Today in Digital Marketing - 159: Why Is Google Rewriting Your Metadata?!

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Amazon fights the loss of third-party cookies with first-party podcasts. Retail e-commerce marketers just got some big love from Google ads. TikTok's new location function will spell more work for social media community managers. And why is Google rewriting those meta descriptions that you slaved over? It's Tuesday, May 26th. Happy National Book Day, Uruguay. I'm Todd Mathen from EngageQ Digital.

Starting point is 00:01:01 And here is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by Ladder. Amazon is the latest company said to be moving into the podcasting business. Reports say they are planning to buy up podcast networks related to news and sports. This, some people believe, is a play for ad revenue in the local search business. With third-party cookies starting to disappear

Starting point is 00:01:23 in the coming year or two, podcasts hosted on their own platform can have local ads spat out based on the IP address of the listener. Quoting Search Engine Journal, local news and sports podcasts avoid privacy issues because listeners self-select themselves

Starting point is 00:01:38 as specific audiences. A news site targets specific listeners in a geographic area. Sports shows can be said to target another demographic made up of males of certain ages. Funny side story here. My first job in radio in the early 90s was at a small regional radio network in British Columbia. It served three markets, Trail, Creston, and Nelson. And even though the programming all came from Trail, each community would hear a different ad.

Starting point is 00:02:04 The DJ would say, we'll be right back. And then the Trail people would hear a car dealership ad. C each community would hear a different ad. The DJ would say, we'll be right back. And then the trail people would hear a car dealership ad. Creston would hear a restaurant. Nelson would hear their own thing. How did this all happen? Remember, this was around 1991. Cell phones didn't exist. When we needed a mobile phone, we had to use a radio phone and the help of a special radio phone operator. And actually, how this splitting of the ads by geography worked was amazingly low-tech. The commercials were all on these cartridges that looked like old 8-track tapes. They had this machine you could put three carts in and press one button. Cart one would play to one market, cart two to another, and cart three to the third, all

Starting point is 00:02:43 at the same time. They laugh if you like, but back then that was like rocket science. Anyway, back to Amazon. No official word on their podcast strategy yet, but they have certainly identified a desire to buy up content like the huge acquisition of video game streaming site Twitch. Google Ads has some nice new functionality for retail e-commerce advertisers. Now you'll be able to see performance by retail category between search and social.

Starting point is 00:03:12 Until now, there wasn't really an easy way to drill down into this, so digital marketers had to hack it a little, like making sure they had a specific naming convention in their campaigns or ad sets and then filtering that element to see results. For instance, if they sold desks and living room furniture, they would make sure that each category was in the campaign name somewhere. Anyway, there's a great piece about this, complete with screenshots of the new layout over at searchenginejournal.com.

Starting point is 00:03:35 If you'd like to check that out, see the link in this episode's notes. Still ahead, Google will rewrite your metadata if it doesn't like it. Why are major platforms abandoning their marketing APIs? And this mobile app's reviews went from 4.5 star average to 1.2 stars literally overnight. What happened? That's in a minute, when Today in Digital Marketing continues. I am not an athlete, but my wife, who is a scientist by training, was on Canada's national wheelchair basketball team. Today, she coaches. And when I got my vanilla protein powder from

Starting point is 00:04:16 Ladder, I made her try it. It has a kind of like grown up vanilla pudding kind of feel. Would you drink that? Yeah, I'd drink it. I think it would be great with a banana. Ladder was founded by LeBron James and Arnold Schwarzenegger. And unlike other supplements, every batch is tested by a third party to verify the highest quality standards. My wife and I head to the blender where she finally learns that I lost that top part years ago.

Starting point is 00:04:45 I need something to cover it. We don't own the thing anymore. I do this all the time. You're weird. Ooh, that's good. It's good with a banana? Yeah, it's good taste. Use the code BETTEREVERYDAY for 30% off everything site-wide at ladder.sport.

Starting point is 00:05:05 That's BETTEREVERYDAY for 30% off everything site-wide at ladder.sport. That's BETTEREVERYDAY at ladder.sport. If your digital marketing responsibilities include SEO, then you're probably very familiar with metadata. Those are hidden fields of text that describe the page to search engines and other bots. One of the most important for SEO is the description field. Now, an important thing to note here, the description field doesn't actually help you rank. Google doesn't consider the text there when it comes to how high up a search result page you should land. Other things matter, like heading structure, page speed, how mobile-friendly it is, and about a million other factors.

