This Week in Digital Marketing - August 6, 2021

Another week full of digital marketing insights! We keep up with all the updates, so you don’t have to. If you have a YouTube channel, use paid digital advertising, or have any other digital concerns, let us know, and we’d be happy to help you!

Growing Your YouTube Channel

• Double down on what’s working. Focus on one thing to grow your channel. Once your channel is large, you can branch out for new topics.
  
• Use clickbait, but provide value in your videos. 
  
• Keep your boundaries, but share some personal life to build the relationship with the audience.
  
• It’s all about the idea, headline, and thumbnail.
  
• Provide some level of entertainment, rather than strictly education content.
  

Apple’s iOS 14.5 Update

• 45% of users consented to app tracking
  
• A lot of people don’t care about being tracked for ads
  
• Many people haven’t updated their software. About 30% of people still need to update their software, which probably won’t change much until iOS 15 comes out in the fall.
  

Analyzing the top 10 YouTube results
Semrush recently conducted a YouTube SEO study based on 15,000 keywords that triggered a featured video in the SERP. Then, it took a look at the top 10 YouTube results for each of those keywords. The findings seem to be in line with many of the YouTube best practices that I’ve seen. The study found that:

• 45% of videos were between three to five minutes, and 5% were shorter than one minute.
  
• 52% of videos ranking for “how-to” keywords are longer than five minutes. For the general sample, it was only 33%.
  
• More than half of the videos that ranked in the first position have more than 50 words in the description.
  
• Only 8% of videos with timestamps rank in position one — so while they may be important for UX, they’re not crucial to ranking highly.
  
• Title similarity with keyword ratio, number of views, and video duration were the most important parameters, according to the machine learning model Semrush used.
  
• 18% of videos were from channels that have less than 1,000 subscribers, so even smaller channels can find themselves among the top 10.
  

SEOs and e-commerce marketers weigh in on product ranking factors
Over 80% of respondents selected keywords in the name of the product as the most important ranking factor for products in Google Search, according to a study conducted by Joe Youngblood. There was a three-way tie for second place between keywords in the reviews, keywords in the title tag and the number of inbound links. And, internal links took fifth place, with 68.2% of the responses.

Youngblood’s study goes as far as to list the top 20 product ranking factors for Google Search, according to the 35 SEOs and e-commerce marketers that participated in the study. At the bottom of the list are recency of reviews, linking document quantity and number of photos or videos of the product.

Why we care: While reviews and media may not be the most important ranking factors, they’re still worth putting effort into as they may convince prospective buyers to make a purchase. The sample size here is quite small, but it may still be worth taking a glance at the responses to see if your experiences align with that of the participants.

Analyzing the performance of various GMB Post types
Sterling Sky’s Joy Hawkins recently shared a case study in which her team manually analyzed clicks (according to Google My Business [GMB]) and clicks and conversions (inside Google Analytics) for over 1,000 GMB Posts from a variety of small businesses. The findings cover the types of Posts that perform best, whether to use titles and emojis, what to include in Post images and what to post about.

• COVID Posts performed the best, followed by event Posts, offer Posts and update Posts. COVID Posts appear higher up in the local knowledge panel, but they’re text-only. Note that COVID Posts actually replace your Posts carousel, so your other Posts won’t be visible anywhere else.
  
• Posts with titles got almost twice as many clicks and conversions as ones without titles. Just make sure you’re not writing them in all caps — Posts with regularly capitalized titles received nearly twice as many clicks.
  
• Posts that contained emojis received double the clicks, according to GMB insights, and also got more conversions than ones without.
  
• Photos that contained text in them received nearly four times the clicks compared to photos without text. Logos don’t seem to count, though, as there was no measurable difference between Posts that contained logos and ones that didn’t.
  
• The GMB Post types that received the most activity were about specials or discounts. Second to that were ones that contained CTAs. And, the third-best-performing Post type contained a sense of urgency (e.g., same-day appointments). 
  

Trying to get shadow banned -- for science
“Shadow banning is the first thing every social media marketer’s mind goes to when they experience sudden drops in engagement or reach,” wrote Stacey McLachlan for Hootsuite. 

However, Instagram’s CEO says shadow banning isn’t actually a thing: “If someone follows you on Instagram, your photos and videos can show up in their feed if they keep using their feed. Being in [Instagram’s Explore page] is not guaranteed for anyone. Sometimes you’ll get lucky, sometimes you won’t.”

To test her “how to get shadow banned” experiment, McLachlan decided to act like a bot. She said the most SMMs believe that there are three main ways to get banned:

1. Using too many hashtags
   
2. Using irrelevant hashtags
   
3. Writing generic comments on a bunch of other people’s posts
   

So she hopped to it. Posting pictures that would normally get engagement with WAY too many hashtags, spam-commenting things like “Nice post” to random accounts on the Explore page, and posted stock photos of her city to her feed.

Did it work? In short, no. She couldn’t get shadow banned. The experiment actually got her account a ton of comments and support, which may be why. McLachlan’s engagement did dip during the shadow ban attempt — going from 17% to just above 9%. But her reach remained the same. “I wouldn’t say I’ve been ‘shadow banned’ so much as I’ve been ‘correctly noted as being a liar,’” she wrote.

Is shadow banning real? Or is Instagram just good at determining what users want when they search for hashtags and content on the platform? Or are the two one and the same?

Digital Marketing Snippets

• Pay off in 4 interest-free installments: There are multiple platforms that offer this service. Nearly 75% of people participating in these services are Millennials and Gen Z.
  
• Microsoft has added an additional cost to use target impression share to determine where your ad will be shown.
  
• Reddit has hired its first VP of Business Marketing from Instagram. He is leading the sales team and growing the ad business. 
  
• TikTok is testing stories for their app. It has been running for several days, but they’re unsure if it will be released as a feature.
  

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