Today in Digital Marketing - Shots Fired.

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

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. Today, shots fired. The first salvo in the attempt to break up Facebook is underway. Why hiding your webpages from Google won't keep you from being penalized, there's a new placement available for your Facebook ads, well, there will be soon, and how one very bad word rocketed a post straight to the top of Reddit this year. It's Wednesday, December 9th, 2020. Happy Fatherland Heroes Day, Russia.

Starting point is 00:01:00 I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Some breaking news in case you haven't heard it. This morning, the American trade regulator, the FTC, asked a federal court to break up Facebook. Specifically, they want the court to force Facebook to sell off some of the platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp and turn them over to independent businesses. This isn't particularly surprising. The American government's been signaling that they might be interested in doing this for a while now. In addition to this big federal suit, 48 states and territories are also filing their own lawsuits against Facebook.

Starting point is 00:01:37 For its part, Facebook's early defense seems to be, well, you let us buy the companies in the first place, so what the hell? Their tweet this morning read, years after the FTC cleared our acquisitions, the government now wants a do-over with no regard for the impact that precedent would have on the broader business community or the people who choose our products every day. The reactions to that tweet are not going Facebook's way. Two of my favorites, spare us the pearl clutching. Facebook has had no regard for its impact on society or democracy.

Starting point is 00:02:10 And, okay, explain how you're not a monopoly, though? It's still early days, of course, so no direct effect on our work as digital marketers at this point. At the market close today, Facebook's stock down, but only by less than 2%. America isn't the only nation to be sniffing around the big tech companies. We learned more this week about the forthcoming European legislation that would ask Google and others, more on that ask part in a moment, to reveal some of their algorithm secrets and update that disclosure every time they update the code. Here's a language the proposed legislation uses, quote, providers of online search engines shall set out the main parameters which individually or collectively are most significant in determining ranking

Starting point is 00:02:57 and the relative importance of those main parameters by providing an easily and publicly available description drafted in plain and intelligible language on the online search Yes, I said ask Google, not require Google. The guidelines are not legally binding, but are designed to help, quote, facilitate compliance. If that sticks, the good money is on Google just ignoring it. Oh, they'll put out a news release talking about how much they respect the European Union and how important they think Europeans are, and then they'll ignore it. And it's only part of the algorithms they want disclosed, specifically the ranking variables. In fact, they go out of their way to say that the search engines won't need to, quote,

Starting point is 00:03:40 disclose algorithms or any information that, with reasonable certainty, would result in the enabling of deception of consumers or consumer harm through the manipulation of search results, unquote. So you might be asking, what ranking factors do they want? We're not entirely sure yet, but most likely they'll want to know the weighting given to factors like page loading speed and whether the site is secure, how consumer reviews factor into their ranking, accessibility, and so on. Again, nothing yet for us digital marketers to act on, though if Google does in fact disclose those things, I will let you know first, right here.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Speaking of what factors contribute to a page's ranking in Google, we've known for a while now that Google plans to introduce a new metric called Core Web Vitals. And that metric will be relied on heavily to determine how high your brand's website will rank. Your Core Web Vitals score will be made of three things, how fast the page loads, how soon a user can interact with it, and how much the page's layout jumps around. You know, when a banner ad pops in at the top and everything shifts down a little. That. But we learned something surprising about that this week that honestly surprised me a little. Google search engineer John Mueller said in a recent live

Starting point is 00:04:53 stream that pages you remove from the Google index, either via a no index meta tag or you block them in your robots.txt file file those pages will still count against your web vital score that's something that's also part of your website so if you like you use some extra functionality and that's no index then kind of like people see that as a part of your website and say well this website is slow or this website is fast i guess that does make sense no indexing a page doesn't prevent users from seeing it. It just asks search engines to not make it searchable. So it is still part of the user experience.

Starting point is 00:05:33 One follow-up question someone asked is, is there a way to ensure that particular pages are not being used to assess how well a site passes core web vitals? Wheeler said he didn't have specifics, but reminded people that Google's index tends to look at the URL structure to determine how pages are grouped together. So if you're specifically worried about the search pages on your website, for example, then putting those in a folder with the word search in it, in other words, the URL is like slash search,

Starting point is 00:06:02 makes it a little bit easier for Google to understand that all of your search pages belong together, all of your product pages belong together, all of your blog posts belong together. He said they might be able to treat them individually when it comes to the measurement of your core web vitals. The list of Facebook's available ad placements may be growing soon. You may see ad pods in that list soon. An ad pod is a pair of back-to-back mid-roll video ads inside the existing in-stream ads placement.

