Today in Digital Marketing - The Case of the Rewritten <TITLE> Tags, Part II

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. 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. Today, and you thought competing against Amazon was hard now?

Starting point is 00:01:08 Also, why live audio might be part of your next marketing plan? A surprise redesign of one of the world's biggest websites? And Facebook's continued panic about TikTok plays out in the most predictable way. It's Thursday, August 19th, 2021. Happy Sour Herring Festival Day, Sweden. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. We're coming to a shopping mall near you, Amazon. The Wall Street Journal today reporting Amazon plans to open sort of mini department stores in California and Ohio to start.

Starting point is 00:01:46 There'll be 30,000 square feet compared to the average department store at 100,000 square feet. It is expected they'll sell their own private label goods there. And it'll be interesting to see how well they fit into that retail category. Back in the mid-90s, department stores accounted for 10% of U.S. retail sales. Today, they're less than 1%. This won't be Amazon's first bricks and mortar. They actually have 89 real-world stores right now, from bookstores to small grocery stores. But there may be trouble looming ahead in the form of American anti-monopoly legislation being proposed

Starting point is 00:02:17 that would prevent companies like Amazon from selling their own private label products on their platforms. One final Amazon note, the company passed an important milestone last month, quoting Inside Ecommerce, between June 2020 and June 2021, consumers spent $610 billion at Amazon, $566 billion was spent at Walmart. This ends Walmart's 31-year run as the top U.S. retailer, which it began when it passed Sears in 1990, unquote. But that's only in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Both companies are still way behind the global leader, Alibaba, which logged $1.2 trillion in sales in the last year. A couple of days ago, we reported that the Google search index appeared to have a bug in it, which would ignore the title tag on a page and instead pick seemingly random metadata to use as the main title headline. Most of these instances showed it using a page's H1 tag, but others reported it was using the pages file name, or it was putting content display tags like italics in the title, or using the intended title tag but ignoring the first few words of it, or putting a date at the front of the title. One guy wrote a pretty detailed blog post about this, showing that Google actually replaced one of his page titles with text found on another page of his site entirely. Google's never guaranteed their index will use your title tag, but until now it's been pretty judicious in its substitutions. Most of the time it's actually been the meta description they've messed with. Or if they did change the title, it was a tiny change,

Starting point is 00:04:02 like adding a business's name to the end. Not this kind of complete overwriting change the title, it was a tiny change, like adding a business's name to the end. Not this kind of complete overwriting of the title with completely different text. Many digital marketers spend hours trying to craft just the right title or the right title template for their website, knowing that these few words often make or break a user's decision on whether to click to their site. So is this a bug? It might not be. Responding to SEO pros on Twitter, several Google search engineers this week kept reiterating the party line, we never promised to always use your title tags,

Starting point is 00:04:35 though they do seem to concede it's been a little all over the map lately. So absent from any official statement from Google, it seems as if they've turned up the dial a bit on these title tag substitutions, and in doing so, perhaps introduced a few bugs along the way. If that is the case, we can probably expect more of our title tags to be rewritten by Google. This is, of course, a continuation of our industry's drunken infatuation with machine learning, a kind of daddy-knows-best approach to marketing technology, where platforms opt to use educated guesses

Starting point is 00:05:11 instead of the data we hard-code into our page titles, ad campaign structures, body copy, and so on. So far, no reports that this rewriting is having an impact on the site's actual ranking. Facebook's Department of Redundancy department today announced what we all knew was coming. Facebook Reels. Yes, Reels, Facebook's panicked response to TikTok, which they jammed into the Instagram app, are now coming to what they like to call the Blue App. You might recall last week we reported that users in some countries were seeing Instagram Reels in Facebook,

Starting point is 00:05:47 like just sort of cross-posting them there. This is different. These will be Facebook Reels, composed in Facebook, visible in Facebook groups, on the newsfeed, and so on. And really, it's no different than their panicked response to Snapchat some years ago, where they jammed stories into Instagram, then threw them into Facebook for good measure. All snark aside, this is probably good news overall for us digital marketers.

