In the End, Will Direct Mail Save Us All?

[00:00:00] It's Friday, January 26th. Today, Meta wants to have AI redesign your ad. Worst part is, you might not be able to turn that redesign off. Also, in a world of declining digital ad effectiveness, could postal mail be our marketing savior? Google's data reduction is somehow giving

[00:00:20] marketers more data and the helpline is back to solve a problem connecting Google ads to GA4. I'm Tod Maffin. That's a head today in digital marketing. You can buy and sell new ad products via Instagram, eBay and Co.

[00:01:01] It was never easy to reach new target groups. Shopify offers a single secure platform to build all tools around your online business. Test free and present a business of the world. Shopify.de-try Before we start a tiny bit of breaking news, literally breaking as several parts of Google's

[00:01:34] marketing platform appear to be broken this hour. Specifically, Google Ads, Google Analytics and Search Ads 360. One particular issue, the programmatic buyer dimension is only returning dash values for some people within the completed ad manager historical reports when you run them

[00:01:51] via the ad manager reporting UI or the ad manager API. Google says they are working on it but in the meantime there is a workaround. This information can still be obtained within

[00:02:02] the ad manager UI by visiting the associated order or proposal. It does seem like it's all hands on deck over there to get these glitches fixed but if you are experiencing weirdness today, it's not just you.

[00:02:15] Every Friday we check in with our Meta Ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell. Andrew has visibility into $300 million in Meta ad spend through his Slack community called Foxwell Founders. Andrew, this week we reported on Meta's new Brand Rights Protection Manager. Can you first walk us through what this is?

[00:02:38] Yeah, so there's actually three things that they came out with that are new but we can talk about the Brand Rights Protection Manager first. So the Brand Rights Protection Manager allows basically what this is what Meta says, rights holders to monitor for misuse of their brand and report

[00:02:56] intellectual property infringement and business impersonation. So essentially this is in the Meta business suite so in the business manager and leverages AI and machine learning to basically find areas where people are using your stuff and not telling you.

[00:03:16] It's essentially what it comes down to. So you can save searches and things like that. This is basically what it is. It allows you to monitor this and tell Meta and be able to find it more quickly.

[00:03:30] So is this for products? Do you upload images of your products presumably and then it looks for ripoffs of it or are we also talking about brand mentions that are out there that you might hire a media monitoring company for in the past?

[00:03:45] I think for the most part this is looking at images because it talks about the reference library which is part of this where you upload all this stuff into basically being images. It used to be 50 now you can have 200 so looking for variations of the brand assets.

[00:04:03] So I think primarily it's around images but I do think that it's starting to capture mentions of it if people are copying your name or something like that it probably will be picking up on that

[00:04:15] because it has the saved search so now you don't have to go in and search manually which you used to have to do and then it has a cross surface search which apparently they didn't have before either which was now looks at ads, commerce accounts and posts.

[00:04:30] So it kind of looks at everything and then has the save searches there as part of it as well. So it's looking for terms and it's looking for images but I think mostly right now it's still around the images or like the creative variations.

[00:04:42] Yeah, like I wonder if this is of any use for people that don't sell physical products that you know frequently get ripped off? I think it's probably of most use to those people but I also think if you are you know somebody that's posting

[00:04:59] something like that would be a unique look or something like that that you know is yours like a logo or something like that it doesn't have to be you know that probably is a good way where people are would be potentially using your logo.

[00:05:14] So I think it's interesting, I mean certainly the way that this was managed before was really bad and this product wasn't very good and a lot of people had a real challenge with it because again you had to go in and search every time

[00:05:25] so the fact that this is here I think is a really good thing and hopefully we'll continue to help. Pretty much every week now it seems Mida is making announcement that they are rolling out generative AI.

[00:05:36] They announced it again, is there anything different here? What's new about their this week's Gen AI announcement? Yeah, so in the generative AI stuff you know they we've heard about it for a while. We've heard about it being utilized but we didn't really know where, when or how.

[00:05:56] They now have announced we're rolling this out to everyone and they're rolling out three things. One is image expansion so if you upload an image it will expand the size of that image to fit certain areas in different placements.

