Today in Digital Marketing - Does Google Hate This Headline?

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, brands keep getting woke, but consumers aren't buying it. LinkedIn adds two new ad types B2B marketers will love. Why augmented reality is the future of e-commerce. The opaque box that is core web vitals. And the U.S. state that has banned banning. It's Tuesday, May 25th, 2021. Happy Towel Day. And no, your podcast player didn't skip a day. Yesterday was a stat holiday here in Canada, so that's why you didn't hear a show. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageU Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:57 The conspiracy theories are everywhere. You won't rank high in Google if you use multiple H1 tags. Not true, by the way. You'll drop in ranking if your title tag doesn't have at least 14 words. Also not true. But what about this belief? Punctuation. Today's quiz is adding punctuation after a link bad for your SEO. For instance, if your URLs have a dot at the end of each URL because that's how your CMS makes

Starting point is 00:01:26 them, are you losing SEO rank? The answer later in today's episode. Three quarters of brands could disappear and consumers wouldn't care. That's the finding of a study by the Havas Media Group. They do this research biannually, and it gets worse. This is the 12th year in a row in which the value of brands has declined. What's driving this? Maybe cynicism. While 73% of people polled said brands need to act for the good of society and the planet, 71% think companies won't deliver on their lofty ethical promises. Even so, the number of people who prefer brands that work purpose into their messaging has gone up 10 points from 2019 to 64%.

Starting point is 00:02:17 A little more than half will pay more for brands that take a stand. Quoting the study, historically, companies have been looking after people's functional and personal needs, but brands now face a bigger challenge. The more claims they make to be delivering change at a collective, societal level, and the more those promises are left unfulfilled, the wider the gap between what we expect and what we actually get, and the deeper the cynicism." The report also confirmed other research that shows Gen Z expect brands to practice inclusion

Starting point is 00:02:49 and work toward reducing inequalities across race and sexuality. The study pulled 395,000 consumers around the world. Well, file this under it took them long enough, LinkedIn is finally rolling out the ability to boost posts. Boosting, of course, a kind of quick and dirty way to throw a small budget behind a post and give it more reach. Quoting the company, starting today, you can easily boost any high-performing organic post directly from your LinkedIn page. With the click of a button and a few payment details, you can give your most engaging or time-sensitive content a little boost to quickly expand your audience reach, unquote.

Starting point is 00:03:30 Like Facebook's version or Instagram's or hell, even TikTok now, there are a limited number of objectives. In LinkedIn's case, they are brand awareness, video views, engagement, and website visits. Your audience targeting is also a little dumbed down. You get to pick from job seniorities, job functions, company industries, membership in a Facebook group, or one of your preset audiences. Also, they're adding a new regular type of ad, events. These will show up in the LinkedIn feed and will help you promote your event by highlighting key event details like date, time, and how to join your event. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, LinkedIn has been working to refine its virtual event

Starting point is 00:04:09 options over the past year in response to increased demand due to the pandemic. The platform made its events option available for all company pages last April, then added live streaming for events a month later, providing new ways to facilitate connection in the app, and host virtual events that are linked back to your company presence, unquote. And finally, they are also updating their mobile page analytics offerings, so now you'll get the same insights that the desktop version provides. Snapchat today published new data about the use of branded augmented reality to influence shopping behavior. First, no surprise here, Snapchat says the use of AR is rising.

Starting point is 00:04:51 According from the study, across the four markets measured, more than half of people aged 13 to 49 claimed to have used AR in the past, and nearly one-third have used branded AR. And this behavior is here to stay. More than three in four of all consumers believe AR technology will play a role in how people shop in the next five years, unquote. Also, and this is a big one, those branded AR experiences do seem to increase purchase intent. Almost two-thirds of consumers polled who've used branded AR for shopping said they are

Starting point is 00:05:23 more likely to purchase after that experience. Snapchat has everything to gain here, of course. They were the first major app out of the gate which used AR as a foundation both for fun and for shopping. This study polled 1,000 people aged 13 to 49 across the US, the UK, France, and Saudi Arabia. As you may know, Google has only been indexing the mobile version of websites lately. So if you have a desktop version that differs from what your mobile visitors see,

Starting point is 00:05:52 there's a good chance that version of your site is not indexed at Google. But today we learned it's not all said and done. This all started more than four years ago, and Google said the deadline would be last September. Then they extended that deadline to March. Now, Google says, they're still not done. Apparently, they are working through some issues with some sites, so it's all a bit behind. Still with Google for a moment, another upcoming change everyone's talking about are the new Core Web Vitals metrics, which will come with next month's page experience update. We know what's in those metrics, how fast your page loads,

