Today in Digital Marketing - Does Slowing Down Your Site Help Your Google Ranking?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. It is Tuesday, August 29th. Today, the SEO advice that sounds completely backwards, but does it work? A new benchmarking dashboard could help you avoid some uncomfortable client conversations. Click fraud is worse than you think. And on the ad-free premium podcast, which you can learn more about by tapping Go Premium in the show notes, Andrew Foxwell with a deep dive into Q4 planning, how offers should look, how do you test in a machine learning world, and Meta's new metric, brand reach saturation. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Sometimes marketing advice just seems backwards. Run ugly looking ads on Instagram and you'll get better results. Brands will get more views on TikTok by dropping high production values. Does the same apply to SEO advice? Here's a quick quiz to start us off today. Should you slow down your website to increase your time spent on page, which could increase your Google ranking? I'll have the answer at the end of today's episode. Instagram is once again borrowing another feature from a rival, this time, of course, TikTok.

Starting point is 00:01:43 And this is a big one. One of the most engaging features of TikTok is the ability to create a new video based on a comment left on a previous video. How might a brand use this? Someone comments asking whether your product is gluten-free, and you can make a new video answering the question with that comment visible in on-screen text. That is what Instagram is now bringing over to Stories. It's in testing right now, but soon you'll be able to swipe on the comment you want to highlight, tap Add to Story,

Starting point is 00:02:13 and the comment will show along with the original post in the Stories feed. No details on how wide a test this is or when it'll roll out publicly. Earlier this month, Instagram added a way to highlight fan-created reels posted through the Add Yours sticker challenge. Snapchat continues to dive headfirst into AI with a new generative AI feature called Dreams. This lets people create fantasy images of themselves, like as a superhero or a tuxedo-clad business executive or a mermaid. You may have seen these before on app stores. They all seem to come out the same week with ridiculously expensive by-the-week subscription packages. Others, like Remini, went a bit viral last month with people using them to create more professional-looking LinkedIn profile photos.

Starting point is 00:03:04 To get there on Snapchat, you'll go to Memories, and you should see a new tab for Dreams. You'll upload or take a few selfies, and then it will create a pack of eight images. After that, if you want more packs, they are $1 each. Don't go looking for it right now, though, because it is only in testing in Australia and New Zealand. It will begin rolling out to the rest of the world

Starting point is 00:03:22 over the next few weeks. Dreams joins MyAI, which shows up as a friend in your friend list, but is in fact a chatbot. Apparently, it can even send photos to you, though when I tried it, she kept claiming she would, but never did. Now even my artificial friends are dissing me. AI is getting more real world every day. platforms, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. You can get the average engagement rate, the impression trends, the most shared content by type like video, photos, carousel, and so on, the most engaged with content, and the most hashtags used during the month and week. Again, the URL is social-trends.agorapulse.com. And by way of disclosure, our agency has had a comp account with Agorapulse for several years now, which we use for monitoring a few internal social channels.

Starting point is 00:04:32 September traditionally marks the TV industry's awaited fall schedules and big advertising season. But this year stands out because of a now long-running writer's strike and a pivotal shift in the industry. Linear TV advertising has declined recently, as shown by the media giant's earning reports. This mirrors a change in viewer habits, with Nielsen noting record streaming numbers. The rise in streaming shouldn't be surprising. With original content and devices like Chromecast, Fire TV, and Roku, a shift towards streaming was of course anticipated. In July of last year,

Starting point is 00:05:06 streaming accounted for 35% of TV views. It was up to 39% this past July, surpassing both cable and broadcast. And as viewers migrate, advertisers follow, quoting Forbes. It tracks then that advertising would be losing steam for traditional TV. Advertisers follow the eyeballs.

Starting point is 00:05:27 If people are drifting away from cable and broadcast, then advertisers will as well. They'll find cheaper alternatives on digital, where the cost for reaching 1,000 consumers is lower. Plus, with platforms such as Disney Plus and Netflix adding ad tiers that have shown success, advertisers can follow viewers to their preferred place to watch. DoorDash says it plans to offer its restaurant partners a new service, phone orders. Rather than using the app, customers will be able to call into a number and place an order directly with a restaurant. But there's a catch. Those customers won't be speaking with humans. They'll be speaking with DoorDash's AI bots trained on the restaurant's menu.

Starting point is 00:06:12 The new system will also try to upsell customers. DoorDash, of course, is positioning this as a way to help restaurants take more orders during peak times when they might be too busy to answer the phone. It claims the system will let people bounce to a human operator if they want, though it wasn't clear on how easy it would be to do that. What was clear is that this is a white label product, so customers won't know that their voice is being logged by DoorDash. The company also didn't say whether that voice data would be used to train its systems.

