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Shots Fired in the World of Social Today
Shots Fired in the World of Social Today
TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:
- The first salvo in the attempt to break up Facebook is underway.
- Why hiding your web pages from Google won’t keep you from getting penalized.
- There’s a new placement available for your Facebook ads.
- And how one very bad word rocketed a post straight to the top of Reddit this year.
Below is the transcription from this episode
It’s Wednesday, December 9th, 2020.
Happy Russian Fatherland's Heroes Day.
I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, Today in Digital Marketing.
Facebook Breakup?
Some breaking news — this morning, the American trade regulator — the FTC — asked a federal court to break-up Facebook.
Specifically, they want the court to force Facebook to sell off some of their platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp and turn them over to independent businesses.
This isn’t particularly surprising — the American government has been talking about this for a while now.
In addition to this big federal suit, 48 states and territories are also filing their own lawsuits against Facebook.
For its part, Facebook’s early defense seems to be “Well, you let us buy the companies in the first place, so — what the hell?” Their tweet this morning read “Years after the FTC cleared our acquisitions, the government now wants a do-over with no regard for the impact that precedent would have on the broader business community or the people who choose our products every day.”
The reactions to that tweet are NOT going Facebook’s way: Some of my favourites:
- Spare us the pearl-clutching. Facebook has had “no regard” for its impact on society or democracy.
- AND: Explain how you aren’t a monopoly though
It’s all early days still, of course, so no DIRECT effect on our work as digital marketers at this point.
At the market close today, Facebook stock: Down, but by less than 2%.
Google to Reveal Algo?
America isn’t the only nation to be sniffing around the big tech companies.
We learned more this week about forthcoming European legislation that would ask Google and others — more on that “Ask” part in a moment — to reveal some of their algorithm secrets, and update that disclosure every time they update the code.
Here’s the language the legislation uses: “Providers of online search engines shall set out the main parameters, which individually or collectively are most significant in determining ranking and the relative importance of those main parameters, by providing an easy and publicly available description, drafted in plain and intelligible language, on the online search engines of those providers.”
Yes, I said ASK Google. Not REQUIRE Google. The guidelines are not legally binding but are designed to help “facilitate compliance.” If that sticks, the good money is on Google just ignoring it. Oh, they’ll put out a news release talking about how much they respect the European Union, and how important they think Europeans are. And then they’ll ignore it.
And it’s only PART of the algorithms that they want disclosed — specifically, ranking variables.
In fact, they go out of their way to say the search engines won’t need to “disclose algorithms or any information that, with reasonable certainty, would result in the enabling of deception of consumers or consumer harm through the manipulation of search results.”
So what ranking factors do they want? We’re not entirely sure yet, but most likely they’ll want to know the weighting given to factors like Page-loading speed, whether the site is secure, how Consumer reviews factor into the ranking, accessibility, and so on.
Again, nothing YET for us digital marketers to act on, though if Google DOES, in fact, disclose these things, I’ll let you know first — right here.
Google Considers NoIndex Pages
Speaking of what factors contribute to a page’s ranking in Google, we’ve known for a while now that Google plans to introduce a new metric called Core Web Vitals — and that metric will be relied on heavily to determine how high your brand’s site will rank.
Your Core Web Vitals score will be made of three things: How fast the page loads, how soon a user can interact with it, and how much the page’s layout jumps around. You know how when a banner ad pops in at the top and everything shifts down a little? That.
But we learned something about that this week that, honestly, surprised me a little.
Google search engineer John Mueller said in a recent livestream that pages you remove from the Google index — either via a NoIndex meta tag OR you block them in your robots.txt file — those pages will STILL COUNT against your Web Vitals score.
CLIP
I guess that DOES make sense. NoIndexing a page doesn’t prevent USERS from seeing it. It just asks search engines to not make it searchable. So it IS still part of the user experience.
One follow-up question someone asked: “Is there any way to ensure that particular pages are not being used to assess how well a site passes Core web Vitals?”
