Today in Digital Marketing - 146: Nausea on the Google See-Saw

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

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It is Wednesday, May the 6th, 2020. Happy National Nurses Day. Today, LinkedIn disappears from Google, and nobody's sure why. Shopify merges their online and offline platforms. Roku joins the over-the-top TV ad auction, and some nice changes at Pinterest. I'm Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by Tresta.com. More fallout from the big Google update that happened on Monday,

and it's not looking great, well, for some people, quoting Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Journal, based on just about 30 or so hours, I'm seeing tons of site owners complaining about huge ranking drops in the past 24 hours or so. Google said it can take up to two weeks to fully roll out, but site owners, publishers, webmasters, SEOs, etc. And then the piece quotes a whole whack of people reporting that their sites went way down in the listings. But let's not forget, Google is a seesaw. When sites move down in the listings, they're replaced by sites that have moved up. And indeed, some SEO agencies report that

professional services like real estate, legal, and finance seem to have generally improved their position, while medical services may have dropped. Unless they haven't. Some agencies reporting that medical is up. One person reported, I just had a client skyrocket to number one for practically every personal injury term we've been targeting for him for the last five years. I think you get what I'm saying here. And besides, listen, no digital marketer, not you, not me, none of us should obsess over our brand's website dropping in Google. Yeah, I said it. Nobody. Instead, we should be focusing on traffic from Google organic searches.

What matters is whether you're getting more or fewer visitors, not what average position you're at. Something weird happened last night at around 8 o'clock Eastern Time. Google seems to have delisted LinkedIn from its index. The whole site. All of LinkedIn is currently just gone from Google, at the time I'm recording this at least. The links to their main hubs, links to your personal profile, poof, gone. Even the so-called knowledge panels that show metadata about personalities, the LinkedIn icon, also just gone. No one's quite sure why or what happened. Google hasn't said anything.

LinkedIn hasn't said anything. What makes it even more confusing is it seems to have only happened with the American LinkedIn. That is to say, www.linkedin.com. Other national versions like ca.linkedin.com for Canada, still there. It's not really clear whether this was an accident, maybe a glitch in Google's big core update. Maybe the two companies are just having a corporate pissing match. I mean, who knows? Also probably unrelated, but Hootsuite this morning reported that they are experiencing intermittent issues with LinkedIn and LinkedIn company streams. Shopify is making some nice integrations between online and offline sales for its e-commerce clients. They have launched an updated point of sale system that will handle both offline and

online sales, giving customers a single unified experience. Quoting Marketingland.com, the new POS seems full of useful features designed to enable merchants to serve online, in-store, or curbside customers in a flexible way. Among them are app integration, more actionable insights on store performance and reporting, and mobile checkout for in-store or curbside usage, unquote. Shopify says brands that merged online and offline sales with their tools saw a 30% jump in revenue year over year. Roku, the smart TV box with all the usual subscription services you'd see on Amazon Prime and the likes. Roku, they have launched a new ad platform now called OneView. And some brands like Experian, Intuit, and Lexus are already in and using it. Quoting the company,

the OneView ad platform aims to help advertisers ramp up their streaming ad programs by leveraging streaming TV identity data so marketers can plan, buy, and measure ads across over-the-top desktop and mobile data from one platform. It's designed to integrate the reach, inventory, and capabilities of Roku's existing advertising solution with the identity and attribution tools from demand-side platform Dataksu, unquote.

Roku says their two platforms can now reach four out of five homes in the U.S. And somewhat related, NBCUniversal has also launched a streaming ad business for its local and regional connected TV advertisers. It's called NBC Spot On. I want to talk to you about one of our sponsors, Tresta. Tresta is a mobile app for iPhone and Android that lets you do business calling and texting from anywhere. With Tresta, you can set up your business phone number, Thank you. Trusta offers the call management features that empower you to communicate smarter and more efficiently. One of the best things about Trusta is it's so flexible.

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So I've had a chance now to play around with the Google Podcast Manager that I reported on yesterday, and it's actually really interesting. So if you have a brand podcast, maybe worth playing around with as well. It's super easy to register as long as you own or can access the email address that is in your brand's podcast's RSS feed. The dashboard has some great info, including how much of each episode on average people listen to, you know, kind of like YouTube and the other video platforms have. This podcast seems to hover around 90% completion, which is great. Doesn't surprise me since it's short. But the episode I did recently when I devoted a whole show to reporting a single survey about how COVID affected social media, that one only averaged 67% completion, which also makes sense if people don't really care about that one topic. It'll even show

you what percentage of people listen on a smart speaker. You can also add other users as admins and viewers and so on. But I did have a brief moment of panic when I saw that I was only getting like 25, 30 listeners per episode. I know I have more than that. My platform provider, Anchor, doesn't even show Google Podcasts as a platform because it gets less than 2% of the listens. So don't freak out. You are only seeing data from people who listen using Google's podcast platform. And that's hardly anyone right now. Pinterest continues to improve its offering to users,

now introducing features that can help people plan meals and attend virtual events. Users will be able to add a note to a board, and there are automated ways to organize your pins on a board. Pinterest hasn't seen a jump of more than 50% of users planning virtual events on its site, like virtual birthday parties or virtual baby showers. They say engagement with boards is up nearly 75% on a year-over-year basis.

And finally, for this sunny Wednesday, Sprout Social has updated its iOS app to include reporting. They added this to Android a few weeks ago. It's not all of their reports, only about a third or a quarter of what's available on desktop. But the main ones are there, and this is nice. It actually spits out a full PDF report on your phone, not some kind of abbreviated mobile version.

They also added publishing capabilities for Google My Business. Special thanks to Trusta.com for sponsoring today's podcast. Hey, if you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because current listeners rated and reviewed the show. So if you're getting value from this brief daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes reviewing and rating this podcast a simple one-click process. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

I want her to be my nurse. I'd love to, but I've been stripped of my powers.