Turn and Face the Strange Ch-ch-ch-Changes

[00:00:00] It is Tuesday, April 9th. Today, under pressure, TikTok is about to push out a new app as Instagram

[00:00:08] says, Let's Dance. The modern love between third-party platforms and APIs, and life on

[00:00:14] Mars might seem easier than the space oddity we're seeing in Meta's ad auction these

[00:00:19] days. I'm Tod Maffin, that's ahead today in Digital Marketing.

[00:00:25] There are lots of metrics for digital advertising, and each platform has its own metrics too.

[00:00:31] Take Google's Ad Strength number. That's a measure of how well Google thinks your ad

[00:00:35] is set up, mostly in terms of your creative. That's different, by the way, from quality

[00:00:40] score, which tries to give you an idea of how well your ad performs compared to other

[00:00:45] advertisers. But one question that keeps coming up for marketers makes up today's

[00:00:50] trivia question.

[00:00:52] Does Ad Strength affect your position in Google's ad auction? The answer at the end of today's

[00:01:00] episode.

[00:01:01] YouTube is launching Shopping Collections, a new way for creators to curate products from

[00:01:11] their favorite brands. YouTube's example? For instance, they could pick a selection

[00:01:15] of products for any theme from your current everyday makeup look to the ultimate capsule

[00:01:20] wardrobe. Collections will appear in a creator's product list, store tab and video description.

[00:01:26] These collections can be put together on the Studio Mobile app, though the company says

[00:01:31] it will be coming to desktop soon. They're also launching a new affiliate hub in the

[00:01:35] YouTube app so creators can find the latest list of shopping partners, competitive commission

[00:01:41] rates, promo codes, and even request samples from brands. Third, YouTube is expanding

[00:01:47] its bulk tagging for affiliate shopping creators that expansion sees the feature going to all

[00:01:52] shopping creators. And finally, they've added fourth wall to their list of platforms that

[00:01:56] support content management.

[00:01:59] If you've been feeling like your ads on Meta's platform have been really volatile

[00:02:06] lately, you're not alone. Anecdotal reports are all over social media, with media buyers

[00:02:11] saying the last month has seen particularly strong swings. But what does the broad data

[00:02:17] tell us? For that I'm joined by Yarden Shaqed. Yarden is CEO of Verus. They anonymize and

[00:02:23] aggregate data from 6,000 e-commerce advertisers so they've always got a great bird's eye

[00:02:28] view of the overall market. And Yarden, according to your data, when did this volatility

[00:02:32] start?

[00:02:34] Starting on February 20th, there was a lot of volatility that we were starting to see,

[00:02:42] starting at CPMs and flowing through to ROAS. 40% of companies were what we call significantly

[00:02:54] affected which means that they had a deterioration on a ROAS basis of 10% or more. And 13%

[00:03:02] of companies were very significantly affected which is a deterioration of over 25% or more.

[00:03:12] And can we infer any patterns? Like is this just for specific brands or company sizes or

[00:03:17] is Meta moving the spend around?

[00:03:19] It's a lot about like spend shifting to weird places, like all the spend shifts to reels

[00:03:25] or all of a sudden, all the spend is on iOS versus Android and things like that. And it

[00:03:33] feels like there's something in the mechanism that got a little out of whack. That's what's

[00:03:39] going on and nothing to do with a specific company or thing. There was theory going around

[00:03:46] it was Shopify. We disproved that. iOS, we also disproved that. It wasn't like there

[00:03:52] wasn't any trend that happened to everyone from what we saw.

[00:03:56] Is this volatility dramatic enough for us to consider pausing Meta ads entirely?

[00:04:02] I mean, Meta is still king. Even at that 10% deterioration it's still worth it to spend

[00:04:11] most of your budget on Meta. It's the only place that people are actually able to build

[00:04:16] significant top of funnel and scale. We haven't seen spend deteriorate even though some of the

[00:04:24] performance has deteriorated. So on a macro thing, it's definitely something to observe.

[00:04:31] It's something that happened. It's something to watch out on. But my takeaway is actually

[00:04:36] like social media is overhyping this problem. And there's a lot of issues here, but

[00:04:42] it definitely has not become a channel that is unusable.

[00:04:47] Jordan Chiquette is CEO of Verus. If you want to compare your ad data with others in the industry,

[00:04:52] you can sign up for a free Verus account at varos.com. That account will let you benchmark

[00:04:57] against specific categories, give you real-time market trend data and a four-week data look back.

