Ok, so February was a bit crazy. But 2022 is the year everything goes back to normal – honest! For those of you craving something dependable, here’s the (ever so slightly edited) roundup of our frankly marvellous ‘3 in 3’ videos, bringing you February’s digital marketing news.
Episode 16, with Nichola, Jess, and Colleen
Facebook Ads – Reach and Frequency Buying vs Auction Buying
The team provide a quick breakdown of how to make the most of your Facebook ads, depending on what you hope to achieve with your campaigns.
Colleen outlines the benefits of Auction Buying. This kind of FB campaign allows more granular control over your adverts, allowing you to target specific subgroups to boost your conversions.
Nichola explains that Reach and Frequency Buying is great for small businesses and new brands, getting the word out there and raising brand awareness.
Google is testing Topics for interest-based ad targeting
Google has announced a change of direction in their bid to ditch 3rd party cookies and improve their reputation for online privacy. They’ve jettisoned the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), their previous attempt at providing advertisers with a less intrusive way to target customers (short version – it was confusing, deeply flawed, and fairly unpopular).
The new Topics function will only store up to three weeks of browsing history, categorising the websites you visit according to their ‘Topic’ (chosen from 300 possible categories, with no categories available for things like political or religious sites, ensuring more personal data is kept off the radar).
Advertisers will then target users based on three Topics chosen at random from the five top Topics associated with the user. Users will also be able to access their data, to see what Topics they’ve been associated with.
Do we like it? Jess applauds the increased privacy and safety, Colleen wonders whether it’ll be of any use at all in providing personalised ad content.
The launch of TikTok Tactics
TikTok have released a really helpful new marketing course to help you make the most of advertising on Tiktok. Unfortunately, they’ve named it TikTok Tactics, which if you say it fast makes you sound like a Klingon warlord ordering your troops to board a Cardassian vessel.
Jess rates it as quick and informative – despite only taking 30 minutes, she learnt more than she thought she would.
Nichola points out that it’s a more open, honest approach than Facebook’s. Colleen agrees, comparing this resource to the little block of text that Facebook gives you. Tik Tok want you to learn more about how to use their tools.
Episode 17, with Lucy, Jess, and Beth
SEO benefits of responsive web design
We get a quick rundown of how Google’s ‘mobile first’ approach to indexing produces benefits for websites designed with phones in mind.
Beth explains that your website will load faster across all devices, if you optimise for mobile – and the faster your site loads, the more likely your visitors are to stay.
Lucy adds that the faster load time will also provide benefits for your search engine rankings, as Google tends to prioritise sites which load quickly.
How to segment your audience for successful retargeting
Lucy raises the idea of broadening your retargeting strategy by thinking about the life events that might trigger interest in your product or services. An example might be removals or storage companies targeting property search website users.
Beth talks about the rise of some decidedly cheeky PPC campaigns, such as the way media agency Kairos media have targeted users searching for their rivals Social Chain (click here to see what she’s talking about).
Episode 18, with Kaitlyn, Jess, and Darren
We debuted our new jingle in this episode. The fans are appreciating our new, more commercial direction, although some are saying it lacks the joyful abandon of our earlier work.
TikTok is cracking down on harmful and dangerous content
Tiktok are trying to improve the safety of their platform with a crackdown on harmful content. They’ve announced that in the last quarter of 2021, 89% of videos deemed to have harmful content were removed without a single view.
Darren’s glad to hear this – he thinks TikTok need to be even more responsible than other platforms, as their audience is generally younger and possibly more impressionable.
Kaitlyn is in full agreement, citing an example of a poorly explained DIY video that got someone hurt.
Google’s John Mueller says putting dates in meta titles has no effect
John Mueller has publicly stated that putting a date in your meta title will have zero effect on your SEO efforts.
As Darren says, we don’t do that at Trio – the main reason being that it’s a waste of valuable ‘real estate’ that could be used for keywords and terms you want to rank for. The only time that we’d make a date reference in a title is for a ‘2022 trends’ or a roundup (like this one).
Google Ads making changes to automated extensions
Fresh news for anyone running a Google Ads campaign – Google is now automating your ad extensions. You’re allowed to add a maximum of four different types of extension to your PPC ad – these include additional links, product info snippets, location info, things like that. Google’s now going to add these extensions for you, based on their assessment of what’s going to help your ad.
Darren welcomes this as part of Google’s general trend for machine learning, providing useful suggestions for your campaigns. He also points out the other benefits of the new features, such as being able to pause or change individual extensions while the campaign is running. Additionally, having all four extensions automatically generated means that you’ll get the maximum amount of exposure on the search results page, which means better value for your ad budget.
Kaitlyn sees the automated function as being a great help to smaller businesses who are too busy focusing on the day-to-day running of their business to be getting granular with their ad extensions.
If you need a chat about your digital marketing needs, call Trio Media today.
