Today in Digital Marketing - That Web Site is Ugly As Sin. (And It's 100% Deliberate.)

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

Twitter launches a brand new ad placement It’s D-day for children’s brands on YouTube Yes, Instagram’s growth rate is on the decline And don’t mock that horribly designed web site. It might just be killing it in conversions. ----- Can you help spread the word? Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today AND/OR click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish The Premium feed, with exclusive deep-dive interviews with social algorithm experts, is at http://patreon.com/todayindigital Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. Links to Tod's social media at at the bottom of http://TodayInDigital.com Sources: https://www.seroundtable.com/medium-google-traffic-loss-28788.html https://www.searchenginejournal.com/do-ugly-sites-sell/342203/#close https://www.searchenginejournal.com/elegant-themes-vulnerability/342079/#close https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/twitter-announces-promoted-trend-spotlight-goes-global.html https://wersm.com/facebook-updates-instant-articles-with-new-features/ https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/6/21051465/youtube-coppa-children-content-gaming-toys-monetization-ads https://reddit.statuspage.io/incidents/4wjdbl6r6sgs https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagrams-user-growth-is-slowing-according-to-a-new-report-from-emarkete/569794/ https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-advertising-launches-sweepstakes-for-advertisers-327181 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Monday, January 6th, 2020. Happy National Shortbread Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Twitter launches a brand new ad placement. It's D-Day for children's brands on YouTube. Yes, Instagram's growth rate is on the decline. And hey, don't mock that horribly designed website. It might just be killing it in conversions.

Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. For a reason I've never fully understood, a lot of brands keep their corporate blog over on medium.com. I mean, I guess I understand part of it. There's some limited virality and discoverability there. But honestly, why not put it on your own site and pixel those visitors? Anyway, if you are one of those, maybe check your analytics this week. Some SEO watchers are saying the site has seen organic visibility declines of up to 40% in the last month alone. I have seen the charts, and they look nasty. Like, just suddenly a huge drop-off.

SEMrush is reporting that number a little lower, at a 30% decline from October to December, but that's still a big drop. And in the first week of this month, so far, Medium has taken an even deeper dive. Experts can't agree on the reason for this. You can see some theories in an seroundtable.com link in this episode's description. But just a word of warning, if your brand channels include Medium. Twitter has a new ad placement, and it is not for the faint of budget,

the Promoted Trend Spotlight. Of course, promoted hashtags have always been a thing. Twitter calls them promoted trends. But now this new spotlight puts your promotion at the top of the Explore tab on mobile and runs in video. That top block has existed for a while, but usually it just shows organic editorial content. Honestly, I'm a little surprised it took Twitter this long to monetize that spot. Disney Plus was one of the first to use it in what video gamers would call early access. Now it is available in the US, the UK, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, and Thailand. Don't expect to be able to tell your brand's full origin story there, though. It only supports videos up to six seconds or animated GIFs. You could also use a static image,

but honestly, if you're running a campaign in that kind of real estate, why would you? And it's kind of an interesting pacing mechanism that they've made for it. Your ad will appear at the top of the Explore tab in that position for the first two visits per person per day. After those initial two visits, your ad moves to the standard promoted trends placement, and that spotlight placement up top reverts to showing organic editorial content. Twitter says people spend 26% more time looking at the spotlight box compared to the standard units below. Well, duh, it's a giant colorful box at the top of the screen.

More importantly, they say a study found it brought double the ad recall and a 67% lift in stated likelihood to use a brand in the future. Interestingly, they either didn't poll for or share any lift in actual conversions. It is not a great day for children's brands. Today, YouTube flipped the switch on its huge changes to channels that feature content aimed at kids. Now, targeted ads are banned from running on kids' videos. Comments have been removed,

along with some other community features like push notifications when there's a new uploaded video. YouTube warns that child-focused channels should expect to see, quote, a significant business impact, unquote. That's due to the loss of targeted ads, of course. And those ads are banned from videos even if YouTube knows that the person watching is an adult. It's just a binary switch.

