Today in Digital Marketing - 205: 🍰 The Cake Is a Lie

Starting point is 00:00:00 On today's show, how much of an effect do review sites have on your brand's Google position? Plus, Shopify wants your e-commerce store to be faster, Spotify wants you to share specific podcast moments, and Bing, Bing just wants you to take it seriously. It's Thursday, July 30th, 2020. Happy National Cheesecake Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. As you may know, American lawmakers yesterday dragged the CEOs of the top tech companies into a, well, shall we say, focused Q&A session, all part of their antitrust inquiry. As part of that,

Starting point is 00:00:40 one congressman said the problem was that these tech companies are trying to build technology monopolies. Take Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa. It's not like Walmart is building out this kind of voice tech. It's terrible. Shame on Amazon. So, yeah, that happened. All right, next story. What have I got here?

Starting point is 00:00:58 Oh, yeah, guess what company is building out its own voice assistant? Walmart. And this one is named Sam after their sam club stores where they started testing this last year it lets you look up prices see store maps find products even has some information on covet 19 but in the walmart implementation only store staff can access it the idea is that a customer comes up to a staffer asks them a question they don't know the answer to then that employee pulls out their phone essentially asks the same same question to Sam, who may or may not know the answer because let's face it, this tech is still pretty new. We could certainly see some marketing opportunities in store if this rolls out to

Starting point is 00:01:34 customers. But until then, yeah, bad Amazon. All joking aside, one thing that is true about these old school retailers is that most are diving deep into digital marketing to drive sales. Let's stick with Walmart for a moment. Today, Walmart's in-house media network announced it has launched its first omni-channel reporting tool. Quoting Marketing Dive, this provides partners with real-time retail data on how Walmart display and sponsored products campaigns are performing both in-store and online. The analytics offering is available through the Walmart Ad Center, a new single sign-in self-service platform that Walmart will feature more prominently in the coming months for brands looking to set up and manage their campaigns.

Starting point is 00:02:25 The algorithms that power platforms from social media sites to search engines are pretty complicated. And you don't usually get an opportunity to ask a specific question about how they work. You can tweet questions about the Facebook news feed algo until you're blue in the face. Nobody there is going to give you a specific answer. But the same can't be said for Google. In case you didn't know, every week a Google search engineer named John Mueller does a live stream on YouTube for people who manage brand websites. Maybe people like you. And you can join and even ask him questions. Very detailed questions about the Google search algorithm if you want, and he will give you a straight up answer. This week, there was a great question about the impact of those review sites on your brand's

Starting point is 00:03:09 position in Google. Sites like Trustpilot or Angie's List or Yelp. If those sites are ranking your brand poorly, does Google downrank your listing? Is there any effect? Here's Mueller. I don't think you'd see any effect on the ranking of your website from that. At most, what might happen is that people stumble across that in the search results for your company name. They're like, oh, what does this mean? And then they get lost in that website. Sometimes it makes sense to try to create other kinds of content that go up, especially for things like a query for your company name. But it's always a question of where you invest your time. If people are already searching for your company name, they kind of know where to go anyway. Whatever you do, it is always important to at least monitor these sites so that you know what people are saying about your brand.

Starting point is 00:04:07 Speaking of the Google algorithm, one of the most important ranking factors these days is the speed of your brand's website. If pages on your site load slowly, you will end up lower in the search engine results pages. But it's not just search engines. We know that site speed affects everything, including, and perhaps more importantly, e-commerce conversions.

Starting point is 00:04:25 This may be why Shopify today announced it has a new speed report in its admin panel. It uses Google's site speed measurement API, something that they call Lighthouse. It'll show you a composite speed score of your Shopify store, and perhaps more importantly, it also shows you the relative speed of your shop compared to shops like yours. The company's CTO says they are planning to add historical scores and trends to the report and a stat showing the speed impact of your store's theme. Today also marked the launch of Bing's new Webmaster Tools platform. Some new features there, a URL inspection tool that lets you inspect Bing indexed versions of your URLs. That'll let you detect potential indexing issues due to crawl or not following the Bing Webmaster Guidelines.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Also added, crawl control. You can now submit specific URLs to be indexed up to 10 a day manually. And it gives you the ability to block URLs. There's also a new site scan tool and a robots.txt tester tool. Bing may have a small share of the search engine pie, but it is growing and is worth checking out. One very nice thing I noticed this morning, you don't have to go through the whole domain verification thing, which usually involves dropping a specific code deep into your domain's DNS settings. If you've already verified your domains with Google's version of Webmaster Tools,

Starting point is 00:05:48 something they call Search Console now, then Bing's platform will essentially take Google's word for it and import those domains to the Bing platform. One of Spotify's biggest gets in the podcast world launched yesterday. So let's just dive in. With a couple of hiccups. So let's just dive in. Which they left in. So we're going to just dive in.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Okay. We're recording this for the toppers. I'm sorry. I'll be quiet. The Michelle Obama podcast, that's actually its name, is now out. Her first guest, former President Barack Obama. I know, shocker. But the podcast is also unique in that it is testing an entirely new form of podcast marketing, shareable quote cards. For those people in the test, as they listen to the show,

Starting point is 00:06:38 short, colorful cards will pop up with a quote from that episode. The cards are meant to be shared on social media, of course. It's an interesting idea, and one that Spotify in particular is uniquely positioned to offer since it's one of the few platforms where podcast episodes are streamed. Most podcast apps, probably like the one you're using now, unless you're using Spotify, download each episode's MP3 file as it becomes available in the show's RSS feed.

Starting point is 00:07:05 But Spotify is different in that, like their music service, you play the content off their server. This gives them the ability to do stuff like this, shareable cards popping up at the right moment. It is just in testing for now. No word on whether this will become part of their main platform or becomes a product that we digital marketers will have to buy if we want them added to our brand's podcasts. And finally, three short items in the lightning round today. Google has updated some of its ad policies, mostly to clarify them, make them more clear, give some specific examples as to what would be on their naughty list. Also, funding choices. Google's consent management tool for publishers using Google ad servers can now handle CCPA Thank you. So it's affecting all third-party platforms equally. What is different between the platforms is the error message you'll see reporting this Facebook issue.

Starting point is 00:08:09 On Agora Pulse, it will say, And on Buffer, the error message there says, Oh dear, looks like Facebook might be having some troubles right now. Maybe try again after making a cuppa. I am not making that up. Yes, it is National Cheesecake Day today. Most historians think cheesecake is Greek in origin. The first mention anyone can find was in the 5th century BCE in the recipe book of a Greek doctor.

Starting point is 00:08:41 It was apparently more like bread back then. It was only when the British removed the yeast and added eggs instead did it start to shape up in the way that we know it now. That happened around the 18th century. For the record, a cheesecake is not actually cake. Most food experts put it in the custard pie category. According to Google Trends, interest in cheesecake has been going up and usually peaks around December of each year. The current average cost per click for the word cheesecake in Google? Just 55 cents.

Starting point is 00:09:11 As always, full transcripts to each episode are at todayindigital.com and follow me on social media. All my links are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - 205: 🍰 The Cake Is a Lie

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