Today in Digital Marketing - Google’s "[Exact Match]" = Kinda Generally Similar (You Know, More or Less)

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Facebook pulls yet another analytics tool used by marketers... The biggest challenge yet to Google's new cookie-replacement... Core Web Vitals is delayed... Podcasts come to the world's largest social network.... And when is an Exact Match not "exact"? When it's a Google ad campaign.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a DAILY email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterPodcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin the Community: Slack or DiscordEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Get this as a daily email newsletterLeave a VoicemailToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, Facebook pulls yet another analytics tool used by marketers, the biggest challenge yet to Google's new cookie replacement, core web vitals is delayed, podcasts come to the world's largest social network, and when is an exact match not exact? When it's in your Google ad campaign. It's Monday, April 19th, 2021. Happy Independence Day, Venezuela. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. One of the first things people who audit e-commerce sites look for are trust seals.

You know, those little icons or graphics from Trustpilot or the Better Business Bureau. The idea being that they are globally recognized as meaning you can trust the website you're on. It's also been widely believed that having these seals on your website helps your SEO. After all, part of Google's code looks for a site's trustworthiness. These seals must help that, right? Today's quiz, are trust seals a good way to improve the trustworthy metric that Google uses to consider how high or low you rank? The answer, later in today's episode. An interesting discussion started up over the weekend in the circles of people who run PPC campaigns on Google.

As you may know, Google has three ways that you can use to match keywords, broad match, phrase match, and exact match, the latter being the most precise. If you only want to pay for clicks on the search term, blue discount shoes for men, then you could make that an exact match search. And that's the only thing that'll fire, those exact words, in that exact order. That's why they named it Exact Match, after all. But over the weekend, people started reporting that Google's been taking more liberties in what they allow Exact Match to show for. For instance, if you use Exact Match for the phrase shoes for men, it seems Google will match similar phrases like shoes men, men's shoes,

and shoes for a man. In other words, rather than exact match being, well, exact, it's becoming more of a meaning match or intent match. It turns out this is actually a change Google made in 2018. Indeed, that announcement back then used that shoes for men example. So how do you get an exact match? The short answer is you can't. Instead, Google will trigger on searches that are the same meaning or the same intent as the keyword, which is frustrating. One of the most unfortunate trends in the online marketing space is the platforms believing that their machine learning is smarter than all of us. And if we wanted a very precise search, Google's reaction is, nah, you didn't really want it that precise. Here, we'll just fix this up for you.

Please, platforms, stop. We're not idiots. If you want to run a recommendation banner across the top suggesting we loosen up our search, by all means. You want to send us an email about it? Go right ahead. But if you want us to believe that your machine learning makes your platform smart, then stop trying to dumb down what we can do with it. Meanwhile, over on the Google search side of the company, they have announced they've pushed back the launch of the Page Experience algorithm update.

This is the one that would introduce the three-part core web vitals as ranking signals. It was originally scheduled to go live about a month from now. That's now been postponed an additional month, so they're looking at mid-June now. Even when it kicks in, it won't be at full strength. Quoting from Google, Page Experience won't play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August. You can think of it as if you are adding flavoring to a food

you're preparing. Rather than add all the flavor at once into the mix, we'll be slowly adding it all over this time period. Unquote. A brief recap, Core Web Vitals is a series of three indicators, how fast your page loads, how soon someone can interact with it, and how much the layout jumps around. It's less a score and more of a pass or fail.

Google is quick to remind people that Core Web Vitals is only one of hundreds of ranking signals and its introduction should not cause massive changes in the index. By the way, a new page experience report is now available in Google Search Console, which lets you measure your own Core Web Vals and combine them with other signals like how mobile-friendly your site is and whether you use HTTPS. On Thursday, Facebook announced it would remove Facebook Analytics. On Friday, it said it would kill off Audience Insights. And over the weekend, it announced it will be deleting yet another tool that marketers have relied on, this time Facebook Attribution. Their attribution service helped you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns across publishers' devices and channels. You could compare how your campaigns were performing both on and off Facebook, all from the conversions you'd already set up in your Pixel or your app.

But never mind any of that, because Facebook will stop using the statistical modeling that it used to estimate conversions, that modeling was only introduced a year ago, and will just straight up delete the tool entirely in August. To their credit, Facebook finally put on their big boy pants and actually sent an email out to some advertisers about this, rather than relying on their big boy pants and actually sent an email out to some advertisers about this, rather than relying on their usual communication strategy of, I've got it here somewhere, ah, here it is, not communicating. They say they'll be building a new attribution tool because they're, quote, committed to effective and accurate measurement.

