Facebook announced Wednesday it is replacing its ad relevance score with three new “more granular” metrics. It will also be removing six additional ad metrics, replacing them with what it calls “more actionable” measurements.

Goodbye relevance score. Facebook’s relevance score offered advertisers insight into how relevant an ad may be to the audience it targeted. The relevance score was reported as single metric, but starting Wednesday, Facebook will begin rolling out three new metrics to replace the relevance score. The single score will no longer be available after April 30.

Three new relevancy metrics. The new metrics are quality ranking, engagement rate ranking and conversion rate ranking.

The quality ranking metric will measure an ad’s perceived quality compared to ads competing for the same target audience.

The engagement rate metric will work the same way, showing an ad’s expected engagement rate compared to ads competing for the same audience.

The conversion rate ranking shows an ad’s expected conversion rates when compared to ads with the same optimization goals and audience.

As with the previous relevance score, these new metrics are not factored into an ad’s performance in the auction, but instead provide insights into how changes to creative assets, audience targeting or post-click experience may impact ad performance.

Other metrics sunsetting. In addition to the relevance score, Facebook is shuttering six other ad metrics next month.

• Offers Saved
• Cost Per Offers Saved
• Messaging Replies
• Cost Per Messaging Replies
• Mobile App Purchase ROAS
• Web Purchase ROAS

Facebook said it regularly updates its metric offerings, and removes any that are no longer being used, replacing them with more effective measurement tools.

New metrics to replace those being shuttered. Facebook is introducing new metrics that will aggregate data from the shuttered metrics.

“We are introducing Posts Saved metric so business can see how many people saved their ads,” wrote Facebook, “Offer ads will be counted in the new Posts Saved metric, so we’re removing the offers saved metric.”

The Message Replies and Cost Per Messaging Replies metrics are being replaced with new Messaging Connections and Messaging Conversations Started metrics.

“We heard feedback that Messaging Replies were not as valuable because marketers are more interested in the NEW conversions that began with people who had never messaged with their business before OR messaging conversations that started after a period of inactivity,” wrote Facebook on the Help Center page. The company says the new Messaging Connections metric will only measure new conversations.

The mobile and web purchase ROAS will now be wrapped into one consolidated metric showing ROAS across all channels.

Why you should care. Facebook’s relevance metric updates should offer advertisers more nuanced insights into predicted performance and where to focus optimization efforts. If you are using any of the other metrics in you’re reporting, plan to update those reports in the coming month.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

Look around you, people are either watching vlogs and video interviews or enjoying branded video content and live stream recordings. This goes to imply that video marketing is at its peak as people are engaging with video content more than ever before.

Talking about video marketing, one cannot help but mention YouTube, the platform synonymous with it. Being a video marketer, YouTube SEO needs to be at the top of your priority list.

You might be uploading stellar videos on a daily basis, but nothing matters if your videos don’t manage to get seen. After all, with 400 hours of video content being uploaded every minute, how do you ensure yours stands out and attracts viewers?

Don’t let your YouTube marketing efforts go waste. Here are eight effective ways to ensure your videos get ranked highly on YouTube and attract views.

1. Use relevant keywords

Be it Google or YouTube SEO, the first and foremost step is conducting keyword research. Start with making a list of potential keywords related to your video, it can be anything that people will use that can direct them to the video.

Next, use YouTube’s autocomplete feature to identify the popular keywords people use to search. You will be met with long-tail keyword suggestions here which prove to be a lot more accurate than the generic short-tail ones.

Apart from manually searching for keywords, you can also use tools such as TubeBuddy and vidIQ to find the best keywords and tags to use.

2. Optimize the title, description, and tags

When you are browsing videos, the first element that catches your eye is the video title, isn’t it? Not only should the video title be compelling and interesting, but it should also contain the target keyword/s. The same applies to the video description and tags that best attribute your video.

YouTube video descriptions are highly underrated. Marketers don’t realize that this space provides context and influences ranking too. While you have 5000 characters to play with, YouTube just displays the first 157 characters. So use this space wisely, infused with keywords and appropriate call-to-action words.

Another important SEO element is adding relevant tags which make your video easily discoverable.

3. Create engaging videos

Ultimately, people will watch your videos and will keep coming back for more if you upload fresh, engaging and informative content which happens to be an important ranking signal to YouTube’s algorithm.

The more compelling your videos are, the higher is the audience retention which automatically increases your chances of showing up under YouTube’s search suggestions.

In addition to the content, it is important to pay heed to the production quality too. For example, poorly lit and inaudible videos will certainly not entice viewers. So, invest efforts in enhancing the production quality of your video in order to drive views.

4. Encourage subscriptions

Managing a YouTube channel that barely has subscribers and viewers is as good as talking to a wall. Don’t stop at just uploading a video, make it work for you by reaching your target audience and encouraging them to engage with your channel and subscribe to it.

Building a strong subscriber base increases your chances of being ranked highly on YouTube because it goes to show that you have an engaged community which is a huge plus point.

Now, how do you get people to subscribe? Start with asking for it. Make it a practice to insert this call-to-action at the end of every video and include it in the video description. You must also encourage subscriptions outside of YouTube by adding a widget on your website or asking your followers to subscribe on your Facebook or Twitter pages.

5. Add compelling thumbnails

If you have been using YouTube’s auto-generated video still as the thumbnail, you need to stop being lazy and change your ways.

The thumbnail is the first visual reference your audiences get of your video which influences their decision to view it. So it needs to be compelling enough to grab their attention. Instead of settling for an auto-generated still, why not use customized thumbnails which are far more appealing?

It is a good idea to show the close-ups of human faces to strike emotional connect and the appropriate amount of text to make it click-worthy. You can also add your brand logo but make sure it doesn’t overshadow the thumbnail, given the restricted space.

6. Use the closed caption feature

You might have come across “CC” while watching videos on YouTube. CC stands for closed captions, an important YouTube SEO tool.

Closed Captions (CC) refers to the text overlay or transcription of the video. Using closed captions in videos makes it appeal to a wider audience and lets your viewers watch your video with ease irrespective of their surroundings. This leads to higher user engagement in the form of likes, comments, shares, and subscribers.

Discovery Digital Networks conducted a study and found an overall increase of 7.32 percentage in views for captioned videos.

While YouTube generates auto-captions, you rather add closed captions for search engines to accurately index. This impacts your SEO ranking.

7. Name files appropriately

It’s easy to overlook this step but the fact is that naming your video file appropriately is more important than you think. Instead of going ahead with “video_final.mp4” or “brand_filmFINAL.avi,” it is important to rename the video to include the keywords as it is an indicator to search engines about what your video file is about.

