Today in Digital Marketing - The Secret Candy Machine, Revealed 🎃

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, an inside look at how Google determines if your web content is trustworthy. Getting data from Twitter just keeps getting more expensive. MailChimp may kick you off its service if it doesn't like the content of your emails. And I know this will shock you, but guys, there's a bug in Facebook's ads platform. I know, right? Who knew? It's Thursday, October 29th, 2020. Happy National Cat Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. One of the big, big changes to the Google algorithm in the last couple of years has been known by the acronym EAT.

Starting point is 00:00:38 E-A-T. It stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. The more of that stuff you have, the higher you'll rank. And part of the way they determined those three is by trying to figure out who wrote the content, the author of the blog post or web page in question. Which is why a Google patent filed this past March could shed some light on how they determine that stuff and what it means for your SEO efforts.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Their algorithm looks at things like bylines, of course, but it's much deeper than that. Quoting searchenginejournal.com, it enables them to be able to identify authors throughout the internet based on their writing style alone, even when their names are not explicitly mentioned on the page. Google is then able to create an author vector, which can be used to characterize authors, identify unique traits about their writing style, and identify other authors whose writing is similar. If this patent is actively being used in Google's organic search algorithms, this has a variety of interesting implications for SEO. For example, Google may be able to identify if a page has falsely used an expert's name

Starting point is 00:01:44 as the author of an article they did not write. Also, Google may be able to assign authorship to articles where the author is not listed based on the writing style alone. These implications suggest that faking good EAT is not as easy as it sounds, unquote. So one more reason why the best way to rank higher on Google is not to try to game the AI, but rather focus on just producing really good content that answers people's questions. Getting analytics data from Twitter is about to become even more expensive. That's on top of the already high prices Twitter charges for access to its data. This past August, Twitter launched a new API. An API, of course, is a backdoor into the data of a platform. Developers use APIs to build public-facing web apps. But we are seeing more

Starting point is 00:02:36 and more of these public web apps calling it quits. Twint, a popular data scraping tool for researchers and journalists, just stopped working about a month ago after this new API rollout. Tim Barker, the former CEO of DataSift, told TechCrunch, quote, once Twitter directly entered the data analytics market after its 2014 acquisition of Gnip, it wanted limited players and no longer a competing ecosystem. You can look on Crunchbase, but I guarantee no one is in their bedroom starting a Twitter-centric startup anymore, unquote. Still quoting TechCrunch's piece here, quote, the most glaring evidence of Twitter tightening access to its data are massive hikes in pricing, which have pushed several startups out of the market. In the early days, the pricing of Twitter

Starting point is 00:03:21 data was volume-based as they were building an economy and an ecosystem. But once that market matured and was funded by venture capitalists, Twitter was a post-IPO company that saw an opportunity to churn profits. According to one developer, the market price nine years ago of high-quality metadata for 100,000 tweets was around 25 to 50 bucks US. Today, Twitter estimates the same quantity of data could potentially cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Google today added several updates to its Google Ads report editor. First, the panel is now on the right-hand side of the report editor,

Starting point is 00:04:03 giving you more space to work in your report. You can also now quickly find data fields for your report with a search function. Add or remove them with what Google calls in a press release, a drag-and-drop experience. Sounds like a bad ride. Chart icons have been added, and there are new formatting, filtering, and sorting tools, including, and this is a nice touch, conditional formatting. And finally, you can now add new data fields into your report while the report is still loading.

Starting point is 00:04:28 You can kick the tires on those changes in the Reports tab in your Google Ads account. All right, a handful of small items for you. First, MailChimp today changed its terms of service to include this text. MailChimp does not allow the distribution of content that is, in its sole discretion, materially false, inaccurate, or misleading in a way that could deceive or confuse others about important events, topics, or circumstances. Unquote. This, of course, is another platform trying to stay ahead of the fake news issue, but interestingly, they say they will be making the determination of what's true and not.

Starting point is 00:05:04 Second, reports say that there is potentially a big bug with DPA carousel ads on Instagram stories. Specifically, the issue is with the dynamic copy, like product name and price. Apparently that copy is not updating on subsequent images. It's just using the same text, so if you're using dynamic carousels, better double check those. Third, the coverage report within Google Search Console is delayed again, apparently now delayed by about 10 days. The delay is usually only about two days. Google has not responded to these complaints yet. And Pinterest says it added 26 million more users in Q3, taking it to a new high of 442 million monthly active users. That's a small dip in the growth rate, but year over year,

Starting point is 00:05:48 Pinterest's growth rate is still better than Facebook's, Snapchat's, and Twitter's. Well, my wife and I are off to the mainland tomorrow for some medical stuff, so no regular episode tomorrow, but there will be a special weekend edition Friday. Brian Barlata writes the excellent newsletter called Sounds Profitable. It's a weekly look at the technology behind podcast advertising. So everything from dynamic ad insertion to analytics, that kind of thing. Tomorrow, Brian will be here in my place to talk about the huge changes in the podcast advertising space that Spotify is forcing on the marketing industry.

Starting point is 00:06:26 My Halloween setup is ready to be COVID friendly. Instead of handing out treats at our door, I've created a kind of secret candy dispensing machine. Kids will walk up to the sidewalk. There'll be a wireless doorbell to press. I will be on our deck shielded from view by big curtains. When they see the doorbell from behind the curtains, they will start to see colored lights start to flash. A fog machine

Starting point is 00:06:46 will start creating smoke, and they will hear this. Please stand back. Thank you for using the Candy Auto Distributor 3000. And really loud, too. Like, I'm renting a 200-watt amplified speaker system for this. And then I will be rolling their candy down this 15-foot-long PVC tube that we bought.

Starting point is 00:07:14 So hopefully it'll appear to be some kind of huge machine that dispenses candy when they push the button, but... I don't know. Maybe we won't even get kids. It is 2020 after all. But I will record a video of the whole contraption and put it into our Slack group for you. There's a link in this episode's notes if you'd like to join the Slack community. That's it for me. Our production assistant is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. This podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital.

Starting point is 00:07:41 Find us at engageq.com. Full transcripts to every episode are on our website, at EngageQ.com. Full transcripts to every episode are on our website, TodayInDigital.com. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. I will talk to you on Monday. Brian will see you here tomorrow. Together, just work

Starting point is 00:08:02 together. This, this is our family. And we work together. This is our family. And we work together. Just work together.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Secret Candy Machine, Revealed 🎃

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