Facebook: The Land of the Make-Believe ROAS

Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• E-COMMERCE: Those Sales You Made Weren't Real. Happy Friday!
• SNAPCHAT: Will Scan be the Next Big Thing?
• TWITTER: Ticketed Spaces Launches
• FUNNY ADS: Pixel Campaign is Hilarious

Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

E-COMMERCE: Those Sales You Made Weren't Real. Happy Friday!

So you started work today, you popped open your Facebook ads manager to check on that campaign and — whoa! Good news! Purchase conversion value is up... ROAS is up...

This is great! Or, it would be, if it were real.

This morning, Facebook cranked up the dial even further on its conversion modelling.

To be clear, this update only applies to the Purchase standard event for non-Value Optimization campaigns.

Honestly, I wish Facebook would take a page from Microsoft's ads manager which splits out the conversions it guarantees from the ones it estimates and puts them in two separate columns.

Facebook's approach so far has been to lump all conversions — real and estimated — into the same bucket, meaning that column can't really be trusted at all.

SNAPCHAT: Will Scan be the Next Big Thing?

Snapchat is doubling down on its moves in the augmented reality space, announcing they'll be making the Scan function more prominent — right on the main Camera screen of the app.

This scan lets people take a photo of things like food, plants, clothing, and so on — and Snapchat will offer a variety of experiences, like showing a list of similar fashion items available for purchase.

TWITTER: Ticketed Spaces Launches

Twitter announced today that some accounts will now be able to sell access to one of their hosted live audio events, which they call Spaces.

The monetized version is called Ticketed Spaces — applications opened a couple of months ago and they've approved a handful.

As for attending one of these paid events, anyone on iOS can now pay for a ticket and attend.

Twitter says it will only take a 3% cut of the price — which sounds great at first, until you also subtract Apple's ridiculous 30% cut, meaning a creator will only see 67% of each ticket sale.

And if you do well the minute you exceed $50,000 in revenue, Twitter's cut jumps to 20%.

FUNNY ADS: Pixel Campaign is Hilarious

If you've ever watched an Apple news conference, you might remember the over-the-top, breathless descriptions of their products — usually narrated by their then head of design, Jony Ive.

Here's a sample:

Yesterday, Google released its new Pixel 5A smartphone — notable mostly because it has a headphone jack, something Apple dropped from its phones a while ago, much to the chagrin of everyone who isn't an Apple executive.

Which might be why Google hired a Jony Ivy soundalike voice actor to make this absolutely brilliant ad:

Hey, if it takes shaming Apple to get a headphone jack back, I'm all for it.

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com