8. Be consistent

To improve your rankings and build an engaged community, you must be consistent with uploads. You need to be committed to churning out unique and relevant video content and stay at the top of your game because that is the only way you can improve engagement which in turn boosts search rankings.

Just like any other social media platform, maintain a content calendar for YouTube and ensure you reward your community with videos on a regular basis.

For more on getting videos to rank, also check out our guide on YouTube optimization. Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Marcus is the founder of Brew Interactive, an inbound digital marketing agency that specializes in marketing to the affluent audience through digital. He is also the author of the highly raved book, Social Payoff.

Related reading

When it comes to being visible online, video content is increasingly proving its worth as a way to grab attention and – crucially – to engage meaningfully with internet users. Luke Richards takes a look at the rise of video, alternatives to YouTube, social and what it all means for search marketers.

Voice search and image search are increasingly becoming more prominent in our society. Wajid Ali from Forward3D investigates how far the technology has advanced and how it will be used in the future.

In an increasingly competitive and regulated world, how to market an ICO will be the difference between success and failure.

Video marketing has been getting huge for a few years now. Videos allow companies to reach a wider audience – thanks to the popularity of powerful video marketing platforms – and to increase their sales and conversions. But how easy it is to really see ROI from your video marketing campaigns?

If you work in any technology-based company or sector, you know things are always changing. What was standard practice and trendy and new one day or week becomes outdated and ineffective the next. As SEO trends constantly come and go, one simply can’t afford to not change. It is a company’s flexibility and ability to accept and support constant change that often succeeds.

If you’re interested in entering the technology field or you’re returning to the industry after a long break, here are some of the old online trends to avoid. You’ll notice these trends were once the accepted but have since grown stale and have fallen by the wayside:

Music Playing Website

As if hold music or elevator music wasn’t bearable, there was a time when companies welcomed visitors to their website with this awful, outdated music. This old online trend quickly became a no-no as website visitors quickly left a site.

“Click Here!” Linked Buttons

These forms of old online trends are still heavily used even though they aren’t as effective as other types of linked text. Web users now are in a hurry and want context to what kind of website a text link will take them to. The generic “click here” doesn’t tell the busy web user what the linked page is about and whether they would benefit by clicking through to it.

Long Sales Letters

There are multiple reasons the long sales letters disappeared. The largest two reasons being the fact that print is now largely out of date, being replaced with everything digitally, and the other being the short patience and attention spans of busy consumers who don’t want to read long text.

Buying Links

While a good link building campaign still has value today, the link building process has changed. The old online trend of buying links was common practice, but that technique of getting links is a serious no-no that violates SEO ethics and best practice today. Before buying links was a thing, anyone could link to whatever and however many of external pages as they liked. This caught the attention of Google, the largest search engine who put a stop to this form of link spamming with its Penguin algorithm. Since then it’s become important to consider where you’re linking to and the authority of that site.Linking to quality sites gains credibility for your site as well as the trust of Google and web users. Instead of buying links, it is acceptable to “trade” for links via guest posting and blogging outreach.

Yellow Page Advertising

Back in the day, the “Yellow Pages,” or phone book was delivered to each home. It contained a large, local business directory. If you needed a company’s phone number, hours, location or briefly see what they specialized in, you would look it up in the “Yellow Pages.” In addition to basic business information, some businesses would grab reader’s attention through sprinkling ads throughout the phone book. These old online trends was a good idea then. Now, however, with the widespread use and accessibility of the computer and Internet and smartphones, people now have immediate access to the same vital business information on the go.

Keyword Stuffing

In the past, SEO specialists and programmers were overzealous in their use of keywords. The use of keywords in a piece of content made it hard to read and understand. This caught the eye of Google who implemented the Panda algorithm to put a stop to the practice. The use of keywords in online content is still important today, but, now inserting an amount of keywords exceeding 3% of the content is looked down upon.

Artsy and Hard to Read Fonts

With all the websites out there, people use to use a variety of ridiculous fonts such as comic sans and papyrus to show the unique style and personality of the brand. However, these fonts were also distracting and

hard to read. Now, its more professional and credible to use an easy to read font such as a Times New Roman or Calibri and avoid the old online trend of overly artsy fonts.

Phony Stock Photos

While numerous organizations and companies still use stock photos on their websites and printed collateral, the stock photos of today are vastly better than their predecessors. The use of staged, grainy obviously noticeable stock photos are unpopular as these old online trends lower a brand’s credible perception.

Distracting Websites

Back in the day an overly busy website was seen as a way to impress the website visitor, make one’s website memorable in the sea of millions of other websites. Little did developers know how distracting and confusing these old online trends made their website. Today, developers are more focused on the user’s experience. This has resulted in an easy-to navigate, simplistic, yet creative looking websites.

Print Media

Print media has seen a similar to the demise of the “Yellow Pages” and phone book advertising. While print media is till widely used in advertising and in journalism, many consumers access information online via the internet on their smartphones. With the popularity of online media, many advertisers and news outlets have developed digital copies of their content.

Whether you’re an “old school” SEOer who has resisted changing with the times or you’re a new SEO specialist, avoid these common old online trends. They will keep you living in the “dark ages” and prevent you from seeing results in your company’s SEO strategies and campaigns.

If you’re a business owner and aren’t familiar with SEO and its current best practices, contact the specialists at SEO.com. We are a full-service internet marketing firm helping businesses both large and small with all aspects of their online presence.  Our staff has been in the industry for numerous years and know the current SEO online trends.  Contact us today to learn how we can help update your SEO strategy to be in alignment with current online trends.

Thank you to everyone who participated in our 2019 Martech Salary Survey. We’re analyzing the compensation data now, and we’ll release the full results at the MarTech conference in San Jose in just a few weeks. (There’s still time left to snag a ticket — it’s a packed agenda you won’t want to miss.)

But as an advance look, I want to share with you the data we collected about marketing technology and operations roles and responsibilities. (Click on the graphic above for a full-screen — i.e., readable — view of the chart.) Having run this survey two years in a row — here’s the data from last year — we can see how these roles are evolving longitudinally over time.

For our analysis, we filtered the data down to only those respondents who reported their role as primarily marketing technology, marketing operations, or combined marketing operations and technology management. We excluded respondents who identified as a “digital” role instead — even though many have martech responsibilities — to focus on dedicated marketing tech and ops positions.

For 2018, n=432 respondents were qualified by these criteria. For 2019, n=371. The survey was global, although the majority of respondents were from the US.

