The Empire Strikes Back

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[00:01:44] It is Thursday March 7th.

[00:01:46] Today here come the penalties.

[00:01:49] Google starts bringing down the ban hammer.

[00:01:51] Why engagement is not your brand's best social friend?

[00:01:55] PayPal rolls out a new iPhone payment method,

[00:01:58] and you would not believe how much money T-MU has spent on Facebook ads.

[00:02:05] I'm Todd Maffin, that's ahead today in digital marketing.

[00:02:10] Well the big Google update meant to fix a lot of the crappy search results lately.

[00:02:14] It's not even been out for a week and already the company is handing out plenty of yellow flags.

[00:02:20] The Big Anties spam update rolled out Tuesday.

[00:02:23] It is aiming specifically at three things, most notably the automated low effort AI blog posts which have been like 90% of my Google searches in the last six months.

[00:02:34] And while the algorithm is hopefully knocking back some of those sites,

[00:02:38] human beings employed by Google are now manually penalizing some of those bad ones.

[00:02:45] This is something Google has always done. They call them manual actions,

[00:02:48] quoting search engine roundtable.

[00:02:50] Google issues a manual action against the site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that the pages on the site

[00:02:56] are not compliant with Google's spam policies.

[00:02:59] Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate the Google search index.

[00:03:04] Google has been busy issuing manual actions, in fact many SEOs and site owners are saying their sites are no longer showing

[00:03:12] in the Google search index even for a site command after receiving the manual actions.

[00:03:17] Indeed, poor one out for this guy.

[00:03:20] All right what is going on guys who runs a whole army of AI generated blogs.

[00:03:25] The fuckers got me he uploaded this YouTube video saying getting clapped by Google has cost him $13,000 in monthly revenue.

[00:03:33] All my sites in the Google search console that which used any AI was fully deindexed.

[00:03:39] What is that saying about tiny violins again? Can't remember.

[00:03:43] Anyway, this cheap content policy and the abuse of expired domain policies both went into effect this week.

[00:03:50] In a couple of months, Google will start enforcing the third leg of the update site reputation abuse.

[00:03:56] So maybe soon a glorious end to the trend of major publications being turned into cheap affiliate marketing sites.

[00:04:08] So you've got a product you want to sell and have some information up on your website.

[00:04:12] What's a surefire way of getting people to read your product page?

[00:04:16] The solution for many years has been to generate as much engagement on a social media post linking to that page as possible.

[00:04:22] Since high engagement means more people will click to read it, right?

[00:04:27] Well, not anymore if that even was ever true.

[00:04:31] A new report from the PR platform memo has failed to find a connection between how much engagement a post gets on social media versus how many people actually go on to read that linked post.

[00:04:43] Their study was about news articles I should mention rather than product pages, but certainly their similarity quoting the company across all articles and topics we analyzed.

[00:04:52] We found no clear connection between social engagement and actual readers of the news.

[00:04:59] Here's how social media today calm covered it quote does that mean that social media is useless for websites looking to drive traffic?

[00:05:06] Well, no is the brand awareness benefits would still be significant.

[00:05:10] There would still be some correlation between exposure and link clicks even if it is more minor than expected but the data does suggest that the connection between post reach and CTR is not as direct as you might hope while fewer people are engaging with content in stream more are now sharing links in message threads.

[00:05:31] One finding they confirmed which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone quote social engagement was higher per article among negative articles unquote.

[00:05:42] I know shocker.

[00:05:48] More options opening up for small businesses to take payment digitally in person PayPal today announcing that tap to pay on iPhone is now available for all Venmo business profile and PayPal's

[00:06:00] Zettle users in the US this lets small businesses accept contactless card and digital wallet payments directly on their iPhones with no additional hardware quoting the company.

[00:06:13] Consurers are going increasingly cashless more than 40% of Americans surveyed say that none of their purchases are made with cash in a typical week and that trend is expected to continue as a result accepting card in digital wallet payments in person is increasingly table stakes for small businesses.

[00:06:29] But until recently businesses have had to purchase and manage card readers to do so unquote merchants can also set up the system to add taxes except tips send receipts and issue refunds funds from sales will settle into a businesses Venmo or PayPal Zettle account buyers do not need a Venmo account to take advantage of this for every transaction PayPal charges a fee of 2.29% plus 9 cents flat.

[00:06:56] This all comes two years after its competitor stripe teamed up with Apple as the first payment partner for tap to pay stripe also offers tap to pay on NFC equipped Android devices unlike PayPal's transaction fee striped charges 10 cents per tap to pay transaction with additional fees for card and digital wallet payments.

[00:07:17] A doby will soon bring a huge update to its mobile express app its graphic design tool that competes with canva that update well generative AI of course this week Adobe added AI to the beta versions of express they're definitely playing catch up with canva which introduced a whack of AI tools last year.

[00:07:39] Once it rolls out more fully users will get a text to image generator a generative fill feature to insert or change an existing image and a new text effects feature to make text look a little bit more interesting if you are already a creative cloud member you'll be able to work on assets from Photoshop and illustrator and the express app also has some direct publishing tools to social platforms like Instagram and tick talk.