[00:06:15] So even if you've cropped it in one placement it could have the potential to use the whole thing. Background generation is one so if you upload a product with your product catalog and that has a pink background

[00:06:29] it will potentially put that image in four different backgrounds like one in a library, one against a brick wall, one in a factory like it will do that automatically based on what it knows that person responds to

[00:06:44] and text variations as well it automatically is going to be utilizing text variations on its own. So these are available to everyone and they're rolling out all three of these is what we know

[00:06:57] and so these will all start to see them and there's not necessarily going to be a way to turn them off as far as I know. Now that's interesting.

[00:07:06] Yeah so I think you will be able to like I think right now they'll have opt in and out but I think over time this will not be something that you'll be able to necessarily control.

[00:07:19] Potentially the background generation piece you'll be able to control and you'll be able to say yes I want to have the text variations

[00:07:26] but I really think the image expansion one you definitely won't be able to turn off that'll do it on its own and give it the right. But will you be able to ask it to regenerate if it's just like missed the mark?

[00:07:37] I don't think there'll be an opportunity for that. I think you'll have a lot of if you're very like hardcore on your brand this is going to become an uncomfortable place for you

[00:07:47] and you're gonna have to just sort of accept that it will look different be resized and potentially put on a background image.

[00:07:55] I think there is places that you can upload like exclusions that I've heard that they may be rolling out so that probably will be part of this but basically nobody had access before it was in beta now they're rolling it out to everyone.

[00:08:09] It's sort of one of those changes that Meta often makes these days where it makes me feel like do these people ever run a marketing campaign?

[00:08:17] Like they're they're talented software engineers but have they ever managed a brand before because to me as a brand manager as an agency owner

[00:08:25] it's horrifying that they'll that to run an ad on you know one of the two major platforms you just have to take what it's going to create for you even if it creates something that is off-brand. Yeah, yeah it's obviously not an ideal situation very strange and

[00:08:45] it's going to create a lot of more messiness to be honest with you but I also think they're clearly confident in the results of this so they're clearly confident in the fact that it has provided more reliable results for people over time.

[00:09:00] So, you know the test the beta test that I've seen of this and the results of them haven't been anything magically different than what we've already had or what like we've seen on manual but certainly the sizing is one that I have seen be helpful because I think

[00:09:17] sizing is an area where there's opportunity to make the ad look a little bit better instead of getting more control of the advertiser so that one I actually do agree with but the other two it's really going to be difficult to see.

[00:09:28] I don't like the text variation one I think that Meta would really mix words and make it really strange but we've already started to see this pop up in our community if people are like

[00:09:36] Meta saying this is not what I, not what we wrote we would never say this so there's going to clearly have to be more guardrails there but I think they're going to roll it out

[00:09:46] it'll be really messy and make a bunch of people mad and then the rollout controls as things go on I'm guessing how this is going to probably look.

[00:09:52] Are those text changes also not opt, we can't opt out of those, we can't edit those or do we have more flexibility over the... It depends on where you are in the world, in most places now you can opt out of that

[00:10:05] but I don't think that's going to be an option in the future necessarily. I don't actually mind the different backgrounds thing I mean obviously it would be great if we had the ability to say no rerun that you made a mistake

[00:10:19] or I don't want to use it at all but even in the event that we can't do that it is entirely possible as you mentioned that one of these different backgrounds might perform better let's say that Meta comes up with 12 different backgrounds that it's going to test

[00:10:32] will they expose the metrics on those different backgrounds for us so that we can tell so that we can get some marketing data back right so that we can say oh look when they tested it against a brick wall it actually gave us double the conversions

[00:10:46] will we get any of that level of data? At this point I think that you could look at a winning variation and it would potentially show this information but I don't know yet because the reporting that I've seen on this has been Meta telling you

[00:11:01] hey the purple background did the best so that's the only thing that you know you don't know how the anyone... you only know the best one so obviously if that was something that was you know released that would create a lot more clarity

[00:11:18] Yeah for sure and even knowing like the worst performed one if there was one that was just was absolutely dead you know okay you know we're not going to position our product against bloody knives again or something like that Alright Andrew thank you see you next week

[00:11:31] Thank you Andrew Foxwell is our Meta ads correspondent you can learn more about Andrew's digital ads training program at b.link.foxwell or his Slack community which we are in of senior Meta ad buyers

