TIKTOK
What’s next for TikTok?
No, we don’t mean the United States’ proposed banning of the platform.
TikTok released its What’s Next 2023 Trend Report, outlining key marketing and content creation shifts that could happen in the coming year.
TikTok predicts three “major forces” will drive changes:
- Actionable entertainment, or, incorporating platform-native entertainment content in your promotions. “When advertising messaging is delivered like an ad, but loved like entertainment, brands see incredible business results,” TikTok says.
- Celebrating joy. Make space for nice things. Bonding with your audience through meaningful connections and providing a language for people to bond over is going to be super important.
- Community-built ideals. People are using TikTok to find answers to questions and explore niche interests. Brands can leverage this by building micro-communities on the app.
In a nutshell, making resonating, entertaining, and niche content that looks native and organic will earn you brownie points from TikTok’s audience.
Going sideways: Also, it seems TikTok is testing landscape videos with select users worldwide.
Previously, TikTok announced it would allow 10-minute videos and with this new potential feature.
The entire thing looks a bit too familiar, right? Yes, it does. Because YouTube.
Why we care: 2022 was the year TikTok established itself as a major player in the social media space. 2023 may see the platform trying to take top spots from the likes of YouTube.
Experience is now a search metric
Double “Es” could spell double trouble. But let’s hope not.
Google is updating their search quality raters guidelines by adding an experience signal to its Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness (E-A-T) principle.
E-experience needed: Google will look for signals in content that show some degree of experience like:
- Actual use of a product.
- Having personally visited a place.
- Communicating what a person experienced.
For example, if you search for “how to fill a tax form correctly,” Google would prioritize content written by an actual financial or accounting expert.
The new E-E-A-T principle is part of an officially released guideline – so check it out.
And now, an Analytics update: Google has released a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) landing page report that should help you examine page effectiveness and optimize accordingly.
The report will compare average engagement time per session, conversions, new users, views, and total revenue, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Why we care: The E-E-A-T is another big change in how Google plans to approach organic content in 2022 and beyond. Make sure you adapt to the new principles so you don’t get overtaken.
Also, GA4 got another welcome addition that should help you better understand how your website performs. Now it’s time to execute!
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Here are a few cool stories you’ll find on their channel:
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E-COMMERCE
E-commerce brands: please don’t make these JavaScript mistakes
The best SEOs can climb the search ranks as smoothly as bighorn climb steep cliffs.
But the harsh truth is that most SEOs stumble when faced with highly technical website details… like JavasScript (JS).
As Justyna Jarosz points out, Google can’t index e-commerce websites with JavaScript blunders, which results in lower presence on the search engines – and lower revenue.
So if you’re running a custom website on JS for your store, make sure you don’t do this:
#1 – Page navigation through JavaScript. When they land on a page, Google’s crawlers will skim the page by following links on your website structure.
The problem is, JS based navigation often lets crawlers see only products on the first page.
For instance, Nike’s infinite scrolling product feed is actually indexing only a few visible products, while leaving out the rest.
One solution is providing bots with page navigation based on <a hrefs> that will “lead them” to the next crawling page.
#2 – Generating links to product carousels. Product carousels can help with revenue, but if done excessively in JS, they can hamper your indexing.
Justyna found this out when she tested a popular product page that over-relied on JS to display product carousels – disabling JS made these sections invisible for bots.
If you’re unsure, check if your product carousel is indexed in the Search Console.
#3 – Blocking JavaScript files in robots.txt. Hey, it happens. Sometimes a number of your JS files may be disallowed in robots.txt, and Google can’t access them.
When this happens, Google will skip indexing your important resources… and consequently they won’t appear on SERP, or count towards your topical authority. Ouch.
Check robots.txt, and if there is a part of JS you don’t want bots to follow, disallow only that.
#4 – JavaScript removing content from the website. Unoptimized JS, such as clickable panels that open description boxes, etc., “block” users from accessing important content.
Don’t do this.
Instead, make sure you serve this information even when JavaScript is disabled so Google can locate them and understand it’s the part of the same entity.
Phew, that was technical. Make sure you consult a web developer and fine tune that JavaScript. It will make Google happy – and your rankings even happier!
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Broad match keywords used to have a bad reputation. But that seems to be changing…
Since Google got rid of its broad match modifier (BMM) and left us with “broad match,” a lot of advertisers have ditched the match type altogether.
It’s understandable, really. Broad match keywords were notorious for being unreliable, too broad, and for populating search terms reports that made no sense.
It wasn’t uncommon for a “running socks” search to trigger phrases like “tennis shoes,” for example.
But there’s good news: Google redesigned how broad match keywords work.
Here are a few things that have changed since BMM was taken away from us:
- Broad match keywords now give more relevant searches based on your ads account. Broad match uses all the signals in an ad account, including your landing page and other keywords in the ad group, to reach relevant customers. It’s no longer a guessing game, thankfully.
- Google changed its language from “related” to “relevant” to describe how broad match keywords work, confirming that they started being careful with our precious ad dollars by providing us with cleaner search results.
If you decide to add broad match keywords, let Google gather enough information about your target customers with its initial setup first—i.e., your phrase and exact match keywords.
And when you add broad match keywords, make sure to pair your campaigns with an automated bidding strategy to only compete in relevant auctions.
And just so you know… this doesn’t mean you should just add broad match keywords into every ad group in Google Ads.
But it’s always worth a test.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GROWTH NEWSLETTER: Grow.co is a weekly newsletter dedicated to customer acquisition, growth marketing, and retention. Sent weekly since 2010, it focuses on tactical and practical information that is especially useful for serious growth professionals.*
REDDIT: If you need some extra help running ads on Reddit, now you have it. The platform launched a new Reddit for Business website containing tips, case studies, stats, and other resources to help you manage your campaigns. Sounds useful.
INSTAGRAM: Hacked accounts can be scary stuff! Luckily, Instagram launched a new destination to resolve your account issues quickly and stress-free. Hope you won’t need it, though!
E-COMMERCE: And then, there were many. More and more retailers want to lessen their dependence on Amazon by selling products on rival marketplaces such as Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and others. Smells like more ad opportunities to us!
STREAMING: Uh-oh… Netflix’s ad-supported tier is off to a bad start. The streaming platform is allowing advertisers to take their money back after missing out on guaranteed viewership goals by roughly 20%. Guess not many people want to pay and see ads…
*This is a sponsored post
BRAIN TEASER
What has no hands but might knock on your door, and if it does you better open up?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
It’s weird out there
Octopuses have a weird way of communicating.
When they meet a fellow cephalopod deep in Australian waters, they greet the newomeber by… hurling a large object towards it. Weird way to say hello!
This is just one of the six weirdest animal behaviors recorded by scientists in 2022.
Here’s another: cockatoos prove their intelligence by using their beaks to open trash bins.
Lemurs prove the opposite by picking their noses with long fingers.
Let’s admit it, we all know a person who does at least one of these!