Today in Digital Marketing - Things Are About to Get Creepy (and Ridiculously Effective?)

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Instagram removes a popular tactic of social media community managers… here’s why your brand’s web site suddenly got a lot of traffic today, Spotify’s new patent is equal parts creepy and potentially ground-breaking in terms of marketing, and TikTok cozies up to agencies. Wait, no, scratch that. Just one agency.  • Enjoying the Show? Rate/Review Us! • Join Our Free Slack Community • About Us: Ads / Classifieds • Transcripts • Leave a Voicemail • Follow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchMore Info on the Stories Covered:Spotify Patents Speech Recognition Tech (Patent PDF here)Instagram Testing No More Shared Feed Posts In StoriesFiltering Referral SpamAll Core Web Vitals Must Be Met For Ranking BoostJon Loomer’s “Facebook Ads and iOS 14” CourseGoogle’s Course on Apple’s iOS Changes to TrackingFacebook Ad Category ExclusionsTikTok and WPPQuiz Answer: Embedded Videos and SEO Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, Instagram removes a popular tactic of social media community managers. Here's why your brand's website suddenly got a lot of traffic today. Spotify's new patent is equal parts creepy and potentially groundbreaking in terms of marketing. And TikTok cozies up to agencies. Wait, no, scratch that. Just one agency. It's Monday, February 1st, 2021. Happy Constitution Day, Mexico. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Lots to get to today,

and we will start with a quiz. When it comes to SEO, how will your company's video rank if you embed that video on your website versus just uploading it directly to your site? In other words, how does embedding that video affect where you appear in the results page? Will embedding a video hurt that video's rank or help it? Or will it make no difference at all? The answer at the end of today's episode. So please join me in welcoming Todd Muffin.

I spent about 20 years on the professional speaking circuit. Thank you. Good morning. I keynoted more than 600 conferences everywhere from Romania to Australia, from London to Berlin. And while most of that work was around digital marketing tactics, one of my most popular speeches was on the future of biometric marketing technology, using people's faces or voices or eye tracking to understand their emotional state and developing a marketing campaign to, well, exploit that emotional state.

Most of what I presented has since come to fruition. There are small cameras at the back of some grocery store shelves to track where on the shelf you're looking, cameras in casinos to measure how fast people are walking when they enter the building, as fast walkers have a higher tendency to be fraudsters. But one technology that I talked about that hasn't quite made it out yet,

at least not that I've been able to find, at some point, a company was working on tech that would heat map your face. What parts of your face were warmer and what were colder because they claimed that certain patterns indicated emotional states. Warm cheeks and a colder chin was happy, a lukewarm forehead with a hot nose was anger, that kind of thing. This sort of technology has always fascinated me, which is why news of a Spotify patent that just got approved captured my attention. The patent

is called Identification of Taste Attributes from an Audio Signal. There's a link to the PDF in the notes if you want to read the whole thing. Essentially, it uses speech recognition to try to identify the gender and age of people in the room and their current emotional state. And why? Well, the patent language makes it sound like

they'll just use it for music recommendations, but I think we all know this will be used for ad campaigns. Remember, when Facebook came along, many marketers were wowed by the staggering number of targeting buckets we had available now. No more just age, gender, and geography. Now we could target by very precise interests. You want to reach British grandmothers who love Chuck Norris? Done.

But one thing that's been missing from pretty much all marketing technology is targeting based on emotion. And while, yes, Facebook and other social platforms have tried to jam sentiment in there with the wow, ha-ha, angry, and other emotion-based reaction engagements, we digital marketers haven't been able to use those for targeting. For instance, all British grandmothers who love Chuck Norris and are currently sad. That's probably a good thing,

especially when you consider that how certain political parties of certain countries might exploit that, people who are angry about immigration or sad about refugees. So what will Spotify's new tech enable in terms of ad campaign targeting? The patent says very clearly it could indicate, quote, an emotional state of a speaker providing the voice, unquote, but more than that, it might pick up vehicles on a street

or a room full of other people talking or birds chirping or printers printing, all identifying targetable aspects. The closest Spotify would say about its potential use for marketing was, quote, There's one other question here that the patent most definitely does not answer. Where will they get that audio from in the first place? The voice. You can't control Spotify with your voice right now unless you link it to a smart home device.

