Today in Digital Marketing - Don't Believe the (Mobile) Hype

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, October 7th, 2019. Happy World Habitat Day. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, is TikTok starting to piss off its top influencers? Turns out mobile conversions are not all the rage. Google confirms that backlinks do not expire. Sort of.

Starting point is 00:00:19 And oh my, what chaos a single no-index meta tag can bring. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Cue the outrage. TikTok is using videos uploaded by its users in ads now. One user found his video being used in a TikTok ad on Snapchat. Snapchat? We'll get to that in a moment. And he was, of course, a little surprised, saying that he had not agreed to have had his work turned into an ad. Articles were written over the weekend, angry tweets were

Starting point is 00:00:48 sent. You know how this goes. Of course, like most of these situations, the user had, in fact, consented to this use in the terms of service. There's really two issues here for us marketers. First, missed opportunity for TikTok to not reach out to this guy first, maybe pay him a little. It's more about cementing good relations with your influencers. Nobody likes a surprise, even if you have the legal technical right to do it. But second, TikTok is advertising on Snapchat? No, wait, let me rephrase this. Snapchat is letting TikTok advertise on their platform?

Starting point is 00:01:24 Yes. And apparently TikTok is the number one advertiser on Snapchat. And number two on YouTube. I don't know, maybe I'm a little backwards here, but if I owned Snapchat, there is no way I would let the platform which is eating away at my market share advertise. Fox News doesn't get to run ads on CNN. Just this week, Disney banned Netflix ads from running across its television networks. Weird. You don't need to dig around too deep in

Starting point is 00:01:55 your Google Analytics to see that mobile traffic is absolutely dominant on the web these days. And yes, mobile conversions are still growing, but a new study from digital agency AcuraCast shows that desktop is still the king among conversions. Quoting Marketingland, overall, desktop visitors convert 60% more than mobile visitors, and conversions from a desktop device are worth 93% more than mobile conversions on average. For B2C companies, conversion value was calculated as the average order value, and for B2B, it was calculated as the lead value and propensity to buy. Marketingland says, as a rule, people still tend to browse on their smartphones

Starting point is 00:02:41 and buy on the desktop. The study followed 10 million ad clicks across 100 accounts over a full year period, ending this past August. Google confirming last week in a Webmaster's Hangout that backlinks to your brand's website won't really expire in the Google index, though they do decay over time. Here's Google's John Mueller. They don't expire. What does happen, though, is that,

Starting point is 00:03:10 especially if you're talking about a large website that's growing regularly, then the pages that links are on, over time they get even deeper and deeper within this website. So, for example, if you have a link from CNN and it's in an article that's linked on the home page, then that's something that's really important for us.

Starting point is 00:03:30 On the other hand, if this article is maybe a year or two later is somewhere in the archive at CNN, then that article itself is not something that we would find that important anymore. So it's not that the link expires after a certain period of time, but just often that the page where that link is on, that becomes less and less relevant over time, if it's on a site that is growing fairly regularly. By the way, if this Google Index stuff interests you, it's worth

Starting point is 00:03:56 checking out John's regular Office Hours series on YouTube. Look for the channel called Google Webmasters. If your business uses Patreon in its revenue stream, you may have noticed a drop in traffic or even a drop in new supporters in the last few days. It turns out someone there, Patreon, accidentally removed their entire website from Google's index. Yeah, you can do that if you want, or if you're not careful, you just pop the no index meta tag onto the header file of your site and boom, you are off Google. And Bing, and probably all the other search engines too. It only took Patreon a couple of hours to fix once a Twitter user alerted them to the issue.

Starting point is 00:04:35 But it's possible that it was out of search engines for more than two days. Okay, lightning round. Instagram is removing the followers tab this week. Did you even know it was there? It's kind of creepy. It let people see what posts you were liking, what comments you were editing, but it will be gone soon. Google Ads now surfaces user-generated photos in your product reviews.

Starting point is 00:04:57 It's already live on mobile in the US, but don't worry, they don't just start slapping the images on your reviews. There's a new schema you have to add, and you need to be part of their product ratings program. In this new fake news world, Google says it's raised the bar in letting publishers into the Google News program, giving them more hoops they have to jump through. And Snapchat has added a way for us marketers to see what discussion topics are trending among its users. It's called the Snapchatter Report, and it's based on discussion

Starting point is 00:05:25 trends over the preceding months. And that is what you missed today in digital marketing, brought to you by EngageQ.com. If your podcast app has a way to review and rate podcasts, and you value an ad-free daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to do that. It really does help. I'm Todd Maffin. You can follow me on Twitter at ToddMaffin.com, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Don't Believe the (Mobile) Hype

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