Top 5 marketing technology and operations responsibilities

One of the first things that jumps out from the year-over-year data is the consistency of the top five responsibilities. From martech staff and managers up to more senior directors and VPs, these are the core functions that these roles deliver to the organization:

1. Research and recommend new marketing technology products.
2. Operate marketing technology products as an administrator.
3. Train and support marketing staff on using marketing technology products.
4. Integrate marketing technology products with each other.
5. Monitor data quality within marketing technology products.

If you’re looking for a brief marketing technologist job description, that’s a pretty good one.

You can actually map these top five martech responsibilities across the complete grid of the 5 Forces of Marketing Technology & Operations:

• CENTRALIZE + AUTOMATE: Operate marketing technology.
• DECENTRALIZE + AUTOMATE: Integrate marketing technology products.
• CENTRALIZE + HUMANIZE: Train and support marketing staff on marketing technology.
• DECENTRALIZE + HUMANIZE: Monitor data quality.
• CHANGE: Research and recommend new marketing technology.

While the foundation of marketing technology management is centralizing technology and data — the “operating” in marketing operations — real success in these roles is often achieved through connecting to the rest of this grid.

Training and supporting marketing staff on martech is key to modern marketing enablement. Integrating martech that may be decentralized across marketing helps more teams use more specialized tools without being siloed. Monitoring data quality looks for anomalies in customer experiences and empowers front-line staff to identify and fix erroneous information.

Researching and recommending new marketing technologies is a key element of embracing continuous change.

Changes and gaps in martech responsibilities

As we go further down the list, there were a couple of significant drops in the frequency of other martech responsibilities. Participants in this year’s survey were a little less likely to:

• Perform technical reviews of marketing technology products (-11%)
• Identify and sundown outdated or unused marketing technology products (-10%)

Reduced technical reviews may be a function of the maturing of martech products. They’re more polished. Many have been around long enough now to have established track records. More of them are certified partners in the ecosystems of major martech platforms, which can simplify their integration and provide some assurance of their quality and interoperability.

The 10% drop in identifying and sundowning outdated or unused martech isn’t huge. But at 47%, less than half of marketing technologists reported this as one of their job responsibilities. Maybe in the scheme of ever expanding martech stacks this isn’t a top priority. After all, many of these tools are cheap or free. But still, good marketing stack hygiene feels like it should be higher on the list.

But what really concerns me are the two responsibilities highlighted in orange below:

It is disappointing that, for the second year in a row, performing data privacy and compliance reviews and performing security reviews both remained at the bottom of the list of martech responsibilities — and even dropped a few percentage points.

Given the current environment, where privacy regulations and data security breaches present increasing risks to brands — both financially and reputationally — it seems imprudent for these responsibilities to be “not my job” in marketing technology and operations.

I’m willing to acknowledge the excuse that perhaps an IT or security team outside of marketing operations carries the mantle of governing privacy and security. It’s wise to have a dedicated security expert conduct reviews. But even when that’s true — and I believe IT should provide expertise and oversight here — it does not absolve marketing technologists of their duty to manage their stacks with these factors in mind too.

In the marketing stack, security should be everyone’s job.

Differences between junior and senior martech responsibilities

This year, we also segmented the martech job responsibilities data into two groups:

• Junior Roles: Staff and Managers
• Senior Roles: Directors, Senior Directors, VPs, and C-Levels

This is how they compare with each other (click on the graphic below for a full-screen version that highlights the delta of significant differences):

The differences aren’t surprising, although it is reassuring to see that several strategic martech responsibilities that had lower averages overall were ranked significantly higher among senior martech leaders. Senior roles are much more likely — 37% to 42% more likely — to:

• Pay for marketing technology products from a budget, partially or fully (71%)
• Negotiate business terms for purchasing marketing technology products (68%)
• Approve or veto purchase of marketing technology products (68%)

With more than 2/3 of these senior-level martech positions given the above authority, we can add these three responsibilities to the core job description of such roles. The majority of senior martech leaders also own these responsibilities:

• Architect the overall marketing stack of all marketing technology products (69%)
• Monitor the performance and other SLAs of marketing technology products (56%)
• Integrate marketing technology products with non-marketing systems (58%)
• Perform technical reviews of marketing technology products (56%)
• Identify and sundown outdated or unused marketing technology products (59%)
• Identify and consolidate multiple instances of same or similar marketing technology products (56%)

It’s also a bit encouraging to see that 44% of senior martech leaders perform data privacy and compliance reviews — up 9% from the overall average of 36%. But it should be a responsibility of the majority of these roles. And still only 27% perform security reviews.

As a profession, we’ve got work to do on privacy, compliance, and security.

Customizing martech without tears code

This year’s data also revealed a slight drop, from 43% to 35%, of participants reporting that they customize martech products with software development.

It could be that the out-of-the-box capabilities of martech products, particularly with all the off-the-shelf choices available inside marketing platform ecosystems, offered by certified third-party developers, have reduced the need for homegrown martech software.

Another factor may be that the democratization of marketing technology is proceeding apace, with a growing array of tools for citizen development and citizen integrators. See: Now every marketer is an app developer — even if they don’t know it. Marketers are tailoring marketing technology for their specific workflows and customer experiences, but they’re not explicitly doing “software development” with programming languages like Python or Javascript.

As we discussed in the 3 trends driving the Second Golden Age of Martech, we’re moving beyond a strict “build vs. buy” dichotomy to a world of custom apps & ops built on common platform foundations.

One thing is clear from this year’s data. Marketing technology management continues to mature as a profession, with increasingly well-defined roles and responsibilities.

P.S. If you’re working in or leading marketing technology management, one more thing is for sure: the MarTech conference is for you. Come join us April 3-5 in San Jose to hear about vendor-agnostic martech leadership strategies from brands such as Aetna, Autodesk, Cisco Meraki, Docker, The New York Times, Netflix, Nordstrom, NPR, Sub-Zero, Zillow, and more.

Get your ticket now.

This content was originally published on Chiefmartec.com

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Scott Brinker is the conference chair of the MarTech® Conference, a vendor-agnostic marketing technology conference and trade show series produced by MarTech Today’s parent company, Third Door Media. The MarTech event grew out of Brinker’s blog, chiefmartec.com, which has chronicled the rise of marketing technology and its changing marketing strategy, management and culture since 2008. In addition to his work on MarTech, Scott serves as the VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive.

If there’s one thing that’s universally accepted, it’s that the results of SEO are unpredictable.

However, as more investment is made into the channel, we’re being put under increasing pressure to be performance-driven (and show the value we can drive “up front”) in the same way, our paid counterparts have been for some time.

