The Disturbingly Low-Effort Path to Millions of Facebook Views

SEO: Surprising Results From The Largest CTR Study Ever Conducted

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We begin today with some surprising details regarding click-through rates on Google. 

seoClarity has conducted what they say is the largest CTR study ever. 

CTRs were analyzed by position, device (mobile and desktop), country, seasonality and even industry across over 750+ billion impressions and  17+ billion unique keywords.

Here are the results.

• Click-through rates have declined significantly - especially for top positions - since their last study.

• Searches with no clicks on an organic result on page 1 or page 2 account for an estimated 65% of searches.

CTR by Device

• Mobile users are less likely to click top-ranked listings than desktop users. 

• Click-through rate for position 1 decreases from 8.17% on desktop to 6.74% on mobile devices.

CTR by Seasonality

• May and December are the months with the lowest click-through rates, and July through to September are the highest.  

CTR By Industry

• CTRs by position vary significantly from industry to industry. The industry you operate in can also have a significant impact on users' search behaviours.

• ‘Real Estate’ has the highest average CTR across the top 10 positions (2.45%), and ‘Apparel & Fashion’ has the lowest (1.43%)

Knowing what device will have a higher clickthrough rate provides marketers with valuable insight into their targeting.

Quoting the report again:

Based on its data volume alone, the full report contains a great deal of detail and provides reliable metrics to search marketers.

PLATFORMS: Meta Gets Creative

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On today’s episode of Who’s Copying Who?! Today’s contestant: Facebook copying Snapchat!

With the announcement of its new Creative App Platform for Facebook Stories, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, could score a few points for creativity. 

Quoting the company:

What are they talking about here with apps? They don't mean mobile apps. They mean mini-apps — like Snapchat's implementation, which they literally call ‘Minis’, in which developers share micro-versions of their full apps within Snap. 

Facebook's variation is limited to Stories, and has attracted several developers for the first phase including VivaVideo and Vita, Camera360 and Sweet Selfie.

Creative App Platform is still in beta, but it seems it is part of Meta's broader effort to regain young users.

LimeCall is a lead engagement solution that boosts conversions and customer experience using a callback widget, call scheduling, call tracking, analytics, and more.

PLATFORMS: Instagram Attempts to Reel in Your Attention

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How well is Instagram's copying of TikTok going? Their version, which they call Reels, might not be doing as well as they say.

Why else would they announce this today — they're ready to straight-up bribe people to post on Reels.

The company says users will be rewarded for posting short-form content on Reels instead of TikTok under Instagram's new incentive program.

It's possible to earn up to $10,000 for posting Reels on Instagram…

But here's the catch: 

Nobody knows how Instagram's bonus offers are calculated or what factors determine how big of a bonus they're eligible for. 

One Reddit user was offered up to $35,000 for 58 million views in a month.

On the other hand, a Twitch streamer with around 800 Instagram followers, was offered $8,500 for 9.28M views in a month. 

So, $0.0009 per view?

Instagram's Help Center doesn't offer much help:

According to the Reels Play Bonus Program Rules page, the feature is slowly rolling out and may not be available to you yet.

REELS: It’s New if You Don’t Have TikTok

Image: Instagram

Speaking of Reels, Instagram is finally introducing new Voice Effects and Text-to-Speech features — bringing them up to parity with the TikTok version.

Text-to-Speech allows an auto-generated voice to read your text aloud… and the voice effect will make you sound like a chipmunk or robot, and so on.

And honestly, it’s about time... that was one of the biggest gaps between the two.

So will this convince marketers to create more original content for Reels, as opposed to removing watermarks from TikTok videos and then posting to Instagram?

META: The Most Viewed Posts On Facebook

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Meta's Transparency Center has provided marketers with some insight into the most viewed Facebook posts for this quarter. 

If there is anything we can learn from these posts... It's to stop trying so hard. 

The majority of the “widely viewed” posts were in the form of text posts, with a "Facebook background" behind the text (you know, the big wall of colour), and in the form of a question.

The top five posts on the platform in Q3 were all that format, and they read:

• Who can honestly say they never had a DUI ✋ I'll wait

• Spell your name, but for each letter press the first word that comes up in your predictive text...

• What has EARS But doesn't listen?🤔

• Who the heck sleeps with a Fan and AC on?

