This Week in Digital Marketing - July 30, 2021

We’re back with the latest digital marketing updates for you! We’re able to audit your website, social media, Google Ads, and more, then we can work with you to create a custom solution that’s exactly what you and your business need.

4 Marketing Traits to Emulate from Businesses like Amazon

1. Obsess about your customers
   
2. Being aggressive, experimenting, and using profits to grow (especially in the beginning)
   
3. Optimize for Lifetime Value (LTV) instead of short-term revenue
   
4. Have the best culture and focus on people
   

Google’s three-strikes ad policy isn’t the problem, it’s policy application that worries advertisers
Google Ads’ new three-strikes program, which begins in September 2021, applies to violations of its Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances and Dangerous Products or Services policies. If an advertiser is found to be in violation of Google’s policies, they’ll receive a warning for the first infraction. After that, penalties become increasingly strict with each violation, leading up to account suspension after the third strike.

The PPC professionals that spoke to us for this article were largely in favor of the three-strikes system. However, Google’s enforcement, which can be haphazard, has them concerned. “I’ve had ‘false flags’ come up specifically in these categories a handful of times over the past year (including display ads for a cybersecurity company being disapproved for promoting drug use!),” said Tim Jensen, campaign manager at Clix Marketing.

Communicating the change with stakeholders and clients ahead of time can help you frame their expectations once the new policies come into effect. Eventually, more advertisers may potentially run afoul of the system, so it’s best to get ahead of it now instead of allowing that first warning or strike to be issued.

Collect user data with click maps 
You have probably heard that to be successful you need to be data-driven, only if it was that simple. Collecting data is the easy part; figuring out what matters and how to use this information to your advantage is a lot more difficult. Here to save the day are click maps – a simple yet powerful heatmap tool that makes it easy for you to collect, visualize and understand your website’s analytics data.

Using keywords in YouTube videos: How to get more views
Video has been the “next big thing” for a while. Over 75% of GenZers age 15-25 watch YouTube. “Their most used platform is YouTube closely followed by Instagram – so video is clearly a priority for them,” wrote Sorilbran Stone. So it only makes sense that more search marketers are using Google’s video platform for both paid and organic reach.

This guide demonstrates how YouTube’s algorithm works and how you can optimize your video content to show up in those results. The key is to plan for your audience and work backward from there. Important metrics include things like watch time, retention rate, and engagement, but your keywords are also critical.

YouTube assesses keywords not just from titles, tags, and descriptions, but also from the audio of the video — which means it’s critical to actually say them in your audio script and transcription. How do you choose the keywords? Well, good, old fashioned keyword research, of course.
Google fixing two search bugs; review snippets and soft 404 detection
Google has confirmed it is resolving two bugs, one related to review stars showing in the search results and another related to how Google processes soft 404 documents. The two issues seem to be unrelated.

Over the past couple of days, Google Search has, for the most part, stopped showing review snippets — the image above shows the same results screenshotted two days apart. And, Google recently changed how it detects soft 404 pages, which caused some to see spikes in soft 404 errors but not clearly seeing if those pages were in the Google index or not. Both of these issues can directly affect your traffic from Google Search, so when the company does fix them, it may lead to more traffic.

Google link spam update rolling out
Google has begun the two week process of rolling out a new algorithm update; the company is calling it the link spam update. Google said this update targets spammy links “more broadly” and “across multiple languages.” It is a global update that impacts all languages and seems to target links that are manipulative and not natural. 

As of Tuesday, I have yet to see many complaints from SEOs about this update. I should add that, over the weekend, I did notice an unconfirmed update that seemed to target more “black hat” methods but again, that was the weekend, and Google said this update started on Monday, so the two are probably unrelated.

In any event, if you see a ranking drop in Google over the next couple of weeks, it might be related to some of your link building methods.

Google review stars back in the search results
Google seems to have resolved the bug that was preventing review snippets or stars from showing in the search results. We are now able to see the gold stars for many results in the Google Search.

The bug began creeping into the Google Search results interface on Wednesday, July 21st based on the reports that were sent to us. By the following day, the review stars were hard to find for any query you conducted in Google. Google confirmed the issue on Friday, July 23rd. Then, on Monday afternoon (July 26), the issue started to get resolved and now everyone seems to be able to see review stars again.

Why we care: Reviews not showing in the snippets can lead to a lower click through rate from the search results. Lower click through rates can lead to less traffic and less traffic can lead to fewer conversions.

Instagram is disabling interest and activity-based targeting of underage users
Beginning in a few weeks, advertisers will only be able to target Instagram, Facebook and Messenger users under the age of 18 (or older in certain territories) based on their age, gender and location, Instagram announced Tuesday. As such, previously available targeting options, such as those based on interests or activity on other sites or apps, will become unavailable to advertisers. This policy change will roll out worldwide.

Why we care: If you’re managing Instagram, Facebook or Messenger ad campaigns that target minors based on their interests and activities across the web, then you’ll need to find an alternative way to reach them as you’ll be losing access to those targeting options in the coming weeks.

How Google ranks features like news, images, videos, etc.
Gary Illyes from Google explained in a recent podcast how Google Search ranks its vertical search results, i.e., news, images, videos, etc, within the core search results. Why does Google show an image carousel for a specific query in the fourth position and why does Google show videos for another query in the top position? 

Google uses a number of methods for this but Gary Illyes explained that each index or feature bids, like you would in an auction, for each position. So a video carousel can bid based on the weights Google assigned it, to be in position three or position four and Google’s overall universal search system will figure out where to place it. Google also decides when to show a feature based on click data, which is super fascinating as well. This gets a bit technical, so we recommend you read more.

Digital Marketing Snippets
Google released an “About This Result” overlay for pages to give additional information as to why certain search results are popping up.

Snapchat is a leader for AR effects and e-commerce.

Instagram’s in-app analytics will be growing to 60- and 90-days later this year. 

TikTok allows advertisers to sponsor ads that are trending on the platform, called Spark Ads. Use a code to find the TikTok you want to sponsor in the Ad Manager on the app.

Live stream shopping is continuing to grow. YouTube is beta-testing this feature with on-demand videos, but will be expanding to live videos in the future.

We stay up-to-date with everything going on in the marketing world, so you don’t have to! That’s part of our drive to provide the best marketing services. 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!