Today in Digital Marketing - 185: Meet John Smith, Serial Cart Abandoner

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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. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, who is John Smith and why is he messing up your analytics?

Starting point is 00:01:05 If your brand's website is jumpy, Google plans to penalize you. Facebook shuts down its TikTok clone, but that doesn't mean they're out of the game. And how much of an impact is this month's ad boycott on Facebook going to have? Probably not much. It's Thursday, July 2nd. Happy World UFO Day. I'm Todd Maffin, and here is what you missed today in Digital Marketing. There's been something of a mystery the last few months among digital marketers who work in the e-commerce space. Someone has been going around to shopping sites, adding a product to their cart, then abandoning it.

Starting point is 00:01:41 And yes, this happens a lot. Hell, there's an entire industry of tools that help draw people back. But in all these cases, the person has registered their name as John Smith. Every time, John Smith comes, adds a product, apparently at random, then leaves. And not just for a few sites. Thousands. John Smith. Add to cart.

Starting point is 00:02:03 Leave. John Smith. Add to cart, leave. John Smith, add to cart, leave. Well, now we know who John Smith is. And it turns out it's not a who, but a what. Googlebot. Yeah, that same piece of code that travels the web to index pages has been adding products to people's e-commerce shopping carts and putting in the fake name John Smith. Apparently the bot is doing this to check to make sure the pricing that you've got posted on your product pages is the same as when they add the product for checkout.

Starting point is 00:02:34 And no, you can't opt out of it because you've already actually opted in. If you've uploaded your product feeds to Google Merchant Center, you agreed to this kind of automatic price verification in the terms of service, which, of course, you totally read. Yes, Google knows that that might mess with your analytics, making it look like your abandoned cart metrics are higher than reality, but you're kind of stuck with it if you want your products to be shown across Google. You can control the rate of that crawling. Talk to your web admin about monkeying with your robot's TXT file. But for now, at least, it looks like John Smith isn't going away. Speaking of Google, you should be aware that in their big algorithm update that happens next year, they'll be adding a new metric that could downrank your brand's website if your web page's layout jumps around

Starting point is 00:03:25 too much. You've been on web pages like this before. You go to click the cancel button, but before you click it, a banner ad pops up on the top of the page, pushing everything down a bit, and now your mouse is over the submit button, which you click by accident because a split second ago you were over a different button. That's exactly the kind of experience that Google is trying to eliminate, and they will have a new metric called Cumulative Layout Shift. It will check to see how much of your web page jumps around as it loads and give it a score. Too high a score, and your page gets less rank in Google. Now, this new algo update is a few months off yet, so you've got time to check this,

Starting point is 00:04:04 and if your site does this, fix it. Facebook is shutting down two of its testing apps. The company makes a lot of these apps, tries them out, then shuts them down, but what's notable here is what one of those apps was. Lasso. Lasso was Facebook's attempt at cloning the ridiculously popular TikTok. Lasso actually launched about two years ago, although it was only ever available in a handful of countries, but now they are shutting it down in eight days. Copying their competitors? It's kind of Facebook's jam. Just ask Snapchat. No, sources say Facebook has decided to shift those resources into putting TikTok-like functionality into Instagram, which, you know, does make sense. They're calling that test Instagram Reels

Starting point is 00:04:57 and is currently available in Brazil, France, and Germany. Also being shut down this month, Hobby, which was Facebook's go at making a Pinterest clone. A few nice features for you B2B marketers who spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. They've launched three new things. First, follower analytics. You can find this in your company page analytics. It will show you the full list of every person that's followed your page, I guess, so you can thank them for following maybe. Anyway, it's view only. You can't download the list. Also, they've added a new limit to how many times a company page manager can send invitations to their connections to follow their company page. Previously, you were limited to 50 invites per manager per day.

Starting point is 00:05:45 Now, that limit is 100. But it's not 100 invites, it's 100 credits. Each invite costs one credit, and if your invite is accepted, you will get that credit back. Although, no, the credits do not roll over. One more complexity, once you have exceeded your 100 credit limit, they are gone for the month. And finally, LinkedIn is adding the ability to record the pronunciation of your name and have that audio file available on your profile. All right, time for the lightning round. YouTube has added auto-generated smart replies to its studio dashboard to make it quicker for you to reply to comments.

Starting point is 00:06:29 Here is how YouTube announced it in a news release, and I swear to God I am not making this up. This model learns comment and reply representation through a computationally efficient dilated self-attention network and represents the first cross-lingual and character byte-based smart reply model. Jesus, Google, can you not? Advertising fraud prevention company Check is expanding its ad verification platform to paid search in a dashboard they call Check PPC. Nike has dropped its digital marketing agency Razorfish. Reports say they're building out their own in-house agency.

Starting point is 00:07:03 Nike spent more than $82 million on digital media in the U.S. last year. Thanks for having me. and people who have purchased any products. If you use the popular WPForms Lite plugin on your brand's WordPress site, be aware there is a serious vulnerability in the code that was just discovered. Again, that's the WPForms Lite plugin. You should update it to version 1.602 or above. And now that we're in day two of the Facebook ad boycott, we have a sense of, despite the headlines, how few big advertisers are participating. Quoting CNN, confirmed their plans to pause marketing on Facebook. Those top 25 businesses, according to the data, accounted for 3% of Facebook's 2019 revenues. Well, my wife and I had a restful

Starting point is 00:08:14 Canada Day yesterday, which is why there was no episode then. Honestly, I expected to do a lot of gaming, but instead I spent hours trying to make a sticky bun pork dinner, which was just a complete fucking disaster. Like, how do you roll pastry in a perfect circle? I'm serious. This is not a rhetorical question. The photo showed it in a perfect circle. Mine comes out looking like some kind of alien head. At least it tasted okay. Our regular theme music is by Mark Blevis. Ad sales by Podcorn. Special thanks to the Arrogant Worms for permission to use this song. Canada

Starting point is 00:08:52 is really big. Check them out at arrogantworms.com or on Spotify. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. We're the second largest country on this planet Earth. And if Russia keeps on shrinking, then soon we'll be first.

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Today in Digital Marketing - 185: Meet John Smith, Serial Cart Abandoner

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