Today in Digital Marketing - Tiny Icon, Big Moves

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. Today, is that new WordPress plugin causing you to drop in Google's listings? YouTube is betting big on Shorts. Twitter has new options for media buyers, Snapchat wants to get more AR in the hands of digital marketers, and a small upgrade for your store's Google My Business profile might bring in more foot traffic. It's Thursday, May 6th, 2021. Happy National Nurses Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today

Starting point is 00:01:01 in digital marketing. You might know there are a number of website plugins that can change the content of your homepage on the fly based on where someone's coming from. For instance, if you detect that someone's in Europe, you can give them one version of your homepage that's different than the one Canadians would see. Or you can serve different content based on the browser they're using, one for Chrome, another for Edge. But can this hurt your Google ranking? Today's quiz, does changing your site's content based on the IP or user agent visiting that piece of content violate Google's cloaking policy? And could it earn you a penalty, which would move you lower in the search engine results? The answer, later in today's episode.

Starting point is 00:01:55 One sign that the social media apps are taking a new feature seriously is when they devote a separate button in the UI to it. We saw Instagram do this for their TikTok clone called Reels, and now YouTube is doing it for their TikTok clone, which they call Shorts. Yes, Shorts is getting its own button at the bottom of the YouTube app soon. Also, the company announced today it will be expanding access to Shorts

Starting point is 00:02:19 to everyone in the U.S. over the next week. Until now, only a handful of people in a test group had it. The format has been a winner for YouTube. They're up to 6.5 billion daily views. That's billion daily. A big chunk of that from India, by the way, where TikTok is actually banned. Also, they're increasing the maximum duration of videos to 60 seconds, up from only 15 seconds.

Starting point is 00:02:46 Though, peculiarly, if you're using music from their own pre-approved music library, that music will stop playing after 15 seconds. I guess they didn't plan for the potential of longer videos in their contracts with the music labels. Oops. They've also added new filters, both in the recording and editing workflows. And soon they will have auto captions for the videos, which you will also be able to edit manually. Side note here, as some of you know, I do a 60 second daily summary of this podcast on TikTok. It's sort of a headlines only format. About a week ago, maybe a week and a half ago,

Starting point is 00:03:21 I started uploading those as YouTube shorts. And I have to say, they've actually provided a noticeable lift in my channel views. Twitter has announced a bunch of new stuff they're hoping will catch the eye of digital media buyers. First, they're getting exclusive broadcast rights from the MLB and the NHL. Yes, I said Twitter. They're also going to get some news broadcasts from NBC. This is in addition to the deal it made earlier for exclusive online rights to the Olympics. All this to bring more heft to their curated categories ad product. This is a group of niche topics like lighthearted content or sports, which advertisers can run pre-roll on. Quoting Twitter,

Starting point is 00:04:09 the publishers included in each of our curated categories are always hand-selected by Twitter teams for their relevance and conversation-driving ability within their category's topic, ensuring a deeper level of contextual alignment for brands. Unquote. And here's Social Media Today's take on it all. Quote, There is strong potential here. And while video has never really taken off on the platform the way Twitter would have hoped,

Starting point is 00:04:31 its ongoing content deals still facilitate direct audience connection. And Twitter users are increasingly watching more video content on the platform every year. Snapchat plans to launch a creator marketplace, sort of a matchmaker site, to let brands find and partner with influencers on the platform. But not just creators. They'll also include the people who make Snapchat lenses and some of their augmented reality filters. This is big business for some people.

Starting point is 00:05:03 More than a few have actually quit their day job and now just build lenses for a living. This could be huge for digital marketers. AR is definitely one of the up-and-coming techs that we will all be using soon. But finding an AR designer hasn't always been easy. This should make it easier. In fact, AR creators will be first in this database. They'll add actual Snap video creators next year. You might recall back in 2018, the company launched a similar service called Snapchat Storytellers, but that focused only on video creators. This new creator marketplace will open to brands later this month,

Starting point is 00:05:38 backed by a $3.5 million fund to encourage even more people to become lens creators. Well, oops, here's a big bug Google's dealing with today. Seems its local service ads are glitched and some campaigns are changing their bid mode on their own. Specifically, people are seeing the maximize leads strategy being switched over to max per lead. Google confirmed it's a bug and they are working on it. But if you run local services ads on Google, it might be worth popping in to make sure your bid modes haven't been changed too. And if you spend a lot of money on Google ads this way and have been impacted, reach out to your rep. Because sometimes Google will cough up a little bit of cash in compensation for glitches like this. Some great news for stores and restaurants that want even more traffic.

Starting point is 00:06:33 Google My Business now lets you specify if your location is wheelchair accessible, and specifically how. If that's you, log into Google My Business, select your business, click on the Info tab, and go down to Attributes. You'll be able to specify if you have an accessible entrance, wheelchair-friendly restaurants, accessible parking, and an elevator large enough to accommodate a wheelchair. Alright, back to today's quiz. Could changing your site's content based on the IPs or user agents move you lower in the search engine results?

Starting point is 00:07:10 The answer, probably not. Google has a policy against cloaking that describes it as the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. So in other words, if you change parts of your page's content for reasons other than to manipulate Google, then you're probably safe. Google search engineer Gary Ilias said in a recent Reddit thread, I can't promise no action,

Starting point is 00:07:34 but if it's not done for manipulating rankings or actual spamming, I'd be mighty surprised if the web spam team cared. Another reminder that this weekend, my interview with an anonymous Facebook ad support rep is coming. This is one of the people who you chat with on the web when your ad account gets blocked or a campaign gets denied. We won't be saying his name, but we have confirmed he's legit. Among the questions he answers in the 37-minute interview,

Starting point is 00:08:02 do the reps really understand how broken the Facebook ads platform is? And do they actually care? Why are so many accounts getting shut down for what are obviously wrong reasons? Is there a maximum number of interests that might be way too much for the system? And do the reps keep notes on certain ad accounts or people that are always asking questions?

Starting point is 00:08:22 And if so, what do those notes say? The full eye-opening interview comes out this weekend in the premium newsletter, both the audio and a full transcript. You still have time to sign up. Premium newsletter comes out every weekday and is only $5 a month. Go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter or tap the link in this episode's notes. By the way, if you were one of the people who asked a question via the form and you are not a subscriber, email me from the email address you

Starting point is 00:08:51 used to ask your question and I'll make sure you get it at no cost. All right. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Tiny Icon, Big Moves

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