Facebook is updating how it filters repeat organic impressions for Pages. According to a Facebook spokesperson, the company is shortening the time-frame by which it calculates the metric.
The initial announcement came via an update last week to a Facebook Business blog post published more than a year ago. The company said it is changing the way it measures Page impressions to align with the methodology it uses for ads: “This is not a change in distribution, but a change in the way we filter out repeat organic impressions that occur within a short amount of time.”
A Facebook spokesperson told Marketing Land that the update will be rolling out over the coming weeks.
Why we should care
This update is noteworthy as it clarifies that a drop in impressions isn’t necessarily a drop in the Page’s performance, but a result of Facebook changing how it calculates organic impressions. For marketers measuring their organic engagement metrics against their impressions — the updated metric may reflect improved engagement rates, as impression numbers may drop without impacting engagement rates.
According to Facebook, the update is designed to, “Make it easier for businesses to make comparisons across paid and organic channels.” In other words, creating a more of an apples-to-apples comparison between organic and paid results.
Facebook counts an ad impression by the number of times an instance of an ad is on screen for the first time: “If an ad is on screen and someone scrolls down, and then scrolls back up to the same ad, that counts as 1 impression. If an ad is on screen for someone 2 different times in a day, that counts as 2 impressions.”
Facebook would not give specifics in terms of the timeframe it uses to filter out repeat organic impressions but said some Page owners may not notice a difference at all.
Organic engagement for brands on Facebook has been in decline for some time but took a major hit in January 2018 when the company changed its algorithm to de-emphasize organic content from brands while prioritizing posts from friends and family.
About The Author
Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. 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, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.
Agile has been around the software world for a few decades, but now marketers are getting on board – with a few modifications.
I’ve had the pleasure of helping companies in both software and marketing transition to agile. Today I’ll share with you some ways that I’ve seen first-hand how marketers have made agile more relevant to how they work.
The agile marketing manifesto
The Agile Manifesto was a collaborative effort between a group of software developers written in 2001 to combat a lot of problems they were experiencing such as a divided relationship between business partners and software developers, a process that was more important than people and rigid planning that wasn’t always in the customers’ best interest.
This has long been the epicenter of agility and a commonly referenced document. However, it’s pretty software specific, so in 2012 a group of marketing evangelists came together to reinvent the manifesto to closer resonate with the marketing world.
The Agile Marketing Manifesto speaks to marketers about creating value for customers, adaptive and iterative campaigns, being experimental and learning through a build-measure-feedback loop.
A hybrid approach to methodology
In software, the Scrum framework has been the most common way to practice agile. With Scrum, teams work in a timebox called a sprint. The most common sprint cycle is two weeks. The Scrum cycle is a repetitive, continuous way to work and has built-in ways to inspect and adapt your work and your process along the way.
Another popular framework is Kanban, which came from the manufacturing world at Toyota. This production system way of working is about the continuous flow of work through a system, visualizing your work, seeing where your flow might be experiencing bottlenecks and changing your process to increase productivity.
Kanban has branched out of the manufacturing world and has been used as another method for applying agility to an organization. It’s commonly used for customer service teams, business teams and even in people’s personal lives to manage their small business or home life.
Most marketers are using a hybrid approach, meaning they are taking some of their favorite practices from both the Scrum and Kanban methods.
So which method is right for your company? It depends on the size of your company, the type of work you do and the current culture.
Here are some common traits I’ve seen that work well with Kanban:
Smaller, more nimble companies
Work that supports multiple clients, such as ad agency teams or creative services teams
Work that has a very quick turnaround times and can’t stick to a plan for a week or more
A culture that is very free flowing and lacks process
Scrum might be the better choice for you if these characteristics resonate better:
Larger companies with multiple teams
Work that has typically followed a waterfall planning process
Work that can be planned with few interruptions for a few weeks
A culture that is process-driven
The hybrid approach works well for marketers because many of them feel Scrum is too structured and Kanban is too loose. They only way to know for sure is to be agile about how you approach this change, try out a few different ways and see what works best for your company.
A single marketing owner
Agile marketers are often abandoning the traditional Scrum roles of Scrum Master and product owner and are combining this into a single role that takes on both responsibilities.
A marketing owner has a big responsibility to work with customers and stakeholders, prioritize the work for the team and continually change the plan as more information is learned from experimentation. This role also helps the team with its process, becomes the organizational evangelist for change and keeps the team empowered and productive.
A big reason for the combination of roles is the Scrum Master role is new, companies don’t realize the value and Scrum Masters don’t come cheap.
I don’t think all agile marketers need a Scrum Master, but larger companies that are going through a major culture change should make this investment if you’re going to practice Scrum.
I hope you’ve learned how agile marketers are working. Now it’s up to you to decide how you’ll practice agile marketing at your organization.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
The font, called Noto, was launched in 2016 by Google and Monotype, which spent five years creating a family of typefaces that include upwards of 300,000 glyphs representing more than 800 languages. The Latin characters in the typeface family are simple and sans-serif, and they look slightly slimmer and cleaner than Ikea’s previous type, Verdana.
But that’s not the main reason that this change makes a lot of sense for Ikea. As the company continues to operate 422 stores globally and open even more, it needs a typeface that will work in all of these contexts while unifying Ikea’s brand.
Details of Ikea’s 2020 catalog (left) and 2019 catalog (right). [Photos: Ikea]
Noto is considered the most universal typeface in existence. That’s because computers don’t necessarily recognize all glyphs, particularly in less common languages that have their own scripts. If your computer doesn’t recognize a letter, it will render the glyph as a box, which is called a Tofu in the typeface biz. Noto is short for “No Tofu,” providing visual representations of every letter of all of the 800 languages. It’s part of Google’s goal to make a font available for every language that is considered a script by Unicode, the consortium that creates standards for computers.
Given that in the last year Ikea opened its first store in India, where there are 22 national recognized regional languages, to go along with stores across Asia where conventional Western typefaces don’t work as well, it makes sense that the company wants to use a font that will support a broader range of languages.
The English alphabets of Noto Sans (top) and Verdana Regular (bottom). Noto offers a broader range of international character sets.
“Our ambition is to make Ikea one of the most loved and trusted brands in the world,” said an Ikea spokesperson in a statement. “We are renewing the Ikea visual identity to make Ikea even more recognizable. Today, people experience Ikea in many different places, both physical and digital. We needed to complement and update our visual identity to enable many more people to meet Ikea in a consistent and inspiring way.” The company updated its logo recently, making it more legible and mobile-friendly, and the new typeface, the spokesperson added, “stands out, builds a strong visual identity over time through consistent and coherent use, and feels modern.”
Using Noto means that Ikea won’t have to worry about changing typefaces for different languages when it prints its yearly catalogs, the most recent of which arrived earlier this month and was the first to use Noto. Instead, the company will be guaranteed standardized branding across the more than 50 markets where it currently has stores and the places where it is looking to expand in the future. Previously, Ikea used the font Verdana, which it changed to in 2009 because its former typeface, Ikea Sans, didn’t support Asian characters (though it didn’t stop some designers from complaining about the decision and even dubbing it “Verdanagate”).