So will those device providers sell voice data? Will Spotify's app start asking for microphone permissions to eavesdrop on us? Strange new world, friends. In the endless arms race between Snapchat and TikTok and Instagram, all those platforms have been racing to add new features, or in Instagram's case, copy new features. So it's a little strange to see a new test from Instagram where they're taking a feature away. A feature many digital marketers used for user-generated comments. You know the main Facebook feed, of course, and you know the stories.

Well, there's a hybrid, too, where you can take an image off the feed and publish it to your brand's story. It's resizable and movable, kind of like a sticker. That's what they're taking away. Sharing feed posts within stories. I suppose they're doing this because as socialmediatoday.com noted quote, the only way you're going to see a person's IG story is your top bar if you follow them.

And if you follow them, that means you'll also see their regular posts within your feed as well. And it can be annoying, as Instagram notes, to be double served the exact same posts, unquote. And yes, that's true, but that's not the only way you'd see those. Because many social media community managers who work for lifestyle brands often use customers' posts in their brand's stories as user-generated content. Again, this removal of this function is just a test for now, so unless you happen to be

in this test group, you're still able to do it. And of course, even if this goes through, you should always be able to do it manually by just screenshotting a post and then adding that to a story. This morning, a lot of digital marketers who manage their Google Analytics woke up to what at first looked like a nice surprise, a big jump in traffic. Suddenly it seemed many more people were interested in what you were selling. But it turned out to be a lie because that increased traffic being reported by many folks in our space is all coming from referral spam. What is referral spam?

There are different flavors, but a common one is when a bot makes a whole bunch of requests to a page on your site that doesn't exist. They start requesting a page called, like, freesocialbuttons.com. That URL isn't on your site, of course, but those requests still show up in Google Analytics. The idea being that a webmaster would go, hey, what's that site?

And maybe check it out. Sometimes they're not web pages, but show up as a referrer, hence the term referral spam. If you notice this too today, you can block these in certain web firewalls like Cloudflare or filter them out. And there is a link in today's show notes that will show you how. We've been talking a lot about the forthcoming change to Google's search criteria, something they call core web vitals. This is a set of three metrics, actually.

How fast your web page loads data, how soon someone can interact with the page, and how much the layout jumps around. As we get closer to this update in May, Google has been feeding us a bit of information at a time. It's mostly been technical so far, but recently we learned a lot more about how it may change your brand's existing Google ranking. We've known for some time that Google has benchmarks for all three, and you've got to beat the benchmarks to be on the good side of it. But now, search engineer John Mueller confirms, actually, you'll need to meet all three benchmarks, speed, interaction, and layout jumps, in order to qualify for the ranking signal boost. In case you're curious, here are those benchmarks that your brand's web page must meet in order to take advantage of this. First, the page's main content should all load within 2.5 seconds of a user landing on your page.

Second, users should be able to interact with the page within 100 milliseconds of landing on it. That's one-tenth of a second. And finally, webpages really should not jump around at all, if you can help it. This may mean turning off those announcement banners at the top or ad blocks that unfurl themselves. As for measuring these, Google actually has six ways to do this. They report your results like a traffic light, red, yellow, or green. You will need all three in the green,

which signifies you've met these minimums. To be clear, not meeting these doesn't mean you'll be kicked off of Google. In fact, it may not even mean your ranking will drop directly because of this, but it most certainly means you won't get the bonus ranking points awarded to sites that do meet it.

And if those sites are your competitors, well, then you will drop. Core web vitals aren't the only topic that comes up lots these days. Of course, the big change to Apple's iOS devices affecting all our ad campaigns is on the mind of pretty much all responsible digital marketers. You've heard me report on this lots here, and there's still lots to unpack. For instance, did you know that the optimization events you've had in your reports will all but disappear? They are going to limit you to eight different pixel events.