Starting point is 00:06:13 Obviously, it's another placement. It's not there right now, but it's coming. And another opportunity for organic content. For now, only some of Instagram Reels' features will be supported on Facebook Reels. For instance, Remix, which TikTok calls duets, are not available. Facebook says they'll start by putting them in Facebook groups. Proof, once again, that Facebook developers spend no actual time inside Facebook and have no idea how people use it.

Starting point is 00:06:41 TechCrunch, I thought, nailed it today in its coverage. Quote, for Facebook, TikTok represents an existential threat to its business. If users' time and attention are being spent elsewhere, Facebook's advertisers could then follow, impacting Facebook's bottom line. So instead of competing with TikTok in just one app, Facebook is now using two. Unquote. Facebook Reels has started to roll out as of today for a small number of US users.

Starting point is 00:07:11 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 00:07:30 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Not many marketing plans include live audio as part of their program, but that may be something you'll want to consider in the months forward. And an announcement from Twitter today may have you poking around the new format earlier than you may have thought.

Starting point is 00:07:48 Today, Twitter began rolling out an update to its API, which will let third-party platforms offer live Spaces broadcasting to their clients. This, in theory, could mean that you could use your current social media tool, like Agorapulse or Buffer, to go live on Twitter Spaces. There's no guarantee these platforms will integrate it, of course, and honestly, it seems like a bit of a stretch for most of them, but that code will be there. More likely, this will enable entirely new tools that make it easier to use Spaces. One of the additions many people wanted is in there, Discovery, so people can find interesting live Sp spaces instead of just hoping to catch one by someone they follow. Quoting socialmediatoday.com,

Starting point is 00:08:30 Because just as live streaming was quickly inundated with low-quality, even offensive streams, live audio can also get very boring very fast if you're not able to locate quality relevant broadcasts. Unquote. No word when this discovery function will start working on their own site and apps. Also part of the new API, analytics, to measure how your brand's spaces have performed over time.

Starting point is 00:09:01 Well, not directly related to our work as digital marketers, but I thought an interesting story nonetheless. OnlyFans today announced it is getting out of the porn business. OnlyFans started as a competitor to Patreon, a platform that lets creators charge a monthly fee for access to content like articles, artwork, podcast episodes. But it was the influx of mostly young women offering nude photos and videos of themselves that gave OnlyFans its reputation. Today, the company said they will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit content, starting in October. Somewhat confusingly, they say nude photos and videos

Starting point is 00:09:40 will still actually be allowed as long as they fit within a new set of policy guidelines. So, I guess, make it arty? Why the change? The banks and payment processors, which have always been a little pearl-clutchy about nudity. Also, OnlyFans is making the VC rounds looking for more cash. They have 130 million users and had been praised for giving sex workers a place to do their jobs more safely. OnlyFans took in more than

Starting point is 00:10:08 2 billion in sales last year, 80% of which went to creators. They say they are on track to double that 2 billion this year. And finally, if you haven't been to Wikipedia lately, it's worth stopping in as they've launched a pretty significant design change, which is, by the way, most notable on desktop. You won't really see much of a difference on mobile.

Starting point is 00:10:31 The main change, everything's a little cleaner, simplified, fewer links to other Wikipedia pages and so on. But here's what I've learned from my week in hell. Sorry, did I say hell? I meant home automation. Maybe someone can help me understand this because it seems like these devices need to sit in the home for like a day or two before they start fully working. It's like they need to marinate or something.

Starting point is 00:10:56 And no, I'm not talking give it time to do a firmware update. I do firmware updates immediately. Why? Because I'm not a monster. That's why. But almost every device I put in has not worked right away. And then the next morning, I do firmware updates immediately. Why? Because I'm not a monster. That's why. But almost every device I put in has not worked right away.

Starting point is 00:11:12 And then the next morning, it's like, no, no, everything's fine. You can connect to me. I don't get it. Also, my thanks to those of you who offered advice on my conundrum about Apple's desktop music app not having shortcut keys. I found the solution and I've been using it all along. Alfred, which is a Mac quick launcher, has it built in. So thank you to those of you who suggested it. I can now completely enjoy my crappy 80s first wave remixes.

Starting point is 00:11:59 Talk to you tomorrow. 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. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Case of the Rewritten <TITLE> Tags, Part II

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