Today in Digital Marketing - Everything Is Made Up, and the Points Don't Matter

Starting point is 00:00:01 Today, Amazon's secret plans to take on Shopify, Twitter joins the reactions crowd, YouTube offers brand safety managers a tiny slice of peace of mind, and the new Microsoft ad score, which means literally nothing. It's Friday, September 10th, 2021. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 465. Every so often in the halls of conferences, in between meetings at the office, you hear the SEO nerds quietly conferring with each other. You know what's working now?

Starting point is 00:00:38 Putting your keywords in H6 tags and putting your H6 at the top and CSSing it to look like an H1 tag. Pass it on. Little tips to try to game Google. These tips come and go, and some move out of the tinfoil hat crowd and become adopted as mainstream SEO wisdom, even though nobody's tested it, or sometimes even though Google themselves says, no, that's not how our ranking system works at all.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Among the whispered tips that have been circulating for years now is metadata. Specifically, putting your business's location in your image metadata, then uploading it to your Google business profile. Do that, say the SEO nerds, and you'll rank higher. It sounds like a lot of effort, but is the tinfoil hat crowd onto something? Does it actually work? The Friday quiz, does putting location metadata into the images you upload to your Google My Business profile

Starting point is 00:01:40 help you to rank higher in Google? Somebody actually did a study on this. We will have the answer and the study's author later in the episode. As of this week, there is a simpler way to understand how well configured your Microsoft ads account is. Their ads platform now shows what they call an optimization score. This number is basically a score sheet of how many of Microsoft's AI recommendations you've implemented regarding things like bidding, keywords, targeting, spend, ads, extensions, and so on. Yes, it's very similar to Google's version, which has been around for a couple of years now. And often, AI gets things

Starting point is 00:02:22 wrong. As anyone who's ever looked at machine learning generated recommendations in an ad account can tell you. It'll find an underperforming ad set and recommend that you quadruple the budget there because somewhere in its code it applied some assumptions that might be right for most accounts, but not yours. After all, AI can't know the nuances of your audiences, or a unique funnel approach, or the fact that Dave in marketing can't wrap his head around video still, and so you're running still images when everyone from the receptionist up knows it's the wrong play. Nevertheless, the math on this new optimization score is pretty simple. If you apply a recommendation that has a score uplift of 10%, your account's optimization score increases by 10%. Applying all the recommendations can get you to 100% for your account.

Starting point is 00:03:11 There is a somewhat peculiar workaround, though. Microsoft says in addition to accepting the recommendations, you can also just dismiss them. That, too, will get you a higher optimization score, which might lead some to wonder, if I'm dismissing your recommendations without implementing them, how is my account more optimized exactly? So in the end, Microsoft Ads' new optimization score is

Starting point is 00:03:42 a lot like the old game show, Whose Line Is It Anyway? where everything is made up and the points don't matter. Some new features on their way from YouTube for content marketers. First, we're getting insight for evergreen videos. That's the informal name for videos that stay popular for an extended amount of time. They started testing this last month. It is now rolling out to everyone. Second, trending hashtags,

Starting point is 00:04:12 giving us a sense of what topics are proving to have the fastest growth. For now, this is only on mobile and only in the US. Third, some new brand safety controls in the form of AdSense blocking. This will let you specify which ads or types of ads you do not want running on your brand's YouTube channel. This was available before, but only for channels in their partner network. Now they are expanding it out to their multi-channel affiliate networks as well. Fourth, the ability to bulk edit video chapters. This is a really nice upgrade from the recently introduced chapters system.

Starting point is 00:04:41 Some videos are having chapters created automatically. So if YouTube did this and you want to make a mass fix, you should be able to indicate a bunch of videos where you want this disabled. And finally, you should soon be able to appeal the dreaded yellow icons via the Studio mobile app instead of only by desktop. The yellow icon indicates when a video's monetization is disabled. This should be out to all partner accounts by the end of the month. Amazon is said to be working on creating its own point-of-sale system,

Starting point is 00:05:14 one that can process both online orders and in-store orders. And even more interestingly, they plan to sell the platform to third-party sellers. The system apparently will also let merchants manage their inventory and will offer Amazon's Palm scanning payment technology. The move is said to be designed to lure merchants away from Shopify and coax them onto Amazon's system. Grandview Research says the global POS market will grow from 9.3 billion last year to nearly 20 billion by 2028. The Amazon POS is still being developed, and it is not known when they will launch it publicly.

Starting point is 00:05:57 One of the nice subtle things Facebook added a few years back were reactions. Previously, we only had one reaction for comments or posts, and that was like. The like button is still there, of course, but underneath it lies love, haha, oh my god, wow, and a few others. And these reactions on the paid media side can be used to get a more nuanced understanding of how people feel about your creative or your messaging. It is no doubt also being used internally by Facebook as an algorithmic ranking factor in determining content distribution. Others copied the idea. Hell, even grumpy old LinkedIn uses hover reactions now.

