Today in Digital Marketing - A Totally Human-Achievable Number

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. It is Friday, September 22nd. Today, if you can't beat them, partner with them. Google's strange solution to the TikTok threat. Also, SEO pros probably won't like Bing's latest move. X kills off another feature from its platform. And on the ad-free premium podcast, which you can learn more about by tapping Go Premium in the show notes, three

Starting point is 00:00:56 reasons why Meta's ad performance has been down across the board, what you can do about it, and the new maximum value of conversion, what it is, and how it can help your shopping campaigns. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing. Something weird is happening in the TikTok app. When some people go to search for something, they're seeing prompts to search in Google. It's not a bug. It's not an ad. It is, according to TikTok, a test of a future partnership. The integration looks like an ad unit. It's like nothing we've seen in the app before.

Starting point is 00:01:33 It takes what the user searched for and turns it into a call to action to search for that phrase on Google. The whole thing is a little weird to me. Weird that Google would try to get on more platforms while it's being sued in the U.S. for allegedly trying to lock competitors out. Weird that TikTok would create a partnership which takes someone out of their app and onto someone else's app or site. And with those redirected eyeballs, add revenue. If indeed TikTok is capturing 40% of young people's searches, a number which came from Google, by the way, then the Google move begins to make some sense, put themselves right in those search results, and hopefully steal some eyeballs back. Google wouldn't answer media questions about whether there was a financial arrangement between the two companies, quoting Marketing Dive, and

Starting point is 00:02:24 maybe there isn't. Maybe the benefit for TikTok, as opposed to charging Google for this option, is actually via improved discovery, with Google indexing more of its content and showing more TikTok results in search. That could also be stepping on the toes of YouTube Shorts, Google's own short-form video offering. But maybe, given TikTok's emergence as a discovery threat, it's a best-of-both-worlds option for the big G, unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Either way, an interesting development in an always fast-moving space. Microsoft's Bing search engine will soon no longer let you disavow links. Disavowing is the process of telling a search engine that you don't want your website to be associated with another site that is linking to your site. For instance, let's say I set up a really spammy web page full of links that I sell, and then I slap a link to your site on it. A search engine might think you paid for that, which is against its terms, slap a link to your site on it. A search engine might think you paid for that, which is against its terms, and would penalize your site's ranking. By disavowing, you tell the search engine, hey, look, we have nothing to do with that spammy page. Please don't consider it when you rank us. Disavowing links has been a part of an SEO

Starting point is 00:03:39 professional's job for more than a decade. But now, Microsoft says it will be removing the disavow links feature and its associated API. And it's happening soon, next month. What's the reason? Why, AI, of course. A Bing rep said they believe their AI is so good now, so adept at spotting bad sites, that it can figure it out on its own. Quoting an executive from the company, Bing has invested heavily in developing and improving our artificial intelligence capabilities,

Starting point is 00:04:10 which enables us to better understand the context and intent of links, as well as the trustworthiness and authority of their sources. We can now differentiate between natural and unnatural links, and we can ignore or discount the latter without affecting the former, unquote. For its part, Google has said for years that manually disavowing links you think are bad for your SEO doesn't actually need to be done, and in fact can hurt your ranking. They only recommend disavowing links when Google penalizes you, something known as a manual action. But Google still has a disavow functionality, at least for now.

Starting point is 00:04:53 Twitter Circles, or I guess X Circles now, is being shut down. The feature was a kind of knock off of Instagram's close friends functionality, which lets you create a subgroup of people and tweet privately only to them. Some people used it for family and friends, some to silo their interests, and so on. It actually had only been around since August of last year, launched right in the middle of the messy acquisition battle. This wasn't really a tool that marketers used. You could only have one circle, and it could only have 150 people in it, so it wasn't really good as a VIP club or anything like that. And it was buggy. This past spring, some of those private tweets meant only for people in a circle

Starting point is 00:05:33 were posted publicly. It's possible this is meant to push people toward paid subscriptions, where users can post privately to a group of paying users, X, of course, pocketing 3% of that. Unless you've made more than 50K, then X's cut jumps to 20%. But more than likely, they're just choosing to have what few engineers remain there spend less time on buggy software that not many people used. Circles will disappear at the end of next month.

