Today in Digital Marketing - {meta tag="triple-my-traffic-please" when="now"}

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. 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. Today, this one bit of code could triple your web traffic.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Will Reddit make up your next media buy? The podcast industry continues to be thrown curves by Apple. And regulators may kill a huge Facebook deal. It's Thursday, August 12th, 2021. Happy Air Force Day, Russia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And before we start, some news for you fellow Redditors out there,

Starting point is 00:01:30 I've started a subreddit for this podcast. You will find it at r slash today in digital. Memes and shitposts welcome. All right, on with the show. What if I told you adding a few characters to your website could more than triple your web traffic? It's true. Google Today publishing an article demonstrating how using the Max Image Preview directive could increase clicks as high as 330%. How do you use such directive?

Starting point is 00:01:59 It's a meta tag. That's it. Pretty easy to add to any CMS. There is one big catch here. You didn't think it'd be that easy, did you? Traffic coming from Google Discover. Discover is a section that appears in a number of their apps, like Home and the primary Google mobile app. Think of it sort of like Instagram's Explore tab, except for webpages, not images. It tries to show sites and ads, of course, that it thinks the user is interested in based on their

Starting point is 00:02:23 previous travels around the web. Still, this is good news, though mostly for news publishers, since a recent study found that almost all the web pages on Discover are news stories. Either way, it's still a tag you should consider adding just in case you make it into the 1%. Max Image Preview tells Google what size image to show in the preview. When a page is shown in Discover, it's recommended you set the tag to show the largest image on the page.

Starting point is 00:02:48 So in code, it looks like this. Meta name equals robots. Content equals max image preview large. To prove the point, in its piece today, it mentioned a food blog that increased their click-through rate from Discover by 79% and a Brazilian magazine that increased clicks by 330% over a period of six months. We may all be hearing more from Reddit's sales team soon coming for our media budgets. The company today announcing a new funding round of $410 million so far,

Starting point is 00:03:24 and by the end of the round, they will have taken on $700 million. That puts Reddit around a $10 billion valuation. They say most of that money is earmarked for building out their advertising platform, as well as hiring more people. Reddit is definitely maturing as a potential place for our ads. In Q2, they hit $100 million in ad revenue for the first time. That was nearly triple over the previous Q2. And this past March, they hired their first CFO.

Starting point is 00:03:50 If that sounds suspiciously like getting ready for an IPO, you're probably right. Co-founder Steve Huffman told media, quote, We are still planning on going public, but we don't have a firm timeline yet. All good companies should go public when they can, unquote. So far, many advertisers have shied away from the platform for brand safety reasons, given that many of the self-moderated communities it hosts can somehow be out there, if you know what I mean.

Starting point is 00:04:17 But you certainly can't say the platform isn't maturing. The world's biggest podcast app, Apple Podcast, seems to still be broken. Some podcast producers reporting that their episodes are taking up to three days to appear in the app. Pod News asked around and said, quote, A few have told us that if you log into Apple Podcasts Connect and change the frequency of your podcast in the interface, that appears to get Apple to rescan your feed. Oddly, said someone there quoting, it appeared and disappeared a few times from Apple Podcasts

Starting point is 00:04:51 before being there permanently a few hours later. Apple is seemingly aware their support team has responded to one publisher saying this was an issue on our end with our servers. There's nothing on your end you can do to prevent it from happening again. It should not happen again, but if you do notice an episode Considering the app is responsible for 40% of the world's podcast downloads, it's a little surprising how many issues it has. For one, and I guess this is a feature, not a bug, but still, if your iPhone is in low power mode, Apple Podcasts will never check for new episodes, even if you open the app.

Starting point is 00:05:32 And there was a separate bug around downloads that took six weeks before Apple even admitted there was an issue. Some estimates say that cost the industry $14 million in lost ad revenue. One analyst reported that the bug wiped nearly $2.5 billion off the value of Spotify. 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. Has Facebook lost its first antitrust case? Well, it's not in the courts, but it's certainly in the hands of regulators. And so far, those regulators are not impressed. Be Zen. to spend $400 million to buy it. But now, that might be cancelled because of the UK competition regulator that found in a preliminary report published today

Starting point is 00:06:49 the deal should be stopped because it would, quote, negatively impact competition between social media platforms. Quoting from their report, quote, millions of posts every day on social media now include a GIF. Any reduction in the choice or quality of these GIFs could significantly affect how people use these sites and whether or not they switch to a different platform, such as Facebook.

Starting point is 00:07:12 As most major media sites that compete with Facebook use Jiffy's GIFs, there is only one other large provider of GIFs, Google's Tenor. These platforms have very little choice, unquote. And really, I don't think any of us would put it past Zuckerberg to just cut off access to non-Facebook platforms, or require them to hand over more user data in exchange for the popular images. The proposed sale was something of a panic on Jiffy's part. Industry rumors have it that, despite raising $150 million over eight years, the 100-person company was running out of cash. When Zuckerberg came along and offered less than what most analysts valued it at, the British regulator's final decision is due in October.

Starting point is 00:07:58 And a very special welcome to our new premium newsletter subscribers, Marnie and Shekhar. Thank you for supporting our work. If you want to get this podcast as an expanded daily email newsletter with links to follow, videos, exclusive content, check out todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in today's episode notes. Okay, home automation update. So it turns out the lawn sprinkler that claims to use Bluetooth to communicate but can't get a damn signal when you're like four feet away from it, apparently it uses a

Starting point is 00:08:28 network mesh protocol called Thread. I'm told, by YouTubers of course, that the solution to all my problems is Thread. And the iPad that I was using as my home hub does not support Thread. So now, as of an hour ago, I have a new HomePod Mini, which apparently does. Does any of this make any sense to anybody else? I'm trying here. And I'm probably going to need some kind of thread device somewhere between the HomePod and the sprinkler.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Honestly, they're only like 10 feet apart, separated by our front door. But I've ordered a damn thread-enabled door sensor to put on that door. So maybe my mesh will grow bigger. Is this all one giant conspiracy? Like is thread like you need this Apple thing and Apple is like, now you need this door sensor, which says now just enable thread and it's never going to end level with me. Also, I heard from several of you yesterday who did not know what Boxing Day was.

Starting point is 00:09:24 My apologies for that. I actually did not realize who did not know what Boxing Day was. My apologies for that. I actually did not realize that Americans didn't do Boxing Day. Turns out it is a Canadian and a British thing. It is the day after Christmas. Does having bad Google reviews hurt your SEO? Find out the answer tomorrow on the Friday Quiz. Talk to you then. One life to live, no spit to give. Trying to you then. Ain't no bird feed. This ain't no pigeon hole. Take the given gold. Break the mold so I can grow.

Starting point is 00:10:05 Be on the block. Past the borough. No time to borrow. Nothing promised tomorrow. Gotta get that. Take that. Unapologetically. And I'ma be more than what they thought I could never be.

Today in Digital Marketing - {meta tag="triple-my-traffic-please" when="now"}

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