Rand Fishkin goes through a trove of internal Google documents. Here’s what he found!
Putting aside the memes that sprouted after this week’s hearing, there were also some internal documents released, which painted a clearer picture than some of the statements caught on video.
Rand Fishkin took the time to go through some of Google’s internal documents and… Let’s just say Google’s mantra certainly isn’t “Don’t be anti-competitive”.
Some highlights from Rand’s deep dive:
- Google does use “user signals, like clicks” in SEO rankings.
- It does have a measure of “domain” authority.
- They do machine-learn against human rating data.
- Sunday Pichai basically lied to the US Congress in 2018 when he said Google doesn’t track the percentage of clicks they send to other websites vs. own properties. They do!
- Google did talk about cannibalizing traffic from search from other businesses (like eBay and Amazon).
While we don’t have the whole context for the conversations leaked in these internal documents, they certainly don’t make Google look good, do they?
BIG TECH
Ready for round 2?
Or, as we should say, Q2 (for most companies). We devoted the first section of yesterday’s newsletter to the historic tech hearing that went down – today, we’re talking all about earnings from the companies that testified.
Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Apple all put out their reports yesterday. And, for the most part, they painted a rosy picture of the future for big tech. Up, up and away!
Here’s a breakdown, by company, of the earnings reports:
+ Amazon
- Net income: $5.2B (doubled from $2.6B last year).
- Revenue: $88.9B (up 40% from last year and beating expectations).
The Crew’s take: There are plenty more numbers in the full report here, but revenue and net income are the big takeaways. These numbers beat guidance and expectations for Q2, and investors are happy – the stock price shot up 5% after hours.
- Revenue: $18.69B (up from $16.89B last year).
- Monthly active users (MAUs): 2.7B (an increase of 12% YoY).
- Daily active users (DAUs): 1.79B (an increase of 12% YoY).
The Crew’s take: Facebook’s stock jumped almost 7% after-hours – the most of any company on this list – and for good reason. The company was able to show significant user growth, which is always a good sign for marketers!
In the report, Facebook did make the caveat that user growth is starting to normalize, so we shouldn’t expect to see the rapid growth continue for much longer.
+ Alphabet
- Revenue: $38.3B (down 2% from last year).
- YouTube ad revenue: $3.81B (up 5.8% YoY).
- Google advertising revenue: $29.9B (down 8% YoY).
The Crew’s take: When we mentioned earlier that the earnings reports painted a rosy picture for these companies, we weren’t talking about Alphabet. Advertising revenue took a big hit in Q2, and this was the first overall revenue drop in company history.
Investors didn’t seem to mind, though – the stock was up nearly 1% after-hours. Check out the full report here.
+ Apple
- Revenue: $59.7B (up 11% YoY).
- iPhone revenue: $26.4B (up 2% from last year).
The Crew’s take: This was Apple’s biggest Q3 (yes, different financial year for Apple), earnings report yet, as revenues hit historic levels and iPhone revenue showed promising signs of growth. The company also announced that a 4:1 stock split is on the way. The one caveat, though? Apple confirmed rumors that the iPhone 12 will be delayed by a few weeks.
If you’re interested in taking a deep-dive into Apple’s numbers, you can do that here.
SPONSORED BY UPVIRAL
This is where 20% of our new subscribers come from. Can this help you too?
Noticed the little section at the bottom of each newsletter (don’t scroll there now though)? Believe it or not, this is where ~20% of our new subscribers come from.
Over one year ago, we spent many hours researching what is the best referral tool to use for us and we landed at UpViral. Why did we pick it?
- One-click sign-ups so we could use it with our existing readers.
- Social media sharing done easily.
- HTML snippet to integrate on our website.
- Custom domain with SSL.
- Fraud protection.
That’s not everything it can do, far from it.
- You can do one raffle-style giveaway or prizes for each certain threshold (like we do).
- Public smart leaderboards can be shared to make a competition more engaging.
- Retargeting with the FB Pixel is possible.
- You can create custom e-commerce actions such as visiting a certain product page.
Referrals are powerful. UpViral lets you easily create and manage a referral system – whether you are managing a SaaS, an e-commerce store or a newsletter like us.
It starts at only $39/month for unlimited campaigns for up to 10k subscribers, so check it out!
Scaling $20k/day: Nick Peroni’s CBO Stack campaign
Do you have a solid scaling structure? Because Nick Peroni shared his system when it comes to hardcore scaling, and we think you’ll probably be interested. Plus, we haven’t featured something like this in a while…
A little bit of context: This structure is designed for those of you who already have well-performing audiences and are looking to scale. Buckle up!
You can still have your single interest audiences and LLAs (Lookalike Audiences) running in their own CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) campaigns. But, if you want your campaigns to skyrocket faster than Millenium Falcon enters hyperspace, here’s what you should do:
1) Take all your main Custom Audiences (CA):
- Views
- Add To Cart
- Initiate Checkout
- Purchase
- Emails
- 50%, 75% and 95% Video Views
- Ads engagements
2) Create the following LLAs for each CA: 1%, 3%, 5%, 7%, 10%.
3) For every CA create a CBO campaign containing 5 ad sets. Each ad set will target one of the LLAs you created. So, if the event is Purchase, your CBO camp will have 5 ad sets each one targeting the following:
- 1% Purchase LLA
- 3% Purchase LLA
- 5% Purchase LLA
- 7% Purchase LLA
- 10% Purchase LLA
More rules to follow:
- Set a minimum budget of $250/day.
- Only 1 ad per ad set.
- If the CBO performers well for 2-3 days, duplicate it into a new CBO with a $500 budget – and then to $1k, and so on.
How do you find performing audiences?
With five bucks.
Yes, Nick Peroni uses $5 Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO) campaigns to test audiences. So, once you have performing creatives and products, here’s how to proceed:
- Start testing as many audiences as you want at $5 per day.
- Once you find a performing audience, duplicate the ad set 5 times into a $100 per day CBO campaign.
- When you get enough events, create LLAs and test them.
- Rinse and repeat.
From here, you can use the CBO Stack campaign to take things further.
This isn’t an advanced structure, but it works. Simpler sometimes means better – and who doesn’t like simpler?
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
FACEBOOK: New accessibility tools and technologies are available on the platform, with scalable font sizes being one of the major highlights.
TIKTOK: Ever heard of Triller? They’re a TikTok competitor, and they’re suing TikTok for enabling audios to be synced with video in that unique TikTok fashion.
BUZZFEED: The media company has launched a shopping site, which will let visitors purchase products without having to redirect back to the seller’s site.
SNAPCHAT: Reports everywhere! Snap released three reports – a diversity report, a usage report, and a CitizenSnap report, all of which offer some different insights into the platform.
GOOGLE ADS: PPC Hub reported that Google is testing considerably larger font headlines for top ad slots in search results. Higher CTRs on the way?
BRAIN TEASER
A man stands on one side of a river, his dog on the other. The man calls his dog, who immediately crosses the river without getting wet and without using a bridge or a boat. How did the dog do it?
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.
Here’s how to make your own bar chart races
If you’ve spent any extended amount of time on social media in the past few months (we all have, don’t lie), you’ve probably seen some sort of bar chart race. Whether it’s about the number of fast food chains in the world or economic issues, one thing’s for certain: they are captivating.
If you’d like to make your own, we just came across this simple tool which lets you do just that. Just put in your data, the number of bars you want it to display, the length of the race, and you’re done!
If you do end up making a bar chart race, please send it in – we’d love to see what you come up with.
Or maybe you can build “Netflix for bar chart races”, we’re interested either way…