Starting point is 00:06:33 And so, perhaps predictably, Twitter has decided it finally will jump on the reactions bandwagon too. It's been in testing for the last few months. They are now rolling out a countrywide test of tweet reactions. The downside? That country is Turkey. I mean, unless you're in Turkey, then they're no bully for you. The test shows four new emoji reactions. Thinking, crying, laughing, and clapping. We knew this was coming because this past spring,

Starting point is 00:07:01 Twitter conducted a pretty widely distributed survey with different sets of reactions, asking people which set of four they'd prefer to see. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, Of course, the counter to this is that these are largely vanity metrics, which will give users yet another meaningless scoreboard to compete on, lessening the overall platform experience by trivializing contributions. In general, likes and follower counts contribute to the same, as acknowledged by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself, but reactions at least provide some additional nuance and a broader indicator of how others are responding to a comment or post. Really, if you're going to have likes, you may as well have reactions. And while there is also a risk that response emojis can be used in negative ways as well, by limiting which options are included, Twitter can negate this.

Starting point is 00:07:49 Note there are no clearly negative options within the current reaction test set. Unquote. 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.

Starting point is 00:08:22 Join free at Rakuten.ca. 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.C-A. And back to the Friday quiz. Does adding geotag metadata to your images in your Google business profile improve your Google ranking? To answer that question, I'm joined by Joy Hawkins, owner of the Sterling Sky Agency. Hi, Joy. Hi, Todd. So our production coordinator, Sarah, has actually kept the answer away from me on this one. So I'm

Starting point is 00:08:55 going to take a shot at it and say that yes, it does help, but not by much. Am I right? Well, in our test, we weren't able to find any impact whatsoever. So if there was an impact, it was so small that it wasn't measurable. So we found pretty much nothing. I would have thought that Google wanted to reward behavior that they want you to do, like putting your geotags in place with increased rankings. Does that not happen? Yeah, well, something to keep in mind is I hear a lot of best practices that, you know, Google says you should do this, but it doesn't actually do anything. So it's always important to kind of watch what they do, not what they say. But in this case, I think the main thing is that when you add a photo to a listing, Google

Starting point is 00:09:35 already knows where it's located because it's, you're literally adding it to a listing that has an address on it. So adding additional information, you're not giving Google any info that they don't already have. That's a good point. What about on the flip side of that information that they don't necessarily have that stuff on your website? So what about if you were to add geotags to photos on your website? Yeah, we tried that as well. And we were actually checking to see if it had any impact organically, like in the localized organic results or the local pack, again, found nothing measurable.

Starting point is 00:10:06 I was kind of surprised by that one. I thought maybe it would be like a small minor thing. But yeah, just like nothing that we could actually see. No traffic increases or anything like that either. Joy, tell me about your agency. Yeah, so I have a team of around 20 employees in the US and Canada. And all we do is local SEO and trying to get more traffic for small businesses from Google. Thank you for joining us on the Friday Quiz, Joy.

Starting point is 00:10:29 Yeah, thanks for having me. Joy Hawkins owns the Sterling Sky Agency in Toronto. They are at sterlingsky.ca. And look for their very detailed blog post about this topic called, Does Geotagging Photos Influence Ranking? Again, they're at sterlingsky.ca. Can nobody make a decent monitor? This is my question now, because I've been through three monitors, and right out of the box, they haven't worked in some way.

Starting point is 00:11:00 I don't mean like I didn't like the way the stand looked or anything like that. I mean, they straight up did not work properly. I just got one in from Bank, B-E-N-Q, I don't know how to pronounce that. Anyway, on the right hand side, giant blue bar, and then all of the texts completely squished up against the side. And, you know, I tried DisplayPort, I tried USB-C, I tried HDMI, it's all still there. I call support and support doesn't have no idea. And then they're basically, well, here's an RMA number, that's all I can do. Like, honestly, how hard is it to make a monitor? Was this crap happening 15, 20 years ago? Oh, well, here's an RMA number. That's all I can do. Like, honestly, how hard is it to make a monitor? Was this crap happening 15, 20 years ago? Oh, God, I sound old.

Starting point is 00:11:30 A programming note here. The bonus episode that we had scheduled for premium newsletter subscribers about Google Ad account audits will still happen. It will happen next weekend. We had some lingering technical problems. So we will be getting that to you in one week's time. I'm not giving up. That's it for the week. lingering technical problems. So we will be getting that to you in one week's time. That's it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital

Starting point is 00:11:50 on the unceded territories of the Sunemu First Nation on beautiful Vancouver Island. Production support and fact checking by Sarah Gill. Theme composer Mark Blevis is changing the minds of pretenders while chasing the clouds away.

Starting point is 00:12:03 Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll talk to you on Monday. Wilco has it. The TV fun game with extra features for everyone, youngster or pro. There's automatic scoring and not just one game, but four. You can choose tennis, or hockey, handball, or squash.

Starting point is 00:12:35 To increase the challenge, switch to a faster ball speed, and a sharper angle. Even change the bat size. The TV fun game with extra features is at we'll call now 5988 it's not over yet. I'm not giving up. I'm not giving up.

Today in Digital Marketing - Everything Is Made Up, and the Points Don't Matter

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