Starting point is 00:06:35 So I guess kind of a sub-placement. Quoting Adweek.com, ad pods can contain a mix of 15-second skippable and non-skippable video ads, as well as long-form ads of more than 15 seconds. And Facebook noted that a limited number of publishers are excluded from skippable ads. The social network said combining ads up front or together enables it to reduce the frequency of ad breaks further in-stream so that viewers can watch content with fewer interruptions, adding that advertisers will have more opportunities to scale value

Starting point is 00:07:06 by using the format to boost overall inventory, unquote. The new placements are in testing now. No guarantee they'll make it to the final placement list we all use, of course, but those tests usually do lead to a more complete rollout. Since you're all digital marketers who listen, I promised to take you behind the scenes on the digital marketing and monetization of this very podcast. The platform I use, Red Circle, turned on its programmatic advertising yesterday. These are ads that are automatically inserted into specific locations of the show.

Starting point is 00:07:38 After I upload the file, I drop these little markers down to show where the ads can go. These are now enabled on their platform on all podcasts that have more than 500 weekly downloads. This podcast is hovering a little bit over 6,000 downloads a week. I checked my dashboard, and after a day, I have earned $7.25. So I figure after about a month, and after converting that to those sweet, sweet Canadian loonies, it's looking like about $275 a month, and more as the audience size increases.

Starting point is 00:08:09 But because these get dropped in automatically, I don't get to approve or decline them. In fact, I don't even hear them. I only hear them when I listen to the podcast, just like you do. That said, Red Circle does let you opt out of a bunch of brand categories, so if I did it right, you should not be hearing any ads related to gambling, alcohol, nightclubs, cigars. I might actually take that out. I do love a good cigar. Guns, immigration, politics, extreme violence, pornography, or malware. Wait, are malware developers advertising on podcasts now? Can you imagine? We make the best ransomware. Please, please download.

Starting point is 00:08:48 Oh, there's also an exclusion category called unmoderated user-generated content. So no idea what kind of ads would be in that category. Honestly, I'm a little tempted to turn that back on and see what we end up with. Who knew exclusion categories

Starting point is 00:09:02 of programmatic ad platforms could be so much fun? See why you listen to this podcast? Finally, and a quick warning, there is a swear word in this segment. The usual news releases are trickling out this year with that whole year in review stuff that everyone does. Top Google searches around the world this year. The first four you could probably guess, coronavirus, election results, Kobe Bryant, and Zoom. But in fifth and sixth place,

Starting point is 00:09:31 references to cricket games in India. Rounding out the top 10 in order, coronavirus update, coronavirus symptoms, Joe Biden, and Google Classroom. As for the top mobile apps of 2020, TikTok had the most downloads, followed by Facebook and WhatsApp. Interestingly, Likey, that's the TikTok clone, well, one of the many TikTok clones, managed to squeeze itself into the number 10 position.

Starting point is 00:09:54 But that's just downloads. When we look at the most number of monthly active users of all those apps, it is all Facebook. Well, the top four are anyway, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Did I mention the U.S. government thinks Facebook has a monopoly? I said that, right? Fifth place, Amazon. Then, in order, Twitter, Netflix, TikTok, Spotify, and Snapchat. But who cares about downloads or monthlies?

Starting point is 00:10:18 What we care about as digital marketers is cold, hard cash. So what mobile apps garnered the most consumer spend with in-app purchases? Number one, Tinder. Turns out you can pay your way to the top of the pile. And number two, TikTok. Where's the money there? Well, you can buy little icons to spam a live stream with, and that streaming creator will get some of that money. Apparently, a lot of that. And Reddit reported a bunch of year-end stats. My favorite was they announced the most upvoted post of the year. It was a photo posted by Rick Astley, the real Rick Astley, backstage at a Vegas show in 1989, his first tour,

Starting point is 00:10:57 riding a bicycle. That was the photo. But the post didn't get to the top because of the photo or because it was the Rick Roller himself. It was actually because of the most upvoted comment, which linked to an Ask Me Everything that Astley did four years ago. The top comment on that AMA was, will you ever give me up? To which Rick Astley replied, go fuck yourself. The Christmas lights arrived. You know, the ones I talked about yesterday, the ones you control with the phone.

Starting point is 00:11:31 They're really cool. They are super fun. Had a hell of a time trying to pair it, but once you do, it's really kind of cool. You basically point your camera on your smartphone at the entire string of lights. You put it all in the frame, and then it flashes the lights

Starting point is 00:11:45 in some kind of code sequence, I guess, and somehow manages to map every single light to its location. And then you can create your own patterns. It's really cool. I am certainly having fun with it. Oh, they cost way more money than a string of lights should.

Starting point is 00:11:59 But I'm having fun. I don't have any hobbies. Leave me alone. All right, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, away. home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - Shots Fired.

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