Today in Digital Marketing - Reels Hits the Major Leagues with a New Ad Placement

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Facebook's answer to TikTok just got a major enhancement media buyers will like. How will Google handle your website's infinite loading pages? Microsoft dives deeper into AI-based ad campaigns. Twitter is working on a new way to opt your brand out of off-topic threads. And on the premium podcast with no ads, more stories, and extended weekend episodes, tap the link in the show notes for more. How much does proximity matter in your SEO?

Starting point is 00:00:55 And how can you exploit it? It's Tuesday, February 22nd. I'm Steph Gunn, filling in for Todd Maffin. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing. Meta has announced the expansion of Facebook Reels to 150 countries. Reels, of course, is their answer to TikTok. And with the expansion of the format comes a brand new ad placement, the overlay. Select creators in the US, Canada, and Mexico will be able to test this out. Those in the test group will have the opportunity to experiment with two different overlays. First,

Starting point is 00:01:33 banner ads, which appear as a semi-transparent overlay at the bottom of a reel. And then second is stickers, which appear as static images that can be placed anywhere within the reel. These are non-interruptive ads, which appear transparently atop the play in content rather than pausing the video. These sort of look like a suggested video that pops up at the end of a YouTube video. Facebook will choose how the ad will be displayed in the frame based on what is best suited to the viewer. The revenue for overlay ads in reels will go partially to the creator of

Starting point is 00:02:05 the Reel. Who can access the new ad format? If you're already eligible for in-stream ads for on-demand on Facebook, you will also be eligible for overlay ads. The company plans to expand eligibility in the next coming months. In addition to overlay ads, creators will soon have the option to monetize their Reels with stars, the virtual tipping mechanism that's already available on Facebook Live. Facebook is also finalizing creative tools like Remix, 60-second Reels, drafts, and video clips. And just in case you hate the top row of stories at the top of the Facebook app, you're going to hate this even more. They'll soon be adding a new Reels label at the top of the feed. Google has confirmed that the page experience update is starting to roll out for desktop.

Starting point is 00:02:59 The update will be slowly rolled out over the next several weeks and will be complete by the end of March 2022. According to the company, the desktop version will contain the same three core web vitals metrics and thresholds as the mobile version of the page experience update, which was rolled out earlier this year, except that it does not need to be mobile friendly. Additionally, Google plans to help site owners analyze how their desktop pages are performing by releasing a Search Console report, which will launch before desktop becomes a ranking signal. The march toward full AI-based ad campaigns continues. Microsoft Advertising yesterday announced that auto-apply recommendations

Starting point is 00:03:45 have been released on the ad platform. Advertisers will be opted into all five recommendation types in the platform and should opt out if they do not want them to apply automatically. Here are the five types of recommendations you'll start to see the platform suggest. Create expanded text ads, create responsive search ads, create multimedia ads, remove negative keywords conflicts, and finally fix conversion goal setting issues. The company said that opting in won't increase your budgets. Advertisers can view recommendations in the scheduled to auto-apply section of the recommendations page. In this section, the cards provide a short description of the potential issue and the date by which the recommendation will be applied. Email notifications can also be enabled for recommendations by selecting the add preference

Starting point is 00:04:37 optimization email preference. Detailed information on the target account along with a schedule of upcoming automatic adoptions will be included in that email. 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.

Starting point is 00:05:15 Do you allow comments on your website? As long as you can moderate them, it could help with your website's position in Google. During an SEO office hours hangout last week, Google search advocate John Mueller explained that comments can add SEO value to web pages in the form of additional context. As long as users leave comments that are relevant to what the page is about, then that information can assist with search engine rankings. On the other hand, if a user leaves an irrelevant comment, it may cause your rankings to drop. Off-topic comments may send mixed signals to Google about what that page is about and what

Starting point is 00:05:52 queries it should appear in. According to Mueller, the biggest challenge with user comments is making sure that they stay on topic. But if you can find a way to maintain comments on a webpage, that gives you a little bit more context and helps people who are searching in different ways to also find your content. On the topic of SEO office hours hangouts, Mueller was also asked whether Google is capable of crawling webpages that use infinite scrolling. These are pages that keep loading more and more content as you scroll to the bottom of the page. In short, yes, Googlebot however is limited in its ability to how much infinite scrolling it can handle. According to Mueller, it is possible for Googlebot to render your page the way it's set up already. Quoting Mueller, essentially what happens

Starting point is 00:06:46 when we render a page is we use a fairly high viewport, like if you have a really long screen and we render the page to see what the page would show. And usually that would trigger some amount of infinite scrolling in whatever JavaScript methods that you're using to trigger the infinite scrolling. And whatever ends up being loaded there, that would be what we would be able to index, unquote. However, Googlebot may not be able to render everything on your page, depending on how long your page is and how infinite scrolling is triggered. Mueller said utilizing the URL inspection tool is the best way to determine how much of a page can be crawled by Google.

Starting point is 00:07:31 So, you've been tagged in a Twitter thread that starts out about your brand, then kind of meanders off, and is now generating hundreds of tweets that have nothing to do with you, but you're still seeing because you've been tagged in it. There is good news ahead. Twitter is testing a feature for users who don't want to be part of a thread anymore. A Twitter user has tweeted a screenshot of a new leave this conversation feature being built on the platform. To be clear, this was found through reverse engineering. The code isn't available yet, but if you are part of the test group, you will see the option to get out of this conversation. Here's how it will work. The option will untag your account's username from a conversation, it prevents people from mentioning

Starting point is 00:08:17 you in the conversation again, and it will stop you from receiving notifications about it. When you leave the conversation, your brand's Twitter handle will appear as plain text in the tweet where it's mentioned rather than a hyperlink. Google Merchant Center has added a short title option for smaller ad placements. The platform says that the short title attribute should be used to identify your product briefly and clearly. As opposed to the title attribute, the value you submit for the to add the brand name if it's a differentiating factor. product. Describe the product shown on your landing page. Use professional and grammatically correct language. And finally, don't use capital letters for emphasis. If you don't follow these requirements, Google says it will disapprove your product. Thanks for listening. I'm filling in for

Starting point is 00:09:37 Todd for the rest of the week. If I do sound a little raspier than usual, I lost my voice over the weekend. Like it started happening Friday night. And I basically took every measure possible to make sure that I had it back for today, which included a lot of tea and basically not talking at all over the weekend, which was not very fun for me, especially because it was a long weekend here in Canada. So we played a lot of chess and a lot of Mario Kart, which also isn't very fun when you can't scream at your competition. Here's something you want to comment on. Just tweet your thoughts with the hashtag TIDM and I'll read it out on the show. Thanks again for listening. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Reels Hits the Major Leagues with a New Ad Placement

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