Today in Digital Marketing - Pocketing a Smurf Monkey for LOLz and Elo

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, are your leads disappearing from your inbox before you can get to them? Google wants you to back off being so damn specific with your keywords. How will Facebook's new moderation system affect reviews of ad campaigns? And Honda goes digital for its car reveal on a most unlikely platform. It's Monday, November 16th, 2020. Happy International Flamenco Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in Digital Marketing. It's Monday, November 16th, 2020. Happy International Flamenco Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:32 And we start with three items about Google. First, last week someone sent SEO journalist Barry Schwartz a couple of screenshots. They were of the top results in Google for the brand name of a company. The guy who sent him the image works for that company. The first screenshot showed the organic results for a search for a company. The guy who sent him the image works for that company. The first screenshot showed the organic results for a search for their company. No problem, there was their company right in the top results like you'd expect. But second screenshot, the same search, but this time the fellow turned

Starting point is 00:00:57 on the ads they were running for that search term. So as you'd expect, the ad showed up at the top, but here's the thing, the organic result was now gone. And so, we start this week with a quiz. Does Google drop your organic listing if your own ad comes up for the same query? I'll have the answer at the end of today's episode. There may be a critical bug happening in your Google My Business messaging. Someone reported this on localsearchforum.com, quote, Our clients get leads in daily through the GMB app's request a quote feature, which is part of messaging.

Starting point is 00:01:39 There are generally multiple messages coming in a day. Yesterday, a message came in, but when you go to where you would respond to it, the message is gone, as are any other messages for that listing. The prompt is to edit your greeting, so it's like it's been wiped clean, unquote. So this person sent a support request into Google, which appeared to confirm the bug.

Starting point is 00:02:00 They wrote back, somewhat unhelpfully, quote, we found that your Google My Business concern is the result of a technical issue. Our engineers are working on the issue, but they don't have an estimate for when they'll resolve it, unquote. This person says when she's gotten that type of reply in the past, it's typically taken months to resolve. I'm not seeing widespread comment about this and normally wouldn't report something if only one person mentioned it, but this is a big bug if indeed it's happening to others. After all, these are actionable leads that may be dropping.

Starting point is 00:02:33 So if you use this request to quote feature in your GMB profile, maybe send yourself a test lead to make sure you're getting them all. When Google ads were first offered, they were pretty basic. You could advertise for men's shoes, and it would show your ad on searches for men's shoes, and also men's footwear, boots for guys. It was a pretty broad match. And when Google let us refine that more,

Starting point is 00:03:00 they literally named this search Broad Match. But most digital marketers running Google Ads are using Exact Match or Phrase Match or applying negative keywords, just generally running smarter campaigns. Which is why it's a little weird that Google says it will start recommending you switch back to Broad Match. Apparently, they'll do this if you're using smart bidding. They'll look at your phrase or exact keywords, and if they think you'd do better with a wider query range, they'll suggest you switch to broad match.

Starting point is 00:03:31 So this means keywords like women's hats could also apply for winter headwear for women or women's accessories. This is, of course, yet another move toward machine learning. These ad platforms think that their AI can forecast better results. Facebook's all over this stuff. So, if you're skeptical, yeah, me too. Google did point to two brands who say it's working for them.

Starting point is 00:03:54 One travel brand saw a 20% boost in conversions and was, quote, really surprised, unquote, by the results of using Broadmatch with smart bidding. As always, your mileage may vary, but you may want to try it out with a subset of your spend to see if their AI really can generate better results. You don't have to be running Facebook ads for long before you run into one of their agro-bots auto-declining a campaign you've set up, claiming it was against their community standards, or your targeting is too personal, or your image is too sexual, but your image was literally of a shoe. So you do what we've all done, fill out the appeal form, and then wait. There was a time, back in the glory days, when you'd get a decision from a human within a couple of hours. But these days, often the first decision you get back is from a different appeal bot, which will just uphold the original ruling.

Starting point is 00:04:51 So you appeal again, and maybe days or weeks later, you get an actual human who, let's face it, probably won't even look at your campaign and will just respond with copy and paste text about how their decision stands and they know this isn't what you wanted to hear and they're sorry and blah, blah, blah. Do I have that about right? If you too have been on this merry-go-round of misery, you may be interested to know that Facebook is updating its moderation queue system and it's entirely likely that things are about to get worse. Here's what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:05:24 In the past, Facebook's human reviewers went through content more or less chronologically. Content, comments, ad campaigns, all thrown into the same review bucket, and they'd go through them basically in the order they came in. But now, Facebook says it's going to use, wait for it, machine learning to identify which pieces of content are more egregious and deal with them first. And okay, snark aside, I do think it's a good idea that they take on issues of potential child abuse or credible reports of a suicide threat before our stuff. I do. But now that this kind of moderation is based on importance criteria like safety, expect your ad campaign appeals to get pushed further down the queue.

Starting point is 00:06:09 As socialmediatoday.com reports, Now those same detection systems will be used to categorize all moderation reports. One thing noticeably absent from Facebook's announcement? Anything about hiring new reviewers. If you're a car brand and you want to reach younger audiences, the best advice would be go to where those younger audiences are. So tomorrow afternoon, Honda will reveal its 2022 Civic. It won't be holding an event with car journalists. They won't have a Zoom news conference.

Starting point is 00:06:48 They're going to stream it on Twitch, the live streaming platform for gamers. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, they will announce the prototype, along with a mini tournament of the popular game Fortnite, complete with play-by-play by hosts and a live performance by a hip-hop artist, of course. This will be the first-ever live global debut of a car on Twitch. The Honda Civic has been the top car for Gen Z and millennials for a decade now. The car will go on sale in the spring. How far the mighty have fallen.

Starting point is 00:07:23 Well, not that far, actually, but below the 50% mark for the first time, I'm talking about Apple's podcast index. Pretty much since the beginning of Apple's venture into podcasting, the company has dominated the space. Now, it looks like a contender is taking a big bite out of Apple, and that contender is Spotify. Here are the numbers. This data is from Buzzsprout, by the way. As of right now, downloads from Apple Podcasts account for 47% of all plays and downloads from Buzzsprout's platform. Spotify is at nearly 25% and Google Podcasts is third with just over 2%. I have to say this does not track with the podcast downloads that I see.

Starting point is 00:08:05 Of downloads of this podcast, Apple is number one, of course. Spotify is actually a distant third. And in second place, the mobile app Overcast, which accounts for roughly a quarter of the volume that Apple Podcasts gives us. Also, Apple today announced that podcasts can now be embedded on any website using a new tool that they have launched. Oh, and for whether Google will drop your brand's organic listing from the results page if you are also running an ad, Danny Sullivan from Google says, nope, they don't do that. Quoting him on Twitter, we are not removing search results because an ad is showing. There's no test or anything like that. What happens in search results is entirely disconnected

Starting point is 00:08:50 from ads, period. URLs sometimes drop from the index temporarily for a variety of reasons, none of which relate to ads. Here's a sentence only two or three of you will understand. Oh, and if you do understand this, please tweet me. Last night, I made it to mid-gold by pocketing a Smurf monkey. And those two or three of you will think either that's funny or that I'm a horrible person with no gaming ethics. Fact is, both are true. Talk to you tomorrow. Take your chances, hoping something good will happen. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Pocketing a Smurf Monkey for LOLz and Elo

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