Yes, Facebook's move is likely tied to the industry move away from third-party data. It's why Google raced to launch its own replacement, which they call FLOC, F-L-O-C, stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. It's currently out in the wild and testing. It's not been without its haters, though. The DuckDuckGo browser, the Brave browser, just a couple of the tools that say they'll block FLOC. And now a potentially huge block from WordPress, the web CMS that runs more than two out of every five websites on the planet. The company today announcing they consider Google's Flock a security risk and are thinking

about blocking it by default on all WordPress sites. A proposal being considered would disable Flock on WordPress sites in their upcoming version 5.8, slated for July release. Flock, you may recall, will work by shifting the tracking of consumer behavior from third-party cookies to the browser, where they'll group people into buckets of interests and activities which advertisers can use to target. You, as a web user, would travel around the web with the kind of passport that identifies what buckets you're in

and reveals that to every website. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a very thoughtful piece on the impact that this will have on consumer privacy. Quoting from that piece, Google's pitch to privacy advocates is that a world with F, and other elements of the privacy sandbox, will be better than the world we have today, where data brokers and ad tech giants track and profile with impunity. But that framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between old tracking and new tracking. It's not either or. Instead of reinventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a world without the myriad problems of targeted ads. We stand at a fork in the road.

Behind us is the era of the third-party cookie, perhaps the web's biggest mistake. Ahead of us are two possible futures. In one, users get to decide what information to share with each site they choose to interact with. No one needs to worry that their past browsing will be held against them or leveraged to manipulate them when they next open a tab. In the other, each user's behavior follows them from site to site as a label,

inscrutable at a glance but rich with meaning to those in the know. Their recent history, distilled into a few bits, is democratized and shared with dozens of nameless actors that take part in the service of each webpage. Users begin every interaction with a confession. Here's what I've been up to this week. Please, treat me accordingly. Facebook, never too proud to jump on a trend, announced this morning that it will be, quote, all over this whole audio stuff. I'm actually paraphrasing. That's not an actual quote.

Here's what they announced. First, a set of audio creation tools, which they describe as a sound studio in your pocket, but is more accurately a scaled down set of basic audio editing functions. They'll build their music library into it, too. Second, a new post type. Soundbytes. Short little audio clips that you can post on your page or profile's timeline. Third, podcasts inside the Facebook app.

You'll be able to listen inside the app, even if that app's in the background. They'll also have some kind of discovery tool or directory. They didn't specifically say if they'd be making their own or licensing someone else's, though I have seen some industry speculation this morning that there's some kind of connection to Spotify for this. Fourth, what we all knew was coming, Clubhouse. Well, they're Clubhouse clone. You might recall from our previous reporting on this that Facebook had two internal teams competing on the design and implementation of this.

Looks like the Messenger app people won. And it's going to be basically an audio-only version of their Room's video conferencing feature inside Messenger. It'll be available on the main app too. And finally, monetization options. Nothing new here either. It's the usual micro-currency that people can buy and then slap on a live stream, where the Room's host can cash in those stickers for money, like Twitch's Bits, YouTube's Super Chat, TikTok's Diamond Stickers, and so on.

Down the road, they're also planning to let you charge for access to an audio room. I thought this was interesting, actually. Either a one-time deal or a recurring subscription to an audio room. And they're also starting an audio creator fund, just like all the others. None of this is live yet, by the way. It's still a couple of months out. Speaking of Clubhouse clones, it wouldn't be a day without reporting on a new one. This time, Reddit's. This morning

the company said it would soon launch Reddit Talk. And, like Clubhouse, speakers sit at the top of the screen on a kind of virtual stage. Listeners appear below. There are tools to react or to speak. Honestly, it's the same template that everyone's following. At launch, you will find it inside subreddits.

During the current testing phase, only mods will be able to start a session, though they can invite anyone to speak. There's an application form now for mods that want to access it. Reddit joins everyone else who's trying to cash in on the live audio trend. Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Spotify, even LinkedIn are all in various phases of planning. How's Clubhouse doing through all this?

Today we learned they raised a Series C funding round, valuing the company at $4 billion, roughly the same amount Twitter tried to buy it for. That's about triple compared to its previous round in January. The actual dollar value raised, though, was not revealed. It was indeed a busy day for announcement, and Pinterest had one too.

They are launching a new portal to let copyright owners claim their content and remove that content when they want to. To get started, content creators need to submit a content claiming portal, and if your application is approved, you'll upload your original content. You'll then be able to tell the platform to delete any versions it finds on anyone else's boards, now or in the future. Oh, and as for the quiz, are trust seals a good way to improve the trustworthiness metric that Google uses to consider how high or low you rank? We have an answer directly from Google search engineer John Mueller.

And that answer is no. Obviously, if there are some specific qualifications that you have, I think it makes sense to highlight that on a page. But just taking random seals and copying and pasting them on a website, I don't think that really impresses users and definitely doesn't impress Google a lot. My thanks to the Danish user named Read for Liberty who reviewed this podcast saying, I recently stumbled upon this podcast and found it to be a breath of fresh air. Here I found a broad and narrow list of news valuable to my small business, which will help it grow. Thank you and see you on TikTok. Thank you very much.

If you'd like to help us, please rate and review us. You'll find a link in this episode's notes that makes it a simple 10-second one-tap process. And yeah, if you're not following me on TikTok, you're missing out. I do a daily 60-second summary of each day's podcast, as well as a bunch of series like Social Algorithm Week, reviews of Facebook ads, discounts on marketing tools. Follow me there, at Digital Marketing Secrets. That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow.