This Week in Digital Marketing - July 23, 2021

There have been a lot of developments and new knowledge passed around the marketing world this week. We’ll walk you through what we know when it comes to social media, SEO, and strategy.
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Social Snowball
Simplifies affiliate customer acquisition. Currently only available on Shopify with plans to expand to other platforms in the future. Affiliates and ambassadors are a huge traffic source. People are already posting their favorite brands, so why not build off of that source? Using Social Snowball, each person receives their custom link for social media. The only thing that the business owner needs to do once it’s set up is send the affiliates commission payout. Social Snowball has a variety of payment plans to fit each business’s needs.

New Metric: The Rage Click
What is a Rage Click? When users repeatedly click a specific area of your website in a short amount of time. There are heat mapping tools available to help you, like Microsoft’s free heat mapping tool, Clarity. You can sort from the most Rage Clicks to the least. This shows you what areas of your website are the most frustrating for users, allowing you to make improvements to the user experience on your site. A high number of rage clicks could mean that a critical element of your website isn’t working properly, which could lead to a loss of sales and revenue.

Secrets from a Facebook Ad Support Rep

• When writing an appeal form to Facebook, keep your message short and polite.
  
• Facebook reps typically only have 1 or 2 chat supports open at one time.
  
• Show what your issue is. When you get an error, submit a screenshot of the whole screen to give context to your issue, rather than cutting down to the error message.
  
• Reps don’t have access to very many ad details, so they most likely be able to tell you why an ad wasn’t approved.
  
• There are multiple tiers of reps, however, only first tier reps talk to customers. Tier members can only talk to members in the tier above and below their own tier.
  

Free Products or Services
This is one of the easiest ways to grow your audience to show long-term success. It increases the amount of attention you’re getting from potential customers. Email newsletters, podcasts, and etc, are free, and there’s a way to monetize them once they're established. In the end, delayed gratification wins.

Voice Commerce
More and more people are using voice commerce. Amazon’s Alexa and Echo are the more popular home options for many people. This trend is expected to continue to grow over the next 3+ years.

Google Officially Launches SeekToAction for Key Moments for Videos in Search
SeekToAction markup is now out of beta and can be used for any site with videos. This markup allows Google to identify “key moments” from your videos. With more and more videos showing in Google Search, it’s a good idea to put in the effort to make your videos stand out from the rest, which could potentially improve click-through rates.

Google Ads to Try Three-Strikes, and You’re Out Policy
Starting in September 2021, Google Ads will begin testing a new three-strikes pilot program for accounts that repeatedly violate ad policies. Well, it might be four-strikes; it starts with a warning but then an additional three-strikes after that warning – your Google Ads account can be suspended. 

Strikes expire after 90 days, according to Google. If you’ve had two strikes, fix the issues, send an acknowledgment of the issues and fixes, and then do not violate another policy for 90 days after the fix, your account resets, in a way, and the next violation will be the initial warning again. As always, search marketers will be able to appeal any violation and enforcement decisions.

Google Illustrated What Different Types of Traffic Declines Look Like
Daniel Waisberg of Google came up with illustrations of what six different categories of organic search traffic drops look like when you are looking at your performance report in Google Search Console. It is broken down into these categories:

• Site-level technical issue
• Page-level technical issue
• Manual action
• Algorithmic changes
• Seasonality
• Reporting glitches

So if you see these types of traffic drops, you may want to dig in and figure out what is the cause.

Why we care: It gives you a way to clearly see what to expect from various SEO issues and how your traffic may be impacted. It is important to note that these illustrations are generalizations and that you do need an experienced SEO consultant to diagnose any real issues with your website.

Google announces new deals sections, promotional tools and expanded reporting ahead of the holiday shopping season
Ahead of the holiday shopping season, Google is launching new sections in its search results to showcase deals, rolling out tools to highlight promotions, and expanding reporting capabilities in Google Merchant Center.

“Deals related to your search” is a new section within the Shopping tab that shows discounted or competitively priced products. And, when users search for deals during major retail sales events, like Black Friday, Google will show a new carousel that highlights relevant deals. When uploaded via Google Merchant Center, these promotions and deals are automatically shown to users on the Shopping tab, even if the retailer or manufacturer isn’t running ads on Google.

The company also rolled out the ability to indicate that a promotion is only available to first-time customers, and promotions can now be highlighted in the Shopping tab — this can be done through Google Merchant Center. And, the best sellers report in Merchant Center is getting expanded to include historical best seller data and relative demand data, both of which can be used to help retailers decide what to stock as they prepare for major shopping holidays.

Google says your redirects only need to stay up for a year
For the sake of SEO and Google being able to trace your changing URLs, Gary Illyes told Twitter that any redirects should stay up for a minimum of one year. However, you may choose to keep them up longer for the sake of users (nothing is more annoying than clicking a link to a new site and getting a 404).

The “clock” for this one year of redirection starts when Google initially crawls and recognizes the redirect — not necessarily when your team implements the change. This could be another reason to keep it for longer than the year mentioned.

Why we care: This is the first time Google has officially confirmed that the signals passed through redirects last forever even after a redirect is moved, if the redirect is live for over a year. If you have stakeholders or clients that really want to remove redirects for whatever reason, it is safe to do so from an SEO perspective after that one year mark (specific to Google Search).

Why did Google rank this result? They’ll tell you
Google is rolling out a new SERP feature that tells you why a result was ranked the way it was. This feature is an expansion to the about this result box that launched in February 2021.

Google Search can show the terms it matched on the web page and your query, including the terms that were related but not direct matches. Google also lists if links from other websites influenced the ranking, if the results had related images, if there were geographical reasons for the result ranking and more.

Why we care: Search marketers always wanted to know why Google ranked a specific site for a given query. Well, Google is now giving you pretty detailed clues into why. Of course, this is not detailed ranking weights and signals, but it does tell you if the words match or match closely, if people link to the site, if there are geo-specific reasons and more.

Twitter is working on a dislike button
“Twitter writes that iOS users may see upvote and downvotes in several different styles (up and down arrows, a heart icon and a down arrow, and thumbs up and thumbs down icons) and that it’s testing the feature to ‘understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.’ Currently votes are not public,” wrote Ian Carlos Campell for The Verge.

Social media managers, rejoice! Instagram data now spans 60 days 
And it’ll expand even further to 90 days of data later this summer, according to a tweet from Vishal Shah, VP of Product at Instagram. This update will be a big deal in helping both marketers and SaaS tools show trend data over time. We love something that makes our jobs easier.

TikTok’s new Spark Ads to boost native content 
“Spark Ads enables brands to amplify existing organic videos that fit their campaign objectives such as video view and conversion with great flexibility and efficiency,” said the TikTok For Business Editorial Team in the announcement. 



TikTok Ads
TikTok ads drive more unplanned purchases and a higher amount of unplanned responses that intend to purchase. TikTok provides a continuous cycle of engagement, which implies that their audience is more leaned in and fully immersed in the content, so advertisers will be more likely to capture a buyer’s attention.

TikTok’s algorithm: Great for advertisers but weird if you zoom out
“A Wall Street Journal investigation found that TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want: the amount of time you linger over a piece of content. Every second you hesitate or rewatch, the app is tracking you.”

That’s the summary of this 13-minute video on WSJ that digs into just how TikTok’s algorithm figures out its users’ interests and then takes them down very niche rabbit holes of content. The publisher created over 100x bot accounts and assigned them specific interests and then had them watch over 100k videos on the social media app. 

TikTok says “shares, likes, follows, and what you watch all play a role in what TikTok shows you.” But the WSJ found that TikTok actually only needs one metric to target users so specifically: how long you linger over a piece of content. “Through this one powerful signal, TikTok learns your most hidden interests and emotions.”

This video highlights the debate we’ve been seeing play out on multiple channels. When search marketers have access or targeting based on this very specific data, it also means we can customize our advertising to those very niche audiences. If you love pets and TikTok figures out that you love French bulldogs in particular, advertisers can use that to make distinct ads to serve that particular audience. 

But audiences may not realize that lingering on specific types of TikTok videos gives both the social media company and potentially advertisers that information — which as the video proves, can be very personal. 

It’s the classic paid advertising conundrum: audiences want targeted advertising, but they’re afraid of giving up their personal data to get it.

To provide the best marketing services, it’s important that we stay up-to-date with everything going on in the marketing world. With the right skills and knowledge, we’re able to help you with what you and your business needs. By creating a custom strategy for each of our clients, we give them exactly what they need to make them grow. Contact us for a consultation!