Invariably, this means setting targets and being held accountable for whether we hit them or not. But this shouldn’t be an issue and in fact, I believe it’s completely possible, with the right caveats and education, for SEO to become a results-led channel. And ultimately, if we’re going to continue to grow in popularity (and see further investment), we need to be.

Measure the right things

For a long time, SEOs have talked about “improving keyword rankings”, with the coveted number one spot on a high traffic term, being the primary focus for many marketers. In 2019, however, this approach is myopic. I’m not ruling out rankings entirely, they still have value, but promoting the idea that a small, well-backed site, can outperform a titan like Amazon, Compare The Market, or RightMove for a competitive term, is unrealistic. Moreover, the resources required to do this could be better spent driving change elsewhere and this is why it’s important to measure the right things.

For forecasts, I typically look at three metrics: traffic, conversions, and revenue, with the former holding the most importance.

My reasoning – While you may receive a significant amount of new traffic from a high-value term, but (more often than not), the traffic will not be as qualified, lowering the “true value”. Used as a vehicle to drive wider site change, SEO. However, it should build results across your businesses search landscape as a whole and this can only really be measured through increased traffic (and from this, we can work out conversion and revenue increases).

But traffic isn’t a “clean” metric either and can be influenced through changes in the market, wider media activity, competitors, or even the weather. For this reason, many look to derive a “growth factor” or absolute increase figure from keyword gains, basing the output of expected traffic from changes in position (and the clicks received from this). This is an approach we’ll discuss shortly and certainly can give an indication of any potential performance gains, but its reliance on keyword data still provides a few flaws.

Put this into context

A key point to make with any forecast is that it is a projection, based on factors that we believe we can predict with varying degrees of certainty. Apple cannot provide an exact figure to shareholders, for the total number of new iPhones they will sell; nor can Disney foresee the specific number of tickets the next Star Wars film will sell. This context is important, given the unpredictable nature of search marketing.

I think we often lose ourselves in trying too hard to be accurate, that we miss the point of a forecast altogether, it’s an indication, not a definitive statement of growth that could be achieved, linked to the investment that is made. So it’s perfectly fine to caveat as such and represent any figures as non-binding. I personally use a “percentage certainty” score depending on my experience of rolling out specific activities (and their impact), which is often well received.

Importantly and as a key takeaway for this section, you need to put your data into perspective.

If you’re required to project the impact of a minor change perhaps to help and IT prioritize their development queue it may be more realistic to provide a percentage range instead of a specific number. So long as the methodology and your explanation of how this could come to be are logical and data-driven. Ultimately, a forecast is only as reliable as the data and the experiences of the person making it.

Projecting growth (or not)

In terms of working out the specific figures, each SEO has their own methodology, but broadly speaking, these can be grouped into three:

1. “Experience-based gut feel”

This kind of forecast draws on the expertise of the individual and can be a useful, “quick and simple” guideline for making snap decisions. The reliability of the projection is intrinsically linked to the knowledge of the person making it and shouldn’t be utilized in any official capacity or to make business-critical decisions. But this is not to say that this type of prediction isn’t valuable, it just depends on the use case and context the forecast is being made under.

2. “Ranking-focused click curves”

This uses ranking data to project an increase in keyword position over time (and the value from this). In my experience, many “off the shelf” forecasting tools use this method, which relies on modeling traffic based on click-through rates from ranking positions. More advanced studies might include competition or seasonality factors (perhaps from Google’s Keyword Planner) and may provide the output as either a total growth figure or shown by month using a compound growth rate or more complex increase curve.

3. “Traffic-based growth modeling”

This is, in my view, the most accurate way to forecast and frequently uses historic traffic data to predict the impact of not carrying out SEO activity, taking the market impact, seasonal changes, and other factors into account, and estimating projected increases from this. It’s often incredibly difficult to perfect and typically requires the help of a data scientist. But, if executed correctly, this methodology can provide a good representation of the impact your proposed activity can make.

A side note: In many scenarios, you may expect to see an increase in traffic predicted over your time period. However, SEO takes time and doesn’t often conform to the pre-set timelines of a campaign or contract. As such, it may be that a true forecast may not show immediate growth or even (if your site is following a downward trajectory) no increase at all.

The key takeaway here is that without the activity, you may be in a much worse place that you are predicted, and no growth doesn’t necessarily mean no value.

However, at their heart, each of the above methods still requires an expert to assess the types of changes you are intending to make and their impact. This must be someone with enough experience of the channel to understand how the different projects will move the needle, in the context of your site’s situation.

There’s no “official view” of how search activities will impact your performance and opinions may differ between experts. Moreover, the value of each work-stream will likely change by industry (or even by the query) and this is an important context to keep in mind when discussing targets and key performance indicators.

Evaluate objectively

So far, we’ve discussed context, measurement, and methodology.

As such, in this whistle-stop tour of forecasting, it would be a missing piece not to touch on evaluating performance and targets. As I mentioned in the last section, SEO takes time and we’ve already established that it’s highly unpredictable. So, holding it to the same degree of accountability as other channels may be unhelpful. Importantly, performance needs to be a two-way and open conversation between your expert and your business (as it’s impacted by many different factors); in my experience, continuing with this approach throughout the completion of a strategy and into the evaluation process is the best way ensure you’re driving the most value from the channel.

There’s no official blueprint or road-map to SEO success and it’s highly likely you’ll try things that do not work and others that exceed expectations. Not every fluctuation in traffic or missed target (or over-achievement) for that matter is due to performance and your expert should be able to explain why this is the case. Deviations do not always mean the model is off either; remember, in an SEO forecast, you’re ultimately asking your expert to predict not only the direction of a constantly evolving algorithm but changes to market demand and the world you operate within. It’s not a coincidence that many of us become futurists!

To sum up, predicting SEO results can be very hard but is a challenge we must seek to solve if we are to take the channel to the next level within digital marketing teams. A prediction may use a data-driven methodology, but is still essentially the view of a specialist, based on their experience of the search landscape. Not all forecasts will show growth and not all targets will be hit, this shouldn’t be seen as an issue as long as the reasoning behind this can be explained.

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The martech industry seems to be constantly on the hunt for the next big thing, and understandably so. In an industry where we said goodbye to a handful of platforms and brands in 2018 (R.I.P. LittleThings, Go90s, Rocketfuel), the next big thing may be what keeps us all not only chugging along, but successful. For my big bet, I think the smart money is on an evolution of 2018’s darling, the customer data platform (CDP).