[00:11:45] that's at b.link slash founders both of those affiliate links you can find those at the bottom of our show notes Digital marketing once hailed for its precise targeting and cost effectiveness is facing some challenges heading into this year

[00:12:02] the decline of Google's third-party cookies, Apple's changes of course the replacement of targeting toggles with AI all of which is making ad targeting more difficult and ad costs are rising user tolerance for digital ads decreasing

[00:12:18] but an interesting thing piece in digit a today considers the old lady of marketing direct mail which is actually gaining traction among B2B big box retailers and brands in the home fashion financial services and insurance sectors with conversion rates between one and five percent

[00:12:36] direct mail is proving relatively effective especially when combined with digital elements like QR codes for better tracking five marketing executives spoke to digit a for the story and said first-party data is becoming more valuable and innovations in tracking are enhancing its appeal quoting from their piece quote

[00:12:54] a person's physical mailbox is valuable real estate impressions from a direct mail campaign can be of better quality than a digital campaign as people are more likely to engage with mail in their home or business instead of scrolling past digital banners and social media sponsored posts

[00:13:11] as the digital ad market gets more crowded online users may be less likely to engage with a digital banner or sponsored post direct mail campaigns are a way to break through the noise unquote

[00:13:23] the whole piece is worth a read you'll find it at digit a dot com look for the article called in rocky digital advertising landscape advertisers reconsider direct mail I'm sorry I know that the theme is really cheesy we're working on a better one I promise

[00:13:46] tech support at the various platforms as you know are pretty terrible if they exist at all which is why we have started the digital marketing help line

[00:13:55] calling with a problem you're having we will find an expert to suggest some ways to fix your problem here is this week's call I'm having problems setting up conversion correctly for Google ads to show up on Google analytics we do lead form submission conversions

[00:14:12] and we get the whole Google ad code from once we set up the account we put it on the website it shows that it's firing but for some reason

[00:14:19] I'm not sure how to make that show up on Google analytics all our reporting software that pulls the information pulls exactly the same information that we're seeing on Google ads

[00:14:29] for an answer to this question I'm joined by Steve Perron owner and partner of collective 42 Steve you've heard the question what do you think is going on here

[00:14:38] so it's not uncommon to see that kind of misconception that you set up conversions from Google ads it should show up in GA4 however that's not the case

[00:14:50] GA4 if you want conversions for Google ads to show up you could connect your Google ads account to GA4 but that's still going to show up in a separate section in Google analytics for

[00:15:02] I believe it's like the advertising section on there but if you want to have your conversions fired from your paid ads into GA4 you actually need to create them within GA4

[00:15:14] and then feed them into Google ads the best way to do that is to create the conversion event with let's say Google tag manager and let's say it's a form fill

[00:15:27] so create a conversion event that's a form fill be it a unique landing page or an actual form submission have that event fire in Google analytics for

[00:15:40] turn that event into a conversion and then within Google ads you can go to the conversion conversion section within Google ads and you can import your conversions from Google analytics into Google ads

[00:15:55] so there are separate platforms so we have some clients that run Google ads conversion pixels and they report out of Google ads and then we have other clients that then create Google analytics of four conversions and import them into Google ads

[00:16:11] they will show different numbers because there is some different attribution so but if you want to see Google analytics for conversion show up under let's say a source medium report you have to create them in Google analytics for

[00:16:24] so they are separate kind of ecosystems but there are ways to connect it how do you prevent duplication of data then if Google ads is sending data over to the advertising side of GA4

[00:16:33] and GA4 is set up to log conversions are you not would you not have to dedupe that that incoming data so I would say that in the Google ad side you would definitely want to

[00:16:46] de prioritize one of the conversion metrics otherwise you will be counting duplicates if you have GA4 conversions importing and Google ads so you can set them up as secondary conversions or just monitor them to see how close they are

[00:17:01] typically I would suggest when you are running Google ads using Google ads conversion pixels they tend to be a bit more accurate because they are in the eco sphere there than rather than importing from Google ads or Google analytics into ads

[00:17:18] but having both you can kind of compare maybe you got 100 from Google analytics for and then Google ads says you got 125 there is going to be a little bit of a discrepancy so it's a nice kind of data redundancy

