Rabbbits Weeekly: Spooky Szn Search Strategy
Microsoft and Reddit share some holiday insights. Plus, more CPC/CPM slander and things about the æconomy, algorithms, ads, analytics and attack vectors.
Spooky Szn 👻🎃💀
Microsoft has dropped some spook szn knowledge, including gems like:
45% of consumers have said they plan to start their shopping sometime in September
Here’s the problem with that tidbit. I went to Home Depot on September 30, Christmas was out and Halloween had dwindled to one bay and one quasi-aisle in front of it. I went again yesterday morning (this frequency is not unusual) and the “get ready for the season” promos playing on the in-store speakers were for artificial trees. Home Depot is over Halloween. (In their defense, one employee told me they had to hide the shipment of giant skeletons until it was time to display them because people kept searching for them.)
Anyway, back to trick-or-treating with The Company Formerly Known for Windows.
First treat, target your advertising to parents.
Second treat, keep some money in the bank (at least for search).
Third (and final) treat, shift from display to search as October progresses (this matches up with the stats Snap shared previously).
Now back to the Home Depot thing. Reddit is the latest social platform to release a holiday marketing guide, and it shows conversions start growing about 36% week-over-week this month. Then it hockey sticks its way to Christmas.
What do they recommend for this month?
Get in front of users exploring holiday purchase options and take advantage of auction efficiency before the height of holiday season
Whose Metric Is It Anyway?
Last weeek, in part 2, I shared this tweet (thread):
Then, I stumbled on this post from Neil Patel:
Why Cost Per Click Doesn’t Matter (And Why You Should WANT to Pay More)
A lot of the same logic, with some callouts to metric benchmarks.
So, why should you ditch CPC and CPM? Well, first, you shouldn’t. Not completely. They are useful metrics of comparison and can be used to spot trends or changes more immediately than some others. A massive increase in CPC is worth digging into. A drastic drop in CPM probably warrants a targeting check. And so on. But they aren’t success metrics, they’re driver metrics.
Optimizing for these metrics means you can end up paying for more only to get less. More clicks at a cheaper CPC may come at the cost of qualified sessions. And so on, etc.
The other important thing to keep in mind is that all these metrics like Impressions, Reach, CPM, CPC, CTR, and (to some extent) clicks, can be gamed by the platforms. Increase impressions by delivering an ad whenever it’s even tangentially relevant. Increase reach by lowering frequency, even though it takes repeated views for a marketing message to stick. Increase clicks by delivering more to people who clicks or in placements that have a higher accidental click rate. (Optimizing for link clicks in Facebook just tries to get your ad clicked, nothing that happens after the click matters to the system. Optimizing for landing page views requires the destination page to finish loading before a click is deemed successful. A/B test those two optimizations and note the difference.)
Focusing on metrics like Cost Per Lead of Cost Per Acquisition puts more of the control in the brand’s hands since success is usually related to their website, offer, etc.
TL;DR: don’t measure yourself based on things you can’t control.
Source Shoutout
If Rabbbits Weeekly isn’t enough for you (or you just want more, more, more), and you’re a data nerd, check out the patron saint of Blue Ion: Avinash Kaushik.
Ads
Speaking of gaming the ad system…remember when I talked about spammy in-app ads driving Facebook’s audience network video ad numbers? Sounds like podcast networks caught on and used a similar approach to boost download numbers.
Assuming you aren’t trying to game some numbers, make sure to pay attention to your ads’ frequency metrics. You know, so you don’t bombard one person with the same ad over and over and over again. Like Groundhog Day, but with you wasting a bunch of money.
Facebook is betting on people remembering their smartphones are actually, well, phones. Call Ads got a facelift, the big new feature is the ability for customers to request you call them via Messenger instead of wondering if anyone will answer if they click “call.”
Facebook’s cooler, younger sibling, Instagram, is officially testing ads in profile feeds. This is the feed you see when you tap an image on a profile and then scroll. So, basically, Too Hip To (Still) Be Square is monetizing your profile feed when others scroll through it. I wonder if they’ll add competitive targeting to this placement a la Amazon?