Starting point is 00:06:28 how soon someone can interact with it, and how much your page layout jumps around. But sadly, apparently, we will not learn exactly how those numbers add up. Google's John Mueller on Twitter said, quote, whether two red plus one green equals three yellow is not something we plan on documenting or announcing. It's like if one word in title plus one in body equals two keywords in H1, chances are there are tiny differences, but they're not by definition stable nor documented, unquote. This isn't anything new, of course. Google doesn't give away the weightings on other ranking factors, lest we filthy digital marketers exploit that knowledge for fun and profit. One thing we do know, despite all the buzz you're hearing about this upcoming algorithm update,

Starting point is 00:07:13 Google says this really won't have that much of an impact on sites' ranking. Over to Instagram now, where the photocopiers continue to churn away. They're testing a new tab in the app to let people look for music tracks to add to their Reels. You know, just like TikTok. Tapping through shows you what other videos have used that music, gives you a way to start a Reels video using that audio. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, Will that work and get more people engaged with Reels clips?

Starting point is 00:07:45 It probably will to some degree, but whether that will be enough to get people away from TikTok is probably the bigger question. And on that front, it seems unlikely. Last week, new data from App Annie showed that users are now spending as much time in TikTok on average as people are on Facebook. Second, they also appear ready to also copy the whole creator fund thing, where people who make videos are given a portion of a giant pool of money doled out by view count. YouTube has a $100 million fund. TikTok has a $100 million fund. TikTok has a $200 million fund and say they plan to boost it to a billion dollars in the U.S. over the next three years and more than double that globally. Snapchat gives away $1 million a day.

Starting point is 00:08:36 So, yes, Instagram, never too proud to just straight up copy what's working, is doing one too. They're calling theirs the Bonuses Program. Judging from screenshots seen in the wild, there would be certain thresholds in view counts people will need to reach. They've also apparently been paying people to cross over to their platform from TikTok. Side note, Pinterest today said its $500,000 creator fund helped its participating creators get nearly three times more impressions on their idea pins.

Starting point is 00:09:04 That's their TikTok clone. And gained 72% more monthly viewers. And finally, Instagram is adding some new insights data for both Reels and Instagram Lives. This is very welcome, since the analytics on Reels were pretty anemic. Soon you'll get data on total plays, accounts reached, likes, comments, shares, and saves. For live broadcasts, you'll get accounts reached, peak concurrent viewers, shares, and saves. For live broadcasts, you'll get accounts reached, peak concurrent viewers, comments, and shares. They're also giving new preset time frame options in Insights,

Starting point is 00:09:32 so now you can view beyond the current last seven days and last 30 days options. Of course, these Insights are only available to business and creator accounts. Not directly related to digital marketing, but I thought this was interesting. The American state of Florida has a new law which bans banning. Florida Senate Bill 7072 now restricts social media platforms

Starting point is 00:10:00 from banning candidates for state offices or any specific news outlet. If they do anyway, both the users and the state will have the right to sue with fines as high as a quarter of a million dollars per day. The law will almost certainly be challenged in court based on the First Amendment. Quoting TechCrunch, The First Amendment argument starts with the idea that although social media are very unlike newspapers or book publishers, they are protected in much the same way by the Constitution from government interference.

Starting point is 00:10:31 Free speech is a term that is interpreted extremely liberally, but if a company's spending money is considered a protected expression of ideas, it's not a stretch to suggest that same company applying a policy of hosting or not hosting content should be as well. If it is, then the government is prohibited from interfering with it beyond very narrow definitions of unprotected speech. Think shouting fire in a crowded theater. That would sink Florida's law on constitutional grounds. Who would have thought the Lincoln Bioservices would become as huge an industry as it has? They were born from apps like Instagram and Twitter that only provided a single link for people to tap. Since then, sites like Linktree, Shorby, Milkshake, Tap.bio, Bio.fm, and Campsite have all been successful in building a business.

Starting point is 00:11:26 Now, another one, Beacons, has raised a $6 million seed round. Beacons launched only last September. They have a generous free plan and a paid version. They also make money by taking a cut of sales through its links to digital storefronts, and it even supports email and SMS marketing. Oh, and as for the quiz, is adding punctuation after a link bad for your SEO?

Starting point is 00:11:57 The answer? Nope, not at all. Google search advocate John Mueller slapped that down on Twitter over the weekend, saying, quote, No, we don't give any special consideration to punctuation after a link. I'm not aware of punctuation next to links ever being a factor. However, I'm pretty certain that if I say, Google doesn't use punctuation next to links,

Starting point is 00:12:16 someone will take that as confirmation that we do use it. Yes, it's Towel Day today, the day that some people pay tribute to the author Douglas Adams. Adams was best known for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The towel thing is a section of the book that talks about, well, how useful a towel is. And really, he's not wrong. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Does Google Hate This Headline?

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