Today in Digital Marketing - 145: Did You Drop Off Google’s Page One Too?

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. It is Tuesday, May the 5th, 2020. at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. big Google update? Did your brand fall off page one as well? Google tests a new conversion event that honestly, why didn't we all think of this one before now? And is user generated content, not all it's cracked up to be? Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Signs showing now that maybe, maybe the worst is over in how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the global advertising business. Quoting Search Engine Land, With the travel industry among the hardest hit, it's notable that several online travel agencies have resumed paid search advertising.

Starting point is 00:01:14 Trivago, Priceline, and Booking.com are running paid search campaigns. TripAdvisor, Omni Hotels, Norwegian Cruise Lines, and Sandals Resorts are among the other travel businesses currently running ads on Google and Bing. Brad Geddes of ad testing platform Adalysis said, We don't have enough data to understand how they are bidding yet and if these are limited campaigns or budgets. What's motivating these businesses to turn the marketing spigot back on is unclear. There is little indication of shifts in search behaviors trending in their favor. The full piece is worth a read, and the link to the original source article, as with all the stories I cover here, is in this episode's notes. As I reported yesterday, Google pushed out a big update to its algorithm.

Starting point is 00:02:08 They call these core updates and do about two or three a year of this size. And like all of these updates, some brands' websites dropped like a rock in Google, flying way off page one. But some went up, and some, no effect. Here are a couple of quotes from the various SEO forums today. One person said, now I am seeing crazy swings. Some major national brands that were ranked at the top

Starting point is 00:02:31 for very competitive financial keywords dropped 10 plus rankings, seeing massive swings in health as well. This looks big so far. Someone else reported, I've never seen my traffic just die like this before. Just watching some keywords blinking in and out, some falling about 10 pages. Traffic is completely flatlined.

Starting point is 00:02:50 I mean, it's dead. I've never seen anything like this, even during past updates. Usually it's just a kind of gradual slide. And yet, as I said, some people are seeing no change. With one person saying, this update didn't do anything. It's all the same for me, at least for now. All I noticed yesterday was a decrease in traffic for a few hours, and then it jumped up again.

Starting point is 00:03:11 So the lesson here, friends, if monitoring the position of your brand's website in Google matters to you, and I don't know why it wouldn't, you should get yourself a subscription to one of the many search tracking services. Generation Z, that's Z for you Americans, are looking for better content and ads, and they have some advice if you are trying to reach them. Market research firm Magid did a study recently

Starting point is 00:03:36 and found that half of young consumers report that they are bored during this pandemic. Compare that to only 30% of adults age 25 and older who say that they're bored. As for what kind of content they want to see, maybe not what you have pivoted to. Generic COVID-19 messaging like things are different now rank way down the list in ninth place.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Up top, fun content. And then, and this sort of surprised me, about 30% of young consumers said they want romantic content. Indeed, we are starting to see something of a pandemic backlash now in advertising. Quoting Marketing Dive, news articles about the coronavirus surged in mid-March and then subsequently dropped. Signs of coronavirus fatigue may indicate that marketers can change the tone of their advertising to more traditional content that is still mindful of public health concerns as more cities and states ease lockdowns. Is user-generated content starting to wane? New data from Sprout Social shows that only 10% of consumers say they want to engage with what we digital marketers often call UGC. The study polled a little over 1,000 consumers.

Starting point is 00:04:51 This surprised me because we've often seen breakout hits in engagement with well-placed UGC. Again, though, this was not an analysis of what people do engage with. This was an analysis of what people say they want to engage with. And those can be wildly different. At my agency, we handle the social media for a number of large shopping centers. Every year we do a survey. What do you want to see on our Facebook page? And always, always at the very bottom are sales and deals. And yet, when we post said sales, they're often among our highest performing posts. What's the lesson here?

Starting point is 00:05:30 Studies are interesting, but not conclusive. You can and should use some kind of labeling system in your platform to understand what kind of content your community responds best to. Spread Social calls these tags. Agorapulse calls these categories. Hell, do it manually if you want. But understanding this is step number one in a good content management program.

Starting point is 00:05:51 Anyway, Sprout's full report goes into way more detail about engagement levels by industry, why consumers unfollow brands, and how consumers find new accounts to follow. There is a link in this episode's notes if you'd like to download the free study for yourself. Google is testing a brand new conversion event. You know those, right? A conversion event is some action that we want a consumer to take. The best usually being a purchase, but sometimes it's subscribing to a newsletter or viewing a specific blog post. Even steps to the purchase, like adding payment information and getting to the checkout screen, all conversion events. And soon, we may have another one. New customer acquisition. This is a new event

Starting point is 00:06:34 apparently being tested in Google Smart Shopping campaigns, and it would optimize your campaign to not just purchases, but purchases specifically from people new to your brand. How does it know if they're new? You upload a list of your current and past customers. And if they are not on that list, priority goes to them. That's a kind of cool spin on what we usually use these uploads for. In most cases, when we upload a customer list to an ad platform like Facebook or Google, it's because we want to target those people. Maybe upsell them.

Starting point is 00:07:05 Not to deliberately exclude them. In that way, you can easily hack this conversion event into your Facebook campaigns now if you want, even though it's not an event that is integrated into the platform. At the ad set level, you just put your customer list custom audience in the exclude box. Anyway, cool idea. It'll be interesting to see the results of A-B tests between revenues from new customers and revenue from existing customers. Heads up if you run a Facebook group for your brand. Facebook is changing privacy settings for groups. Once again, as you know, you've been able to change the privacy setting for your group from

Starting point is 00:07:41 private to public as long as you add fewer than 5,000 people in the group. But now, you won't be able to go from private to public at all, ever, regardless of the size of your group. Facebook says it's to protect the privacy of group members. There is a kind of escape hatch, though. You'll get a 72-hour window before it takes effect in case you change your mind. This rolls out in the coming week or two. Twitter says it's testing a bad word filter, quoting them, when things get heated, you may say things you don't mean. To let you rethink a reply, we are running a limited experiment on iOS with a prompt that gives you the option to revise your reply before it's published if it uses language that could be harmful. Honestly, I would pay a lot of money to see that list of naughty words.

Starting point is 00:08:33 In related news, Twitter was launched 1,506 days ago, and still, there is no edit button. This is cool news if your digital marketing mix includes a branded podcast. Google is launching a podcast manager tool that will provide some really good listener data, like, for instance, retention data. Most of that data really only available in podcasts are streamed, of course, not using the traditional method of having to download them to an app and then play them from that saved file. But it is definitely a shot across the bow to the other platforms. Anchor, for instance, which I use and is owned by Spotify, can report to podcasters basic info like age and gender,

Starting point is 00:09:14 something Google won't have, surprisingly. Apple as well doesn't provide demographic data. If you do a podcast for your brand, you will first have to verify your ownership of your RSS feed by replying to an email that Google will send to the owner listed in your feed. Finally, in the It's Not Just You department, yes, Facebook is having trouble with their ads platform today. You may be getting errors in creating or editing your campaigns. They are working on it. Nothing to say here. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 145: Did You Drop Off Google’s Page One Too?

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