It’s official: The United States is suing Google
The United States government has been busy in the past few months. Between antitrust meetings and threats of lawsuits, politicians have been keeping big tech companies at the edge of their seat on a near-daily basis.
Some of this built-up tension culminated yesterday, when the Department of Justice announced that it would be suing ‘Monopolist Google’ for violating antitrust laws (side note: can we all just start calling Google ‘Monopolist Google’ from now on?).
There are plenty of bold claims in the lawsuit – and of course, Google has already responded. Here are some of the biggest claims, as well as what Google had to say:
- Google pays companies to promote and feature its services, sometimes making it impossible to delete apps with Google on them. This is true, but Google’s reply states that “we pay to promote our services just like a cereal brand might pay a supermarket.”
- Google is forcing people to use its products. This sentiment is at the core of the lawsuit from the United States: that Google is forcing users to use its products, and that many users don’t know how to opt out. Google’s reply is that “people don’t use Google because they have to, they use it because they choose to.”
There are plenty more claims outlined in the full statement, but the two points we pulled out above are the core arguments that the United States has against Google.
So, why is this important? If the United States successfully alters the way Google does business, the effects could be felt by all marketers. But, you don’t have much to panic about yet – lawsuits like this usually take years (or decades) to resolve. For the time being, keep chugging along like always!
SNAPCHAT
Snap is on fyyyre
It feels like just yesterday that we were talking about Q2 numbers, but time flies – and yesterday, Snapchat released their Q3 report.
Unlike the Q2 report (which was lukewarm at best) Snapchat’s Q3 numbers blew investor expectations out of the water, sending its stock price up by 23% in after-hours trading.
The numbers:
- Revenue: $679M (up a shocking 50% from Q3 2019).
- Global daily active users (DAUs): 249M (an 18% year-over-year increase).
- Average revenue per user: $2.73 (up about 28% from Q3 last year).
Who knows how the Q4 will look like, but the numbers are encouraging for marketers considering the platform!
SPONSORED BY PUSHNAMI
Outstanding results at scale with Pushnami’s industry-leading push notification ad network
Pushnami helps 20k+ online businesses and affiliates get 30% more conversions by intelligently reaching their audiences with their push notification platform, which was developed especially for media buyers, affiliates, agencies, and performance marketers looking for high quality US traffic.
Pushnami is used by brands such as Taboola and Fluent to grow revenue without any additional lift.
How does it work? By utilizing proprietary machine learning technology (Pushnomics) to reach maximum optimization for campaigns and offers that can’t be achieved by standard human intervention.
Your website visitors simply opt in to receive notifications and Pushnami does the heavy lifting of follow ups.
You can earn money by sending web push notifications with native third party offers, or even integrate Pushnami’s ad feed into your email campaigns for some extra dinero.
These are the average results achieved by those 20k brands. Average never felt so good:
- 18% average Subscription Rates: For every 100 people that visit your website, you get 18 subscribers to your push list. To whom you can sell over and over and over.
- 30% more conversions by efficiently following up with your subscribers.
- 24% more traffic.
There’s no catch. Try Pushnami for 30 days. You can test it and see if it works. After all, there’s almost no work to implement it.
Start getting more conversions!
SEO
How to get more clicks without improving your ranking
Ranking number one on Google is great, but it’s not always possible. Fortunately, there are a couple other ways to increase the number of clicks your site receives.
One of these is maximizing the CTR of your pages. This is one of the lowest hanging fruits you can grab if your website is already established and you’ve got some pages that are ranking. In this blog post, Aleyda Solis walks us through the process.
The first step is compiling CTR data on your top pages and queries, then identifying the poor performing pages for your meaningful queries. You can get two different scenarios here:
- Poor-performing pages ranking for meaningful queries relevant to your business.
- Poor-performing pages ranking for irrelevant queries.
These two cases will require different solutions. But, let’s start with the first:
+ When relevant pages are ranking for meaningful queries: In this case, there are reasons causing a low CTR that you can’t control, such as:
- A high number of ads included in the results page.
- The query search intent is satisfied by the search result page resulting in non-clicks.
- Inclusion of SERP features that you’re not leveraging but you cannot use.
But there are other causes you have control over, like:
- Non-relevant or unattractive title and meta descriptions shown that can be optimized.
- Inclusion of SERP features (from rich results to featured snippets) that you’re not leveraging but that you could be.
+ When the ranked page for your meaningful queries is a non-relevant one: Here Aleyda lists different scenarios as well:
- A non-relevant page is ranking due to cannibalization issues: To fix the issue here you have to understand if the ranked page cannibalizing the relevant one is a duplicate. Or, if the ranked page cannibalizing the relevant one is meant to rank for a different meaningful query.
- A non-relevant page is ranking due to the lack of an indexable, optimized page for the query.
These are the different issues shown by Aleyda. And if you want to get your hands dirty and solve them, her blog post lists the various steps to take and tools to use.
Cheers to higher CTRs!
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
FACEBOOK: Taylor Holiday just posted some detailed historical data about CPM and ROAS, and it’s leading him to believe that some of the best is yet to come on Facebook.
WHATSAPP: You might soon be able to make calls from WhatsApp on desktop, a feature that could make it competitive, in a way, with Google Meet and similar platforms.
LINKEDIN: A whole host of updates landed on LinkedIn yesterday – one of which will allow you to easily drop links to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms in LinkedIn’s messaging feature.
INSTAGRAM: Badges, effectively a way to donate to people on Instagram Live, are getting additional availability to more users.
FACEBOOK: High CPMs got you worried? According to Brian Rolph Jr’s Facebook representative, scaling your ads for the holidays should be significantly easier once that oh-so-important November 3 date has passed.
BRAIN TEASER
Here’s one for you math nerds: There are three doors: A, B, and C. Behind two doors there is nothing, and behind one door there is a prize. You pick door C.
After you pick, it is revealed that the prize is not behind door B. Do you stick with door C, or switch to door A?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
A Hummer, but it’s electric
2020 has been a lot of things, many negative – but one of the positives? We’ve now seen two legendary vehicles brought back to life with new designs and features.
In mid-July, we wrote about the release of the new Ford Bronco (probably the coolest new car for your off-road adventures), and today? The new Hummer.
There’s one very, very surprising thing about the new Hummer, though: It’s electric. The notorious gas-guzzling days of the Hummer are gone, and the new car – called the Hummer EV – is built for a more modern, environmentally-conscious world.
If you want to check out the car, hop on over to GMC’s website to get a good look. Love it? Hate it? Let us know.