Today in Digital Marketing - The Empire Strikes Back

Starting point is 00:00:00 Thanks to tax reform, American businesses have opened doors throughout our communities. Investing in U.S. manufacturing, workers, and innovation. Spurring half a million new jobs with higher wages and better training. And setting a new record high in corporate taxes paid. Tell Congress to extend and strengthen the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Paid for by Business Roundtable. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:00:37 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. It is Thursday, March 7th. Today, here come the penalties. Google starts bringing down the banhammer. Why engagement is not your brand's best social friend? PayPal rolls out a new iPhone payment method. And you would not believe how much money Timu has spent on Facebook ads. I'm Todd Mathen. That's Ahead. Today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:01:21 The big Google update meant to fix a lot of the crappy search results lately has not even been out for a week. And already the company is handing out plenty of yellow flags. The big anti-spam update rolled out Tuesday. It is aiming specifically at three things, most notably the automated low effort AI blog posts, which have been like 90 percent of my Google searches in the last six months. And while the algorithm is hopefully knocking back some of those sites, human beings employed by Google are now manually penalizing some of those bad ones. This is something Google has always done. They call them manual actions.

Starting point is 00:02:00 Quoting Search Engine Roundtable, Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that the pages on the site are not compliant with Google's spam policies. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate the Google search index. Google has been busy issuing manual actions. In fact, many SEOs and site owners are saying their sites are no longer showing in the Google search index, even for a site command after receiving the manual actions. Indeed, pour one out for this guy. All right, what is going on, guys? Who runs a whole army of AI generated blogs.

Starting point is 00:02:36 The fuckers got me. He uploaded this YouTube video saying getting clapped by Google has cost him $13,000 in monthly revenue. All my sites in the Google search console that which used any AI was fully de-indexed. What is that saying about tiny violins again? I can't remember. Anyway, this cheap content policy and the abuse of expired domains policies both went into effect this week. In a couple of months, Google will start enforcing the third leg of the update, site reputation abuse. So maybe soon a glorious end to the trend of major publications being turned into cheap affiliate marketing sites. So you've got a product you want to sell and have some information up on your website.

Starting point is 00:03:23 What's a surefire way of getting people to read your product page? The solution, for many years, has been to generate as much engagement on a social media post linking to that page as possible, since high engagement means more people will click to read it. Right? Well, not anymore, if that even was ever true. A new report from the PR platform Memo has failed to find a connection between how much engagement a post gets on social media versus how many people actually go on to read that linked post. Their study was about news articles, I should mention, rather than

Starting point is 00:03:56 product pages, but certainly their similarity. Quoting the company, across all articles and topics we analyzed, we found no clear connection between social engagement and actual readers of the news. Here's how socialmediatoday.com covered it. Does that mean that social media is useless for websites looking to drive traffic? Well, no, as the brand awareness benefits would still be significant, while there would still be some correlation between exposure and link clicks, even if it is more minor than expected. But the data does suggest that the connection between post-reach and CTR

Starting point is 00:04:32 is not as direct as you might hope. While fewer people are engaging with content in stream, more are now sharing links in message threads, unquote. One finding they confirmed, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, quote, social engagement was higher per article among negative articles, unquote. I know, shocker.

Starting point is 00:04:59 More options opening up for small businesses to take payment digitally in person. PayPal today announcing that tap to pay on iPhone is now available for all Venmo business profile and PayPal Zettel users in the U.S. This lets small businesses accept contactless card and digital wallet payments directly on their iPhones with no additional hardware. Quoting the company, consumers are going increasingly cashless. More than 40% of Americans surveyed say that none of their purchases are made with cash in a typical week, and that trend is expected to continue.

Starting point is 00:05:34 As a result, accepting card and digital wallet payments in person is increasingly table stakes for small businesses, but until recently, businesses have had to purchase and manage card readers to do so, unquote. Merchants can also set up the system to add taxes, accept tips, send receipts, and issue refunds. Funds from sales will settle into a business's Venmo or PayPal Zettel account. Buyers do not need a Venmo account to take advantage of this. For every transaction, PayPal charges a fee of 2.29% plus 9 cents flat.

Starting point is 00:06:07 This all comes two years after its competitor, Stripe, teamed up with Apple as the first payment partner for Tap2Pay. Stripe also offers Tap2Pay on NFC-equipped Android devices. Unlike PayPal's transaction fee, Stripe charges 10 cents per Tap per tap-to-pay transaction, with additional fees for card and digital wallet payments.

Starting point is 00:06:32 Adobe will soon bring a huge update to its mobile Express app, its graphic design tool that competes with Canva. That update, well, generative AI, of course. This week, Adobe added AI to the beta versions of Express. They're definitely playing catch up with Canva, which introduced a whack of AI tools last year. Once it rolls out more fully, users will get a text to image generator,

Starting point is 00:06:56 a generative fill feature to insert or change an existing image, and a new text effects feature to make text look a little bit more interesting. If you are already a Creative Cloud member, you'll be able to work on assets from Photoshop and Illustrator. And the Express app also has some direct publishing tools to social platforms like Instagram and TikTok. If you want to try it out now while it's still in beta, Android users, you can find it in the Google Play Store. iOS users need to sign up to get access.

