Everything Is Made Up, and the Points Don't Matter

THE FRIDAY QUIZ: Does Geotagging Images Boost You in Google?

Every so often — in the halls of conferences, in between meetings at the office — you hear the SEO nerds quietly conferring with each other. "You know what's working now? Putting your keywords in H6 tags, putting your H6 at the top, and CSS'ing it to look like an H1 tag — pass it on!"

Little tips to try to game Google. 

These tips come and go, and some move out of the tin foil hat crowd and become adopted as mainstream SEO wisdom — even though nobody's tested it, or sometimes even though Google themselves says "Naw, that isn't how our ranking system works at all."

Among the whispered tips that have been circulating for years now is about metadata — specifically putting your business's location in your image metadata, then uploading it to your Google business profile. Do that, they say, and you'll rank higher.

It sounds like a lot of effort. But, is the tin foil hat crowd onto something? Does it actually work?

The Friday quiz: Does putting location metadata into the images you upload to your Google My Business profile help you to rank higher in Google?

We’ll have the answer later in today’s issue.

PPC: Microsoft's New "Optimization Score"

As of this week, there is a simpler way to understand how well configured your Microsoft ads account is.

Their ads platform now shows what they call an Optimization Score. This number is basically a scoresheet of how many of Microsoft's AI recommendations you've implemented regarding things like bidding, spend, keywords, targeting, ads, and extensions. 

Yes, it's very similar to Google's version which has been around for a couple of years now.

Now, AI often gets things wrong — as anyone who's ever looked at machine-learning generated recommendations in an ad account can tell you. It'll find an under-performing ad set and recommend you triple the budget there because somewhere in its code it applied some assumptions that might be right for most accounts, but not yours.

After all, AI can't know the nuances of your audiences, or a unique funnel approach, or the fact that Dave in marketing can't wrap his head around video still and so you're running still images when everyone from the receptionist up knows it's the wrong play.

Nevertheless, the math on this new Optimization Score is simple.

If you apply a recommendation that has a score uplift of 10%, your account’s optimization score increases by 10%. Applying all recommendations can get you to 100% for your account.

There is a helpful workaround, though — Microsoft says in addition to accepting the recommendations, you can also just Dismiss them. That, too, will get you a higher optimization score. Which might lead some to wonder — if I'm dismissing your recommendations without implementing them, how is my account more optimized, exactly?

So in the end, Microsoft Ads' new optimization score is a lot like the old game show 'Whose Line Is It Anyway,' — where "everything is made up, and the points don't matter."

YOUTUBE: Five New Features for Content Marketers

Some new features on their way from YouTube for content marketers.

1. First, we're getting insights for evergreen videos — that's the informal name for videos that stay popular for an extended amount of time. They started testing this last month and is now rolling it out to everyone.

2. Trending hashtags — giving us a sense of what topics are proving to have the fastest growth. For now, this is only on mobile, and only in the U.S.

3. Some new brand safety controls, in the form of AdSense blocking — this will let you specify which ads or types of ads you do not want running on your brand's YouTube channel. This was available before, but only for channels in their Partner program. Now, they're expanding it out to their multi-channel affiliate networks as well.

4. The ability to bulk-edit video chapters — this is a really nice upgrade from the recently introduced chapters system. Some videos are having chapters created automatically, so if YouTube did this and you want to make a mass fix, you should be able to indicate a bunch of videos where you want this disabled.

5. And finally, you should soon be able to appeal the dreaded yellow-icons via the Studio Mobile app, instead of only by desktop. The yellow icon indicates when a video's monetization is disabled. This should out be to all Partner accounts by the end of the month.

RETAIL: Amazon Making Their Own POS Systems

Amazon is said to be working on creating its own point-of-sale (POS) system — one that can process both online orders and in-store orders. And even more interestingly, they plan to sell the platform to third-party sellers.

This system apparently will also let merchants manage their inventory and will offer Amazon's palm scanning payment technology.

The move is said to be designed to lure merchants away from Shopify and coax them onto Amazon's system.

Grand View Research says the global POS system market will grow from $9.3B in 2020 to nearly $20B by 2028.

The Amazon POS is still being developed, and it's not known when they'll launch it publicly.

SOCIAL: Tweet "Reactions" Now Being Tested

One of the nice subtle things Facebook added a few years back were Reactions. Previously, we only had one reaction for comments or posts — and that was "Like."

The Like button is still there, of course, but underneath it lies Love, Haha, OMG, Wow, and a few others. And these reactions, on the paid media side, can be used to get a more nuanced understanding of how people feel about your creative or messaging.

It is no doubt also being used internally by Facebook as an algorithmic ranking factor in determining content distribution.

Others copied the idea — hell, even grumpy old LinkedIn uses hover reactions now.

And so, perhaps predictably, Twitter has decided it's finally going to jump on the Reactions bandwagon.

It’s been in testing for the last few months, and now they are rolling out a country-wide test of tweet reactions.

The downside: That country is Turkey. (I mean, unless you're in Turkey, then that's probably good news.)

The test shows four new emoji reactions: Thinking, crying, laughing, and clapping.

We knew this was coming because this past Spring Twitter conducted a pretty widely distributed survey with different sets of reactions, asking people which set of four they'd prefer to see.

Quoting SocialMediaToday.com:

GMB: Site Managers Role is Going Away

Finally, Google is making a small change to its administrative roles you can give your people — the Site Manager role will be going away on October 24th.

On that date, those people will be automatically switched to the Manager role.

QUIZ ANSWER

As for the Friday Quiz: Does putting location metadata into the images you upload to your Google My Business profile help you to rank higher in Google?

For the answer, we turn to a great blog post by the local SEO agency Sterling Sky.

So, in short — there's no measurable effect.

A Small Note

We had planned to give Premium Newsletter subscribers a bonus episode tomorrow (on the topic of how to know when you are wasting your Google Ads budget) but we had some technical issues, so that content will be to you next weekend.

Today in Digital Marketing is produced by engageQ digital on the unceded territories of the Snuneymuxw first nation on beautiful Vancouver Island. Production support and fact checking by Sarah Guild. Theme composer Mark Blevis is changin' the minds of pretenders while chasin' the clouds away. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio.