Meta Hates Bots. (Except Those It Creates.)

[00:00:00] 80s Friday, June 28th. Today, your Facebook ads might cost more soon, but there is a way out. Google's search ranking apparently considers how busy your business is. WordPress admins get a new and peculiar tag insert. And the end game of civilization has arrived.

[00:00:19] Meta's Influencer Bots. Did anyone ask for this? I'm Tod Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Marketers brace yourself. A new 30% tax is about to be applied to your Facebook and Instagram

[00:00:35] ads, but there is a way to avoid it. The tax is Apple's fees for spending money on its iOS devices. Apple collects 30% for those fees. Some companies have absorbed this, but more are passing this along to customers. Earlier this year, Meta decided to do the latter

[00:00:51] in the US. Now it's expanding that worldwide. Again, you'd only pay this extra fee if you're paying for an ad or a boosted post in the Facebook or Instagram mobile apps. If you want to avoid this, just crank up a laptop or desktop and buy it there. That

[00:01:07] will of course work for most people, but solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, side hustles, a lot of them do their business almost entirely on their phones. For them, this will have an impact. Quoting the Director of Privacy and Fairness Policy

[00:01:21] at Meta, quote, the 30% Apple tax gives them an unfair advantage over competitors, making it hard for them to compete on pricing. None of this strikes me as a good outcome for users or fair dealing with competitors. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Regulators

[00:01:36] worldwide are siding with app developers and consumers who stand to benefit from more choices and lower fees, unquote. If your restaurant isn't ranking as high in Google Search as you'd like, try changing up your menu. A new report suggests menu item names

[00:01:55] is likely a ranking factor along with how busy you are. SEO Agency Reputation Arm reports it discovered that adding a menu item to the Google business profile of a client improved the ranking of that item when someone searched for it. That of course makes sense. Google

[00:02:11] after all tries to match words searched for with words delivered. This also means you may want to consider renaming some of your menu items to be, well, less clever. Quoting SE Roundtable's coverage of this quote, in the example provided she replaced Caesar Kitchen

[00:02:28] with Caesar salad in the menu on June 7th. The rankings were 71 on June 8th. The business profile was ranking in the first position. The agency owner told me she repeated this for other businesses and saw similar results unquote. Also, and I only expected this,

[00:02:46] apparently busyness also factors in. The busier Google thinks a location is, the more of an algorithmic boost it gets. This is of course just anecdotal evidence, which is to say not really evidence at all, but you could definitely make an argument for its logic and

[00:03:01] the menu items thing might be something you'd want to try out. It could soon be easier to add Google's pixels to your brand's WordPress site if you don't take the whole thing down in the process that is. Some people are noticing that

[00:03:16] Google ads platform is prompting some admins to put new WordPress specific conversion codes onto their sites. Oddly, this doesn't connect to WordPress through a plugin. Rather, Google system gives website admins screenshots of a WordPress backend and shows them step by

[00:03:33] step how to paste the new code into the header PHP file. And while it's true, this would work. It's kind of a brute force method of doing things. Some lower level admins might not have access to that file editor and messing around with your PHP files

[00:03:48] can be a little dicey. Accidentally delete a semicolon in your header file and you could effectively bring your whole site down. Ask me how I know. Anyway, this appears to have just started out in testing and has not been fully rolled out yet.

[00:04:06] And that'll bring us to another episode of Nobody asks for this. We all knew this was coming. Fans of major Instagram influencers will soon be able to chat one-on-one with them in DMs. Only, of course, it's not the influencer themselves. It's their AI representative

[00:04:21] trained on that person's personality and mannerisms. Creators can also train their bots using their social media presence to make them more lifelike. This started in testing this week in the US with some Instagram influencers. Meta says it'll make sure that users know

[00:04:36] they're not interacting with real people and that its main purpose is to answer fact-based questions. But as the always-assued Andrew Hutchinson from social media today noted, quote, the bigger question I have is why? Why would people want to engage with a bot when

[00:04:51] they're not actually engaging with a human at all? Really there doesn't seem to be any value in having AI bots that simulate actual humans, especially within apps that are geared around authentic connection. It seems like a step away from the core use of social and into

[00:05:07] something else, a platform where bots end up engaging with bots and real humans are sidelined in favour of automated engagement. Haven't users been complaining about bots for years? Hasn't inauthentic interaction always been a problem on social apps?

[00:05:22] But now we're not only encouraging it but directly using it to replace humans, unquote. All right, Monday is a holiday here in Canada. It is our national day, which we unoriginally called Canada Day. But I will be back anyway with the conversation I had today

[00:05:43] with our meta ads correspondent Andrew Foxwell. Here's a clip. Andrew, I don't know if there's a right way to put this. We do some meta ads at our agency. So let me just ask it bluntly.

[00:05:53] Has June been a shit show for you as well? Yeah, it's been really, really tough. I mean, I think it's been an error like every day, every other day. It's been issues with ad

[00:06:05] serving. The newest one that came up really we started to see it on Tuesday was that if you had an ad on Instagram, you would click through to it and it would bring you to the Facebook login

[00:06:17] page. Which is terrifying too because like sometimes when that happens, it means that your account's been hacked. Correct. Yeah. So I mean, it's terrifying for a whole bunch of reasons, brand spending money without knowing it. You know, it's just been a month. I mean,

[00:06:31] it's been really tough this year. I don't think there's been a week or let's just say a two-week period that there hasn't been some sort of issue. Our full conversation goes into what you can

[00:06:43] actually do if there are bugs, whether filling in that form works. There is kind of a secret to that form which I didn't think of and Andrew will share with you on Monday. We also talk

[00:06:52] a bit about whether the old days of 50 ads in 50 ad sets is back. That's coming your way on Monday. That will do it for this week. Today in digital marketing is produced by Engage Q Digital

[00:07:04] on the traditional territories of the Stunemic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Gild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis at Coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll be back here Monday with that interview and I'll see you

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