Today in Digital Marketing - [REPOST] Everything Is Made Up, and the Points Don't Matter

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Hey, surprise, it's Todd. This is kind of a weird weekend edition. Be protected. Be Zen. which was the file that we had intended to use and did indeed use at the end of the regular episode. So all that to say, some of you did not actually receive the regular episode. You just got some weird 30-second ad. And so for those people, here is yesterday's episode as it was intended to be broadcast to you. Everyone else who actually heard the real episode, you can delete it and move on with your lives.

Starting point is 00:01:02 I'll talk to you on Monday. Today, Amazon's secret talk to you on Monday. Nothing. It's Friday, September 10th, 2021. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 465. Every so often in the halls of conferences, in between meetings at the office, you hear the SEO nerds quietly conferring with each other. You know what's working now? Putting your keywords in H6 tags and putting your H6 at the top and CSSing it to look like an H1 tag. Pass it on. Little tips to try to game Google. These tips come and go, and some move out of the tinfoil hat crowd and become adopted as mainstream SEO wisdom,

Starting point is 00:01:58 even though nobody's tested it, or sometimes even though Google themselves says, no, that's not how our ranking system works at all. Among the whispered tips that have been circulating for years now is metadata. Specifically, putting your business's location in your image metadata, then uploading it to your Google business profile. Do that, say the SEO nerds, and you'll rank higher. It sounds like a lot of effort, but is the tinfoil hat crowd onto something? Does it actually work? The Friday quiz, does putting location metadata

Starting point is 00:02:39 into the images you upload to your Google My Business profile help you to rank higher in Google? Somebody actually did a study on this. We will have the answer and the study's author later in the episode. As of this week, there is a simpler way to understand how well-configured your Microsoft Ads account is. Their Ads platform now shows what they call an optimization score. This number is basically a score sheet of how many

Starting point is 00:03:10 of Microsoft's AI recommendations you've implemented regarding things like bidding, keywords, targeting, spend, ads, extensions, and so on. Yes, it's very similar to Google's version, which has been around for a couple of years now. And often, AI gets things wrong, as anyone who's ever looked at machine learning generated recommendations in an ad account can tell you. It'll find an underperforming ad set and recommend that you quadruple the budget there because somewhere in its code, it applied some assumptions that might be right for most accounts, but not yours. After all, AI can't know the nuances of your audiences, or a unique funnel approach, or the fact that Dave in marketing can't wrap his head around

Starting point is 00:03:50 video still, and so you're running still images when everyone from the receptionist up knows it's the wrong play. Nevertheless, the math on this new optimization score is pretty simple. If you apply a recommendation that has a score uplift of 10%, your account's optimization score increases by 10%. Applying all the recommendations can get you to 100% for your account. There is a somewhat peculiar workaround, though. Microsoft says in addition to accepting the recommendations, you can also just dismiss them. That, too, will get you a higher optimization score,

Starting point is 00:04:28 which might lead some to wonder, if I'm dismissing your recommendations without implementing them, how is my account more optimized exactly? So in the end, Microsoft Ads' new optimization score is a lot like the old game show, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, where everything is made up and the points don't matter. Some new features on their way from YouTube for content marketers. First, we're getting insight for Evergreen Videos. That's the informal name for videos that stay popular for an extended amount of time. They started testing this last month.

Starting point is 00:05:07 It is now rolling out to everyone. Second, trending hashtags, giving us a sense of what topics are proving to have the fastest growth. For now, this is only on mobile and only in the US. Third, some new brand safety controls in the form of AdSense blocking. This will let you specify which ads

Starting point is 00:05:25 or types of ads you do not want running on your brand's YouTube channel. This was available before, but only for channels in their partner network. Now they are expanding it out to their multi-channel affiliate networks as well. Fourth, the ability to bulk edit video chapters. This is a really nice upgrade from the recently introduced chapters system. Some videos are having chapters created automatically. So if YouTube did this and you want to make a mass fix, you should be able to indicate a bunch of videos where you want this disabled. And finally, you should soon be able to appeal the dreaded yellow icons via the studio mobile app instead of only by desktop. The yellow icon indicates when a video's monetization is disabled. This should be out to all partner accounts by the end of the month.

Starting point is 00:06:13 Amazon is said to be working on creating its own point of sale system, one that can process both online orders and in-store orders. And even more interestingly, they plan to sell the platform to third-party sellers. The system apparently will also let merchants manage their inventory and will offer Amazon's Palm scanning payment technology. The move is said to be designed to lure merchants away from Shopify and coax them onto Amazon's system. Grandview Research says the global POS market will grow from 9.3 billion last year

Starting point is 00:06:48 to nearly 20 billion by 2028. The Amazon POS is still being developed and it is not known when they will launch it publicly. 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 00:07:24 One of the nice subtle things Facebook added a few years back were reactions. Previously, $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. One of the nice subtle things Facebook added a few years back were reactions. Previously, we only had one reaction for comments or posts, and that was like. The like button is still there, of course, but underneath it lies love, ha-ha, oh my god, wow, and a few others. And these reactions on the paid media side can be used to get a more nuanced understanding of how people feel about your creative or your messaging. It is no doubt also being used internally by Facebook as an algorithmic ranking factor

Starting point is 00:07:52 in determining content distribution. Others copied the idea. Hell, even grumpy old LinkedIn uses hover reactions now. And so, perhaps predictably, Twitter has decided it finally will jump on the reactions bandwagon too. It's been in testing for the last few months. They are now rolling out a countrywide test of tweet reactions.