A 2018 survey by The Relevancy Group found more than 80 percent of firms had already engaged a CDP vendor or planned to. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Winterberry Group estimated U.S. marketers spent close to $5 billion on data management and integration products in 2018, further evidence of the market’s continued emergence.

However, leading analysts noted that 2018’s customer-data fever was limited in scope. CDPs, like data management platforms (DMPs) and demand side platforms (DSPs) before them, have a narrow focus on a specific subgroup. For CDPs, it’s brands’ existing customers. For DMPs and DSPs, it’s prospective customers, based on online intent data gathered from cookies. All of these platforms almost exclusively cater to consumer brands. I believe that in the maturing era of Big Data, there’s evidence of a new world order.

New class of data buyers and sellers

In martech’s latest epoch, consumer brands are not the only companies that curate, store, leverage and sell data. As such, they’re also not the sole purchasers of marketing technology. Publishers are just one recent example of a newer breed of data buyers and sellers coming to the table.

This new class of data buyers and sellers, already engrained in data commerce, include publishers, platforms and agency holding companies. They bring unique data challenges that CDPs, DMPs and DSPs weren’t built to solve. This new class curates data both online and offline. It also requires the ability to leverage and sell data that covers existing customers, active prospects and potential prospects yet unknown.

All of these needs require tools that offer visibility and insights into this data in ways we haven’t seen before. Data owners need technology to organize, visualize and package data sets at incredible speed and scale to activate within the martech ecosystem.

AI activation for large data sets

CDPs were bankrolled, in part, because of their ability to unify customer data and make it accessible to other systems, specifically helping brands target customers across channels and devices. Platforms, publishers and other data owners require different means of organizing and understanding the data they collect. Rather than collecting data in order to reach those users again, data owners have data that they can monetize or activate for clients, which requires an additional layer of analytics, beyond centralization and organization, in order to activate it.

The technology that we’ve already developed for the targeting use case can also serve the monetization archetype. Though it’s traditionally been used for targeting, artificial intelligence is a general activation tool for deriving insights and driving activation from large data sets, and therefore can serve both needs.

Holistic view of data management

The demand and technology exist. The timing couldn’t be better. The amount of data we create and money we spend to manage it continue to grow. But in order for our new class to embrace yet another tech stack component, three principles, scale, speed and control, must be present in the form this new platform takes.

Scale is an indelible component of marketing solutions in order to justify cost, and even more so in the automated programmatic age. Speed is integral because the longer technology takes to build, implement and start driving results, the lower the ROI. Finally, as data owners leverage new technology and data to monetize data sets, they’ll require increased visibility into data accuracy, coverage, security and more. This level of transparency shepherds an in-depth understanding of data governance practices, a requisite of an age where calls for transparency continue to crescendo in the aftermath of data-related scandals, GDPR and new stateside regulation.

The eras of Big Data, digital and single customer view have long been culminating in this new generation of holistic data management. We’ve been waiting for the technology with the capacity and range to activate this data. Now that it’s here, why should brands have all the fun? There is a new class of data owners, including publishers, platforms and agency holding companies, that can leverage this technology to bring new, unique data sets into the marketplace, which can drive incremental value across the entire ecosystem.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

David Dowhan is founder and CEO of TruSignal, a predictive analytics and big data company. TruSignal is expert at using offline data and predictive score marketing to fuel digital campaigns, partnering with data providers, media companies, DSPs and digital audience hubs to help power their custom, people-based lookalikes, consumer insight dashboards, and bid-price optimization strategies.

Nothing forces you to keep a close eye on Google updates quite like having a wide variety of SEO projects and clients.

With clients in almost every industry, I’m forced to check early and often when changes appear in search to see how they’re playing out differently based on the industry (and even the search intent within each industry).

Moreover, I have to think ahead.

In 2018, most of the big changes came from Google’s search ranking algorithm updates, its growing emphasis on structured data, and tweaks in the Google search console.

But there’s also a shift in focus from what sites owners wanted to what users need.

The rollout of mobile-first indexing demonstrates Google’s response to the impact of technology on human behavior.

As people spend more time with their mobile devices, it’s only natural to pay more attention to content that’s optimized to be dynamic and mobile-friendly.

Google’s speakable markup typifies both the company’s plans for search and the AI-is-the-future mantra. The growing popularity of voice assistants and their newfound place in smart homes have certainly guided advances in how search engines operate.

However, as somebody who drives rankings for a wide variety of clients and personal projects, I’m still holding my breath as to whether voice search can drive any meaningful business metrics.

In 2019, content optimization will continue to matter. From structured data to on-page optimization, competition for ranking advantage may come down to which sites can meet Google updates standards.

For the SEO community, 2019 requires a better understanding of how people engage online in order to create meaningful content that positively impacts user experience and a site’s search engine visibility.

SEOs will need to double-down in understanding four key areas:

• Mobile
• Structured data
• Relevance
• Accessibility

Mobile matters

According to Pew Research Center, one in five American adults access the internet through their smartphone.

In the latest report by We Are Social, mobile phones account for 50% of the web traffic share by device globally.

The growth of the mobile industry has not been overlooked by Google, who rolled out the mobile-first indexing in the first quarter of 2018, after over a year and a half of experimentation.

This move shows that Google is increasingly using the mobile version of your page for its crawling, indexing, and ranking systems. While this update does not provide any ranking advantages per se, SEO in 2019 will certainly put greater emphasis on optimizing pages for mobile crawlers.

Sites that offer two versions of their content will continue to see a negative impact on their SERP (search engine results pages) performance if mobile renderings are amiss. For digital marketers, this means both mobile and desktop content should be equivalent.

As mobile web pages become Google’s primary search engine index, webmasters, SEO specialists, and digital marketers must ensure websites are well-coded and mobile-responsive. Checking out how your page’s content renders across various mobile devices is critical to identifying issues like speed and performance which could potentially affect your bounce rates.

Content optimization through structured data

The search engine results page, especially in terms of informational searches, is dominated by structured data and schema: snippets of information that help Google understand the content of your page rather than guess the data.

Structured data provides Google contextual information that helps in classifying your page and which, when done right, enhances the appearance of your site in search.

In 2019, the SEO community will continue to explore how to further optimize this feature, which is valuable for e-commerce pages and business web pages especially as schema options grow. According to Rebecca Gill of emagine, using expert profiles and structured data can convey to Google who you are, what you’re doing, and why your website should be on page one real estate.

Here are some types of information that can be added through structured data:

• Business name
• Contact details
• Aggregate rating
• Products and services
• Place or address

While structured data enables your site to be featured in Google’s knowledge graph, it’s not a guarantee. Google is stringent and rightfully so on how structured data is implemented.