They grow up so fast. LinkedIn has added new features that make it feel like a real ad platform, including offline conversions, audience insights in the ads manager, and a media library (finally!). The coolest addition is Document Ads. Use a PDF as your ad creative and deliver it in-feed, you can gate access via lead gen forms too.
Do you promote webinars? Then you might like this. A couple highlights from the Webinar and Virtual Event Benchmark Data:
Average length of promotion is 44 days, but 32% of registrations come within 7 days of the event.
65% of registrants attend “live”, but they’re probably multi-tasking.
Wednesday and Thursday are the popular days to host webinars and the popular times are between 11 am - 1 pm.
And finally, reduce, reuse, recycle:
When your audience registers for your webinar but do not attend the live session, this means they are interested in the topic but may want to consume it in a different format. Find ways to repurpose your content by turning the webinar into a blog series, FAQ document, or a series of social media posts to keep people engaging with your content.
Sounds Profitable has a short episode out today on promo codes. They conducted a survey on a selection of Athletic Greens ads to see what listeners recalled, etc. Only a tiny fraction mentioned promo codes in their open-ended responses. The recommendation: don’t send listeners to a new URL with code every ad, create a landing page or robust show notes page that houses all of them and direct the listener to one URL (people like Lex Fridman, Tim Ferriss, Rich Roll, and Andrew Huberman do this to varying degrees).
Algorithms
Neal Stephenson’s next sci-fi project is the open metaverse.
Twitter, the soon-to-be-an-Elon-company, is now TwitTok. Say hello to full screen, immersive video and more videos in your Explore tab.
Instagram put Twitter in their DMs, basically. The feature is actually called Notes and it’s basically a text Story that appears in followers’ inboxes but doesn’t alert them that it’s there.
Oh, and they still want you to use Reels, so they made a guide to help you out. 23 pages of “please, help us be cool like TikTok” content.
They’re having even less luck with their Creator Marketplace, likely suffering from too little, too late. The Business Insider piece is paywalled, but the Today in Digital Marketing podcast has a nice summation. Out of the 12+ influencers that spoke with BI, only one landed one deal. If you don’t have a marketplace of choice yet it might still be worth checking out, but it may run out of creators if things don’t turn around.
Æconomy
Apple is cutting iPhone 14 production (backing off to their original unit estimates, even with last year). Weak sales are likely due to the economic difficulties in China and Europe. But the interesting part is the fact that production is being moved from the lower priced models to the more expensive Pro models. Spending markets everywhere are splitting where the top halves are relatively unaffected and the bottom halves feel the squeeze. The looming recession (or recession adjacent…thing) will not be evenly distributed. (The Great Recession was caused by housing wealth being eroded, that’s not the case this time around. This time around it could be the landed vs. the landless.)
Analytics
A company called FullThrottle Technologies claims to have a post-cookie solution for targeting and attribution, it’s called Audience Flume. The article (and their website) is a lot of jargon and mumbo jumbo that is light on actual details (I’d imagine it’s part protection since the tech is patent pending and part the reality of most tech product messaging these days) but they say they can transmute first party data into a household profile for better targeting. First warning flag, “transmute” is closely tied to alchemy, so bold choice there. A graphic on the site appears to show physical address as the targeting key, my biggest question is how they get that. Since they are privacy-compliant (requires user consent), I’m guessing IP is out (plus VPN and Apple’s Private Relay would monkey with this). When I opened their site it asked to access my location, so maybe it’s that simple. What’s the success rate on those pop-up requests? I love the vision, I’m just skeptical of the reality at this point.
Google Analytics 4 will now track when users start forms, not just submit. Hello form conversion rates 👋
Attack Vectors
Microsoft has confirmed that two Exchange server exploits have been used by state-sponsored groups (assuming that means China, Russia, and/or North Korea) to attack less than 10 organizations. Proof of concept or strategic strike?
That Texas law that wants to make it illegal for social media platforms to remove content because of its political viewpoint (which can’t be disproven and can be applied to pretty much any content) was upheld by an appellate court. What could go wrong?
Alternates & Assorteds
Amazon’s new Kindle is also for writing, I already want one.
No, it’s not just you, movie dialogue is hard to hear these days.