[00:05:03] In a rare peek behind the curtain, Meta has broken out Instagram's ad revenue. And it shows

[00:05:14] a hefty profit over the past few years. Normally Meta groups its financial updates together,

[00:05:19] making it tricky to gauge each app's individual success. But this year, as part of its latest

[00:05:24] legal filing to dismiss an antitrust case, they provided specifics. According to the

[00:05:30] documents, Instagram made $11.3 billion in 2018, $17.9 billion the next year, $22 billion in 2020,

[00:05:41] and $32 billion in 2021. The most recent numbers in the documentation catch up to the first half

[00:05:47] of 2022, which when you extrapolate is likely past $33 billion. Remember,

[00:05:54] Zuckerberg bought Instagram for $1.3 billion. Quoting social media today,

[00:06:00] quote, the data suggests that Instagram generated around 30% of Meta's total revenue in 2022,

[00:06:08] which if you were to extrapolate that into last year's number would suggest that Instagram

[00:06:13] brought in around $40 billion in ad revenue in 2023, unquote. There are other legal things

[00:06:20] happening, not to mention new European Union regulations that require platforms to disclose

[00:06:25] more. So this might not be the only revenue update we get.

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[00:07:15] A Publishing API. They only recently added the ability to see, reply to or hide incoming comments,

[00:07:21] as well as pull some basic post data like engagement numbers.

[00:07:25] Now we're getting more information on what's likely to be in the toolkit with the release

[00:07:30] of the official API documentation. Webhooks will soon let third-party tools get an

[00:07:35] immediate notification when someone replies to a post. This engagement part is really one of the

[00:07:40] key missing pieces that's holding back a lot of brands from posting on Meta's competitor to X.

[00:07:47] A few other details emerged from the API documentation. Accounts will only be allowed

[00:07:51] to publish 250 posts from a third-party tool within a 24-hour period. Those are posts,

[00:07:57] not replies. There is a 24-hour limitation to the number of replies, and that number is 1,000

[00:08:03] replies. As for image formats, they're only taking JPEG or PNG through the API.

[00:08:09] Video uploads will be limited to 5 minutes, and text posts won't be able to exceed 500 characters.

[00:08:16] So far, there still aren't any ads on threads, so you can bet that's high up on the list.

[00:08:26] So Threads wants to be the next Twitter, and TikTok wants to be the next

[00:08:30] checks notes Instagram. TikTok seems to be very close to releasing a new photo-sharing app,

[00:08:37] which will be called TikTok Notes. Which to me is a really strange name for an app that does

[00:08:43] images and not, you know, notes. And some users are already being prompted to automatically share

[00:08:50] their photo posts on the forthcoming app. This is of course super smart since it means the app

[00:08:55] will launch with a whole bunch of content. A surprising amount of TikTok content is indeed

[00:09:00] already just images in a carousel. TikTok would not confirm a launch date.

[00:09:09] Oh, and as for the trivia question. Does your Google ad campaign's ad strength

[00:09:16] affect your placement in the ad auction at all? This has been the subject of some

[00:09:20] speculation on social media in the past few days or so, but Ginny Marvin,

[00:09:24] Google's ads liaison, this week weighed in with the answer. No, ad strength is not ever used in the

[00:09:32] auction. So even if you're not doing Google's content recommendations and even if your ad

[00:09:37] strength is really low, it will not change whether your ads will serve.

[00:09:44] So finally got into a proper video game. You know, I've been, I don't know, I've been

[00:09:49] trying to find a good game to kind of dive into and I thought maybe I'll just do another

[00:09:53] run through of Fallout for the 12th time. But Diablo 4 actually came out on Game Pass and I'm not

[00:10:00] really one into the whole fantasy, all the fantasy scripts sound the same to me, you know, ah, the

[00:10:06] Dark Souls have entered the gem of the den of sin and you shall burn in the depths, you know,

[00:10:10] like all that stuff is just kind of, I don't know, it's in one ear and out the other. Even

[00:10:14] Skyrim was full of it and I loved Skyrim. But anyway, Diablo turns out to be kind of a fun

[00:10:18] game. Although I've done something, I think I've messed up my build so I'm a rogue and I've invested

[00:10:25] in a lot of traps in my build and I can just melt mobs. I can go through like 50 skeletons in like

[00:10:30] literally three seconds. They're comically easy in fact. But the bosses, like what am I doing

[00:10:38] wrong? Diablo players, what am I doing wrong here? Like the bosses are just demolishing me

[00:10:43] and it just seems really unbalanced and I don't understand. Maybe this is a thing with Diablo,

[00:10:47] I don't know, but anyway, we'll see. Anyway, I'm off to do that. Apparently there's a clan I can

[00:10:53] join of Mastodon users so we'll see if I could find a nerdy clan to be with. All right, I'll see you tomorrow.

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