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How to Change Google Ad Settings

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How Do I Turn Off Ad Personalization?

Google Ad personalization is a setting in your account that tells Google that it can use your behavior and interest data as well as other demographic information to serve you with relevant advertisements that are customized for you. Google tracks your activity on Chrome as well as other Google properties and aggregates that data along with that of other internet users. The data is anonymized and sold to advertisers who in then turn choose groups of people they’d like to show adverts to.

This practice is not unique to Google. Search engines like Bing do it as well to generate revenue. Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest also collect and use aggregated, anonymized user data to sell advertisements on their platforms. The sites even track your activity across other websites sites if you allow them too. This extensive data collection is at the heart of the data privacy issues that Facebook has been in the spotlight since the Cambridge Analytica scandal blew up on them last year.

What is Ad Personalization?

Google collects data about your behavior from all their properties. These Google owned properties include your queries on Google.com searches, what you search for and watch on YouTube, places you visit using Google Maps, websites you visit using Chrome, the contents of your Gmail, Google Hangouts use, what you download from the Play Store, Google photos activity, Google calendar entries, your shopping habits, and of course other adverts you click on. Google also collects data about your behavior and preferences from third-party websites and apps that partner with Google. This includes any website or app that shows Google AdWords ads.

Ad Personalization Google Ad Settings

If you are logged into a Google account using another browser, then your data is harvested from that as well. For example, I use Firefox we browser, but I am frequently logged into my Gmail account from Firefox. Google knows everything about my purchases. In fact, my entire Christmas shopping is recorded. Advertisers want to target their advertisement in front of people who are likely to buy from them. Your data is used to make the ads you see more relevant to you with advertisements that match your interests. For example, if you are a person who shops for high heeled shoes, then with the personalization you may be served advertisements from competitors to the shoe brand you buy. If you travel for work often, then you might see advertisements for travel-related products and services.

How Do I Stop The Ads On Google?

Unfortunately, you cannot block all advertisements while you are on Google properties or partners sites. This is one of Google’s largest source of revenue. That’s why they offer all of those free apps. Your data is rather valuable and it is for sale.

You can, however, turn off ad personalization. If you turn off personalization, Google AdWords ads will still use info like your general location data or the content of the website you are currently visiting. This will not affect what ads you see on other ad networks like Bing or Facebook. They both have their own sets of data they’ve collected on you.

Google Ad Personalization
Google Ad Personalization

For example, I kept seeing the same boring advert for Grammarly. Every time I watched a YouTube video, that was the only ad I was served. It is annoying because I already use Grammarly and I was still seeing the same advertisement ten times each day. I finally became fed up and went into Google and adjusted some of my ad personalization settings. I removed business as one of my interests. The did not work for me and I was still seeing the advertisement. Grammarly was using something else about my demographics to target me with their repetitive advertisement. One would think they would remarket me a with a variation from time-to-time to head of banner blindness. So, I decided to turn off ad personalization completely to stop the repetition.

How Do I Find My Google Ad Preferences?

Google controls the advertisements you see. You can change your Google ad settings, but you cannot stop ads completely unless you use something like an ad blocker. If you go to your ad personalization settings, then you can remove certain interests and behaviors that should alter what advertisements you are served. You can also opt out of ad personalization altogether.

How To Turn Off Google Ads Personalization

To control the Google ads you see, go to your Google Account and log in.

  • Go to your Google Account
  • On the left navigation panel, click Data & personalization
  • Scroll down to the Ad personalization panel
  • Select ad settings
  • Turn on Ad Personalization off

If you want to leave ad personalization on, then you can also go to the How your ads are personalized section. From there you can edit your personal information (like age and gender) and interests.

Find Deleted Snapchat Conversations

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How do you find a conversation you cleared out of Snapchat

How do you find a conversation you cleared out of Snapchat

When you delete a conversation with a friend on Snapchat, it doesn’t really go away. Snapchat warns about this when you clear out any conversation. Deleting the chain of messages, just removes the fiend’s name from the list of chats you have going on. Take a look at all the chats you have going on. The list of friends you have Snapped in the past persists until you remove their name. To see it, tap the quote bubble in the lower left corner of your screen to see your list of conversations.
To delete a conversation, press and hold someone’s name. Then tap settings. In the settings list, you will see an option that says, “clear conversation.” If you select that, Snapchat will warn you that this does not delete the conversation, it just removes the person’s name from the list. Go ahead and clear the chats with that person out. If you want to find that so-called deleted conversation, then go to your friends list to find it. Since you deleted your friend’s conversation, they won’t be listed on the convos screen. Use the search box to search for their name. After you find the friend using search, then tap their name to bring up a new blank chat. If you want to find the deleted conversation, then simply pull down on the white space area to see the supposedly deleted lines. That’s it! The conversation is not truly deleted by clearing it. That users’ name is just off the conversation list. If you really want to wipe everything out, you will have to delete the lines from here. Good luck if you’re on a year-long streak! Recently I wrote a post and added a video about how to hide who you are talking to on Snapchat. It’s easy, you can simply change the person’s name on your end. Data privacy and cyber security are major concerns. Although it may seem a bit sneaky to hide who you are talking to from family and friends, there are other reasons to keep your conversations private. Snapchat pops up a notification when you receive a new Snap. You might not want everyone to know who you are chatting with.