Starting point is 00:06:10 Meanwhile, X's arch nemesis Threads is adding a couple of new tweaks, one which will be especially welcome news for social media managers. Many marketers juggle multiple Instagram accounts on their phone, one for themselves, maybe a Finsta, one or more for the brand they work for. On Instagram, you don't need to manually log out of one account and into another to manage them. It has a quick switcher where you tap and hold the profile icon and you can quickly switch to another account. That functionality is now in threads. The company didn't specify if there was a limit on the number of accounts you could quick switch with.

Starting point is 00:06:49 This was announced yesterday, the same day Facebook said they'd permit people to create multiple fake profiles and use them on the site. A peculiar shift from their policy on authentic identity. A policy the company claims is still somehow in effect, despite giving the official nod to inauthentic identities. So anyway, back to threads. Certainly welcome news for people who switch accounts often. Hopefully next up on marketers wishlist, hashtag discovery and an API. We have two quick stories, two, by the way, below the threshold required to bring in the lightning round music. First, Snapchat says its premium subscription now has 5 million users. That's up 20% since just this past June and is about five times as many as Twitter's premium subscription has. And Meta has introduced animated avatar stickers to WhatsApp. Users can now add moving

Starting point is 00:07:38 versions of their digital selves in chats. This is part of Meta's ongoing efforts to integrate avatars everywhere across its platform. Links to the full details of these stories and every story you hear in our podcast are available in our daily newsletter, which is completely free, and you can sign up to it by going to todayindigital.com or tapping the link in the show notes. And finally, no doubt you've heard about Amazon's problem with auto-generated, low-effort books being sold on its platform. The stories are endless. Travel guides recommending you visit places that don't exist. Cooking books that give you recipes which include highly toxic mushrooms.

Starting point is 00:08:21 Enterprising shysters are having chat GPT write terrible books, then upload them to Amazon hundreds at a time. They are, of course, a mix of nonsense and regurgitated blog posts, some of which I'm sure themselves written by AI. To combat this, Amazon this week said it will limit the number of books an author can upload in a specific time period, which is a great idea, really. I mean, even the fastest author can only churn out a decent book, what, once every week? If it's a really small book? Amazon's new book upload limit? Three books a day. Because that's a totally human achievable number of books you could write. And more than anything, I think this new limit signals Amazon's acceptance of AI generated books.

Starting point is 00:09:12 The reason should be obvious. They make money on them. Amazon still hasn't really figured any of this out. Just last week, they said authors must disclose to Amazon when AI was used to write a book. But it wasn't anything about enforcement or even disclosure to consumers. On the other hand, they pulled down some books that had been written by AI after media reports about the trend

Starting point is 00:09:32 started surfacing. More Starfield nonsense. So just skip to your next podcast if you couldn't care less. So Bethesda, which is the name of the company that does this, has got a really interesting way of having their games work. A lot of games, like Far Cry, the progress kind of goes in stages. They call them checkpoints. So if you mess something up, you've got to go back to the previous checkpoint. And that's frustrating at times, but, you know, it's the way games, I think, are supposed to be played. Bethesda games, like Starfield, like Fallout, like Skyrim, let you save at any point.

Starting point is 00:10:21 So just before a boss battle or just before you're about to do something stupid, you can create a point right there. And it's actually not well regarded in the gaming community. It's called save scumming and you're kind of looked down at as a not serious gamer by doing it. I am trying in this playthrough of Starfield

Starting point is 00:10:39 to not do it at all. To not save scum. And I so far I've done it, except I have an ethical quandary now. So last night my video game person was in a room full of friends of my video game person in a faction

Starting point is 00:10:55 that I'm in that I rather like. And my real life person, I, reached across the table to get a drink and my leg moved my controller and it started shooting started shooting my friends my faction now if you can imagine my faction's mad at me it's kind of destroyed a big part of the game that i was going to but it's opened up all of these other things and basically the game thinks i'm a bad guy now um so i don't know what to do do I save stuff? do I go back and pretend it didn't exist?

Starting point is 00:11:26 or do I play it like it's the real world and just like, well, oh well I shot a bunch of my friends I guess I gotta go from there anyway still enjoying the game sorry for talking about it so much that will do it for the week

Starting point is 00:11:41 today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of this Scunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme music by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday. The Garda Hall 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.

Starting point is 00:13:18 Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - A Totally Human-Achievable Number

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.