- Today in Digital Marketing
- Posts
- Want 60% More Conversions? Check Your Thumb.
Want 60% More Conversions? Check Your Thumb.
ALSO: Turns out Core Web Vitals is more important than Google let on... The new scam that's getting Instagram accounts shut down... and why some service businesses are being booted off Maps.
FRIDAY QUIZ: How Many Affiliate Links Are Too Many for Google?
We start with the Friday quiz, brought to you by engageQ digital.
How many affiliate links are too many for Google? In other words, what is the number of affiliate links on a single page that will result in a demotion in your Google ranking?
Is it:
Even one affiliate link will reduce your ranking
More than 3 links on a page
More than 3 links for every 200 words on the page
Do the number of affiliate links on a single web page not affect ranking at all?
The answer, later in today's issue.
CRO: Your Web Site Menu Is Hurting Your Conversions
There is an outstanding thread on Twitter today by Mathias von Appen Schrøder, an e-commerce marketer in Denmark.
It's all about fine-tuning the menu on your web site. And let's start with a reminder that almost all web traffic comes from mobile devices.
I want you to hold your phone right now. Or if you're driving, think about where your hand is when you're holding it. At the bottom, correct? Now, if you're right-handed, think about the areas of the screen your thumb can easily get to.
If you're like most people, you've got a comfortable range from the bottom-left of the screen, to the middle, then to the middle-right. Some areas are just completely out of range, yes? Like the top-left. Or, depending on the size of your phone, anything at the top.
So then why do all of us have little hamburger menus at the top left of our web sites?
When you think about it — and, honestly, I'm a little embarrassed this never occurred to me — perhaps the worst place to put a menu is at the top-left. You can't tap it with one hand.
How big a deal is this?
Mathias says he's lifted their conversion rate by 60% by just redesigning their navigation.
To put 60% in perspective, I would have generated $1,000,000 more in sales this year if I had implemented this January 1st instead of recently.
The full thread is definitely worth a read, has a number of case studies of other redesign efforts and the results, and you can find it at https://b.link/menuthread
SEO: Core Web Vitals Are More Important Than We All Thought
One of the biggest changes in the last year to how Google decides how high up the search listings your site appears has been a relatively new metric called Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals is actually three metrics: How fast the biggest element of a page loads, how soon someone can interact with the page, and how much the layout jumps around.
While SEO pros have been talking this up, and third-party tools have been integrating measurement tools into their platforms, Google themselves somewhat downplayed the importance of the metric.
It's not that it wasn't important — having good scores is good for a user experience, after all — but they said the only way they'd use it as any kind of ranking factor is in a tie-breaker situation. For instance, the ranking of two web pages with roughly the same content and relevancy would be decided in that case on which had the better Web Vitals score.
Now, Google seems to be adjusting that advice.
Answering a question on Reddit, Google search advocate John Mueller said:
It is a ranking factor, and it’s more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn’t replace relevance...
As an SEO [professional], a part of your role is to take all of the possible optimizations and figure out which ones are worth spending time on.
Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of “recommendations”, most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site’s visibility in search.
Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience.
You can find the thread in the r/SEO subreddit under the discussion called "Anyone else not buying Core Web Vitals?"
My favourite comment in the thread: "As usual, you don't have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the other guy."
Google Crawling Quiz
By the way, Google has also put up a little quiz to test your SEO knowledge on crawling. It's a pretty basic true-and-false test, but it's helpful if you want to get more up to speed on how Google's bot crawls web sites.
Among the questions:
Google prefers fresher content, so I'd better keep tweaking my page. (False)
Google prefers clean URLs and doesn't like query parameters. (False)
The faster your pages load and render, the more Google is able to crawl. (True.)
You can take the little quiz yourself at https://b.link/googlequiz
SCAMS: Instagram Bans For Hire
If you wake up one morning to find your brand's Instagram account has been banned for some reason, you may have fallen victim to the latest scam circulating around the dark web.
Basically, people are offering account-ban services for as little as $60. You give them an account you want banned, and they'll get it removed. How?
Either they'll take an existing verified account, change the name and photo to the victim's account, then report the victim's account as a copycat.
Or, they'll just get a bunch of accounts to report it as promoting self-harm and suicide — apparently, Instagram's automated enforcement bot are so tuned to that particular report that they just shut accounts with lots of reports down.
One scammer The Verge spoke to said it was so lucrative that it was basically a full-time job.
And that's where part 2 of the scam starts — getting your account back.
Many of the businesses offering banning services also offered help getting accounts back, sometimes for anywhere between $3,500 to $4,000...
Some users noted that they received offers of account help immediately after their accounts were disabled, and that often the Instagram account that reported them was following the Instagram account that offered help.
All that to say if you run a brand account, do everything in your power to get it verified, if you can. You'll find the option in the Instagram app under Settings, then Account, then Request Verification.
SCAMS: Google Closing the Google Maps Spam Loophole
Speaking of scams, Google is apparently working on fixing a particularly nasty one, though I don't know if it's fair to call it a scam.
Basically it involved someone putting up a Google My Business profile for some kind of service — like HVAC repair, or window tinting, or plumber... but these companies didn't actually do that work. Instead, they ran a very simple web site that looked like they had a local business, but in fact were just collecting leads, which the site owner would then sell to an actual local service business.
A couple of weeks ago, one real business owner noticed his business category in Google My Business changed from “tire store” to “wheel shop”. In fact, this appeared to be happening on every similar business that didn't have an actual storefront address displayed.
