Today in Digital Marketing - What’s the Big Deal About “Internet”?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Google finally admits it hates pop-ups as much as you do, plus how to do an SEO content gap analysis, where to find audio ad inspiration, LinkedIn gets granular, and two and a half weeks and counting, the big Facebook reporting bug is still not fixed. It's Monday, January 25th, 2021. Happy National Voters Day, India. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Instagram has finally added the ability for third-party tools to see and reply to direct messages directly in those dashboards. Nah, I'm just kidding. They

Starting point is 00:00:39 spent that time redesigning their insights page. Again, this is the fourth redesign by my count. In case you care, here's what's new. First, a new name. It's now called the Professional Dashboard. And that's it. As far as I can tell, it's a new name and a prettier banner at the top, but no actual new functionality. Yeah, they've moved some things around, made some things easier to find, made other things harder to find. But yeah, another redesign. In lieu of working on the one thing that digital marketers need the most, access to direct messages in platforms other than the Instagram mobile app.

Starting point is 00:01:17 The head of product at Instagram told me today they are working on getting those DMs into their API, but he wouldn't commit to a date, saying he, quote, totally understands the frustration. I hate them, you hate them, and now we've learned Google hates them too. We're talking about those little overlay calls to action on web pages. You know these? There are a million plugins for websites. They pop up a box to collect usually an email address. They can pop up after X number of seconds or when it thinks that you're moving your mouse over the back button. They're irritating, of course, because

Starting point is 00:01:54 almost all the time they pop up when you want to just read a web page. Then you've got to find the X and smack it away. Well, turns out, having those on your brand's web page will hurt that page's position in Google. Google search engineer John Mueller answered a question about these in one of his recent live Q&A calls. First the question, then Mueller's response. There is actually like one American paper

Starting point is 00:02:19 that literally every day a pop-up comes to sign onto its newsletter. You can see a little of the text below and under, but you have to click it every time. And I've also actually wondered about, first of all, I wonder, are they really getting that many people on a daily basis to sign up to this newsletter compared to what this might be doing negatively to them. Is that something that would be a negative? That sounds like something that we would pick up on. One of the things there is that we focus on the mobile version of the site, and we only use that in the mobile search results.

Starting point is 00:03:01 So that's something where if they're not showing it on mobile, then maybe we wouldn't be picking up on that. But if it's on mobile as well, then that would definitely fall into the category of intrusive interstitials. And we'd say this is kind of like something where we would slightly demote the website in search. Sometimes the tricky part there is with these slight demotions, it's not the case that we'll remove the site from search or we'll kind of like move it to page 100 or something like that.

Starting point is 00:03:29 But if it's really relevant content, then maybe we'll still show it on the first page of the search results, just not like as highly as it could be. So there you go. If you're not seeing decent conversion rates from those little pop-up forms or subscription boxes, maybe it's time to remove them, especially given that they do make the web page jump around a bit. And that is one of the three metrics in the forthcoming core web metrics that Google will penalize pages for. There's a great piece up today on searchenginejournal.com about conducting a SEO content gap analysis. And if you handle SEO or content marketing for your brand or clients, it's definitely worth a read.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Quoting the piece, a content gap analysis is the process of finding holes in your existing content. It involves identifying missing content pieces that could and should align with the various stages of your target audience's buyer's journey. Analyzing your existing content offerings allows you to see where you might be missing valuable assets that could guide readers to the point of purchase. You're also likely to find new keyword opportunities you're not currently taking advantage of with existing content. A content gap analysis often includes an audit of your web pages, blog articles, social media content, landing pages, ebooks and downloadables, and other content assets, unquote. So again, the article is over at searchenginejournal.com. If you want to read it,

Starting point is 00:04:56 there is a direct link in the transcript of today's episode. Podcasts, of course, are the shiny new thing in the digital marketing space, so you might be tasked to create an audio ad for your brand. If this is something you've never done before, it can be hard to figure out where to start with the copy. Back in the old days of newspaper ads, copywriters would often keep a file folder of other ads that they really liked and use that file folder for inspiration.

Starting point is 00:05:24 It was called a swipe file. And that term carried over to the digital world. There are swipe file services you can subscribe to that shows ads from the social platforms you can use for inspiration. Advertsuite.com is one of them. But we've never really had a swipe file for podcasts until now. Magellan AI has released a site called reallygoodpodcastads.com, claims to be the world's largest database of podcasts and advertisers.

Starting point is 00:05:52 But who knows if that's true. I claim to be the top healer in Overwatch, but anyone who's been on my team knows that's completely bonkers. Anyway, the idea is you can search all the ads in their database by industry name, podcast genre, podcast title, or specific brand name. And it's free, which is good because it doesn't seem to work. At least when I tried it today. Maybe they're just under a huge server load with the launch, but I couldn't get searches to work.

Starting point is 00:06:19 But if they do get it working, it could be quite the arrow in your digital marketing quiver. Again, it is at reallygoodpodcastads.com. LinkedIn now lets you control which users can see and comment on your posts. By default, all your posts were visible by all of your connections and followers. Now you can be more granular. There are five options for post visibility. Any user on or off LinkedIn, anyone on LinkedIn only, and also you can post it to Twitter, only people you are directly connected to, only members of a LinkedIn group you belong to, and only attendees of an event you RSVP'd to. As for who can comment, those options are everyone on LinkedIn can comment, only your connections can comment, or no one can comment.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Remember, this applies only to commenting. Anyone can still like, react, or share your post. And some small items to wrap up this Monday. Snapchat is said to be testing dark mode on iOS devices. It's a little late to the party, I think. It's been more than a year and a half since Apple added the feature, and still a whole bunch of apps don't support it. I'm looking at you, Sprout Social.

Starting point is 00:07:34 And LinkedIn. Buffer's been having the day. Their dashboards stopped loading for some people. They got it fixed. Then it started happening again. They are working on it. And Facebook still has not fixed that huge bug that results in missing or inaccurate page follower metrics in reporting. This was first reported to them two and a half weeks ago. Still no fix. Maybe they're busy redesigning an insights page.

Starting point is 00:08:04 Well, a special hello to the students at the Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, who are listening to this episode today as a class project. So my wife and I fell into a deep video game hole over the weekend with Elder Scrolls Online. We loved Skyrim, which was the massively popular single-player game years ago. It's actually the game that got us into gaming in the first place. ESO is like a multiplayer version of Skyrim, which was the massively popular single-player game years ago. It's actually the game that got us into gaming in the first place. ESO is like a multiplayer version of Skyrim. And I was trying to build out my Breton Templar character as a healer and archer, which members of the guild I joined thought was a terrible idea.

Starting point is 00:08:37 So tonight I will be leveling up some more magic skill trees. Tweet me if you have any, you know, advice. That is it for today. And now here it is, your moment of digital marketing zen. And we're back here with Brendan Kehoe, and you've logged on to Internet Brendan. Before we take a look, what's the big deal about internet? Why is everybody making such a fuss about it? Why is it better than CompuServer, Prodigy, etc.? If it worked out as I planned it, then it could be so romantic That depends on how you act Under the lights, cameras, and action

Starting point is 00:09:08 I hope you ain't stringing me along That wouldn't be cool

Today in Digital Marketing - What’s the Big Deal About “Internet”?

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