Done right, it can do wonders to your SERP performance. But if the information provided is inaccurate, too broad, or badly formed, Google will identify your structured data as ineligible, which would negatively affect your rankings.

Research and relevance

RankBrain, Google’s machine-learning AI system introduced in 2015 reflects the evolution of how people look for content online.

Despite very little information from Google about how it works, we know that the technology is an important ranking signal, and it’s unique in its capacity to understand if users are satisfied with their search query results. This means that SEO in 2019 will continue to have a stronger emphasis on watching search intent.

What do users want? Information, resources, or products? Mapping keywords based on a buyer’s journey will be crucial this year.

In addition, RankBrain’s ability to process both single and long-tail keywords demands even more comprehensive keyword research and expanded awareness about your consumers.

Businesses will have to look for all the topics relevant to their industry, understand the search intent around the various topics, and make sure that they match a site’s content closely. Still, Google will continue to favor larger and more authoritative sites, so unless you’re running a page comparable in breadth and depth as Wikipedia or Forbes, the focus should be on niche relevant keywords.

In the meantime, consider updating site content. Since 2011’s Google Freshness update, dated content continues to significantly impact rankings in the SERP. Updating old posts, including its publishing data, will tell Google that sites are providing fresh content, especially those that are linked to higher authority sites.

It’s not about writing daily, weekly, or even monthly. It’s about making sure that your best content is always relevant based on the most recent information.

Last year saw links losing value and the trend will continue in 2019.

Relevance is the new “authority” when it comes to links.

A competitor analysis audit will be essential to determining just how many links, and what links, will work for your industry or niche.

Content and accessibility

If Google’s priority is user experience, then on-page optimization efforts are non-negotiable.

We’ve seen how keyword density is no longer as impactful as before, especially with structured data playing a bigger role in search. Content and writing style will also be influenced by semantic search with Google’s efforts to identify the contextual meaning of the query.

In 2019, expect content with more images, videos, and even music embed. Google looks at user satisfaction and rich media is one way to improve online engagement.

But even if your content is well-written, accessibility to your site can impact how you rank in SERP.

“As of the 2010 census, one in five Americans have a disability, and one in ten people have a disability that directly impacts their computer use. That’s 56.7 million people! This is a huge portion of our potential users, and we have an ethical duty to help all people who will use the technology we create.” – Fen Slattery, Accessibility Lead at Clique Studios.

Accessibility is about inclusion and when your website performs terribly for a group of people, it’s unlikely that it will hold any sort of rankings for a significant period of time.

Ongoing changes

Change is the only thing certain in the SEO industry. Google’s interest in AI technology is firmly anchored on how people look for information online, and the way they do so has changed over the years.

2019 is likely to see even lower organic CTR than in 2018 as Google continues to offer more and more options to keep users in search.

For the SEO industry, this means understanding how people think, and how people act. Digital marketers, website owners, and businesses need to be flexible, curious, and creative. They need to look for ways to gain trust and authority, two values that have not only remained important in an ever-changing SEO landscape but are now considered non-negotiable to getting on page one.

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While marketers of all kinds are laboring over dozens of personas that make up their target audiences, the team at highly successful newsletter brand Morning Brew think they have found a better way.

Target one persona … just one.

“We picked a real human being, detailed out what this human does,” said Alex Lieberman, co-founder CEO of Morning Brew, “literally codified a persona and their behavior that we can reference in any point in time.”

That persona is a lot like Lieberman and co-founder and COO Austin Rief, who together started Morning Brew when they were both in college. It’s a young, high-earning professional, living in a coastal city who is highly aspirational, is tech-forward, is really passionate about business and likes watching Ted talks, said Lieberman.

“The core characteristic of the person is someone who is curious,” he said.

But can a single persona really encapsulate a daily newsletter audience that Morning Brew now counts above 1 million subscribers? Of course not, but Lieberman and Rief believe their creation is relatable enough to the entire universe of Morning Brew readers that its entire content strategy is tied to speaking that person’s language.

One voice to rule them

This week, Morning Brew launched the first in what it says will be a slate of specific industry-focused newsletters. On Tuesday, it rolled out a new daily email on emerging technology, which the founders say will focus on the business of AR and VR, blockchain, drones, robotics and other hot-tech topics. More topical newsletters are on the way, but Morning Brew wouldn’t say what those will be.

The new verticals will carry the same advertising model as Morning Brew’s original newsletter. No banner ads, just “Sponsored by” branding at the top and native advertising throughout that the founders recently told Forbes is bringing in about $200,000 in revenue a week. But even those ads are written in-house in the same voice as the rest of their newsletter.

Rief said the company has built out a detailed voice guide, and though its writing team is like any other, a diverse makeup of people with different styles and opinions on Oxford commas, all of them hew to the same voice.

When email works, it really works

Morning Brew sees a roughly 45 percent open rate, an enviable metric for any brand that has its own newsletters. Its voice and its focus on engaging the target persona play a big role.

Brands tend to overcomplicate email, said Rief. “If people think about it in a more simple fashion, you are creating an email because you believe that you can serve content to an audience that will be worth their time in reading,” he said.

Morning Brew’s goal is simple: Give them your undivided attention for five minutes before the start of the workday and they’ll give you great content.

“The content you create needs to be informed by who your audience is and 100 times better than anything else they are getting,” said Reif.

It’s that focus on shipping great content to inboxes that’s given the humble email newsletter a big boost.

“The cornerstone of an email relationship is trust,” wrote MarketingProfs founder Ann Handley just last week. “Subscribers opt in because they trust that you’ll deliver something of value. If you break that promise, they’ll unsubscribe. You cannot darken their doorstep ever again.”

Handley also touted the 1:1 connection brands get with email, something you don’t get on social media, for example.

“Everything about it (voice, visuals, vibe) is all you. And only you. Those who read your post on LinkedIn are on there interacting with LinkedIn. But when they read your words in your newsletter, they are interacting with you,” she wrote.

For what it’s worth, Morning Brew does include Facebook and Twitter share icons under individual sections in its newsletter, but Rief and Lieberman say those are for reader convenience and those interactions are not a metric they pay much attention to.

More tips from Morning Brew

Knowing the audience is key for Morning Brew, so one rule of thumb they hold is “respond to every inbound email.” Period.

Next, invest in good editorial talent. You can’t write a good newsletter without that.

Email deliverability is an issue for everyone, and Morning Brew has tools in its martech stack to help keep an eye on it. Their advice: Take a good look at the platforms that are out there.

