Today in Digital Marketing - Will This Emoji — 😈 — Hurt Your SEO?

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Does using emojis hurt your search ranking? The surprising effect of a McLoyalty program. The insider scoop of how Google's newest campaign type is performing. The legal risk of using Google fonts. New targeting for Reddit ads.Go Premium! No ads, more stories, and extended deep-dive weekend episodes — https://todayindigital.com/premiumADVERTISING as low as $20: https://todayindigital.com/ads JOIN OUR SLACK! https://todayindigital.com/slackFOLLOW US: https://todayindigital.com/socialmedia(TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit) ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Does your brand need a podcast? Let us help: https://engageQ.com/podcastsOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, does using emojis hurt your search ranking? at zensurance.com's Wednesday, February 2nd. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. We digital marketers are always tweaking things and no part of our world is more tweaky than SEO. We obsess over whether to use a pipe or a hyphen as a separator.

How many times we should use keywords. Well, here's a new thing to obsess over. Emojis. Nowhere in Google's guidelines does it say it bans emojis in page titles or meta descriptions, but is using them a bad idea? The Wednesday Quiz will using emojis in your page title hurt your Google ranking, help it, or have no effect whatsoever? The answer at the end of today's episode. Google's new ad campaign type called Performance Max has only been around for a couple of months, but already some media buyers have tried it out. And some are saying, despite its limitations, it's actually performing better than they expected.

I was expecting it to perform kind of similar to like Discovery or Display, maybe. Jill Saskengale spent six years at Google Ads. Today, she's a digital marketing consultant and teacher. I spoke with her earlier this afternoon. You know, 1% click-through rate, $1 CPC, but it's performing way better. And actually, the last few days, it's been getting me more efficient conversions than search, which I genuinely did not think was possible for this specific business. I mean, I guess given that it's essentially a more algorithmically based type of campaign, I would expect that that would be the case for

budgets that are at scale, like large budgets, because it's got a lot of data. Can I ask, is this are you talking fairly large budgets you're playing with or small business size? I'm about to laugh because I would not consider this a large budget. But objectively, it is we're spending $200 a day on performance max for this advertiser. And this is an advertiser that on a whole is spending between $1,000 to $1,200 a day on Google Ads. Now, there's still a lot of caveats to it. Like a lot of that performance could be coming from branded searches. We have no idea because Performance Max doesn't tell you what searches or placements or anything. Wait, you can't break down the data by placement to find out where your conversions are coming from?

No, very intentionally, similar to, well, smart shopping and local campaigns, which, of course, are being upgraded and turned into Performance Max. No, there's no transparency on that. So there's no search terms report. Of course, it doesn't just run on search. There's no placements report. So you don't know where it's coming from. Same with app campaigns as well, by the way. So that's kind of a common thread.

You don't know where your ads are showing, and you don't 100% know what they look like. Of course, you give it various text and image and video assets, but you don't really know what combinations people are seeing. But the sort of promise of Performance Max is it doesn't matter if it's driving valuable conversions for your business. And so far with this advertiser, which is not an e-commerce advertiser, by the way, it is. Yes, as you heard later this year, Performance Max will soon replace what we currently know as smart shopping and local campaigns. By the way, Jill launched a Google Ads training program just today.

You can find it at learn.jill.ca. Jill spells her name with a Y. Use the code today to get $5 off. This is not an affiliate code. We get nothing if you use it. Again, it's learn.jyll.ca and use the code today. Heads up if your brand's website uses the popular Google Fonts library. A German court has fined an unidentified website for importing a Google-hosted web font in violation of EU privacy law.

As a result of using Google servers to serve the Google font on its pages, the website sent the unidentified plaintiff's IP address to Google without authorization and, says the court, without a legitimate reason. This is a violation of the GDPR in Europe. Since a visitor didn't explicitly give permission to have their IP address shared and IP addresses are considered personal data, that triggered the fine. This time, the fine was only about $100.