This video aimed mostly at kids, no ad revenue for you. Which is especially a shame because there's a lot of gray area here. For instance, videos about Minecraft. Are those aimed at kids? A lot of adults watch tutorial videos about building things with redstone, myself included. Or what about toy channels that are targeted at collectors, not just kids. This shouldn't be a surprise, though. YouTube said back in September that they would be doing this. We all had to indicate whether our channel contained content primarily aimed at children or not. To be clear, YouTube doesn't want to do this,

but it was part of a settlement with the American trade regulator. It was bound to happen eventually. Instagram's growth seems to be evening out a little. According to a new eMarketer report, Instagram's growth has dropped to single digits for the first time ever. To be clear, Instagram is still growing, just not as fast as it used to. What caused this?

In a word, saturation. People who want to be on instagram are now mostly there already and apparently older adults aren't picking it up as fast as everyone expected also snapchat and tiktok may have taken a bit out of the pie as well in 2019 instagram's growth rate was 6.7 percent compare that to just over 10 percent for the year before. But chicken little, sky's not falling. Instagram still has over a billion monthly active users. And remember, that number is still going up, just a little slower than before.

And as for us digital marketers, Instagram is still generally cheaper CPM than Facebook, certainly cheaper than Twitter, and way cheaper than Google or LinkedIn. And eMarketer says it expects ad revenue for Instagram will be up 46% in 2020 thanks to more placements and more e-commerce products. One of the most popular WordPress themes used by brands, especially small brands and stores, is Divi. We use it at our agency. It's a very solid product, although it is getting a little bloaty lately.

But if your brand's website is based on Divi, please note they have released a critical security update. They discovered that the software contained a code injection vulnerability, which lets untrusted users execute database functions. If you're not a nerd, here's all you need to know. That's bad, potentially really bad. So if you manage your brand's website and you use Divi,

stop listening to this podcast, go to the dashboard backend right now and update the software. This is so critical that the company has made this update free, even if you do not have a current support license. Every so often, if you're like me, you stumble across an e-commerce site that is just awful. Like, it's not responsive, the design is terrible, they still use Verdana font, for God's sake.

Come on, nobody uses Verdana anymore. Well, an interesting post on searchangeljournal.com today says that might all be deliberate. Back 15 years ago or so, affiliate marketers came to learn that ugly site design frequently converted better than fancy or contemporary layouts. By ugly, we're talking about the add to cart section taking up more than half of the screen width, or the Buy Now button being abnormally huge. All that, the post's author says, was deliberate. Monkey see big yellow button, monkey press big yellow button,

monkey get banana. Quoting the article, as ridiculous as that may sound, the strategy still exists in different forms today. Currently, webpages on Amazon feature an enormous buy area that dominates the webpage. Amazon wouldn't be using a huge buy call to action if it wasn't effective. It's definitely worth a read if you are responsible

for your brand's e-commerce site design, and you'll find a link in this episode's description. Facebook has launched a refreshed version of Instant Articles. It has what Facebook calls a new, quote, recirculation and navigation surface. Honestly, I have no idea why Facebook insists on calling things surfaces, but whatever. What they mean is this. When users swipe right from an Instant Article, they now get a little area that says more from,

and then it presents more Instant instant articles from the same site. This is what Facebook calls the recirculation surface. Up to 50 articles from the same publisher will show up there now. There is also a new footer that has buttons to save, discuss, and share the articles, and it is hidden when it thinks users are reading. Why should us digital marketers care? Well, they say the new format, sorry, the new surface, provides smarter calls to action. Quoting WeRSM.com, ads or CTA placements were served blindly up until now. Now, Facebook has introduced an integrated CTA and ad yield model, which will estimate the value of a CTA and ad yield model, which will estimate the value of a CTA impression based on regional averages of what publishers might pay to achieve objectives attached to it. The ad yield model

then serves a CTA or an ad based on whether each gives a greater estimated publisher value. Publishers can then attribute a value to a CTA conversion. That is a lot of jargon, and if you care about this format, i.e. you work for a publisher brand like a news organization, the full article is worth a read, and you will find a link in this episode's description. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the kind vault-dweller strangers who built my wife a nuclear power station and jukebox at her camp in West Virginia. She didn't have the plans for those. So thank you.

May all your ghoul corpses be plentiful. In caps. If you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to review this podcast. It only takes a second and it really does help. You can find quick instructions at ratethispodcast.com slash today. And if your brand can use some help with your social media content, engagement, or digital marketing, check out our agency at engageq.com. Follow me on social. Links to my channels and our agency are in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. See you tomorrow.