How to Hide Who You are Talking to on Snapchat

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How to Hide Your Snapchat Convos – Change Display Names

Snapchat is the newest of the major social media channels. It is known for its popularity with teens. However, major brands have found it to be an effective way to reach out to users and the audience on the platform is increasing in age. Initially, messages, called Snaps, disappeared from after they were seen by the recipient. This accounted for the popularity with younger audiences – they could hide conversations from their parents. But to grow and compete with other social media channel such as Instagram, Snapchat had to add other features to make it more palatable for brands. Snapchatters can now save messages from other users but when you do save a message, the other user knows it. The channel added other features as well, such as subscriptions to brand stories, filters, and the ability to save messages.

Snapchat by the Numbers

In the third quarter of 2018, Snapchat boasted over 186 million daily active users. [1] This is actually a slight decrease from the 188 million reported in the second quarter of the same year. Snapchat’s user base has increased in age. Severity-eight percent of internet users between the ages of 18 and 24 use Snapchat. As the platform evolves, the average user age has increased. Usage is inversely proportional to age. Sixty percent of internet users between the ages of 25 and 34 use Snapchat. There is still strong usage for those in the 35-44-year-old range with 45% using the social media channel. The numbers drop off sharply after that with only 25% between the ages of 45 and 54 using Snapchat. It decreases with each bracket.

Snapchat Screenshot friend

How to use Snapchat remains a mystery to many older users. Twitter is simple yet challenging for some to learn to communicate in short chunks of text. Snapchat presents other learning curves as the disappearing Snap idea which is something foreign to older social media users. Snapchat is good at protecting the privacy of the message and shielding the user’s identities. A feature which worries many parents.

Like other major social channels, Snapchat added the ability to communicate directly with other users. People can send messages with text and images to one another. When notifications are turned on, the sender’s name pops up on the recipient’s smartphone’s screen with each message. This may present privacy and security concerns for some. Fortunately, there is an easy way to hide who you are conversing with on Snapchat.

We cannot change our account name on Snapchat. You’d have to delete your account and create a new one to acquire a new username. Your username and Display Name are two separate names associated with the account. Your Display Name is optional, your username is not. Adding a Display Name on Snapchat is a great way to help friends recognize you. Users are free to change their own Display Names as often as they wish. They can also change the Display Name of their friends and followers.

You can change your Display Name at any time. When you change it, new friends will see the updated name. existing friends will not see the change. Snapchatters who have you in their phonebook may see the name they’ve saved you as in their phone.

Snapchat Edit Settings

How to Change Display Names on Snapchat

In addition, your friends can change your name to be anything they choose for their own friends list. When a user changes YOUR name in their OWN friends list, that change is only visible to them. This is how you can give friends a name that helps you keep them organized. For example, if you know two Keiths you can give them each a name or last initial to sort them out. Since many of my contacts are from work, I tend to give them a few letters after their name indicating where they work.

Changing Display Names also helps you hide who you are talking to on Snapchat. When you change someone’s Display Name, then it changes the name listed each time a notification pops up from that person. It’s very quick to do and its shown in this video. You just head to the individual’s entry in your friends list and edit their Display Name.

Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/814300/snapchat-users-in-the-united-states-by-age/

Best Time to Post on Facebook

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When is The Best Time to Post?

What is the best time to post on Facebook? The answer is probably not exactly what you wanted to hear. The best time to post depends many factors like the type of content, what else is happening in your marketing strategy (is there an email campaign that’s part of the sales funnel?) First, assuming you are the admin for a Facebook page, take a look at your Facebook statistics. The stats are called “Facebook Insights.” Data from Insights and your analytics platform (like Google Analytics) will help you understand when the best time to post is.

If you are just beginning to post to a Facebook page and don’t have much history to work with, then you will be just guessing when the best posting times are. That’s fine because you need to have some activity on the page in order to collect data on user behavior. It will take a bit of experimentation, but after there are some posts to a Facebook business page, user data will be populated and begin to show patterns in make sense in Insights. Facebook admins will be able to see what is the best day of week to post and when the best time of day is as well.