But according to the ruling, if the website doesn't stop sending IP addresses to Google, the site operator could be fined 250,000 euros or sentenced to six months in prison. Incidentally, if you're in Europe and this scares you, remember, this is all because the website was having Google host the Google fonts. Apparently, if you self-host the fonts, you should be in the clear, Google's focus on commerce and omnichannel capabilities paid off over the holidays. The company's ad revenue in the fourth quarter grew 33% year over year to $61 billion. According to Alphabet's earnings release, total services revenue hit $75 billion, an increase of 32% year over year. Search and

Other, that's the largest segment of Google ads, increased 36%. YouTube ads grew by 25%. The company says that retail was by far the largest contributor to ads growth in Q4. During the period, Google's promotional features were used by 280% more merchants than the previous year. Moving forward, the company plans to incorporate shopping into more aspects of its product portfolio, including YouTube live streaming. And remember, Google plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome sometime next year. No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Does your brand have a loyalty program?

It turns out that consumers will exchange their data for, well, McNuggets. According to McDonald's, after they introduced their own digital loyalty program recently, sales increased by 12%. That's tracking the last quarter of 2021. The fast food chain's global loyalty scheme is reportedly on track to become the world's largest loyalty program. Customers earn points from every order, which can then be exchanged for menu items. They earn 100 points for every dollar they spend and can unlock different prizes based on the number of points they accumulate. The company hit an all-time worldwide sales figure of $112 billion last year with almost 14% sales growth in the U.S. It says loyalty is the single biggest

driver of digital adoption. Within just six months in the U.S., there were more than 30 million loyalty members enrolled, 21 million active members earning rewards, and U.S. digital sales increased month on month as a result. More than all that, though, the program gives the company that precious first-party consumer data. Reddit has added two new ad targeting options that let advertisers reach users based on their cell phone service provider and device. Beginning today, carrier targeting will be available across the US, the UK, and Canada from all the major carriers, with plans to expand

globally in the future. And number two, device targeting. Prior to this update, advertisers could only reach people based on their phone's operating system. Advertisers can now choose a specific device by selecting Android or Apple phones, as well as wearables. In case you're curious where your Instagram spend is going, some new research sheds light on that. Data from Insider Intelligence found Instagram ad impressions still mainly come from the two main formats, the feed and stories. As for the split, 47% of impressions come

from feed, 42% come from stories. Surprisingly, only 1% of impressions are coming from reels. The platform's stories and in-feed ads accounted for the bulk of its $26 billion in U.S. ad revenues last year, which helped it surpass Facebook.

Just in case you're still not convinced that Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with his vision over the so-called metaverse, consider this data point. On Meta's job board this week, there are 13 available jobs with the Messenger team, 20 on Instagram, 55 for WhatsApp, and 571 jobs open for the Oculus team, which are the VR goggles. In fact, jobs involving augmented or virtual reality now make up 21% of all jobs listed by the company. What percentage of their employees work on their always-broken ad platform? 1.6%.

Oh, and back to the quiz. Will using emojis in your page title hurt your Google ranking, help it, or have no effect whatsoever? The answer, according to Google search advocate John Mueller. So you can definitely use emojis in titles and descriptions on your pages. don't show all of these in the search results, especially if we think that it kind of disrupts the search results in terms of it looks misleading, perhaps, or those kind of things. But you can definitely keep them there. It's not that they cause any problems. I don't think you would have any significant advantage

in putting those there, because at most, what we try to figure out is what is the equivalent of that emoji and maybe use that word as well, kind of associated with the page. But it's not that you get an advantage for kind of like, oh, you have a colorful title kind of thing. So from that point of view, if you like to have these in your titles and descriptions, go for it. If you don't want them there, then that's fine too. I don't think it kind of hurts or harms SEO or kind of helps SEO in any way. One small bit of context here. Remember, he's talking about the search algorithm's response to the presence of an emoji.

Assuming Google doesn't rewrite the title tag and your emoji makes it through, it could cause an uptick in the human click-through rate. Shiny objects and all. Welcome to those of you joining us from the Tech Meme Ride Home. If you've liked what you've heard, we put this out every weekday. And our premium podcast has even more. More stories, exclusive deep dive weekend episodes with industry experts, no ads, audio chapters that make it easy to jump to a specific story and much more.

Check it out by tapping the link in the show notes or by going to todayindigital.com slash premium. Also, our Slack community is very busy, has more than 800 digital marketers in it. You can get advice there, troubleshoot technical issues, post jobs, or learn about gigs that are open. The link to join is in the show notes, or you can go to todayindigital.com slash slack. Talk to you tomorrow. Kick me out in pink or purple. Kicks in an escalate decked out in pink or purple. Caught rain on my parade, yeah. Pink or purple.

Putting you in the shade when I'm in pink or purple.