New Facebook Ad Metrics, Cookie Consent & Google’s Latest Search Update

Use These Success Metrics for Facebook Ads

People can accuse Facebook of so many things (like election interference or housing discrimination), but you can’t say the platform doesn’t provide advertisers enough data. In fact, the metrics Facebook provides is so overwhelming that figuring out what to pay attention to is the hard part. AdEspresso has long been my go-to for all things related to Facebook Ads. According to their updated guide for 2020, there are a few key metrics to keep an eye on: cost-per-result (CPR), ad impressions, click-through-rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), conversion rates, and costs per conversion (CPC). A key takeaway here is to “track impressions to make sure that customers who see your ad do something about it. Otherwise, the ad isn’t effective.”

Choosing Your Cookies

Recently, I was teaching a class about Google Analytics and someone asked about those opt-in to cookies messages. Exactly what percentage of people accept/decline them? Well, here’s the research on that. It’s less about how many people accept/deny the consent notices and more about whether a majority of those “notices” are even GDPR-compliant. The data here suggests they’re not.

Mo Google Updates, Mo Problems?

“Massive changes for some of our most stable keywords this morning. I hope this doesn’t stick.” That was the response of one frustrated customer when Google released a core broad update named the January 2020 Core Update on Jan. 13, 2020. But others are having better luck, seeing more traffic to their websites and a better ranking in search. Here’s an article with Google’s advice on dealing with updates. If you’re looking to improve SEO, read the search quality raters guidelines and focus on the EAT sections (EAT stand for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness). Just remember that while the algorithm controls a lot, there are humans behind the screen.

UI: Too Much of a Good Thing

We’ve all been on a website with load speeds slower than a sloth… the annoyance, the consistent clicking… But on the flip side, what happens when the UI is too fast? This article tells a cheeky, true story of a user-testing experience where faster didn’t mean better. It actually meant the user missed changes on the website and, even when they did see the change, they couldn’t understand what happened quickly enough. The solution to finding balance is to pay attention to the time aspect of the UX.

Nerding Out Over Google’s Year in Search 2019

To round out this newsletter, I thought this video Google created, Year in Search 2019, would be awesome to share if you haven’t seen it yet. I mean, all the cool companies are doing it — we see you Spotify and Facebook. Plus, it’s fun to look back at the past year and review trends (if you’re a data nerd like me, anyway!).