinventing Solitaire for the browser-first workforce.

Money Stuff: Slorg is Sorry He Burnt Slerf

Basically the way crypto works is that a guy named Slorg makes up a token named Slerf, which is distinguished from other tokens by having a cartoon sloth logo. You send $10 million of Solana crypto tokens to Slorg, and he makes a note to himself that he owes you some Slerfs. Then he accidentally flushes that note down the toilet and, due to the irreversible nature of the blockchain, you get no Slerfs and your money is permanently gone, though Slorg is very sorry.

And now we know how crypto works!

mistake was very good for attention, and attention is the true value of any memecoin. So the obvious thing happened and the new tokens that were released shot up around 5,000%.

Mar 18, 2024 ∞

It's A Metric!: First Time Impression Ratio

Today’s metric is one I just learned about: First Time Impression Ratio (FTIR)

According to Meta, FTIR is:

The percentage of your daily impressions that comes from people seeing your ad set for the first time.

FTIR = Reach / Impressions

The lower your FTIR, the higher your frequency.

This matters because you can’t survive on “moment of conversion” traffic alone. Such a small sliver of any platform’s user base is in-market for your given offer at any one moment that you should run campaigns to gain brand awareness (this is why you need both brand and performance marketing (and yes, smaller budgets can put these considerations on hold)).

Attention is gold.

A member of the Foxwell Digital community uncovered an interesting FTIR trend:

a dramatic decline from approximately 60-70% to 10-25% over the past 6-12 months [as of March 2024].

This drop suggests a saturation point where the same audiences are being reached repeatedly, leading to what can be termed as ‘audience fatigue,’ rather than just ad fatigue.

The root causes identified include a lack of creative differentiation, reduced influencer marketing budgets, and underinvestment in emerging platforms

A metric on its own isn’t very helpful, but First Time Impression Rate + Frequency could be a useful combo in your budget allocation and performance analysis arsenal when auditing your social accounts.

Meta