Today in Digital Marketing - How Spammers Are Knocking Your Brand Out of Google Maps

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

The Pin Sin: How bad actors are pushing their competitors off Google Maps. Google makes things a little easier for data nerds. Threads makes its first real steps into the Fediverse. And the social media trend of the week could very well be the single laziest content idea the industry has seen yet.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereListen to NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app. “Future You” will thank you. GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Thursday, March 21st. Today, the pin sin. How bad actors are pushing their competitors off Google Maps. Things are a little easier for data nerds. Threads makes its first real steps into the Fediverse. And the social media trend of the week could very well be the single laziest content idea our industry has seen yet.

I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead Today Digital Marketing. 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. 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.ca. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Is it a bug? Is it an exploit? Nobody's quite sure. The only thing we do know is it's a problem. A big problem. This week, the Sterling Sky local SEO agency noticed that some companies appear to have figured out how to knock their competitors off Google Maps. Quoting from Joy Hawkins at Sterling Sky, quote, people are noticing that several businesses with completely different addresses are all now showing up pinned at the same location. I think there's a good chance this is intentional. Why? Because Google filters out businesses at the same

location. So if you want your competitors to disappear, just move their pins to the same location and they will vanish on Google Maps, unquote. One marketer named Pam Weber reported seeing the same thing, quote, this happened to one of our clients. We were able to get the pin moved back quickly as they had moved it to a completely different city within Florida, unquote. You might be wondering, wait, how does my competitor move my position on Google Maps? Well, for a while now, Google has let pretty much anyone suggest a change to a business listing.

That's been meant for a discrepancy in hours or noting that a business is closed permanently or perhaps in this case, has moved, even if they actually haven't. Google's supposed to notify the affected business before they make the change permanent, but people often miss that email, or sometimes it doesn't come at all. And either way, at least according to one marketer weighing in on this on social media, to fix it, you have to log into your business profile and manually re-enter your address. There's also confusion among marketers chatting about this on social media that Google's system is supposed to flag a pin location if it doesn't match the

listing address. And why that's not happening now, nobody's really sure. So, word to the wise, if your Friday checklist doesn't include, make sure our business is where it's supposed to be on Google Maps, maybe time to add it. Google is adding a new way to keep your data in sync between Google Ads and Analytics. It's called Key Events, and it's going to replace conversions for behavioral analytics. Quoting Google's announcement. Quote, key events help site and app owners continue to consistently measure the most important behavior on their websites and apps so they can supercharge the user experience. With this update, a conversion will be the same whether you're looking at it in your Google Ads reporting or in a Google Analytics report. In this improved, more unified experience,

we are addressing the differences in conversions reporting that marketers have experienced across Google Ads and Analytics, a long-standing request that we are happy to have resolved for our customers." So this will basically let you see the same labels and data across both platforms, something that, as Google mentioned, has been a bit of a point of contention among marketers. Quoting Social Media Today's coverage of this, quote, it's a minor change in the broader scheme, but it could be important to your workflow, ensuring more accurate data tracking across these two key platforms. So now, if you see conversion data in analytics, that same insight will be reflected in Google Ads, rather than messing with your head by showing you different info. Which does mess with your head. There's nothing worse than launching a campaign

based on the data you've studied only then, after launch, to get the feeling that you may have read it wrong, unquote. We have a link to the full update information in today's email newsletter. So your brand bailed out on Twitter, but you haven't been sure where to go next. There's Blue Sky and Threads and Mastodon and a bunch more. But as of today, that decision might be a little easier. Meta's Threads app has turned on Federation. This means that people on Mastodon, for instance,

can follow your brand's Threads account, even if those people don't have or use a Threads account of their own. And why would they use Mastodon to see Threads content when they could just use Threads? Well, Mastodon has no ads and basically no algorithm. That's a big selling point to some people. This wouldn't be meta without some catches, though. If you'd like people from other parts of the internet to see your brand's Threads content, you do need to manually turn that on. It's in the Settings section under Federation, and once you do, then people can follow your brand account from Mastodon or PixelFed or any of the other activity-based social media

platforms, and no, Blue Sky is not part of that network. Plus, you won't be able to see on Th on threads who replied or liked your posts from other platforms. You also can't share posts if they have polls in them, though Meta says that they are working to build all of this stuff in too. It's not open to all accounts. For now, it's only an option for public accounts of people 18 and up in the US, Canada, and Japan. But soon, and I think this is more exciting, the other direction will work too. People on Threads will be able to follow any other ActivityPub account, like Mastodon, or Peertube, that's the decentralized YouTube, or PixelFed, the decentralized Instagram,

or Loops, the soon-to-be-launched decentralized TikTok. But for now, you really have nothing to lose by enabling federation on your Threads account. Snapchat today launched a new augmented reality ad product that says expands brand's reach beyond the pre-capture lens carousel. So this occurs after Snapchatters capture their content with the Snapchat camera, accessible by swiping to the post-capture filter carousel. The company says the new format has these benefits. First, advertisers can upload existing assets and build filters from a variety of templates, including AR face filters, location based overlays, countdown timers, quiz generators, and so on. You can add a call to action to it,

letting you capture mid-funnel signals and guiding users towards specific conversion actions. And it says you can create these usually in less than 10 minutes using Lens Web Builder, which is its free tool for filter and lens creation. Just to be a bit more precise on this, this is a two-step process. First, you build the sponsor filter

on the Lens Web Builder tool. Then you create a sponsored AR filter campaign on Ads Manager. You will find it under Camera and AR Filter there. 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 at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. There are few places left where advertising hasn't crept into our eyeballs. They're over urinals. They're in virtual reality.

And soon, they'll be along for consumers for their rideshare trip. This morning, Lyft confirmed it had launched its Video Ads product. These appear on a tablet, usually attached to the back of the passenger seat so that the rider can see it. They'll start anywhere from 15 seconds into the ride to four minutes, and no, they won't be muted by default, though the rider can silence them if they want. Warner Brothers, BetMGM, and Universal Pictures are said to already be running ads in the new placement. Quoting Marketing Brew, the move to branch out to video ad inventory marks an expansion of Lyft's media business,

which includes in-app display ads, ads that appear inside rideshare vehicles on tablets, on rideshare bike stations, and on the roofs of some rideshare vehicles. The business has been bolstered by an acquisition. Lyft purchased the out-of-home startup Halo, which compensates drivers who display digital ads on the roofs of their vehicles in 2020. Unquote. Lyft's arch rival Uber has been selling ads in its mobile app for more than two years now and reported it had a stable of more than a half million advertising clients. Last month, its CEO said they expect to hit $1 billion in ad revenue this year. And finally, in case you're looking for some lazy, low-effort

social media content for your brand, consider what many other brands have been up to this week. Photoshopping obviously fake images of Kate, the Princess of Wales, into images. In case you've missed all this, Kate had some stomach surgery done back in January. Buckingham Palace at the time said she'd spend until about April, mostly out of the public eye recuperating. Well, that started a whole whack of nonsense conspiracy theories like the king is actually dead and Kate's husband William is now secretly king. Or Kate had a mental health crisis. Or Kate is dead and they're training a body double? Actually, it didn't help when the palace put out a family photo of Kate and their kids, which had some photoshopping done to it.

Kate later posted on social media that she'd just been monkeying around with photo editing and, you know, my bad. So to ride this crazy wave, some brands are poking fun at the most recent apparent sighting. A video posted by the Sun newspaper showing Kate and William shopping on the weekend. The Dublin airport posted that William and Kate were arriving as passengers. The photo had the watermark of the Sun newspaper clearly overprinted across their bodies. Then the Prague airport had their own Photoshop in their airport saying, no, no, no, they came from Dublin to here in the Czech Republic. The New York City Sanitation Department had a crudely Photoshopped photo of her pushing a trash bin out to the curb with the city's separate account,

adding that rat-proof lids are in fact very real and should be used. So there you go. Proof that social media content creation isn't hard. And also that the world is going to hell. Nothing to say here. Thanks for listening. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.

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