Today in Digital Marketing - 170: Metrics and Morality

Starting point is 00:00:00 Facebook is finding itself at the heart of a number of controversies these days, not the least of which is whether to leave the U.S. president's posts up. But now some digital marketers are saying enough is enough. They are pulling all ad spend from Facebook, leaving many other agencies to consider doing the same today, Wednesday, June 11th. Happy Portugal Day. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. A number of digital agencies are halting all their Facebook ad campaigns, not over metrics,

Starting point is 00:00:37 but morality. They say Facebook should be taking a more concrete stand against US President Donald Trump's posts. The New York Times has a pretty detailed read on this today, linked to that piece in this episode's notes, of course. But of the agencies pulling back, one co-founder says they are encouraging their clients to hold back millions of advertising dollars from Facebook, saying, quote,

Starting point is 00:00:58 These massive platforms have to care about free speech issues to some extent, but Facebook is on the extreme end of not caring, unquote. The piece notes that both Twitter and Snapchat have clamped down harder on the president's social media posts, but Facebook continues to leave his posts up and without any fact-checking. I'm sure you don't need a refresher on Trump's tweets and posts, but hey, here's a good example from just yesterday. You know that elderly man police knocked down to the pavement? Where he ended up unconscious and bleeding from the head?

Starting point is 00:01:40 Trump posted yesterday that the man was actually using his cell phone to jam police radio transmissions. And look, no matter where on the political spectrum you land, I think we can all agree that's not at all how cell phones work. Cell phones cannot jam police transmissions. But Facebook has chosen to leave posts like that untouched. The Trump campaign spent more than $2.8 million in advertising on Facebook last month alone. That makes the president Facebook's 10th largest ad client. One bright spot in the digital marketing landscape during the pandemic has been email campaigns. That, according to new research from Campaign Monitor, they analyzed emails sent in March and April and found that engagement with email campaigns was actually up for most industries during the height of COVID-19.

Starting point is 00:02:31 Compared to a year ago, the average open rate across all industries was about 4% in March and about 3.5% in April. But lest you think that's because simply fewer email campaigns were going out. No, apparently total send volume was about the same as last March and April. There were, of course, variations by industry, some significant variations. The average open rate for education was up 13% in March, but the automotive industry was down about 5%. You know those e-commerce pages where there's a bunch of product links up top and then some poor bastard has written like eight paragraphs of copy at the bottom to make Google rank it better? Maybe you are said poor bastard. Well, friends, I'm here to tell you,

Starting point is 00:03:19 you have been working too hard. At least those of you responsible for writing that content. John Mueller, a Google search engineer, revealed on a podcast this week that 90% of the content you're writing on your e-commerce pages actually doesn't matter that much to Google at all. In fact, it might be making things worse. When especially the e-commerce category pages don't have any other content at all other than links to the product, then it's really hard for us to link those pages. So I'm not saying all of that text on the bottom of your page is bad, but maybe 90%, 95% of that text is unnecessary.

Starting point is 00:03:57 The other thing where I could imagine better algorithms sometimes get confused is when they have a list of products on top and essentially a giant article on the bottom when our algorithms have to figure out what is the intent of this page. Is this something that is meant for commercial intent or is this informational page? What is kind of the primary reason for this page to exist? And I could imagine that our algorithms sometimes get confused by this big chunk of text. You'll find a link to the full episode in the notes. Yesterday, I reported you can now put custom hours on your Google My Business profile,

Starting point is 00:04:37 hours that are different from your usual hours, like instead of regular grocery shopping hours, you have a special set of hours for frontline workers or something like that. Now, it looks like there might be a bug with this. Some brand managers are reporting that when they went to add custom hours, it wouldn't take. And even worse, businesses that had temporarily closed during the height of the pandemic and now are reopened weren't able to remove that temporarily closed flag on their profile. Google says they believe it is not a widespread issue, but they are looking into it. If you want to run ads when people search for things, of course, most of us go to Google.

Starting point is 00:05:21 But Microsoft's Bing is still in there and not giving up. They've just launched a new feature in their webmaster tools called Site Scan. It's basically an audit tool that can point out problems with your website that is providing Bing from indexing your site. And some people do use Bing instead of Google. I do. Not that I think Bing results are better. I don't. But because Bing is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft's rewards program gives me three points with every search I do on Bing. Points I then cash in for Xbox gift cards. So if you want to make sure your site is also Bing friendly, just go to their webmaster tools, click site scan, and then start new scan. One nice touch, like Google, it will report issues sorted by severity. So you can focus on fixing the biggest issues first.

Starting point is 00:06:12 And finally, a couple of weeks ago, I reported on a TikTok clone called Zin, which monetized viewership. The more people you referred, the more videos you watched, the more money it would send to your PayPal account. And at the time, I mentioned just how much of a clone it seemed to be. Everything from the font, to the layout, to the icons a clone it seemed to be. Everything from the font to the layout to the icons, pretty much identical to TikTok. Only now it seems it was even more identical than we thought. Right down to the very same videos that were originally on TikTok.

Starting point is 00:06:37 And the creators of those videos say they didn't put them there. In fact, when you look a little closer at the accounts that did upload these copied videos, something fishy is going on. According to app monitoring firm SensorTower, many of these imposter accounts uploaded their first posts on February 19th. Which is weird, considering the app itself didn't even launch on the Apple or Google App Store until weeks after that date. Apparently, Zyn has now been removed from the Google Play Store, and Apple says it's investigating.

Starting point is 00:07:17 I have a bit of a web problem that I'm hoping one of you can help me out with. My website, todayindigital.com, works just fine. Until you put www in front of it. And then it just doesn't work. For some reason, I have been around the block with my hosting provider, Bluehost, and have been deep in CNAME records. They say it's the podcast page providers fault, but it looks like it's set up right over there. And they say it's Bluehost's fault. I'm sure you've been through this game before. Anyway, if anyone is good at this stuff, please hit me up on Twitter. I would really

Starting point is 00:07:48 love to get this fixed. I'm at Todd Maffin, T-O-D-M-A-F-F-I-N. There is a link in this episode's notes. Also, I'm doing a quick poll on whether or not ad spend has increased among people who have listened or are listening to this podcast, rather. Again, a link in this episode's

Starting point is 00:08:04 notes that will take you right to that Twitter poll. Well, if you found this podcast through one of those recommended for you listings, that happened because people rated and reviewed this show. If you're getting value from this daily news podcast, please consider paying it forward by doing the same. You'll find a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. Our theme was composed by Mark Blevis, ad sales by Podcorn. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

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Today in Digital Marketing - 170: Metrics and Morality

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