Lastly, Morning Brew runs a referral program that gives readers gifts like stickers, mugs and t-shirts for forwarding their emails to friends. It’s highly successful, and the founders say word of mouth accounts for 40 percent of the company’s audience growth. But Lieberman cautions that referral programs only work when you’ve already built an engaged audience.

“It doesn’t matter if we gave the best rewards,” he said, “it all starts with content.”

About The Author

Henry Powderly is vice president of content for Third Door Media, publishers of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than a decade in editorial leadership positions, he is responsible for content strategy and event programming for the organization.

Facebook constantly expands its advertising offerings by introducing new features to accommodate advertisers in their effort to make the most out of their platform.

Whether it is creating ads that tell the brand’s story with carousel ads, immersing users in their brand’s world with Canvas or Stories ads, or cutting down the time to create creatives while at the same time tailoring the ad to the ad viewer with dynamic ads, Facebook wants to ensure that it gives advertisers the tools to drive results across its platforms.

In a world where personalization is vital to make experiences more engaging, Facebook Ads are no different. Advertisers need to customize their offering, ad copy and ad creative to ensure the best experience possible. A great experience tailored to the user’s needs hopefully equals higher engagement — or, in terms of Facebook advertising, conversions.

Tailoring your ads to your user, the manual and tedious way

One way you could promote your products to potential customers before dynamic ads were available was to create a single image or carousel image ad and guide people to specific product pages on your website.

But if you were a business with a large inventory to promote, you needed to create as many ads (creative and links to product pages) as your products. And if you wanted to tailor your ads based on where they are on the marketing funnel or the actions they performed (e.g. they viewed or added to the cart a particular product), then things could become really complicated really fast.

Dynamic ads (or dynamic product ads as they are formerly known) allow advertisers to not only automate this tedious process but also create highly personalized ads that promote products with up to date information.

Dynamic ads: The definition and requirements

Facebook dynamic ads help advertisers display the right product to the right people at the right time. Here is how this happens:

A potential customer visits your site and browses through your products. Facebook, through the Pixel, will pair products and users and ‘take notes’ on how they interacted with them. When you create a dynamic ad you can include everyone that exhibited the same behavior, bring them back to your website by displaying the very same products each user engaged with using accurate and updated information available in the product feed. This how dynamic ads can help your visitors to complete the transaction.

To be able to run dynamic ads you need to have the following in place:

1. A business manager: This serves as a big folder where all of your assets (Facebook page, Ad account, Pixel, and Dynamic ads-related assets mentioned below) will be organized.
2. Product feed(s): This is the file where all your products and product information will be stored.
3. Product catalog(s): This is where your product feed is hosted.

How to get started with dynamic ads

Dynamic ads are a powerful offering that can be used across a variety of verticals. Currently, dynamic Facebook ads are available to businesses that sell products (ecommerce), hotel, flight, destination, and home listings.

Your business type will dictate the events (standard or custom) you need to implement. Here are the typical standard events needed for ecommerce businesses.

Source: Facebook

You can add as many events you need to align them to your funnel. Once you have the events implemented, you need to create the feed.

1. Creating a product feed

Facebook requires Facebook advertisers to list all of their products in a file following a specific format. This file is the product feed that will feed the products to your catalog. Depending on your ecommerce platform, you may need to create a data feed using a .csv, .tsv, or .xml file or a third-party feed provider to facilitate this process.

Download the data feed template and fill in the information. Here is what your feed needs to include:

Source: Facebook 

Be sure to test your feed with Feed Debugger to ensure that your feed is set up correctly and fix any issues that may arise.

2. Creating a product catalog

Now, we can create a product catalog. Visit Catalog Manager in your business manager and choose the type that best describes your needs.

Name your product catalog and click on the ‘Add Products’ button to upload your product feed.

Next, choose how you will upload the data (schedule or a one-time upload) and insert the URL of your product feed.

When done, go to the ‘Diagnostics’ tab to check for any issues, if you have done so with Feed Debugger. Now, that your product catalog and product feed are all set up, we can move to the exciting part; creating the dynamic ads campaign.

3. Setting up a dynamic ads campaign

To create a dynamic ads campaign, head over to Ads Manager and choose ‘Catalog sales’ as the campaign’s objective. 

At the ad set level, create a product set. The product set is a subset of your product catalog, and it contains the products that will be displayed through this campaign.

Next, in the audience section, choose ‘Define a broad audience and let Facebook optimize who sees your products’ so you can reach new people (prospecting campaign). To remarket to existing visitors, use the option “Use info from your Pixel or app to create a retargeting audience “.

Scroll down below the connections menu and click ‘Show Advanced Options’. Here are some options that let you refine your audience and exclude people who are less likely to take action, such as someone who has already visited your website or bought from you.

Next, you want to optimize for the right event type. Choose the event that you want to optimize for (View Content, Add To Cart, or Purchase) and set the conversion window to one that suits your needs.

Be sure to fill in any other information (i.e. targeting, budget, etc.) the way you usually do. Now, we will create the ad.

When choosing the ad format (single or carousel), take into account the type of images used in your product feed.  Typically, landscape images will look great with the single image ad format while vertical images will look better with the carousel ad format.

Now for your ad copy, you don’t need to manually insert the product name, description, or any other product information. You can use the ‘+’ button inside each box to pull a catalog field from your product feed.

For instance, click the ‘+’ button in the text field, and select ‘Price’ from the drop-down list.

There you have it. You’ve successfully created your first dynamic ad.

Using dynamic ads creatively

As mentioned previously, dynamic ads are currently available if you promote products, vehicle, flights, destination, or home listings. If you don’t see your business type here, don’t get discouraged as dynamic ads can be used for all verticals. Here are some examples of using dynamic ads creatively.

1. Using dynamic ads to promote your blog posts

When using dynamic ads to promote your articles, the articles serve as products, and all product info will be the article’s information. For example, the product id will be the article’s id; the product description will be the article’s description and so on. Have in mind that you don’t need to rename the product feed’s, only the contents of it.

Promoting your articles this way, allows you to save time and automate a tedious process. Plus, you can easily choose whom you will target; new or existing audience.

2. Using dynamic ads for a betting company

To use dynamic ads top promote betting services, we substitute the products for matches/games and take of advanced product feed offerings by changing product availability based on time. Since matches are time-sensitive, we need to ensure that no match would get advertised after the betting period has ended.

Although these are just two cases, dynamic ads can be used for the majority of the verticals out there.