Starting point is 00:08:12 The downside? That country is Turkey. I mean, unless you're in Turkey, then, you know, bully for you. The test shows four new emoji reactions. Thinking, crying, laughing, and clapping. We knew this was coming because this past spring, Twitter conducted a pretty widely distributed survey with different sets of reactions, asking people which set of four they'd prefer to see. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, Of course, the counter to this is that these are largely vanity metrics, which will give users yet another meaningless scoreboard to compete on, lessening the overall platform experience by trivializing contributions.

Starting point is 00:08:50 In general, likes and follower counts contribute to the same, as acknowledged by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself, but reactions at least provide some additional nuance and a broader indicator of how others are responding to a comment or post. Really, if you're going to have likes, you may as well have reactions. And while there is also a risk that response emojis can be used in negative ways as well, by limiting which options are included, Twitter can negate this. Note, there are no clearly negative options within the current reaction test set. Unquote. And back to the Friday quiz.

Starting point is 00:09:29 Does adding geotag metadata to your images in your Google business profile improve your Google ranking? To answer that question, I'm joined by Joy Hawkins, owner of the Sterling Sky Agency. Hi, Joy. Hi, Todd.

Starting point is 00:09:42 So our production coordinator, Sarah, has actually kept the answer away from me on this one. So our production coordinator, Sarah, has actually kept the answer away from me on this one. So I'm going to take a shot at it and say that yes, it does help, but not by much. Am I right? Well, in our test, we weren't able to find any impact whatsoever. So if there was an impact, it was so small that it wasn't measurable. So we found pretty much nothing. I would have thought that Google wanted to reward behavior that they want you to do, like putting your geotags in place with increased rankings. Does that not happen?

Starting point is 00:10:11 Yeah. Well, something to keep in mind is I hear a lot of best practices that, you know, Google says you should do this, but it doesn't actually do anything. So it's always important to kind of watch what they do, not what they say. But in this case, I think the main thing is that when you add a photo to a listing, Google already knows where it's located, because it's you're literally adding it to a listing that has an address on it. So adding additional information, you're not giving Google any info that they don't already have. That's a good point. What about on the flip side of that

Starting point is 00:10:40 information that they don't necessarily had that stuff on your website? So what about if you were to add geo tags to photos on your website? Yeah, we tried that as well. And we were actually checking to see if it had any impact organically, like in the localized organic results or the local pack, again, found nothing measurable. I was kind of surprised by that one. I thought maybe it would be like a small minor thing. Yeah. But yeah, just like nothing that we could actually see no traffic increases or anything like that either. Joy, tell me about your agency. Yeah, so I have a team of around 20 employees in the US and Canada. And all we do is local SEO and trying to get more traffic for

Starting point is 00:11:16 small businesses from Google. Thank you for joining us on the Friday quiz, Joy. Yeah, thanks for having me. Joy Hawkins owns the Sterling Sky Agency in Toronto. They are at sterlingsky.ca. And look for their very detailed blog post about this topic called, Does Geotagging Photos Influence Ranking? Again, they're at sterlingsky.ca. Can nobody make a decent monitor? This is my question now, because I've been through three monitors,

Starting point is 00:11:45 and right out of the box, they haven't worked in some way. I don't mean, like, I didn't like the way the stand looked or anything like that. I mean, they straight up did not work properly. I just got one in from Bank, B-E-N-Q, I don't know how to pronounce that. Anyway, on the right-hand side, giant blue bar, and then all of the text's completely squished up against the side, and, you know, I tried DisplayPort. I tried USB-C. I tried HDMI. It's all still there. I call support and support doesn't have no idea. And then they're basically, well, here's an RMA number. That's all I can do. Like, honestly, how hard is it to make a monitor? Was this crap happening 15, 20 years ago? Oh, God, I sound old. A programming note here. The bonus episode that we had scheduled for premium newsletter subscribers about Google Ad account audits will still happen. It will happen next weekend. We had some lingering technical problems.

Starting point is 00:12:33 So we will be getting that to you in one week's time. I'm not giving up. That's it for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the unceded territories of the Sunemu First Nation on beautiful Vancouver Island. Production support and fact-checking by Sarah Gill. Theme composer Mark Blevis is changing the minds of pretenders while chasing the clouds away. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll talk to you on Monday. You can choose tennis, or hockey, handball, or squash. To increase the challenge, switch to a faster ball speed and a sharper angle.

Starting point is 00:13:32 Even change the bat size. The TV fun game with extra features is at Wilco now, 59. But then I hear it deep inside. It calls my name, says this is our time. It's not over yet. I'm not giving up. I'm not giving up.

Today in Digital Marketing - [REPOST] Everything Is Made Up, and the Points Don't Matter

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