🔍 Facebook Ads glitches have advertisers feeling weary

Nov 09, 2020

Good morning, Search Marketer, consensus is tough but…

One thing we can agree on (please) is that the U.S. presidential polling was off, again. That got Greg Sterling wondering about the broader implications for consumer research.

How divergent are what consumers say they do and what they actually do? How realistic is it to extrapolate the responses of a thousand consumers to the population as a whole? You can see where Greg's going with this.

"Consumer surveys are a useful tool, but they must be reality checked with behavioral data for a more complete and accurate picture of consumer activity," he says.

E-commerce advertisers started seeing Amazon come back into their Google Ads auctions after the company hit pause during the height of the pandemic. If you're not sure if or how much you're going toe-to-toe with Amazon, look to auction insights. Contributor Tim Jensen explains how to use auction insights in Google and Microsoft for competitor analysis and then use that data to optimize your campaigns.

Keep reading for reactions to the latest round of Facebook Ads bugs and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

Social Short

Facebook Ads bugs unnerve advertisers

Last week, more bugs beset a wide number of advertiser accounts and ads, causing temporary ad disapprovals and accounts being disabled. "This is the second widespread bug that we've seen impact Facebook campaigns in the last 4 weeks,' said Zenia Johnson of 3Q Digital.

Why we care. Advertiser frustrations over an unpredictable and glitchy ads platform could drive them to consider channel diversification more seriously. That could help Snapchat and Pinterest, in particular, both of which have been investing in direct response advertising solutions and saw healthy ad revenue growth last quarter.

Read more here »

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Search Shorts

Foursquare CEO change, seeing double canonicals, dropping URLs

Foursquare CEO David Shim is stepping down. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, current board member Gary Little will take over. Shim founded location analytics company Placed in 2011; it was bought by Snap in 2017 and then sold to Foursquare in 2019. Shim became Foursquare CEO at the end of 2019 and oversaw the merger of Foursquare and Factual in mid-2020.

Earlier this year, we spoke with Shim about how brands and marketers can use location intelligence to identify and act on consumer trends.

Two canonicals. Do you have two different canonical URLs listed on the same page? Google will treat it as undefined, said John Mueller of Google.

18,000 URLs dropped from Google. Mueller also said it isn't surprising to see a site drop 18,000 URLs over a few day period. I'd be concerned…

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