Today in Digital Marketing - "Yeah, uh, about those conversions we said you had...." 🤥

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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. It is Monday, November 25th. What does that say? 25th, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Happy Onion Market Day, Switzerland. Today, TikTok goes after Instagram's e-commerce features.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Turns out advertising on Reddit may not be such a bad idea after all. Why the SEO tactics that you may be using may also be causing your links to get banned. And Google says, oops, you may not have had as many sales as we told you that you had. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Another shot across Instagram's bow from, spoiler alert, TikTok. Now the platform is testing letting some of its creators add e-commerce links to their posts. At the start of this year, TikTok added shoppable ads, and now it looks like it's throwing more development budget at expanding its e-commerce capabilities. In addition to the very Instagram-like link in bio, a TikTok engineer

Starting point is 00:01:32 leaked news of social commerce URLs in video posts. The way it works is about as you'd expect. Tapping on a link on a video sends the viewer to an Amazon store or wherever so that they can buy things. The test is underway with a small group of influencers in the U.S. Are you on Reddit? I'm on Reddit. I'm on Reddit about an hour or two every night. I am not proud of this.

Starting point is 00:01:59 Reddit, of course, is its own little world, complete with its own lexicon and in-jokes and a pretty severe hatred of marketers. And yet, you can advertise on Reddit if you do it carefully, smartly and with the community's tone in mind. But how do the numbers work out? Is advertising on Reddit better or worse than, say, Facebook ads? Well, those beautiful bastards at Agora Pulse's social media lab spent a thousand bucks to find out.

Starting point is 00:02:22 They discovered that even though Reddit's targeting options were pale compared to Facebook's massive database, Reddit actually outperformed Facebook in a lot of key metrics, and not by a little bit either. Reddit got almost 70% more clicks at a cost per click that was about 42% less than Facebook's, and Reddit delivered about five times as many impressions for about the same money. Although the folks at the Social Media Lab report, of course, that that may be more of a factor of the wider targeting that Reddit employs. That said, click-through rate was lower on Reddit and not by a small amount. While Facebook got a 0.9% CTR, Reddit's couldn't even crack 0.3 percent. Google says it will start giving marketers more information about the performance of smart bidding strategies. Now you can see top bidding

Starting point is 00:03:14 signals that are driving campaign performance. You'll find that in the bid strategy report. Those signals include things like time of day, location, device type, that sort of thing. As well, the report is capable of showing you when combinations of those signals resulted in better performance. Quoting Search Engine Journal, for example, the report may show that people are more likely to convert when searching for the keyword business in Los Angeles on a Saturday. Support for target ROAS and maximum conversion value will be available at a later date.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Oh, the good old days of SEO were so simple, weren't they? You'd throw a news release up on a handful of news release sites, add your link to a well-thought-out comment on a discussion forum. Well, friend, the easy days are over. And Search Engine Journal has a list of 10 previously legitimate tactics that no longer work. In fact, tactics that Google will penalize you for using. Top of the list? Yep, press release sites. To this day, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of these content distributors. You upload pretty much whatever text you want, it would put it on a website,

Starting point is 00:04:22 call it a press release. SEO people did this so much, it basically ruined the tactic, and now Google considers those sites to be persona non grata because they were so easy to manipulate. And it's not just those sites. Apparently, Google will also knock back your listing if you rely too much on links with your main keyword in it. Other previously favorite SEO sources that are now on Google's naughty list, links in discussion forums, links from foreign guest books, and links in blog comments. You have been warned. Another day, another reporting bug. Google had a pretty nasty bug in play earlier this month where conversions were being over-reported. It's never under-reported,

Starting point is 00:05:10 is it? I mean, we never get to go to the boss or client and say, hey, it turns out we got more sales than I thought we did. It's always, yeah, so it turns out a lot of those sales we had never actually existed. Anyway, this reporting issue was happening on Google's platform between November 11th and November 20th. And it impacted reporting across all of Google Ads stuff, including data gathered via the AdWords API, Google Ads API, or Google Ads scripts. Company said yesterday they have fixed it. But if you have reports where that data was pulled for that date range, you may want to pull it again, just to make sure that you've got the right numbers there. Well, thanks for getting awfully busy here at our agency with Black Friday coming up. I'm sure it is for you as well. So no lightning round today. If you value a fast paced, easy to digest daily

Starting point is 00:05:55 digital marketing news show, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast wherever you listen to it. It really does help. Follow me on social. All my links are at the bottom of todayindigital.com. They're also in the episode's description. I'm Todd Maffin. Check out our agency at engageq.com and I will see you tomorrow. Thank you. you

Today in Digital Marketing - "Yeah, uh, about those conversions we said you had...." 🤥

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