Starting point is 00:06:44 DoorDash's current privacy policy was updated less than a month ago and says it can collect and use, quote, facial recognition, voice print, and other similar data that may be considered biometric data, unquote. 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.

Starting point is 00:07:17 Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Click fraud may make up more of your ad campaign's results than you might think. Analytics firm Pixelate says invalid traffic in open programmatic advertising averaged 17% in Q2. It should be noted that Pixelate sells fraud detection services, so it's not like they don't have a dog in this race. But if we are to take their numbers at face value, desktop web had the highest click fraud rate at

Starting point is 00:07:49 21%. Mobile web was 16%. Mobile apps were 13%. Where did the fake clicks come from? 57% came from ClickFarms set up specifically to do this. On mobile apps. ClickFarms accounted for only 20% of the fraudulent clicks. As for which is the most attractive ad format for bad actors, the very wide leaderboard banner ad, usually confined at the bottom of cheap mobile apps, accounted for 26%. That was double as many in mobile apps overall. In terms of businesses,

Starting point is 00:08:24 sites in healthcare had the highest rate of fraudulent ad clicks at a stunning 44%. Entertainment, government, arts, and regional desktop web domains were all around 30%. And you thought Karen from accounting doesn't show up to meetings now.

Starting point is 00:08:46 Google is working on a new feature for its Google Meet video conferencing. Not meeting at all. You'll be able to set a meeting to let its AI bot attend a meeting on your behalf. This apparently will be built right into the meeting invites that we've all seen. There will be a yes, no, maybe, and a new one that says, attend for me. If you click that, you'll be prompted to list a few things that you would have wanted to ask or say in the meeting, and the other human attendees

Starting point is 00:09:17 will see those notes during the meeting. If that is, there will be any human attendees. What happens if everyone on the meeting clicks that button and only the AI bots show up? Will they start having conversations with themselves? For now, it looks like the bots just record what's said. So I guess if only bots show up, nothing is actually said. Google says it's actually figured this out. And if everyone sends their AI bots, the meeting will just auto-cancel.

Starting point is 00:09:45 This is a ways out. It's not expected until next year and even then only for those accounts who opt in for their beta program. One piece of this that does actually sound helpful is that the AI will keep notes on what happened. So if you're a few minutes late, you can catch up by reading some bullet points, something that Zoom and Teams already have to some extent. Google says this note-taking part will be out in a few months. Google's Duet AI also includes some enhancements to its Business Suite software. All of this will come at an additional price. And that will bring us to the lightning round. Amazon has raised its free shipping threshold from $25 to $35 for non-prime customers in some areas. This change affects orders that weigh more than 20 pounds or are large in size. Amazon says this is to reflect the increased costs of delivering these items.

Starting point is 00:10:39 Meta has opened a beta test of Horizon Worlds on mobile devices. Horizon Worlds is their social virtual reality platform where users can create and explore 3D worlds. The beta test is invite-only and requires a meta account. And both X and LinkedIn have added support for Passkey. That's the new way of logging in without passwords. Passkey uses biometric verification to authenticate users across different apps and websites.

Starting point is 00:11:07 Oh, and as for the quiz, can you boost your Google ranking by slowing down your web pages, which will make people stay longer on your site? Theoretically, this could work if time spent on site were a ranking factor. But as Google has said many times over the years, time spent on a page is not a ranking factor. Quoting seroundtable.com, Google has said for years and years that it does not use behavioral factors for ranking outside of any of the page experience system metrics.

Starting point is 00:11:41 This has been the overwhelmingly consistent messaging from Google for over a decade. But page speed is a ranking factor, most recently with core web vital metrics, unquote. So artificially slowing down your website won't help your ranking, but it will hurt it. All right, an energy drink update. For those of you following along, I tried to cut coffee out. Not that I didn't like coffee. I actually really like coffee. But the creamer that I put into it, like every day it was 160 calories.

Starting point is 00:12:20 So I cut those calories out by switching to energy drinks like Sugar-Free Monster and Sugar-Free Red Bull. And I actually really liked them. And they were like 10 calories or something. And then I ended up with like a whole bunch of cans. And each can is like $3.95 here in Canada. So now I'm on powder. I'm on like energy drink, 10-calorie powder. It's actually not bad, I have to say.

Starting point is 00:12:47 Maybe I found the solution. Get some soda water in there to make it feel like an energy drink, I guess. Anyway, that's it for today. I'm Todd Mappin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. And drink to the bottom of the glass.

Starting point is 00:13:00 Here's to the bottom of the glass. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh. We all have trials, our problems, our legions, but the good Lord made hell for our reason.

Today in Digital Marketing - Does Slowing Down Your Site Help Your Google Ranking?

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