Starting point is 00:07:23 We have direct links to both of those in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Some interesting additions to LinkedIn's career tools are launching. First, something it calls Next Role Explorer.

Starting point is 00:07:46 This will visualize potential promotions or job title upgrades members could aim for based on their stated skills and career goals. Quoting the company, quote, say an employee is a data analyst but wants to transition into a different area of the company. We'll recommend new roles based on people who've made a similar job change and provide a personalized curriculum of content to start learning hard and soft skills relevant to the job. Or if someone wants to be promoted in their current role, we can help by recommending the skills needed to advance to the next stage, unquote. As Andrew Hutchinson noted in his coverage of this over at socialmediatoday.com, this isn't their first whack at such an idea. Quoting his piece today, quote, LinkedIn has also tried to show college students their likely career progression with its LinkedIn University Finder element, which it retired several years back. LinkedIn's

Starting point is 00:08:35 actually been working on variations of this for years, but has seemingly never been able to get it right, on a broader scale at least. I assume both of these activations weren't entirely accurate for most people, which is why they didn't stick around, but maybe this more confined version of the same, using more specific insights among colleagues, will prove more directly valuable, unquote. Also, somewhat hilariously, Andrew notes that 460 people list themselves of employees of his website. Something he says is nowhere near accurate. But they can't remove those people because LinkedIn doesn't provide any way to disavow people like you can disavow links in Google. Speaking of LinkedIn, who among us can say we've never checked out that who's viewing your profile page?

Starting point is 00:09:26 It's pretty basic if you don't pay for their premium service, but still just as creepy. Now that tool is about to get more helpful or more creepy, depending on your perspective. Added to the filtering options like date and company is a new one called interesting viewers. That'll show you people that thinks can help get you a job, which ones are LinkedIn influencers, which ones work at a company you follow, and a couple of others. It's not really at all clear how it's coming up with these buckets. When I tried filtering for people who could help me get a job, it actually removed HR recruiters from my list. There's also no clarity on what makes someone qualify as an influencer. Still a nice upgrade if your creepy

Starting point is 00:10:06 self still has this in your daily bookmarks. Have you found it yet? Instagram quietly added a secret game to its app, which you will find in your DMs. It is an old school game like Breakout. You move your finger across the bottom to keep an emoji in the air. When you miss, the game ends. If you want to play it, go to Instagram, go to your DMs and send someone an emoji. It doesn't matter which one, it doesn't matter to whom, just as long as that's the only thing you send, one single emoji. Then tap on that emoji and you will get into the game. The person you sent that emoji to will indeed see the emoji, but without any context. So heads up on that.

Starting point is 00:10:50 You may want to explain why you're doing it. Two more related items. Item one, I lost after the first screen. Item two, shut the hell up. Not everybody has this. It's not clear if it's only going to some people or if it's just a slow rollout. Instagram wouldn't say. Timu apparently spent so much money on Meta ads last year that Meta staffers joked they should send them literally a greeting card thanking them.

Starting point is 00:11:21 How much gets you a card from Meta? Timu is said to have spent nearly $2 billion on ads last year. According to the Wall Street Journal, this makes the Meta's top advertiser in terms of revenue for 2023. For its part, Timu denied the figure but wouldn't say how much they actually spent. The company is privately owned by a Chinese holding firm, so it doesn't have any public reporting obligations. It is clear, though, that they have deep pockets. The company bought Super Bowl ads this year and last year.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Analysts believe the company is not profitable, with Goldman Sachs estimating its marketing spend alone contributed to an average $7 loss per order last year. Quoting Business Insider, quote, while its strategy to bombard shoppers with ads and woo them with low prices seemed to pay off initially as customers flocked to the app,

Starting point is 00:12:13 data suggests that Timu may be losing momentum. Observed sales for Timu fell 12.5% month-on-month in December and 4.8% in January. The data showed that the number of Timu users in the U.S. was also declining, unquote. Pivot to in-shitification mode in 3, 2... Threads is finally rolling out two of the most requested items on users' wish lists. First, if you leave a post without

Starting point is 00:12:45 finishing it, you'll get an option to save that as a draft. Second, the camera function finally works in-app, so you can upload a photo by taking one right there and then, rather than choosing from an existing photo from your gallery. Both new features are limited, though. For now, you can only store one draft post and only upload one camera photo per post. So a couple of you have inquired as to why the fancy different music at the end of each episode is

Starting point is 00:13:15 no longer there. As you may recall, I used to do different pieces of music and kind of mix them in, and sometimes they would comment on the show, sometimes they wouldn't. Anyway, two reasons for pulling them. One cost. I mean, it was, you know, a monthly cost to license the music library. But the bigger reason is I was spending more time editing that final bit of music to make it, you know, like the perfect so that I would hit the post at the right time. The lyrics would come in right when I stopped talking and the mix was like I was spending more time on those closing 30 seconds than I did on the entirety of voicing the show.

Starting point is 00:13:53 I'm not exaggerating. Like it was almost always more time on that. So by pulling the music and removing the closing theme and just making the regular theme the closing theme. This is saving me like two and a half hours a week, which I'm spending wisely. I, you know, like leaving early and playing video games. I am feeling better now. Thank you for the well wishes. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Empire Strikes Back

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.