Facebook ad consultant and trainer John Loomer spoke with me this morning. Which includes custom conversions. If somebody opted out, then that's when aggregated event measurement comes into play. So what happens then is they come to your website. They go to a landing page. that's a view content event. They add the cart, there's add cart event. They purchase. Those three events happened.

Facebook's only going to report the highest ranking event. And if in a visit, they perform three different events, only the highest ranking is going to be going to show up in your numbers, which is another reason why your numbers can be down. My full interview with John covers everything from how this affects web based purchases versus app based purchases, why value based optimization is going to be hit especially hard, and a full rundown of what businesses stand to lose the most when the attribution window changes kick in. Pretty much every digital marketer who runs ad campaigns on social platforms

will be affected. Some of you, dramatically, you can't afford to not listen to this interview. And you will hear the full interview for free on a special weekend edition coming up this Saturday. But if you want to listen to it right now, you can, also for free. It's in our Slack community right now in the exclusive content channel. Just go to todayindigital.com slash slack to join or tap the link in this episode's notes.

And two late breaking items just before I came into the booth on this story. First, the Wall Street Journal reporting that Facebook plans to make a pitch in their app for why users should not turn off tracking. That'll be interesting to read. And Google this morning announced they are running a free course this Wednesday on how their platform

will be impacted. You will find a link to register for that webinar in this episode's notes. Speaking of Facebook, the company today announcing it will start testing more granular topic exclusion controls. This will prevent brands from having their ads showing up besides certain topics in the news feed. According to the company, it will allow an advertiser to select a topic like crime and tragedy. That selection would help define how we'll show the ad on Facebook, including news feed.

For example, a children's toy company may want to avoid content related to a new crime show, so they could select the crime and tragedy topic, unquote. This would be an add-on to some of their similar brand safety tools. Last year, they added a reasonably similar function for videos. So far, only a handful of advertisers are in this test, and Facebook says they will probably spend most of the year working on it before it is rolled out to the rest of us.

You know, when you have children, like two or more, you're not supposed to love one more than the other, right? Apparently, TikTok has not gotten that message. Today announcing a partnership with the large ad agency WPP. Quoting TikTok, WPP will have early access to advertising products in development, ensuring WPP and its clients remain at the forefront of innovation as TikTok further develops its suite of products for brands.

This includes partnering on marketing API integrations and next generation formats, such as augmented reality offerings, unquote. Also, apparently WPP will be part of the building out of a new creator partnership program, and they are going to become what TikTok calls their lead agency development partner for creator-focused APIs. Um, okay. But hello? There are others of us out there. I guess give the sales guy WPP who seduced TikTok's executives over what I can only assume was a 27 martini lunch a big fat raise. Social media today says that could put WPP in the box seat

to become the key provider for major brand campaigns on the fastest growing social platform, unquote. Siri, find me a photo for chopped liver. I'm sorry. Siri is now only available for clients of WPP. Oh, and for the quiz, when it comes to SEO, embedded videos and videos natively uploaded to a website will perform exactly the same in Google's index. And why? Well, when sites host their own videos, often they're actually putting them on a content delivery network service, often called a CDN. So that, technically speaking, is a separate website.

And so pretty much the same as embedding that video. So embedding a video doesn't help your ranking, but it also won't hurt it. If you have some thoughts that you would like to add to the show, just tweet with the hashtag Today in Digital, and I will read out some in a future episode. I have decided I'm going Breton Templar as a healer with maxed out provisioning and Thieves Guild skill lines. I know probably only three of you understand that, and I'm okay with that. Remember, nearly 300 digital marketers just like you are in our Slack community. Inside, you will find exclusive deep dive episodes. Jobs get posted there.

People use it to get advice. Hell, we even have a channel devoted to Facebook ad platform outages. It's free to join. Just tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash Slack. And my thanks to the user Dio in the US who reviewed this podcast saying, short and straight and to the point. Love this podcast U.S. who reviewed this podcast saying, short and straight and to the point, love this podcast. All right, that's it for for new styles and you love to shop for jackets

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