[00:17:30] you mentioned one of the reasons that there is a difference between the numbers and this is common across all platforms really is the attribution windows are slightly different is there a way to set the attribution windows on both platforms to be identical

[00:17:43] which in theory should give identical numbers or is that just a marketing pipe dream yeah it's not going to be possible because like Google analytics 4 has its own privacy settings that are within there

[00:17:58] and so yeah they will never be the same so I always like to have more data and then kind of deducing it down what do you report to your clients the Google ad side the Google analytics numbers or do you kind of do a blend of the two

[00:18:10] so typically our clients will be running multiple different types of campaigns let's say search engine optimization as well as paid ads maybe they're running Facebook ads as well so we tend to set up conversions within Google analytics

[00:18:28] or sorry Google analytics 4 and then import them into Google ads and we report there because honestly clients mostly like to look at Google analytics 4 as the kind of the home base dashboard of how are things going rather than all the individual platforms

[00:18:42] yeah we can piece them together in a custom report and report that way but using GA4 as kind of the home base or baseline for your conversions tends to work out best quickly tell me about your agency and where people can find you

[00:18:54] yeah so you can go to collective42.com we're a website design and development shop but we have about 15 to 16 years in digital marketing experience so that's where I can come in and talk about this Steve Perron owner of collective 42 thank you

[00:19:10] yeah thank you Todd if you have an issue with your digital marketing and would like a couple of ideas to try to get a fixed call into our help line

[00:19:17] by going to todayindigital.com slash voicemail if we use your call on the show we will give you a free subscription to our premium newsletter that's todayindigital.com slash voicemail or tap the link at the top of the show notes

[00:19:45] the commercial platform shopify revolutionized millions of companies worldwide with shopify you can sell products via popular channels whether personal p.o.s. system or comprehensive e-commerce platform also social media and markets like facebook instagram and ebay are supported thanks to the constantly growing selection of innovative functions

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[00:20:29] slash try so shopify.de slash try made for Germany powered by shopify in its continued attempt to lure people away from tick tock and snapchat instagram is starting to roll out another feature this one it calls flipside and is an alternative profile of sorts quoting social media today

[00:20:49] instagram's flipside option provides an alternative profile space which is only accessible to you and your chosen connections once you've created a flipside you can then select it as your post audience

[00:21:02] meaning your post will only go to that space you can then visit and view your flipside as an alternative profile gallery where you can also add a new profile name and picture if you choose it's another way for instagram

[00:21:16] to lean into more private sharing which has been a key trend of note in social apps of late fewer people are now posting to their public feeds while preferring to maintain smaller closer knit engagement communities unquote

[00:21:32] and finally an update on a story we reported on earlier in the week google told marketers it would be reducing the amount of data it shared in the driving directions report inside google profiles instead though it seems to have done the opposite

[00:21:48] some marketers and brand managers on social media are reporting a big spike in the numbers starting back from last week some folks asked their google rep about it and that rep told them quote we are aware of the spike I have reached out to our team

[00:22:02] and they have confirmed this is accurate this is likely from improved detection and reporting from the performance metrics I have an exciting week of geeking planned because I'm picking up my network attached storage this afternoon

[00:22:22] basically it's like a cloud server but you keep it in your home or your office I move a lot of video files around so I finally decided that I would do it that way and excited to set it up

[00:22:32] also excited to tinker with the home automation stuff that I'll be able to do and probably will ruin every regular home automation stuff that we have in our house right now that works perfectly fine but that's the life of a tinkerer right?

[00:22:46] don't forget the premium version of this podcast it is just like this one it comes with no ads though better audio quality story links in the show notes audio chapters and access to more than 20 deep dive interviews with marketing scientists

[00:23:00] it comes now with my course on building a small agency and a lot more just tap go premium in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash premium and that will do it for the week today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital

[00:23:16] on the traditional territories of the synonymic first nation on Vancouver Island our production coordinator is Sarah Guild our theme is by Mark Blevis music licensing by source audio ad coordination by Red Circle

[00:23:30] wish me luck hopefully I won't break everything that I've spent the last couple of years putting together I'm Todd Mappin have a restful weekend friends I'll see you on Monday