Today in Digital Marketing - UGC is Cheap and Fast. Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

A huge exploit in one of the most popular web site plugins could give a hacker access to your Dashboard… Google Ads beefs up its attribution reports… If User-Generated Content is so cheap and easy to get, why aren’t all brands doing it? And how to use a free tool from Google to increase your web site speed.Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterMORE:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Reach Marketers: Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)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, a huge exploit in one of the most popular website plugins could give a hacker access to your dashboard. Google Ads beats up its attribution reports. If user-generated content is so cheap and easy to get, why aren't all brands doing it? And how to use a free tool from Google to increase your website speed. It's Monday, February 22, 2021. Happy Antarctica Day, Argentina. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what

you missed today in digital marketing. One of the most common pieces of advice for people doing SEO is to get backlinks. The more websites that are pointing to your site, the advice usually goes, the better you'll rank. But is it true? Or is it simply a numbers game and the unique domains don't matter? The answer, later in today's episode. If you sell anything, online, even services, having a user-generated content strategy is key to driving results. You see this all the time on Instagram. Well, the good Instagram ads, anyway.

Real customers opening the product box or using the product. Some new numbers out this week confirm this effectiveness. eMarketer says 62% of consumers say they're more likely to buy a product if they can see photos and videos from other customers first. As for why they look for that kind of context, the top reason was that the content may highlight something that wasn't obvious. And while Instagram is where most UGC probably lives, the study found that's not where it's most effective. It turns out the influence of user-generated content is strongest on Facebook. Instagram and YouTube took the next positions.

Then after that, it actually fell off a cliff. Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, all under 5% in terms of people saying UGC on those platforms helped inform their purchase decisions. We have some pretty charts in today's premium newsletter on this. The survey polled consumers in the US, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and the UK. So if it's so helpful, why aren't brands doing more of it? Especially given that user-generated content is among the The study itself asked, Why would brands spend more time and money on large-scale productions when this option exists, particularly in a world where content must be created and shifted quickly? Unquote. And remember that if you're posting this content on your website, Google wants you to use the rel UGC tag for any links that consumers may insert into their reviews.

A big upgrade is rolling out this week to the attribution reports within Google Ads. They've now added display ads to attribution reports alongside search, including shopping and YouTube ads. They've now added display ads to attribution reports alongside search, including shopping, and YouTube ads. It is in beta, so there may be some bugs here and there, but Google always releases things with the beta tag on it, even if it's already been through a proper internal beta run. Hell, Gmail was shown as in beta for five years. Also, it's never been clear to me why some attribution channels weren't there in the first place. Like, Google owns its own display ads channel. Why are they only getting around to adding it to their attribution reports now? Last year, the company launched a new look for attribution reports, and they also recently added YouTube ads to attribution reports, although

that functionality is still also in beta. Either way, an excellent addition for the data nerds out there. Speaking of Google, the company is hosting a free online training session on how to use its Test My Site tool. This is a great tool that will help you optimize your mobile site. Remember, Google has already started to only index mobile pages. It'll be hosted by Google's performance lead for mobile experiences, and we'll cover how to diagnose site speed and how to optimize your site beyond speed. You can register at b.link, that's the letter B, then.link, slash Google Webinar. A big bug in one of the most popular forms plugins for WordPress, that plugin, Ninja Forms. If you run this on your brand's website, you need to update this plugin immediately.

The company says the exploit could lead to a complete site takeover if you're not on the most recent version. Yeah, it was a nasty one. Actually, it was four exploits in total, including a way for the hacker to intercept all email traffic and to get access to the plugin's main dashboard. If you're not sure whether you have the right version or not, you are looking for version 3.4.34.1. Anything lower than that is at risk. A side note here, when did we start using multiple dots in version numbers? What the hell is 3.4.34 point? Like, what is that? Whatever happened to 1.2 and then 1.3 and then 1. God, I'm getting old. Anyway, don't forget that the biggest threat to the security of your WordPress site is the use of pirated plugins. More than 17% of all sites that were infected last year had malware from a pirated plugin or theme.

If it's not malware, these days it's either ransomware or a distributed denial of service attack, or in the case of podcast hosting service Buzzsprout, both. Last night, some jackass script kitty started pummeling their site with DDoS packets, then demanded a ransom to stop it. Buzzsprout told them to shove it, and they've been spending last night and today recovering from the attack. They say this is the first time they've been taken offline by something like this. But even so, their customers' podcast audio files and personal information were not compromised. A couple of nice upgrades to tools that a lot of digital marketers use. First, the social platform Agora Pulse has updated its mobile app

and now includes the ability to sign up directly from the app, some UI tweaks, and a new content recommendation chart for the iPad. And Google Calendar now lets you create repeating out-of-office entries and split your working hours into multiple segments each day. The latter is not on mobile devices yet. It's only on the web version of Calendar. And that repeating out-of-office thing, that's only on the web and Android devices for now.

These changes start rolling out today and should get to everyone by mid-March. And the answer to today's quiz, what will get you a better ranking in Google? More individual web pages that are pointing to your site or more unique web domains pointing to your site? For the answer, again, we turn to Google search engineer John Mueller. I don't think we differentiate like that in our systems. So from my point of view, I would tend not to focus on the total number of links to your site

or the total number of domain links to your website, because we look at links in a very different way. And we try to understand what is relevant for a website, how much should we weigh these individual links. And the total number doesn't matter at all. Because you can go off and create millions of links across millions of websites if you wanted to, and we could just ignore them all. Or there could be one really good link from one website out there that is for us like a really important sign that we should treat this website

as something that is relevant because it has that one link. I don't know, maybe from like a big news site's homepage, for example. So the total number essentially is completely irrelevant. Yes, it's Antarctic Day in Argentina today. It commemorates the day that that part of the continent was claimed by the country. Technically, their chunk of the frozen wasteland is in the province of Tierra del Fuego. No country actually owns it, besides Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway,

and the United Kingdom all have a small claim to it under a treaty signed decades ago. Well, my TikTok account kind of blew up over the weekend thanks to a video that I did about a great social content tool that we use here at the agency. The premium newsletter goes out every day with exclusive content, video, and charts. If you're getting value from the show, please rate and review us. It really does help. Links to my TikTok, the premium newsletter, and the rating site, all in this episode's notes. All right, talk to you tomorrow.