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Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: July 2020, Week 5
July 29th, 2020
posted by Radomir Basta to Bing, digital marketing, facebook, Google, TikTok, YouTube
Hello and welcome to another edition of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots – our weekly column where we comb through some of the most relevant news and events that took place within the digital marketing landscape over the last week or so.
Let’s see what “July 2020: Week 5” edition brings us:
- Is Google Upgrading its Google My Business Profile Program?
- Google’s John Mueller Addresses Quotidian Updates to Search
- This New Bing WordPress Plugin Indexes Pages Immediately After Publishing
- TikTok Starts $200 Million Fund to Pay Content Creators
- YouTube Introduces New Metric to Show Creators How Much Money They’re Earning
- Facebook: Posts With Most Likes Don’t Have the Most Views
Alrighty then, let’s dive right in!
Is Google Upgrading its Google My Business Profile Program?
As Search Engine Journal reports, Google appears to be rolling out an upgraded version of a Google My Business profile, and it seems this upgrade is currently in its testing stage for now.
Namely, the new tier of service costs $50/month and it seems to feature a type of trust-related badging system that should help businesses acquire more users and clients.
Tom Waddington, a Local Search expert, has been vocal on Twitter about an offer from Google regarding the upgrade of GMB account. The upgrade offer involved a $50/month plan that featured a refund guarantee and a green icon informing his website visitors that his business is Google Guaranteed.
Google starting to offer an upgraded Business Profile (Google My Business listing) for $50/month that will add the Google Guaranteed badge to the listing and back services the business provides with the Google Guarantee. pic.twitter.com/x4bHLuVEi2
— Tom Waddington (@tomwaddington8) July 22, 2020
Waddington subsequently tweeted more information revealing that the new GMB plan seems to be limited to select local service providers.
Taking into account that many businesses will accept this deal in their attempt to build trust among their customers, their competitors will probably be doing the same in order not to lag behind.
In other words, Google just found yet another way to make plenty of dough with little to no yeast.
Google’s John Mueller Addresses Quotidian Updates to Search
In a recent episode of Webmaster Hangout, John Mueller discussed a new search update that appears to be taking place at the moment. The update is not a big core update, but a small, incremental algorithm change.
According to Mueller, these small updates happen all the time and are called quotidian updates.
“Quotidian” basically means an everyday occurrence, and in terms of these daily Google algorithm updates – they go unnoticed most of the time.
This time, one Australia-based publisher did notice the change, and asked the following question:
“Would you confirm if Google is making any changes into the search results? Because I’m seeing ranking loss and big fluctuations in existing rankings for my Australia based website.”
Mueller answered the following:
“We make changes all the time. So from that point of view I can pretty much confirm that we have made changes in the search results.”
Up To 60 Quotidian Tests a Day?
The interesting thing is that these incremental updates happen in huge numbers on a daily basis. In 2018, for example, Google released the following data about these daily search updates:
- 3,620 Live Algorithm Launches
- 17,523 Live traffic experiments
Combined, that makes for more than 20,000 tests that year, which means the number of live changes and live search tests is around 58 daily search changes.
To learn what the best reaction to these small search changes is, visit this SEJ article.
This New Bing WordPress Plugin Indexes Pages Immediately After Publishing
Bing is rolling out a new WordPress plugin that allows your content to be indexed in search results right after it has been published. This has the potential to become quite popular within the SEO community.
The process of indexing is performed automatically as long as the site owner’s WordPress has this plugin installed.
The publishers who install and configure it with an API key (that can be obtained from Bing Webmaster portal), can be certain that it will detect any newly added pages, along with the updates made to existing ones.
How to Install and Activate the Plugin
Step 1:
Download the plugin here, or find it in the plugin install page located within the WordPress dashboard by searching for “Bing URL Submissions.”
(Image Source: SEJ)
Step 2:
Insert your Bing Webmaster Tools API key in order to activate the plugin. Your API key can be accessed via the following Bing Webmaster Tools portal navigation:
Settings > API Access > API Key
(Image Source: SEJ)
For now, the Bing URL Submissions plugin is available for WordPress users only. However, we can expect this ability to be available to other content management systems in the near future.
TikTok Starts $200 Million Fund to Pay Content Creators
In an attempt to encourage users to create more content, TikTok announced it is starting a $200 million “Creator Fund.”
This money is to be distributed among the US-based users in 2021, which makes for this media platform’s initial steps toward paying its creators for the TikTok content.
The $200 million “Creator Fund” is, of course, expected to grow and be worth well over $200 million as time passes.
“To further support our creators, we’re launching the TikTok Creator Fund to encourage those who dream of using their voices and creativity to spark inspirational careers,” was stated in TikTok’s official announcement. “The US fund will start with $200 million to help support ambitious creators who are seeking opportunities to foster a livelihood through their innovative content.”
Who Can Apply for TikTok Creator Fund?
The eligibility criteria for application includes the following guidelines:
- User must be at least 18 years old
- User must live in the United States
- User mist meet a baseline for followers
- User must consistently post original content that doesn’t violate community guidelines
TikTok users who want to apply for the Creator Fund will be able to do so starting this August.
YouTube Introduces New Metric to Show Creators How Much Money They’re Earning
YouTube is now rolling out a new standardized metric in the channel analytics section that should help content creators track their YouTube generated income and see how much money their YouTube’s monetization methods are bringing in.
The simple metric will show YouTubers their earned revenue relative to video views, which should provide creators a new and consistent way to monitor fluctuations in revenue over time and figure out which content monetization strategies and content types bring in the most cash.
The new metric is called Revenue Per Mille, or RPM, and it displays how much a video content creator has earned per 1,000 views.
RPM is calculated by multiplying all YT revenue (the number reported in YouTube Analytics) by 1,000 and this digit is then divided by total views generated during the same time period.
(Image Source: SEJ)
To find out more about this new YT metric and the difference between RPM and CPM, we suggest reading this SEJ article.
Facebook: Posts With Most Likes Don’t Have the Most Views
The head of Facebook’s News Feed, John Hegeman, has recently shared some interesting insights regarding the metrics for the top-performing content on this social media platform, and some of them are very surprising, even counter-intuitive.
Hegeman revealed that Facebook posts that have the highest engagement levels are most typically not seen by a large percentage of Facebook users.
The insight surfaced when Hegeman responded to a tweet posted by Kevin Roose, a New York Times columnist. Roose’s post drew criticism implying that the Facebook algorithm is allegedly biased.
He shared info from CrowdTangle showing which US-based pages have published the best performing link posts on this platform:
https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1285227935972995072
The tweet led a certain number of users to believe that this social media giant is purposefully pushing content and sources that come from pages with a particular political viewpoint.
The head of Facebook’s news feed then explained how the platform’s news feed algorithm actually works, and it seems that top-performing content isn’t necessarily representing what most Facebook users see in their news feed:
“While some link posts get a lot of interactions, likes or comments, this content is a tiny % of what most people see on FB. News from these Pages don’t represent the most viewed news stories on FB, either.”
The fact is that these top-performing Facebook content lists simply don’t “match” the most viewed content as CrowdTangle doesn’t calculate impressions, but interactions only.
Find out more in this SEJ article.
Wrapping Up
That would be all for this installment of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots. See you next week, until then – feel free to check out our previous edition!
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