Today in Digital Marketing - 🚯 You'll Never Delete a YouTube Video Again

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, March 26th. Today, it's not a rumor, it's official now. Deleting videos from your brand's YouTube channel can hurt your reach, and now we know why. Also, a study finds half of Google ads are being pushed down the page by a new content block designed to keep people away from your website. And Instagram adds a fantastic new engagement feature in the most awkward way possible. And before we start today's show, we are looking for some help. Specifically, we have a writer and production assistant position open.

Starting point is 00:00:37 If you've been listening for some time now, you'll know that our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn, is on mat leave. And since she's been gone, I've been doing most of it. But the agency side of our business is consuming more of my time lately. We've taken on another big client. So we are on the hunt for someone with lots of real world, in the trenches marketing experience to write the first draft of our podcast and newsletter, as well as provide some production assistance. This is a work at home, part time contract role to cover Steph's mat leave. Steph is back in September, so this role will run to the end of the summer. The

Starting point is 00:01:11 successful candidate will need to be available between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Pacific time, and they need to have a deep understanding of digital marketing. So meta ads, social media content, SEO and so on. And of course, an excellent command of the English language. We don't use AI to write our stuff here. A background in journalism or writing for radio would also be great. More information and the application form is at the following address, b.link slash writing job. That is b.link slash writing job. We also have a link at the top of today's show notes. Please forward that to someone if you think they might be interested. Thank you kindly, and on with the show. There's a kind of black magic when it comes to trying to read the tea leaves of a platform's

Starting point is 00:01:56 algorithm. And there are hundreds of best practices, some of which come from the platforms themselves, many from clickbaity blog post headlines that aren't factual at all. Remember the mythology around Facebook and third-party content posting tools? For the longest time, people believed that using a tool like that would reduce your reach. Facebook has said for years and years now that's not true, but people still believe it. Well, YouTube has now given us some official advice about their content discovery algorithm, and it's one I've not heard from them before. That advice, do not delete videos

Starting point is 00:02:33 from your brand's YouTube channel. YouTube product lead Todd Bupre says doing so removes more than the video. Quote, don't delete videos unless you have a very, very good reason. When you delete a video, you delete your channel's connection to the audience that watched that video. If you want to maximize your growth, keep your videos public or unlist them if you must. Unquote.

Starting point is 00:03:00 This is advice I don't think I'd heard prior to this, and it makes me wonder how much of this might apply to other content platforms as well. After all, if the only thing the platforms have to understand what a user is interested in are the posts that we put up on the platform, it does seem to suggest that removing posts on other algorithmic-heavy platforms, like Facebook or Instagram, might also remove some of that audience signal data as well. Either way, algorithmic advice direct from the platforms doesn't usually come often. And when it does, it's usually so vague as to be unhelpful. So this note is a welcome change. Well, here's five words a marketer doesn't want to hear from Google. Erosion of current traffic levels. Shorthand for we'll be sending fewer people to your website from now on.

Starting point is 00:03:54 And you can blame Google's apparent obsession with replacing their entire business model with AI. The company this week announcing it is rolling out SGE to almost all people who use its search engine. SGE stands for Search Generative Experience, essentially when people search for, say, ideas for kids' birthday parties. Rather than showing your carefully manicured, SEO-friendly webpage promoting party products, users will see some AI-generated text about birthday parties. And don't get me wrong, this is probably great for users, though not so much for marketers. This isn't new. For years, Google has focused on giving users what the industry calls a zero-click experience,

Starting point is 00:04:32 meaning if people search for Todd Maffin, they get a knowledge box ripped from my page on Wikipedia rather than my website in the top spot. Until now, this SGE was only shown to users who manually opted into the beta test. Now, it's going almost everywhere. The SEO platform Authoritas has an analysis out that found Google was showing SGE to nearly 92% of all search queries. And where is SGE getting its information from? All over the web, of course. But Quora finished in the top 20 performing generative domains in 11 of 15 categories, according to their study. Wikipedia was the top or second top performing domain in 11 categories. This isn't to say links to websites have disappeared. They're still there, underneath SGE.

