Today in Digital Marketing - 199: Short or Long? How Much Copy Converts Better?

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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, Google gives webmasters a brief reprieve from a dangerously looming deadline.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Good news for brands that invested into Snapchat marketing. New Facebook training will show you how to adjust your content strategy based on pixel data. Google will endorse your business for just 50 bucks. And another blow to TikTok. Is the end coming? It's Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020. Happy National Hot Dog Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital.

Starting point is 00:01:28 Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. There's so much advice out there about landing pages, but one thing we can agree on, the longer the copy, the better. Oh wait, sorry, that's not it at all. You need short copy. The shorter, the better. Yeah, none of us actually really know, but occasionally a decent study comes along and provides a bit of guidance. One of those studies is out this week and is based on an analysis of conversion rate data for nearly 16,000 e-commerce landing pages. The study was from Unbounce, which is a landing page service, so they do have the data.

Starting point is 00:02:03 So which is it? Long copy or short copy on a landing page? I'll tell you what they found at the end of today's episode. Good news for brands that have not yet fully embraced responsive websites. Google says it will delay the start of mobile-first indexing until next March. Let's back up a little. Responsive sites, those are the websites that automatically collapse when viewed on a mobile browser. It's still the same web page with all the same content. It just rearranges itself to make it easier to read on a phone. That's different

Starting point is 00:02:36 than the old school mobile sites, which were actually separate web pages served to people on mobile devices. The main problem with those is that any changes you wanted to make to your site meant that you had to make them to your main site and to your mobile site since they were, technically speaking, two different websites. Google recognizes that the majority of searches now happen on mobile, and so, come March, it will start only indexing the mobile version of your website. Again, this is not a problem for you if your webpages are responsive and provide the same content as the desktop version. But if the content people get on desktop is different than what they'd get from your site on mobile, then you have a problem, because Google will only index whatever it finds on mobile.

Starting point is 00:03:22 Originally, they planned to switch to mobile first in September. This morning, they said they would be pushing that deadline back to next March. They have a pretty good guide on how to prepare for this, and you will find a link to that guide in this episode's notes. Facebook's Summer of Support training program has added some new content this week. It includes purchasing power to the masses, which is all about how new commerce tools are delivering more purchasing power to customers. A case study of how a music brand optimizes its content

Starting point is 00:03:51 based on Facebook and Instagram data. A deep dive into the all-important Facebook pixel, including the basics of how to set up the pixel on your brand's website and how to use Instagram's camera app to more effectively build video ads that drive online sales. Link to the resources in the notes.

Starting point is 00:04:12 If you've invested some marketing resources into Snapchat for your brand and are getting a little worried that you've backed the wrong horse, this should cheer you up. Snapchat this week reported some good growth in the most recent quarter, adding 9 million new daily active users. That brings them to 238 million people who log on every day. Most of that growth coming from outside the US and Europe. In the last year, they've doubled their user base in India. That's especially good news for the company since most of India is on Android devices, not iPhone. And Snapchat, for the longest time, sort of ignored the Android platform. It wasn't all good news, though. The all-important ARPU metric, that's average revenue per user, ARPU, was down the last quarter, and not by a little. Users outside North America only bring

Starting point is 00:04:58 in about a quarter of the revenue per user that North Americans do. That said, Snapchat's overall revenue was up 17% year over year. Google has released a new version of its Ads Editor. That's the standalone desktop app, similar to the now defunct Facebook Power Editor, if you remember that. This new version of the Google Ads Editor has some nice additions. You can now edit combined audiences. You still can't actually create new combined audiences in editor, but you can assign them or remove them from campaigns or ad groups if you like. Also, you can now assign location groups to your campaigns. You can edit video ad sequence campaigns. Local campaigns are finally available in the app. And if you care to apply Google's

Starting point is 00:05:44 campaign recommendations, you can do those in bulk. Honestly, be careful with that. Sometimes Google's recommendations are just completely bizarre. One thing that is not in the app, accelerated delivery. That was the option to push ads out as fast as possible instead of spacing them out over a 24-hour period. That option is now gone across their whole platform. You just can't do it anymore. A warning, some people are noticing bugs with this new version.

