This Week in Digital Marketing - November 5, 2021

The flow of digital marketing keeps us on our toes, and that’s one of the reasons we love it. The need to change up a marketing strategy can be the best reset a company needs to improve their business.

GOOGLE: Adds New Merchant Features Ahead of the Holidays
Google announced new features in Merchant Center to support retailers running promotions, sales, and price drops, including a "Deals" feed in the Shopping tab.

Additionally, the company plans to integrate with Shopify and WooCommerce so that merchants can showcase their deals across Google surfaces.

Here’s what you need to know about the new features. 

The “Deals” feed

• Deals badged products will now appear in a new tab in the Shopping section.
  
• This feed can be found by selecting "Deals" from the menu or by searching for terms like "deals" or "black friday." 
  
• If a product has a deals badge, it is automatically included and will be highlighted based on the offer and discount. 
  

New ways to track in Merchant Center:

• Merchants can view which of their products are eligible for a deals badge in Google Merchant Center's products tab.
  
• Additionally, a new dashboard provides impressions, clicks, and click-through rate data for Shopping ads featuring deals badges.
  

With the new features eCommerce marketers now have multiple places in Google to showcase deals. Retailers running promotions, sales, or price drops need to maintain their product feeds to be eligible for these organic ways to reach shoppers.

How does the TikTok For You page algorithm work?
TikTok’s algorithm (a.k.a. recommendation system) recommends content based on users’ actions, preferences and account settings.

Here are the factors that affect what shows up on the For You page:

• Actions each user takes in the app. This includes likes, shares, comments and follows. TikTok users can also opt out of seeing some types of videos or content from specific creators by tapping “Not Interested” on TikToks they don’t like.
  
• Video information. For You page recommendations can be based on sounds, hashtags and captions featured in TikTok videos.
  
• Device and account settings. Language preferences and country settings are also signals for the For You page algorithm, i.e., users can expect to see some local content on the For You page.
  

Here’s what the For You page algorithm doesn’t take into account when recommending videos:

• Follower count
  
• A history of high-performing content
  

Which is great news for beginners! If you play your cards right, you can go from zero (followers) to TikTok hero overnight.

And how can the For You page algorithm work for you? Basically, getting on the For You page triggers something of a snowball effect:

• Your content is recommended to users who are likely to enjoy it.
  
• Users like, share, or comment on your TikToks.
  
• The TikTok algorithm takes this as a signal that your content resonates with people and surfaces it on even more For You pages.
  

Google recommends placing videos on dedicated pages for maximum exposure
Google has updated its video best practices help document to add a section around how to help your video gain maximum exposure in Google Search. The updated section says “to give your videos maximum exposure, create a dedicated page for each video, where the video is the most prominent subject on the page.

• Dedicated page for video
  
• Video placement
  
• Rich results may require it
  
• Video placed in multiple locations - It’s not that you can’t do this, but having a page dedicated to the video is suggested.
  

How Google’s continuous scroll can affect impressions and CTR
When continuous scroll initially rolled out, SEOs had questions about how reporting would work and how the change might translate to new user behavior. In short, reporting within Search Console remains the same as it did prior to continuous scroll, but impressions may increase for positions 11-20.

Tracking rage clicks with Google Analytics, Tag Manager and Hotjar 
The team over at Portent has developed a method to get rage click events to appear in Analytics reports, be observable recordings in Hotjar and display a survey to visitors to provide feedback on their user experience. Tip of the hat to Rommel Alcobendas, CRO strategist at Portent, and his team for this hack.

Google releases November 2021 spam update
Google is rolling out a new search ranking algorithm update targeting the more spammy side of the search results. The company is calling this update the “November 2021 spam update.” It should take about a week to fully roll out and be noticed in the search results.

“As part of our regular work to improve results, we’ve released a spam update to our systems. This November 2021 spam update should be fully rolled out within a week. We encourage sites to follow our best practices for Search,” Google announced on Twitter. Google linked to the generic Google webmaster guidelines for more guidance.

Google My Business now known as Google Business Profile as Google migrates features to Maps and Search
Google is renaming Google My Business to Google Business Profile, as it moves efforts to bring more of the business profile management out of the Google My Business app and directly into Google Search, Google Maps and those respective apps.

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