Making the most out of your dynamic ads

Dynamic ads are a powerful tool in Facebook advertiser’s arsenal. Since its launch, new possibilities are constantly being added. Here are some possibilities that you will find interesting:

1. Customizing the appearance of your Dynamic Ads

In an endless newsfeed where a majority of the ads look the same, you should create and apply custom templates to your dynamic ads to help stand out and grab your ad viewer’s attention. Depending on the period you are advertising in you can create Christmas, Valentine’s day, Black Friday inspired templates. You can also create “evergreen” templates that include your logo and your brand’s colors.

2. Multi-language and multi-country dynamic ads

Recently, Facebook released two new features that help you target your ideal audience within a country where many languages are spoken. Creating multi-language dynamic ads is very straight forward. Set up the dynamic ads campaign the way you normally would, and use the ‘Create in Different Languages’ option.

Have in mind that this will only change the ad’s copy, not the information that comes from your product feed.

If you are promoting your products across countries that have different currencies and you need to tailor product information to the language of your audience, then you need to create additional feeds that will include currency information (one feed) and country/language information (second feed).

Both secondary feeds can be set up in your Catalog Manager. If you are targeting an international audience consider tailoring your ads to match their language. The chances are that your ads will convert better.

A secondary feed that holds information on different languages will look something like the above screenshot. You need the product id which uniquely identifies your product, then state the overrides for each country-language combination and provide the all necessary product info for each language.

For currencies, you will work similarly. Provide the product id, the country and the price in the country’s currency.

3. Using animations in dynamic ads

The slideshow dynamic ads format helps display your products to users from different angles, including close-ups, without users having to click on the ad. This way, you bring the web experience straight in the users’ NewsFeed. To create Slideshow Dynamic Ads you only need to include multiple images of the same product in the feed as opposed to only one and check the box ‘show when available’ under ‘Catalog Assets’.

Final words

Facebook Dynamic ads are a great advertising solution and should be part of your online advertising strategy. They allow you to automate ad creative creation, tailor your offering to your ad viewer and optimize for success. When done correctly, Facebook dynamic ads can help achieve your KPIs and make more bang for your buck.

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Facebook has lost an estimated 15 million users in the U.S. during the last two years, according to a report from Edison Research. The firm’s “The Infinite Dial 2019,” surveyed 1,500 U.S. citizens age 12-years and older and found that Facebook usage overall has dropped from 67 percent to 61 percent in two year’s time, with the 12 to 34-years age segment down from 82 million in 2017 to 65 million this year.

Twitter usage is also on a downward slope, going from 23 percent to 19 percent between 2017 and 2019. The report found, overall, social media use has stagnated since 2016, with the number of respondents claiming to be on social remaining around 77 to 80 percent for the past three years. But social media marketing experts said they’re not seeing any impact from declining social media use.

People aren’t leaving social, just shifting platforms. While the report showed Facebook users numbers were dropping, Facebook-owned Instagram is experiencing a steady rise. Instagram’s audience reach is still much smaller than Facebook’s, but Edison’s survey found Instagram usage has climbed from 34 percent in 2017 to 39 percent.

Steve Weiss, CEO of digital marketing agency MuteSix, said he doesn’t believe Facebook users are leaving, but instead the current user base is simply aging.

“While the younger demographics may be shifting to Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook is also seeing increased gains from the 55+ segment. In other words, users aren’t exactly leaving, they are simply shifting,” said Weiss. According to Edison’s report, the 55+ age segment of respondents were the only group whose Facebook usage had increase since 2017.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of social media marketing platform Socialbakers, said his company doesn’t have any data indicating a drop in Facebook user numbers.

“In Q4, Facebook reported an increase,” said Ben-Itzhak, “As for Twitter, they have stopped reporting on users which could mean users did not grow.”

Ben Heiser, a content strategist for the Drum Agency, agrees with Weiss in terms of Facebook versus Instagram user numbers.

“Everyone likes to take shots at Facebook usage being down as the end of social media as we know it, but social media is more of a media channel now than ever before. Facebook has global saturation at this point and active users are just switching over to Instagram, which Facebook owns,” said Heiser.

“Here’s the thing – surveys are always skewing perception towards something. One survey cites the 15 million loss in young Facebook users as their rallying cry to jump to audio. However, if you look at the actual numbers, not survey results, Facebook reported that there were 1.52 billion daily active users in Q4, an increase of nine-percent year-over-year.”

Facebook advertising still delivering. Weiss said his ad agency is not seeing an impact from any drops in usage. He believes the Facebook’s Stories ad product, which the company rolled out in the News Feed last year, will drive more advertising on the platform.

“With Facebook’s continued investment in analytics across all its platforms, we also expect to see advanced engagement metrics for Stories, which will ultimately boost bottom-line revenue for Facebook,” said Weiss.

He is confident Instagram advertising revenue will continue to climb, also spurred by Story ads.

“As a matter of fact, advertising revenues on Instagram’s Stories are projected to increase as early studies demonstrate brands can expect to see higher ad recall and click-through rates than from previous ads that were posted on the Instagram feed,” said Weiss.

And then there’s WhatsApp. Edison Research’s survey did not include historical usage data on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging app owned by platform, but did show 23 percent of the survey participants age 12 to 34 years old were using it this year.

“While Facebook doesn’t report on individual app growth regularly, you can easily infer that the growth is happening on WhatsApp and Instagram, which cater and are heavily used by a younger target,” said Heiser.

Facebook has been making subtle moves to get more people on WhatsApp — announcing in January that it plans to integrate its WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger platforms, making it possible for users to communicate between the three apps. Facebook also said it is planning to roll-out WhatsApp ads this year.

Why you should care. While the Edison Research may show declining user numbers, a loss of 15 million users on Facebook may not amount to much for a platform that has 1.5 billion daily active users. And recent reports show advertisers are ahead of the curve with Instagram, with lifts in incremental ad spending from loyal advertisers driving ad spend growth on the platform — money that is still going into Facebook’s pocket.

As Heiser noted, Facebook’s most recent earnings report isn’t showing any major impact from a drop in usage with ad revenue climbing to $16.6 billion during the fourth quarter of 2018. In fact, the company reported the average price of an ad decreased 2 percent, while ad impressions were up 34 percent. Twitter also saw increased ad revenue during the last quarter of 2018, up 23 percent year-over-year.

Overall, marketers shouldn’t make any knee-jerk reactions when it comes to their social media strategy based on one survey, marketers say.

“If you’re planning to use media, you shouldn’t be a fan of one or the other. The focus should be where your audience is most engaged: is it podcast? Instagram? Facebook? If so, that’s where you need to be,” said Heiser.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.