Starting point is 00:06:10 It's not clear if the service is overloaded or if there's something wrong with the code itself. So if that gives you anxiety, maybe hold off on upgrading for a day or two. Imagine that you are in the, I don't know, shoe repair business, and someone does a search in Google Maps for shoe repair. Your shop is there, along with 10 other listings. Now imagine that your listing has a bright green checkmark on it with the words Google Guaranteed beside it. Think more people would click over to your listing?

Starting point is 00:06:42 Damn right they would. Well, I'm here to tell you that you can get this checkmark. And here's how. Let's see, where is that guide again? Oh, here it is. Here's how. Pay Google $50. Yeah, it's as easy as that. 50 bucks a month, that is. Sure, you get other things as part of this. Better call tracking, some new recording options, apparently faster response times with their support people. But let's face it, the real value here is being the listing that is seemingly endorsed by Google. To be clear, this Google guaranteed thing is not actually new. a rigorous screening process that includes checking your insurance, confirming your company

Starting point is 00:07:25 meets all local requirements like license requirements, even background checks on all employees who potentially would enter a customer's home. All this because the consumer benefit to this program is that Google will repay a customer of yours up to $2,000 if they aren't happy with your service. What appears to be new here is this $50 a month fee. Where did this change is making the rounds now. Some HVAC shops already have the option. It's not clear if this is just a small test group or if they've actually launched this. Would you pay 50 bucks a month to be apparently endorsed by Google? I'll bet a lot of brands would. And that brings us to the lightning round.

Starting point is 00:08:07 You can now turn on Face ID for Facebook Messenger. You'll find that in the settings screen under privacy. Only on Apple devices for now. Android coming in the next few months. Netflix is testing a new and cheaper subscription model. Mobile only. You can stream their content anywhere except on a TV for this particular cheaper plan. For now, this plan is only available in India.

Starting point is 00:08:29 American lawmakers Monday banned TikTok from all government-issued devices. This as the Trump administration threatens to ban the app entirely from the U.S. TikTok this week said they are planning to add 10,000 jobs in the U.S. They've already filled at least 35 of those jobs. That's how many lobbyists they have in Washington the U.S. They've already filled at least 35 of those jobs. That's how many lobbyists they have in Washington, D.C. Facebook has removed the manual event tool from its pixel platform, and many Facebook marketers hate its replacement. The new tool won't even let you specify a manual conversion value for a pixel event. You can still jam it into the pixel code in HTML if you want. That appears to be the only way now.

Starting point is 00:09:05 LinkedIn says they will be eliminating 960 jobs, trying to recover from the economic impact of the pandemic. The job cuts will be from the global sales and talent acquisition departments. 960 jobs is about 6% of its total workforce. And Coca-Cola says it plans to double down on digital in the coming year after revenue plunged 28% in quarter two from a year earlier. Oh, and as for the most effective amount of copy on a landing page, the Unbounce study says short copy converts better.

Starting point is 00:09:40 Yeah, the fewer the words on the landing pages it analyzed, the higher conversion rate those pages had. Also, keep the language simple. I know you know this around a middle school reading level. And despite what you may have been taught in marketing school that you're first supposed to scare the customer and then offer your solution, Unbounce actually found that copy that conveyed joy, words like smile and love and delightful, that copy actually produced a higher than average conversion rate. And finally, words that spark anticipation, such as improve and expect, also scored pretty well. Taking a break from the Xbox for a while, I did love the Fallout 76 grind for Boe-In, but logging in every day, running the same events, selling the same purified water day in and day out.

Starting point is 00:10:28 And for what? 20 more electrical resistance on Secret Service armor? Should I be questioning my whole ability to make life decisions here? Follow me on social. All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. More breaking news from the world of digital marketing tomorrow. Talk to you then. Meet me where the meadows grow by the waterhole Lucid dreams of you and me Sky high, busy life I wanna live

Today in Digital Marketing - 199: Short or Long? How Much Copy Converts Better?

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