This Week in Digital Marketing - September 24, 2021

It’s Friday! You know what that means: we’re back with this week’s digital marketing news. These digital marketing updates keep us on our toes, which is one of the reasons we love it! 

Google explains why it made the title change to the search results
For the past few weeks, Google told us it was using the designated HTML title tag 80% of the time. But, on Friday, the company said it is using as-is title tags 87% of the time, a seven-point increase: “Title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before,” Google wrote.

The company listed the following as common reasons why it won’t use your HTML title tag:

• Empty or half-empty titles (”        | Site Name”)
  
• Obsolete titles (“2020 admissions criteria – University of Awesome”)
  
• Inaccurate titles (“Giant stuffed animals, teddy bears, polar bears – Site Name”)
  
• Micro-boilerplate titles (“My so-called amazing TV show,” where the same title is used for multiple pages about different seasons)
  

The SEO community is still mixed on this: Some are optimistic that Google will improve in this area, while others are asking for an option to opt out. If you noticed changes to your click-through rate from the Google search results, it may be related to these changes. Hopefully, the changes are positive since it is a win-win for Google to provide titles that its searchers want to click on. If not, Google said it will keep making improvements. It’s critical that SEOs continue to provide feedback on the adjustments to the title tag system, as well as any changes that play out in real-time.

Instagram is testing ‘Map Search’ in Australia and New Zealand
Instagram has launched “Map Search” as a test for its users in Australia and New Zealand, according to SocialMediaToday. This new feature enables users to discover businesses and other locations of interest via the in-app map (shown above), which can be accessed via the map icon in the Discovery tab. Selecting a location on the map shows users a business’ information, public posts tagged at that location and the associated Instagram account for that business (if applicable).

Why we care: If this feature rolls out more widely and hits the right notes with users, it could help local businesses connect with more potential customers, many of which are likely to be nearby and looking for places to visit, shop or dine at. This may also mean that local business owners will have to pay more attention to curating their presence on the platform.

Instagram has steadily added more e-commerce support over the years. One would hope that e-commerce support would be integrated into map listings, offering even more flexibility for local businesses.

The truth behind the Instagram “saves” craze

• Posts that were saved had a much higher reach than non-saved posts… but that did not necessarily translate to more likes, comments or shares.
  
• When your posts are saved, it expands the reach, but you still need to create engaging content, because people might see it, but if they don’t want to do anything with it, it won’t matter.
  

YouTube's Secret Recipe
Late last week, in a long blog post, YouTube joined the ever-growing list of brands willing to share a bit more of what makes up their recipe — in particular, their recommendation engine: the part that picks which videos will be recommended to you after you watch one video.

Here's a summary for those of you wanting to rank higher in those recommendations:

1. They confirmed what we've all known for some time — that their algorithm is based on machine-learning, so it's less a strict list of elements the code looks for, and more a self-evolving engine.
   
2. Clicking videos helps, but watching videos helps more. And the longer a user watches a video, the stronger a signal it sends that this user is interested in not only the topic, but how that topic is presented.
   
3. Then, they conduct mini-surveys in the YouTube feed. If you're a regular user, you've probably seen a couple of these pop up, asking how satisfying you found the content. Only videos that get 4 or 5 stars are counted by the algorithm. Actually, in its post, YouTube says it does a survey for every single video — it's just that the vast majority of those surveys are done by machine learning, on an estimation of a user profile.
   
4. Shares count for a lot, likes for a bit, and dislikes count against the video in terms of whether it'll be recommended to others.
   

Certainly none of these should come as a huge surprise, but they’re more details than we've gotten before.

How to Maximize Your Engagement on Twitter

• Twitter’s a great place to interact with tech professionals and investors.
  
• Make the most of your current channels to promote your Tweet storm.
  
• Format a blog post as a Tweet storm to promote educational content.
  
• If you know any influential users, ask them to comment, favorite, and/or retweet your content.
  
• Never end a Tweet storm with a link, Twitter wants users to stay on the site/app.
  

What Strategy Wins? SEO, CRO, or PPC?

• Ideally, all of them would win, however, not all of those channels work for every company.
  
• Long-term, SEO.
  
• Short-term and high traffic, PPC.
  
• Not enough people focus enough on CRO, which combines the best of all worlds.
  
• It’s so important to optimize your site and copy for the best user experience.
  

Phrase and broad match keywords that are identical to a query are now preferred
When Google announced that it was expanding phrase match to include broad match modifier traffic earlier this year, it told advertisers that an exact match keyword that’s identical to a query will always take priority, so long as it’s eligible to match. Moving forward, broad match and phrase match keywords will follow that same behavior, Google announced on Thursday.

In addition, the company has provided new details on how keyword matching works when a search is identical to a given keyword as well as when a search is not identical to any of an advertiser’s keywords (shown above). Google has also revealed that BERT’s language understanding capabilities are now being used to understand the intent of queries and match them to keywords.

Why we care: The natural language processing capabilities BERT brings to keyword matching may mean that your ads get shown for more relevant searches. Knowing how Google matches keywords can help you save time and better configure your campaigns. However, the removal of search terms not deemed “significant” remains a problem for broad match. Google has added more historical data for queries that received impressions but no clicks, which can be helpful, but advertisers may be missing out on important search query data if broad match terms with less “significant” queries drive more traffic.

Google also recommended that advertisers group keywords into thematically consistent ad groups so their ads will serve from the ad group they expect them to: “Let’s say your business offers food delivery, and your most popular search categories are sushi and pizza delivery. In this case, we’d recommend three ad groups so you can tailor your creative and landing page: one for ‘sushi delivery’, another for ‘pizza delivery’, and a third for ‘food delivery’.”

5 Reasons Branding is so Important

1. A lot of big purchases are made on brands, not searches.
   
2. People remember the story behind the brand.
   
3. Get your brand out there multiple times.
   
4. How you position your brand determines its value.
   
5. People need an emotional connection to your brand.
   

7 Ways to Gamify Your Social Media and Gain a Following

1. Ask a question to facilitate a discussion
   
2. Create a contest to get people to engage with and push your content
   
3. Do collabs to help your following grow
   
4. Have giveaways to generate a lot of shares
   
5. Connect with a social cause
   
6. Encourage close friends on Instagram and provide special content
   
7. Touch on trending topics to provide value
   

If anything in this post sparks an idea or a thought for you in regards to your digital presence, let us hear it! We’d be happy to help you accomplish your marketing goals for your business. Contact us for a consultation!