Today in Digital Marketing - Go home, Twitter. You're drunk.

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

On today’s show: Better check your brand’s position in Google today Facebook adds real-time product catalog updating Twitter once again proves it can’t be a decent ad platform Bye Kik. We hardly knew ya. And... introducing... the lightening round! Here’s what you missed… today, in digital marketing. Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's Tuesday, September 24th. I'm Todd Maffin. On today's show, better check your brand's position in Google today. Facebook adds real-time product catalog updating. Twitter once again proves it can't be a decent ad platform. And by kick, we hardly knew ya. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. It's a big day in Google land. Today is one of their major algorithm shakeup days. Although Google tweaks its algorithm pretty much every day,

they only do major updates a couple of times a year. And today is one of those days. So what's changed? You are not allowed to advertise products. No, I'm just kidding. But you do have to be smarter about your content. Google's current obsession is actually three obsessions, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, or EAT, eat, as Google calls it. How do you make sure your company's web pages don't derank today?

Here are some questions Google recommends that you ask yourself. Does your website's content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis? That word original is the key here. Now they want to see you write from your own experience and expertise, not just regurgitate other people's stuff. Is the page headline or title a descriptive and helpful summary of the content? In other words, stop with the clickbait. Google says now it's even important your content doesn't have any spelling errors. So what does a marketing person or brand manager do? First, don't panic. It just started rolling out today. Give it another week or so, then jump into your Google search console and see if your performance has taken a hit. If so, I would track down the most popular pages on your site

and make sure the writing fits this new standard. Some really good news for marketers who use Facebook's product catalogs in the Ads Manager. As of this coming Monday, you should see faster inventory data uploads. Now, it'll still get your inventory information on the schedule you previously gave it, like hourly or daily or weekly. But now, and this is really cool,

updates will also upload to your catalog as soon as Facebook detects a change to your data feed on your server. That's a big deal. And even better, if you're running ads that use that inventory data and information on that product changes, Facebook will update the ad live. This new instant update mode will be turned on by default. If for some reason you don't want it, just go to your Facebook business manager, go to product data sources, then select your data feed, and then settings. If you run Google Ads and have relied on the average position metric, that tells how high in the ad block your ads have been appearing in relation to other ads. Well, get ready for some change. Google will be sunsetting the average position metric this Monday.

It will be replaced by four shiny new metrics, including search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate. Essentially, these will reflect the actual placement of your ad on the page rather than the position of your ad compared to others. You may recognize this from when Facebook retired the simple relevancy score, which used to be a scale of 0 to 10 and replaced it with three new metrics. Anyway, all that to say, if you have reports or filters or scripts or rules that rely on the average position metric, best get into your Google Ads platform and tighten those up. Twitter. They can't make a basic self-service ad tool to save their life, but man, are they good at buzzwords.

They've launched something called Twitter Next, which they say is their new advertising service for brands that will, no, no, not promote things, but, quote, create human-centric ideas worth talking about, unquote. They say they'll partner with big brands, too. I swear to God I'm not making this up. Quote, leverage cutting-edge tech to power Twitter's most innovative brand activations. So what does that actually mean? Who the hell knows? Apparently better data insights, maybe using threads a little bit differently, probably more ad reps to help people with their campaigns.

Honestly, it was hard to decipher their announcement today between all the breathless corporate doublespeak. Like Twitter's next tagline, which apparently will be, learn from the past, live in the moment, and focus on what can be. Are these people drunk when they come up with this stuff? Hey, Twitter, I have an idea. How about focus on making a self-service ad tool that works? I still can't figure out how to place a basic Twitter ad using your platform, and I do this stuff for a living. Speaking of drunken behavior, Kik Messenger's CEO apparently drunk-texted a reporter by accident the other day

and let it slip that he was quitting the firm. But the real news here is the Kik Messenger app itself. It's going to. Yeah, for real. Kip says it will shut down the app permanently as it prepares for a battle with American regulators over its cryptocurrency. Did you even know they had a cryptocurrency? It's hard to imagine this will have much of an impact for digital marketers.

In its heyday, say, down 2016, Kip had about 300 million users and was used by about 40% of teens in the US. They did have advertising products like branded GIFs, product suggestion bots, customized quizzes, that sort of thing. But these days, of course, it's a whole lot of Instagram and a little smidge of Snapchat on the side. Bye, Kik. We hardly knew ya.

An interesting video platform out there is doing some smart things Bye, Kik. The way it works is the creator uploads a full-length video, then their system recuts the videos into different versions, shares them on Facebook and Snapchat, and watches the engagement levels of the different versions. It also A-B tests different thumbnails, different titles. When it finds a winning combination, only then will it release its final winning video on its platform. Some brands are singing its praises. One creator brand called Reaction Times had 800,000 Facebook fans before signing up. Now, 3 million fans. And now for the lightning round.

The notoriously private Vine 2.0, oh I'm sorry, TikTok, let it slip that it had 500 million users Wait, what? Yeah, half a billion A lot of that in Asia The Chinese company is opening the door to brands and so far have worked with the NFL, Nike, Samsung and more People who market bands and other music artists may want to check their Spotify artist app this morning. The company has added new analytics like real-time stats on how many people are playing their songs at this moment. Snapchat will now let you run ads up to three minutes long, way up from the previous 10-second cap that had been the maximum since they started taking ads in the first place.

Don't worry if you can't get Google's Remove URL tool to work. Seems like it's on the fritz today. YouTube is moving its TrueView ad product to the main feed. Now, TrueView only charges you when a viewer watches at least 30 seconds of your video or clicks on any interactive element. Nice little touch on Google's ad platform. Now you can set up conversion events right in the workflow of creating a campaign. You'll connect the ad to the event in the workflow, then you get an email with the steps required to connect it to your website. And finally, speaking of Google ads, they will be adding store visits as a conversion event within a couple of days. I really hope it's not the same as Facebook's implementation, which requires you to have multiple locations before you can use that optimization. Come on, Facebook. Are you drunk too?

Well, if you're listening to this on the web and have not yet subscribed, be sure to do that. Today in Digital Marketing is published every weekday. You can find direct one-click links for your podcast app at bit.ly slash today in digital. That's bit.ly slash today in digital. And that is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by engageq.com. I'm Todd Paffin. See you tomorrow.