Starting point is 00:05:22 And SGE's answers have links to regular websites, too. An average of almost 11 links appear in SGE answers, according to the Authoritas study, although only 4.3 of those, on average, were from unique domains. As for your ads and where they'll show up, it seems Google is doing one massive split test right now. Authoritas found that half of the time, Google ads appeared above the SGE output and half of the time below. We have a breakdown by industry in today's email newsletter, which you can sign up to by tapping the link

Starting point is 00:05:56 at the top of the show notes. When you look at the different types of ad formats though, shopping ads appeared below SGE more than two out of three times on average. Again, the full study and all sorts of pretty charts are in our email newsletter. You can sign up to it by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. LinkedIn will soon add dynamic UTM parameters to help marketers track the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Starting point is 00:06:27 UTM parameters, of course, are those keywords embedded into URLs that ride along with clicks, helping websites learn what ad campaign the click came from or what ad variant was used and so on. Quoting LinkedIn, quote, marketers only one time per campaign will add a dynamic UTM parameter to their campaign and then will automatically pull in the account, campaign and or creative name into the destination URL. So it can be picked up by analytics tools, allowing marketers to more easily analyze results, unquote. UTM tracking is a fairly simple model. It doesn't use third party cookies or fingerprinting, so it's a little more privacy friendly. It's also not perfect. Many ad blockers and privacy extensions will strip UTM parameters when clicked on,

Starting point is 00:07:11 so don't rely on it for a perfect reading of your campaign. I'm actually a little surprised LinkedIn hadn't added this before now, as UTM parameters were one of the OG tracking methods. They actually announced this a couple of months ago, but now say that dynamic UTMs will be available around the world by the end of this weekend. One of the top performing post types on Instagram has been the carousel, that block of images that users swipe right to see more of. But that format has always had one problem, at least as it comes to engagement. When people comment on that post, they're commenting on the unit as a whole. There's no way for them to comment on a specific image within that block.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Well, that might be changing soon. Sort of. Instagram is now testing a way for users to comment on specific images within a carousel post, although it's a little more awkward than you might think. A screenshot of this test in the wild shows that users will need to at mention the number of the specific media within that post rather than just tapping on it and adding a comment. So if you wanted to comment on the fourth image in the carousel, you would write at four and then your comment. And that comment won't appear under or near that tagged image. Rather, it'll still show up in the regular comment section, but with a thumbnail of the tagged media below the comment.

Starting point is 00:08:34 Quoting social media today, quote, carousel posts have become a key focus for Instagram as it looks to encourage more personal sharing within the app. Last October, it began testing collaborative carousel posts, which lets other users contribute to carousel feed updates, while more recently, it also began testing expanded carousels with up to 20 images available within a single update. With both options, having a simple way to specifically comment on each frame within a carousel could be of value and could enable more engagement and interaction within the main Instagram feed, unquote. That said, as I mentioned, this is only a test that's been seen out there.

Starting point is 00:09:15 No word on when or if this will make it to all users. YouTube is rolling out a new feature that might change the way we watch videos on the platform. Imagine being able to jump straight to the most interesting parts of a video without having to scrub through it. Quoting YouTube, quote, The way it works is if a viewer is double tapping to skip ahead on an eligible segment, we'll show a jump ahead button that will take them to the next point in the video that we think they're aiming for. Initially, this is a limited experiment available to premium subscribers in the U.S. only, unquote. YouTube also announced it's expanding its remix options

Starting point is 00:09:59 within Shorts, giving creators the ability to remix already remixed clips. Years ago, Adobe made the decision to switch to a subscription model for its popular design tools. I don't think anyone liked it. Some marketers swore off Adobe permanently and looked around for alternatives. And some great alternatives emerged. I bought Pixelmator for the Mac like five years ago for 25 bucks and haven't had to pay them anything else. And Pixelmator does almost everything Photoshop does. Sometimes it does it better. There was another set of independent

Starting point is 00:10:38 tools by Affinity, which had a photo editing app, a vector editing app, and other software that competed with Adobe. Affinity 2 is a one-time purchase. Today, the web-based design platform Canva announced it has bought the Affinity suite, which also includes publishing software that competes with Adobe's InDesign tool. Canva says more than 3 million people use Affinity's apps. As for future plans, quoting Canva's co-founder Cameron Adams, quote, our product teams have already started chatting and we have some immediate plans for lightweight integration, but we think the products themselves will always be separate, unquote. That said, if you're familiar with the concept of inshittification, we might soon see Affinity's apps folded into a monthly subscription.

Starting point is 00:11:31 So this might be a good time to buy the suite if you were sitting on the fence and hedge your bets. Finally, a small update to Threads. It now supports native GIF search and posting via desktop, bringing it one step closer to being the Twitter replacement that Zuckerberg is dreaming of. Just another quick reminder, we're looking for a writer and production assistant. If that is you or you know someone who's interested, please go to b.link slash writing job. And that link is at the top of our show notes today as well. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more.

Starting point is 00:12:26 It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca.

Today in Digital Marketing - 🚯 You'll Never Delete a YouTube Video Again

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