Mueller’s said he didn’t have specifics but reminded people that Google’s index tends to look at the URL structure to determine how pages are grouped together. So if you’re specifically worried about Search pages, for example, then putting those in a folder with the word “search” in it makes it a little bit easier for Google to understand that all of your search pages belong together, all of your product pages belong together, and all of your blog posts belong together. He said they might be able to treat them individually when it comes to Core Web Vitals.
Facebook New Ad Pods
The list of Facebook’s available ad placements may be growing soon — and you may see Ad Pods in that list soon.
An ad pod is a pair of back-to-back mid-roll video ads, inside the existing in-stream ads placement. So I guess, a sub-placement?
Quoting AdWeek.com: “Ad pods can contain a mix of 15-second skippable and non-skippable video ads, as well as long-form ads of more than 15 seconds, and Facebook noted that a limited number of publishers are excluded from skippable ads. The social network said combining ads upfront or together enables it to reduce the frequency of ad breaks further in-stream so that viewers can watch content with fewer interruptions, adding that advertisers will have more opportunities to scale value by using the format to boost overall inventory.”
The new placements are in testing now — no guarantee they’ll make it to the final placement list we all use, of course, but usually, these tests DO lead to a more complete rollout.
RedCircle
Since you’re all digital marketers who listen, I promised to take you behind the scenes on the digital marketing and monetization of THIS very podcast.
The platform I use, RedCircle, turned on its programmatic advertising yesterday. These are ads that are automatically inserted into specific locations — after I upload the file, I drop little markers down to show where the ads can go.
These are now enabled on all podcasts on their platform that have more than 500 weekly downloads. This podcast is hovering around 6,000 downloads a week.
I checked my dashboard and, after about a day, I have earned $7.25 U.S. So after a month, and converting that to those sweet, sweet Canadian loonies, it’s looking like about $275 a month. And more as the audience size increases.
But because these are dropped in automatically, I don’t get to approve or decline them. That said, RedCircle did let me opt out of a bunch of brand categories, so — if I did it right, you shouldn’t hear any ads related to gambling, alcohol, nightclubs, cigars — I might actually take that out, I do love a good cigar — guns, immigration, politics, extreme violence, pornography, or malware. Wait, are malware developers advertising on podcasts? Can you imagine? [russian accent] “We make best ransomware.”
Oh, there’s also an exclusion category called Unmoderated User Generated Content. So, NO IDEA what kinds of ads would be there. Honestly, I’m tempted to turn that back on and see what we end up with.
Who knew exclusion categories of programmatic ad platforms could be so much fun? See why you listen to this podcast?
End of Year Stuff
Finally — and a quick warning: There is a swear word in this segment.
The usual news releases are trickling out with the year in review stuff.
Top Google searches around the world this year — first four you could probably guess: Coronavirus, Election results, Kobe Bryant, and Zoom. But in 5th and 6th place? References to cricket games in India. Rounding out the top ten: Coronavirus update, Coronavirus symptoms, Joe Biden, and Google Classroom.
As for the top mobile apps? TikTok had the most downloads. Followed by Facebook and WhatsApp. Interestingly, Likee — the TikTok clone — squeeze into the #10 position.
But that’s just downloads. When we look at the most number of monthly active users of those mobile apps? It’s all Facebook. Well, the top four are. Facebook, What’sApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Did I mention the U.S. government thinks Facebook has a monopoly? 5th place: Amazon. Then, in order: Twitter, Netflix, TikTok, Spotify, and Snapchat.
But who cares about downloads or monthlies. What we care about as digital marketers is cold hard cash. So what mobile apps garnered the most consumer spend with in-app purchases? #1: Tinder! Turns out you can pay your way to the top of the pile. And #2: TikTok. Where’s the money there? You can buy little icons to spam a livestream with and that streaming creator will get some of that. Apparently, a LOT of that.
And Reddit reported a bunch of year-end stats: My favourite was they announced the most upvoted post. It was a photo posted by Rick Astley. The real Rick Astley. Backstage at a Vegas show in 1989 — his first tour — riding a bicycle. That post didn’t get to the top because of the photo or because it was the Rickroller himself. It was actually because of the most up-voted COMMENT, which linked to an Ask Me Everything Astley did four years ago. The top comment on THAT AMA was “Will you ever give me up?” To which Astley replied: Go fuck yourself.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today in Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.