[00:08:04] If you want to try it out now while it's still in beta Android users you can find it in the Google Play Store iOS users need to sign up to get access we have direct links to both of those in today's email newsletter which you can sign up to for free by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to today in digital calm slash newsletter.

[00:08:23] Some interesting additions to linked in career tools are launching first something it calls next role explorer this will visualize potential promotions or job title upgrades members could aim for based on their stated skills and career goals.

[00:08:43] Quote say an employee is a data analyst but wants to transition into a different area of the company will recommend new roles based on people who made a similar job change and provide a personalized curriculum of content to start learning hard and soft skills relevant to the job or if someone wants to be promoted in their current role we can help by recommending the skills needed to advance to the next stage unquote.

[00:09:07] As Andrew Hutchinson noted in his coverage of this over at social media today calm this isn't their first whack at such an idea quoting his piece today quote LinkedIn has also tried to show college students their likely career progression with its LinkedIn University finder element which it retired several years back.

[00:09:23] LinkedIn's actually been working on variations of this for years but has seemingly never been able to get it right on a broader scale at least I assume both of these activations weren't entirely accurate for most people which is why they didn't stick around but maybe this more confined version of the same using more specific insights among colleagues will prove more directly valuable unquote.

[00:09:46] Also someone hilariously Andrew notes that 460 people list themselves of employees of his website something he says is nowhere near accurate but they can't remove those people because LinkedIn doesn't provide any way to disavow people like you can disavow links in Google.

[00:10:06] Speaking of LinkedIn who among us can say we've never checked out that who's viewing your profile page it's pretty basic if you don't pay for their premium service but still just as creepy now that tool is about to get more helpful or more creepy depending on your perspective added to the filtering options like date and company is a new one called interesting viewers that'll show you people that things can help get you a job which ones are linked in influence.

[00:10:36] And also the other one is a new one called the Flux.

[00:10:41] It's not really at all clear how it's coming up with these buckets when I tried filtering for people who could help me get a job but actually removed HR recruiters from my list there's also no clarity on what makes someone qualify as an influencer still a nice upgrade if you're creepy self still has this in your daily bookmarks.

[00:11:04] It's finally added a secret game to its app which you will find in your DMs it is an old school game like breakout you move your finger across the bottom to keep an emoji in the air when you miss the game ends.

[00:11:18] If you want to play it go to Instagram go to your DMs and send someone an emoji it doesn't matter which one it doesn't matter to whom just as long as that's the only thing you send one single emoji then tap on that emoji and you will get into the game.

[00:11:33] The person you sent that emoji to will indeed see the emoji but without any context so it's up on that you may want to explain why you're doing it.

[00:11:40] Two more related items item one I lost after the first scream item two shut the hell up not everybody has this which is not clear if it's only going to some people or if it's just a slow roll out Instagram wouldn't say.

[00:11:55] Team who apparently spent so much money on meta ads last year that metastaffers joked they should send them literally a greeting card thanking them how much gets you a card from meta.

[00:12:11] Team who is said to have spent nearly two billion dollars on ads last year according to the Wall Street Journal this makes the metastop advertiser in terms of revenue for 2023.

[00:12:23] For its part team who denied the figure but wouldn't say how much they actually spent the company is privately owned by a Chinese holding firm so it doesn't have any public reporting obligations.

[00:12:33] It is clear though that they have deep pockets the company bought Super Bowl ads this year and last year analysts believe the company is not profitable with golden tax estimating its marketing spend alone contributed to an average $7 loss per order last year.

[00:12:52] Quoting business insider quote while it's strategy to bombard shoppers with ads and woo them with low prices seem to pay off initially as customers flocked to the app data suggests that team who may be losing momentum observed sales for team who fell 12.5% month on month in December and 4.8% in January the data showed that the number of team users in the US was also declining unquote.

[00:13:19] Pivot to in shittification mode in 3 2.

[00:13:27] Threads is finally rolling out two of the most requested items on users wish lists first if you leave a post without finishing it you get an option to save that as a draft second the camera function finally works in apps so you can upload a photo by taking one right there and then rather than choosing from an existing photo from your gallery.

[00:13:48] Both new features are limited though for now you can only store one draft post and only upload one camera photo per post.

[00:13:58] So a couple of you have inquired as to why the fancy different music at the end of each episode is no longer there is you may recall I used to do different pieces of music and kind of mix them in and sometimes they would comment on the show sometimes they wouldn't.

[00:14:14] Anyway two reasons for pulling them one cost I mean it was you know I'm a monthly cost to license the music library but the bigger reason is I was spending more time editing that final bit of music to make it like the perfect so that I would hit the post at the right time the lyrics would come in right when I stopped talking and the mix was like I was spending more time on those closing 30 seconds than I did on the entirety of voicing the show I'm not exaggerating.

[00:14:44] So I'm always more time on that so by pulling the music and removing the closing theme just making the regular theme the closing theme this is saving me like two and a half hours a week which I'm spending wisely.

[00:15:02] I you know like leaving early and playing video games.

[00:15:05] So here now thank you for the well wishes I'll see you tomorrow.