FACEBOOK MANDATES CAMPAIGN BUDGET OPTIMIZATION: Campaign budget optimization (CBO) was rolled out by Facebook in late February 2020. Mandated CBO means advertisers will be forced to manage ad spend and daily budgets at the campaign level instead of the ad set level. While that might not seem like a huge deal, experienced advertisers are weary of the loss of control this mandate implies, especially for more complex ad accounts.
Why you should care: In higher education, we’re all about generating quality, prospective students from our advertising efforts. If an ad set is generating tons of leads for a low cost but none of those leads are qualified, we may actually prefer the other ad set that’s costlier, but generates more quality leads. With mandated CBO, Facebook would continue to promote the low-cost (and low-quality leads) ad set despite the advertiser ultimately favoring the other ad set.
FIRST PARTY VS SECOND PARTY VS THIRD PARTY DATA: There’s a lot of buzz out there about the demise of the third party cookie, but to really understand the implications, let’s take a look at the difference between first party, second party, and third party data:
Why you should care: There’s significant talk about Google getting rid of 3rd party cookie tracking by 2020. So no, you won’t be able to follow a prospective student around on the internet after he/she leaves your website, but you’ll still be able to collect information on them based on how they interact with your school’s website, ads, blog posts, emails, and more.
HOW LONG SHOULD A BLOG POST BE IN 2020?: HubSpot did an analysis of its top 50 most-read blog posts and determined the average length of those posts was 2,330 words. But blog length isn’t the only way to ensure a high quality blog – proper backlinking, writing content for Google's featured snippet, adding alt-text, and doing keyword research are other great ways to ensure a quality blog post.
Why you should care: Blogs remain a key SEO tool for every business, large or small. Blogs help expand your site’s indexable pages, helps prove to site visitors that you’re staying atop of trends, and pushes industry thought leadership out to the internet. For any marketer who has been blogging for a while or even new to blogging, let HubSpot’s new data on blogs for 2020 be a fresh reminder (or learning experience) for how to write better blogs.