Most Facebook accounts show a pattern to user behavior. You will see that there is an optimum time of day to post. It does tend to be in the evening hours. However, it is important to note that the time of day is shown in the time zone the page is set to. Look at your user demographics and the countries they reside in. If your page has a lot of offshore users that may be an issue. If your target audience lives in another country and these are many of your followers, then that is acceptable. If you are a domestic company targeting only followers in your home country or people in your locality, and your followers are elsewhere, that indicates a problem. T could mean the followers were bought or incentivized. This can result in low engagement for posts, regardless of best time of day or proper content.

This video takes you on a short tour of Facebook Insights so you can understand when your viewers are online. Posting when they are active helps build up a following and get more traffic to your website, posts, product, or service.

I also have a Best Time to Post on Instagram” video on the metrony.com YouTube channell, for those interested in connecting with an audience that is younger than those that use Facebook.
https://youtu.be/0jxvgwp0egc

Social Media Mistakes – Are You Doing Any of These?

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Social Media Mistakes – Are You Doing Any of These?

All websites should have social media share and connect buttons. It doesn’t matter if the site is a retailer or not, social media is a form of communication for people of all ages. We use social media to make purchases, as a customer service tool, for public relations, and to share reviews of brands we care about. Website social media buttons help your readers share your content – including images and posts – across social channels. They also help you build up a following. If you are indeed a retailer or blogger, then these are a must-have for your web presence!

There are two types of social media buttons every website should have. The first is a social connect button. The second type is a social share button. Social connect buttons are the ones that say something like, “follow me” or “let’s connect” When you tap in a social connect button, you become a follower of an account on a social media channel. These are different from social share buttons.

There are a few configuration mistakes common in social media share and connect buttons. Fortunately, they are easy to fix, especially if you are using a content management system like WordPress or Shopify. Watch this YouTube Video on Social Media mistakes and find out!

Five Common Social Media Mistakes

  1. Missing Social Share – Social share buttons allow users to tap a button on a website and share your content to the social channel of their choice. A properly configured button will have the attribution already set. For example, if you tweet this post using the button on the page, then the post will be attributed to me @metrony. Two taps and the post is shared. Done!
  2. Social Connect Buttons – These buttons are a close cousin to the above social connect buttons, but they are for building up a following rather than sharing. Social connect buttons are the buttons that you click or tap and they automatically have your profile like the profile associated with whatever you are reading. For example, if you tap the Facebook icon in the “let’s connect” section of this webpage, you’ll “like” my Facebook page.
  3. Broken Links – Have you ever gone to a website, hit the social connect or social share button only to have it pop up a window to Facebook.com rather than “like” the page or even land on the brand’s profile page? It happens all the time. The share buttons are set up before the profiles, and configuring them properly gets lost on the madness of getting an e-commerce site set up properly.
  4. Open in New tab – Sometimes social connect buttons take users away from the website. The goal of social media is to get users to the website and take a certain action (buy something, give an email address, get directions, download something, etc…) Social media should NEVER take users away from a website. Many times, a misconfigured connect or share button opens a new tab or window and takes users away.
  5. Add Attribution – Now that we have the social share buttons working correctly – they pop open their own standalone tab – add your user handle to each social share button. Whatever your user handle is per social media channel, that should be tacked onto the end of the post. Be sure that your user handle is correct for each individual channel.

Facebook Adds Cover Videos

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Facebook Adds Cover Videos – A New Option to Help Business Pages Connect With Followers

Facebook added a new feature for business pages. Now instead of a cover photo or image, Facebook pages can feature a video!

Facebook is the world’s largest social media channel boasting over 1.28 billion active users as of March 2017. The majority or 85.8% of Facebook’s daily active users reside outside the US and Canada. Besides Facebook, the company also owns Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp.

Videos are one of the best ways to connect with an audience. They convey emotion, allow creators to demonstrate a product, and all around offer a more personal experience for brands and individuals. Videos are much cheaper to produce than they were just five years ago. Viewers no longer need to see high production value creatives. A smartphone and microphone are all that is needed.

Ideal Facebook cover videos can include a product demonstration for products. A brand could give a message from their founder, or a brief statement of the company’s mission or foundation. Personal brand pages, should show a video from the public figure the page is promoting. Like any other creative, changing the cover frequently, keeps a page looking fresh and in touch

To upload a cover video to a Facebook page:

  • From your desktop, navigate to a business page
  • Hover over the cover image
  • Tap the pencil icon to upload a new cover image or video

The recommended video size is 820 pixels by 320 pixels minimum. The length of the cover video must be between 20 and 90 seconds.

The video cover photo update has been rolling out to pages over the last two weeks. If your page does not have the option to upload a video, check back in a few days. Currently, the video upload is not available from the mobile apps.