• Name something that a lot of people like, but you can't stand 🤔

So yeah, not exactly Pulitzer prize winners.

And since it's just a big block of text, you don’t even have to go to the trouble of finding a stock photo or creating original content.

It appears that if you want 16M comments, all you have to do is ask people if they have a DUI.

Oh, one interesting note I realized — since that post format is not in the API, each of the top five posts on the platform had to have been posted by an admin directly on the page itself.

PLATFORMS: How To Take Up More Real Estate on Twitter

Image: Twitter

After rolling out full-sized image previews on mobile this year, Twitter today announced it will no longer crop image previews on the web.

Images will now occupy more vertical space on a user's homepage, but it is less of a hassle than having to manually click through images to see them in their entirety.

Plus, it's a great way for social media marketers to take up more space on a timeline!

What We Learned from the Survey

Thanks to everyone who filled out our listener survey — we learned a lot and are using the data to make some enhancements to the podcast soon.

Some of you had some specific questions and comments, so I'm going to Lightning Round some of them for you: 

• Can we get more live Zoom expert sessions? Yes, we have plans to make them more regular, probably twice a month.

• Guests should be more diverse. Good point, thank you, we'll try to do better in that regard.

• Do more How Tos. Honestly, this is going to be a no for us. There are a million marketing podcasts out there that are two-hour-long glorified blog posts, and I don't want this to be yet another "How to rank higher in Google" every week. If there's some news about an algorithm change, then of course we'll cover it, but I want to make sure your time spent listening is a complement to other things you might be listening to, not a duplicate of them.

• More Facebook snark. You got it!

• More case studies. Yes, definitely in our plans for the New Year.

• Episode transcripts or links in the show notes. The Premium Newsletter is basically the script each day, with extra stuff like images, related videos, direct links, that sort of thing. (14-day free trial. Tap the link in the episode notes.)

• Share more about your agency and what’s it like to work there. Okay, we can do that — basically, we handle social engagement and moderation for small- and medium-sized brands. Our web site is engageQ.com

• Do more NFT stories. No.

• I enjoy the small updates about Tod’s life. Oh that's not going away. I don't have any real friends, so you folks are getting it all. The only reason I don't talk about my personal life every day is that I lead a pretty boring life. It would all be about Overwatch if truth be told. Last night my wife and I went out for an ice-cream run. See? Kind of boring. But I'll keep you updated on anything interesting.

• I think Tod could loosen his tie and be more casual. Uh... okay?

• There are a LOT of acronyms.A quick reminder of what some mean would be helpful. Excellent point, thank you — we'll try to remember.

• Can you tell us what song you play at the end of each episode? It would be kind of pointless, because they're not real songs in the sense of you being able to find them on Spotify, or being able to Shazam them. They're all from a production music library, for licencing reasons, so the song names are like CMD09 Engine Driving Hip Hop with Lyrics #7.

But the big thing we got back was you're all evenly split into two camps: 

1. Those who like the current length of 8-12 minutes daily and don't want it to change.

2. Those who want a longer episode each day — with more stories.

We have found a way to do both, and that's part of what we'll be unveiling December 1. Premium Newsletter subscribers, you folks will learn about it first ahead of time.

Contest Winners

Fazeel, Taryn, and cbrock84 — if you recognize your name there, check your email — you three are the winners of our podcast survey contest. You have until the end of the day Tuesday to get back to us, otherwise we're sending it to someone else. And again, our thanks to everyone who participated in the survey.

This Weekend

In case you've ever thought of adding to your own personal revenue stream, tomorrow — a special podcast weekend edition all about how to become a Fractional CMO. This is something gaining a lot of traction... basically you rent out parts of your brain to different organizations and act as their white-labeled chief marketing officer. I'll be speaking with Casey Stanton who runs CMOx about the Fractional CMO role, how much you can expect it'd pay, how to get started, and all that. That's tomorrow on the weekend edition.

Credits

Today in Digital Marketing is produced byengageQ digital on the traditional territories of theSnuneymuxw first nation onVancouver Island. Scripting and production support by me, Steph Gunn. Podcast music licensing bySource Audio. And our theme composerMark Blevis is that moment when you finally find the serial number on the back of that thing that you've been looking for forever.