Turns out, this is by design. Google said businesses that are set up only as service-area businesses, and not necessarily actual storefronts, will not have access to certain categories — all this to help cut down on this strange local spam on Google Maps.
AGENCIES: Twitter and Facebook Update Agency Guides
Both Twitter and Facebook this week offered updated advice for agency people.
In Twitter's case, they updated their Agency Playbook, with advice on creating more effective Twitter ad campaigns, including new usage insights, revised ad specs, case studies, and so on.
Their original Agency Playbook had been around since 2019.
Some of the data inside shows that ad engagements are on the rise, and younger users are making up more of the audience talking about big issues.
They also have a section about how to write good tweets — and I'm a little wary of this. Culturally, in the last year or two, Twitter has been leaning toward more informal language, quicker tweets, even tweets that look like they've just been hastily bashed out by an overworked intern.
The Playbook shows an example tweet from the Hims skincare brand that's all lower-case, reading:
(Literally, the last line of the tweet reads "that's the tweet.")
Also interesting to note, Twitter's been advising brands lately to not use hashtags too much — in some cases, recommending you avoid them entirely.
They've also got some data on best practices and conversion tracking...
...as well as practice templates and a calendar of tweet prompts for content planning.
You can find the whole thing at https://b.link/twitterplaybook
And, as I mentioned, Facebook too has its own help out this week in the form of a series of interviews with experts on responding to industry shifts and building effective Facebook ad campaigns.
Which comes at a good time, says SocialMediaToday.com:
...Because Facebook, like all digital platforms, is in the midst of a major advertising shift due to the increased focus on data privacy, which has led to both Apple and Google exploring new ways to provide more capacity for users to stop apps from tracking their actions.
That means less insight for advertisers to go on in mapping out their campaigns, and as a result, marketers are being forced to develop new methods of gathering response insights, and building their ad campaigns based on expanded inputs and considerations.
In the first interview of the series, Facebook's Head of Marketing Science spoke with a couple of agency folks on how they're coping with those tracking changes and some discussion around video effectiveness.
You can read the interview at https://b.link/fbinterview.
COVID-19: Yelp Introduces Vaccination Labels
Yelp is introducing two new profile attributes: “Proof of vaccination required” and “Staff fully vaccinated.”
Attributes are little labels you can put on your profile. Others include Black-owned and LGBT-owned, and so on.
And yes, users will be able to filter their searches for just those locations with that vaccination status.
Interestingly, they also made a note in their announcement to say that they'll be keeping an extra close eye on businesses that apply these attributes to their profiles — in an attempt to watch for any hateful and harmful content on those business profiles.
They say customer reviews that criticize a business’s vaccination requirements violate their Content Guidelines. So far, they've deleted almost 8,000 reviews for violating those rules.
This does seem to be more a consideration for American businesses, since out here in the rest OF THE 96% of the world's population, we consider vaccines a good thing. But, I guess if you're in the U.S., there's a political layer you've got to consider as well.
FRIDAY QUIZ: How Many Affiliate Links Are Too Many for Google?
As for the quiz: What is the number of affiliate links on a single page that will result in a demotion in your Google ranking?
The answer —there's no limit. It doesn't matter. Here's Google search advocate John Mueller:
There is no limit. From our side it’s not that we’re saying that affiliate links are bad or problematic. It’s more a matter of, well, you actually need to have some useful content on your page as well. So that’s kind of the angle that we take there.
The amount of affiliate links that you have on a site is totally irrelevant. The ratio of links to article length is also totally irrelevant.
But, essentially, what we need to find is a reason to show your site in search for users who are looking for something. And that reason is usually not the affiliate link but the actual content that you provide on those pages.
So from that point of view, trying to optimize the affiliate links or trying to hide the affiliate links, or whatever you’re trying to do there, I think is almost wasted effort because that’s not what we care about.
What we care about is the content and kind of why we would show your pages in the first place. And if the content of your page is essentially a copy of a description from a retailer’s site then there’s no reason for us to show your site even if you had no affiliate links.
So you really need to first have that reason to be visible in the search results. And then how you monetize your site, or what links you place there, that’s essentially irrelevant.
The Friday quiz is brought to you by engageQ digital — we'll handle the engagement and moderation of your social channels so you can focus on building your brand. Check us out at engageQ.com.
Sponsor this quiz yourself for a whole month for less than $100. Visit TodayInDigital.com/ads or tap the link in today's episode notes.
And finally…
Why haven't you joined our Slack community yet? Almost 500 digital marketers just like you are there, asking for help, sharing advice, posting jobs. We have people from Connecticut to Nigeria. From El Paso Texas to the Sunshine Coast of Australia.
There are deep-dive episodes you can only hear in the Slack — like:
Jon Loomer on the impact of iOS 14 on ad campaigns...
like the VP of Local Search at top SEO agency Sterling Sky.
Like the head of Brandify, talking about consumer behaviour trends they’ve noticed with the thousands of Google My Business profiles under their management.
Like LA consultant Michael Sanchez on how he's taken brands from zero followers to millions on TikTok
Even an interview with my friend and sex blogger Kate Sloan about how to crank out quality content when you're out of ideas.
This content has never been on the podcast, and you can only find it in our Slack community. It’s free to join — just go to TodayInDigital.com/slack
Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by engageQ digital. Production support and fact checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio.
Reply