Today in Digital Marketing - “I’m Here Live. I’m Not a Cat.”

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, a new e-commerce tool from Facebook claims it'll improve your conversions by 75%. What happens to your brand's Google ranking when you remove comments from your company's blog? Instagram changes its algorithm to lock out TikTok uploads. And here's why you should definitely know how to turn those AR filters off in Zoom. It's Tuesday, February 9th, 2021. Happy National Pizza Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Pretty much the entire digital marketing industry is in a big transition right now, away from third-party data collection to, well, a whole bunch of different solutions.

Starting point is 00:00:41 Google's creating interest-based cohorts, Facebook's changing attribution windows, and now we know what Twitter plans to do. The company today announcing its plan, and it's kind of a brilliant old-school method, a new website tag with plain old URL parameters. Quoting the company, when someone clicks on a website ad, the Twitter click ID's unique identifier will be appended automatically in the URL. When the person lands on the website and the Twitter pixel fires, this ID will be captured, sent to Twitter, and used to attribute the site visit to the click, unquote. And I suppose that's one way to get around the cookie issue,

Starting point is 00:01:17 to not use a cookie at all. Twitter says in testing, they saw a tenfold increase in site visits as reported in their ads manager. They also say they've made some improvements to how it predicts who is likely to convert. So your campaign optimizations should perform better now. And they've tweaked the way the website card format looks with better navigation to a full screen browser, reduced loading time for websites and improved usability of media controls. A big day for marketers who run Shopify stores.

Starting point is 00:01:53 Today, the company has started rolling out its integration with Facebook and Instagram. Once it's active for your store, people will be able to choose Shop Pay as a payment option within the Facebook or Instagram apps. It'll also pull in their personal info like name and email address and will let them pay directly in the Facebook or Instagram apps. It'll also pull in their personal info, like name and email address, and will let them pay directly in the Facebook or Instagram app. Shopify says Shopify checkout on ShopPay is 70% faster than the regular web method and has a 1.72 times higher conversion rate. Also a nice touch, ShopPay offsets all of the delivery emissions for every order. This is especially smart, given how many consumers say a company's environmental policies play a factor in their purchase decision.

Starting point is 00:02:31 As for that rollout schedule, it starts today in the U.S. Here's where it gets a little complicated. It'll be within Facebook pay for all Shopify merchants using checkout on Instagram. If you follow the logic there, it will come to Shopify stores using checkout in the actual Facebook app in the coming weeks. Their news release this morning did not mention other countries. If you run a brand website that has a blog, there's a good chance you've got comments enabled on your blog posts. That's the way most CMS platforms like WordPress come by default. Blog comments have always been a little bit iffy. The spammers jumped on them pretty much immediately, having the bot's ads crap like,

Starting point is 00:03:14 great article, buy my sunglasses please. The spam got so bad that WordPress itself bought a spam plugin called Akismet and bundled it in. Some web admins just gave up entirely on comments and turned the feature off. I think this is happening more and more, actually. But what about those of us in the middle? You've got a blog. Lots of those blog posts have comments. What's the harm in deleting those comments from the page and turning off comments entirely? The harm, apparently, is your Google ranking. Google engineer John Mueller said recently during one of his regular SEO hangouts that removing all comments from a website

Starting point is 00:03:51 could very well drop you in the results page. We do see comments as a part of the content. We do also, in many cases, recognize that this is actually a comment section, so we need to treat it slightly differently. But ultimately, if people are finding your pages based on the comments there, then if you delete those comments, then obviously we wouldn't be able to find your pages based on it. So that's something where, depending

Starting point is 00:04:18 on the type of comments that you have there, the amount of comments that you have, it can be the case that they provide significant value to your pages, and it can be a source of additional kind of information about your pages, but it's not always the case. One other side note here, this is also a consideration if you decide to change CMSs, you know, like going from WordPress to Drupal, for instance, as sometimes those comments don't port over easily.

Starting point is 00:04:50 Speaking of WordPress, one of the more popular builders, Elementor Pro, announced today it is changing its pricing model. They're adding new tiers and nerfing one, as we would say in the video game world. Nerfing generally means reducing its value. It's mostly going to affect you if you are on their $200 per year plan, which let you use their product on up to 1,000 websites. Now that plan will only let you have 25 sites. And honestly, that's pretty fair. I mean, if you're managing 25 client sites, $200 a year is still pennies. Now, above that level are the studio level,

Starting point is 00:05:22 which caps at 100 sites for $500 a year, and Agency Pro, which will bring back that 1,000 site cap, but that's now at $1,000 a year. For those tiers, a new VIP support option. They promise you'll get a human response to your email or chat ticket within 30 minutes. The company says this is the first significant pricing change since the original tiers were introduced five years ago. Elementor is now on more than 7 million websites. These pricing changes happen one month from today. Oh, and if you're on the low-end tiers, the ones that give you access to either one site or three sites, nothing changes in terms of pricing or services.

Starting point is 00:06:02 When Instagram copied TikTok and added what they call Reels to their app, lots of people who were on TikTok started posting on Reels. But they weren't posting Reels per se. They were just uploading copies of their TikTok videos to the Reels space on Instagram, basically cross-posting. Instagram, as you can imagine, wasn't too thrilled with that. And today, they have rolled out an update to their content discovery algorithm, an update that downranks those cross-posted TikTok videos.

Starting point is 00:06:32 And really, this is probably one of the easiest algo changes they've ever had to code, since every time you export a TikTok video to your phone's storage, it slaps a big TikTok logo in the corner. You can still upload your brand's TikTok videos to Instagram Reels if you like. Just don't get surprised if they get a fraction of the views they used to. Some interesting data from marketing profs and the Content Marketing Institute shows most B2C content marketers were satisfied with how their brand handled COVID-19 and messaging around it. More interesting, though, is that most of those same content people, 84%,

Starting point is 00:07:08 said the messaging changes they made because of the pandemic will probably stick around. And if you're thinking, ha, content marketing people, I wish we had that kind of expertise. Well, don't fret, because in that same study, only 41% of B2C marketers said they considered their brand to be in the sophisticated or mature phase of content marketing. As for where their space is going, 61% say they expect to invest primarily in content creation, 54% in social media management and community

Starting point is 00:07:38 building, and 53% are planning website enhancements this year. The premium newsletter has a link to the full study and all sorts of pretty charts. The online meeting app Zoom is rolling out some new AR filters. You can now virtually apply lipstick and eyeshadow, just like a Snapchat filter. Zoom also supports third-party filters, like those that can turn your face into a cat. Just be sure you know how to turn those filters off. Unlike this poor bastard, a lawyer who was in court via Zoom and had accidentally triggered the cat face. I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings. This is the judge speaking.

Starting point is 00:08:20 You might want to... We're trying to... Can you hear me, Judge? I can hear you. I think it's a filter. It is. I don't know how to remove it. I've got my assistant here. She's trying to, but I'm prepared to go forward with it. I'm here live. I'm not a cat. I can see that. Turns out the lawyer was using his secretary's laptop. She had turned that cat thing on for a previous call. Neither of them knew how to turn it off. So, in case you're having a bad day, at least you're not that guy.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and even newsletter exclusive content. By the way, there is a free tier too. You'll get a sample bonus issue once or twice a month. And the newsletter usually comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes.

Starting point is 00:09:24 That's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - “I’m Here Live. I’m Not a Cat.”

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