Starting point is 00:05:49 But the description field is important for your click-through rate because that's the text that rides underneath the page title in Google search results. For instance, under the listing of this podcast, you'll see text reading, a fast-paced eight-minute rundown of what you missed in the world of digital marketing and social media. The description, of course, is meant to entice people to click. So imagine the surprise when people discovered that Google was just straight up rewriting those descriptions. Now, this wasn't manual, of course. They don't have a bunch of staff in a dark room feverishly changing your text. It was all automated. And Google's John Mueller has now explained why that happens. Basically, if they think that your existing description is low quality, they will find other text on your site to put there,

Starting point is 00:06:25 even if you have put that meta description in place on purpose. And what you ask is low quality to Google? The old crap like keyword stuffing, or maybe your description is picking up strange text in the alt tags of images. But overall, if it feels the meta description you've put in isn't a good match for the search query the user inputs it might tweak your text one viral video that's all it took for tiktok's average review rating to plummet on google's play store from four and a half stars to 1.2 stars over the course of just one night the video was from an ind Indian influencer who attempted a comedy sketch

Starting point is 00:07:08 about a woman being assaulted in an acid attack. I mean, what the f***? Holy. And then three things happened in succession. Two of them we'd expect. One was a little surprising. Thing one, the guy apologized. It was just a joke, dude. Thing two, TikTok pulled the video.

Starting point is 00:07:24 And surprising thing three, TikTok pulled the video. And surprising thing three, Google pulled the reviews. Yeah, they deleted all of the negative reviews that flooded in saying that people were just setting up bot accounts to downrank the app. Even with this mitigation, though, TikTok's average rating on the Play Store at the time that I write this is 1.4 stars. The share of Android devices, of course, is much higher in India, so much so that over on Apple's App Store, TikTok's average rating sitting mostly unchanged at 4.6 stars.

Starting point is 00:08:03 Speaking of TikTok, there are some screenshots circulating around the Twitters today that shows them testing the ability to add a location to your videos. So if you shoot video at a sports stadium or at a specific park, you can tag it. This, of course, has repercussions for the social media community managers among you. If they roll this out more widely, and of course they're going to, and you are hypersensitive about the media monitoring you do for your brand, this will be something else that you will need to keep an eye on. I don't think this is available in their API, and probably won't be for a while, so this will be something you'll be doing manually on your phones.

Starting point is 00:08:37 Similar to how Instagram actually took this API functionality away. Used to be, third-party platforms like Sprout Social could pull location data from Instagram photos and put posts it found that were tagged with a specific location, like, say, your office, into their customers' inboxes for review. Then they stashed it under a separate area because Instagram took away the ability to comment on those posts, and now they're just gone.

Starting point is 00:09:01 Like, you can't monitor Instagram locations at all unless you do it manually on your phone. It's dumb, and now they're just gone. Like, you can't monitor Instagram locations at all unless you do it manually on your phone. It's dumb, and I don't get it. All right, lots in the lightning round today. If you market on Shopify, are you neglecting perhaps the biggest asset you have there, your Shopify blog? Check the link in this episode's notes for more on that.

Starting point is 00:09:22 A new study has found that more than half of employees at advertising and marketing agencies say they are working longer hours since the whole COVID-19 thing. 59%, to be precise, that is higher than the 55% of professionals among all industries who say that they are also working longer. Strange bug over at the social media platform Buffer. Apparently, customers with pro subscriptions were being downgraded automatically. Something to do with subscriptions through iTunes and Google Play. They say they fixed it, but if you still find yourself on a downgraded plan suddenly, be sure to reach out to them. Facebook has new blueprint courses for digital marketers. 15 in all.

Starting point is 00:09:57 They include mapping the customer journey, how to create and manage a content calendar, and creating authentic messaging. Links to those courses in this show notes. Spotify now lets you add as many songs to your personal library as you like. Previously, you could only add 10,000 songs to it. TikTok now makes more money each month from in-app charges than any other non-gaming app, including YouTube. That revenue comes from digital currency that you buy to gift creators who then convert that currency into real money.

Starting point is 00:10:26 Hertz has now joined the growing list of big name companies filing for creditor protection. That list includes JCPenney's, Neiman Marcus, J.Crew and Pier One. And finally, because we all need a bit of comedy, U.S. President Donald Trump says he is considering setting up a commission to investigate social media. Because something something anti-conservative bias. Saying the radical left is in total command and control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google. If you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed the show. And if you're getting value from this short daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same.

Starting point is 00:11:06 You will find a link in this episode's description that makes rating and reviewing this podcast a simple one-click process. Special thanks to Ladder for sponsoring this episode. Remember, you can check them out at ladder.sport. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. Did you know if a traditional media outlet under delivers your advertising impressions, most will never tell you and that you will pay for what was not delivered. Get negotiation help with traditional radio or TV campaigns. Go to medianegotiator.us.

Today in Digital Marketing - 159: Why Is Google Rewriting Your Metadata?!

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