Today in Digital Marketing - Will Location Marketing Save Us from the Cookiepocalypse?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, January 29th, 2020. Happy Kansas Day, Kansas. I'm Todd Baffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Google just can't make up its mind on how to compete with TikTok. Will location marketing rescue all of us from the coming cookiepocalypse? One of the web's biggest players drops dramatically in Google traffic, and a huge hole discovered in one of the most popular WordPress frameworks. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Well, that didn't take long. Just yesterday, I reported on the launch of Byte, essentially a reboot of the old popular Vine app. And guess what's already there? Spambots. Specifically, spam comments on videos. The developers say comment spam is their top priority to fix. Byte has a lot of catch-up to do to get close to the functionality in TikTok and Instagram and the sort. Coming up soon, the ability to like comments and the ability to block, filter, or limit commenting on Byte videos. More importantly for us as digital marketers, they say they'll be launching new discovery and creation features in the coming months. Speaking of short video apps, Google has launched a new one called Tangy.

Starting point is 00:01:18 It's sort of TikTok, but for learning things. It's on the web and an iOS app for now, and covers how-to videos on things like crafting, painting, cooking, beauty, fashion, and so on. This, interestingly, is a lot of how the Chinese version of TikTok works. While on that app, users can upload pretty much whatever they want, at least in China, the most popular videos are how-to videos, whereas everywhere else, it's mostly music, dancing, and memes. This is a strange move by Google, given that they were looking at buying TikTok clone

Starting point is 00:01:50 Firework just a couple of months ago. Then again, Google does have a habit of starting projects and then killing them. Remember Google Wave, anyone? Anyway, if your brand is in a space where that kind of tutorial video might work from a marketing perspective and you like to get an early jump on things, perhaps check it out. The website is tangi.co. As companies like Facebook roll out more privacy controls and browsers drop support for third-party cookies, where does how marketers should be able to get more than 60% location opt-ins if they follow best practices. Quoting the piece, In a recent survey, millennials were the most likely to share their location, that's 44%, compared with other generations. Gen Z was next with 40%. Millennials were the most likely to say they were not at all concerned with the privacy implications.

Starting point is 00:02:55 The article has a list of the industries that people are most willing to share their location information with. Near the top of the list, travel and transportation, and then, perhaps surprisingly, shopping and retail. A recent survey of 1,300 Americans found that people are split on how they handle location requests from websites and apps. One-third always accept location requests, another third block them, and the final third says, it depends. There is a link to the article in this episode's description. If you monitor your brand's Google position from time to time, you may notice some big drops and jumps periodically. This happens. It's not always your fault. It even happens to the big players. Some writers at Forbes.com have apparently seen a huge drop in traffic to their articles, like down about 10 times since just a couple of days ago.

Starting point is 00:03:48 And apparently some articles that are usually popular aren't even cracking 100 views in 24 hours. It's hard to know why these things happen. This apparent drop at Forbes happened well after the recent algorithm change. All that to say, monitoring your Google search position is a pretty important thing to do on a regular basis, and investing in an SEO tool is probably worth the small cost. One of the most popular WordPress backend builders has a serious vulnerability, so pay particular attention here if your brand's website uses the Elementor framework. The vulnerability is called an authenticated reflected XSS. That's nerd speak for a hacker being able to run a script from

Starting point is 00:04:33 another site and steal login credentials. The exploit was found by a security company who contacted the publishers of Elementor who updated the framework right away, but you may still have to update your install of Elementor manually. So if you manage your brand's WordPress site and you use Elementor, make sure you're updated to version 2.8.5. Well, if you value a daily digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. There's a link in this episode's description that makes this an easy one-click process. As you can tell from my voice, I am still sick today. Follow me on social, feed my ego, perhaps it'll make me better. Link to my channels and our agency is in this episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. God willing, I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Will Location Marketing Save Us from the Cookiepocalypse?

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