JB’s Digital Update 15th Nov 2022

It used to be said that users had to see banner ads up to 7 times before they were inspired to take action, and beyond that they were “meh”. Certainly, when I ran ads on sticky portal websites, you needed to manage ad inventory to show a variety of ads to returning traffic, in the knowledge that too much and they’d ignore it, too little and they’re not minded to click. 

Now a mere 21 years after my non-AI discovery, YouTube is allowing you to manage your ad frequency to cap ad display to a desired level which is juuuuust right. Aside from the eventual resolution of this inherent conflict of interest, it’s a win for advertisers. If you play the frequency game right, you can significantly increase the performance of your ads. 

Look for the ad frequency features in YouTube ads and optimise the doo-dahs out of them. Talk to me about running ads on PPC, Social and YouTube.

It must be tough being John Mueller (sounds like a movie title), he’s damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t. He revealed recently that Google doesn’t look at “old” links in the same way and it may treat them as irrelevant and ignore them. 

This shouldn’t be a surprise. But if it is, then you need to listen up: Google will always allow old links to fade away into the distance, or else there can be no way for new sites to come along and usurp the older ones, amongst other things. Now, this doesn’t mean that *all* old links are ignored, but a link from a page given 10 years ago, which hasn’t been updated or linked to since is not going to be as valuable as a link from a page which has been updated and continues to acquire links. 

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed I didn’t say “link from a *newer* page”. If a page is updated and it keeps acquiring links then it is likely to still be relevant and useful. 

So, if you have a page with a heap of links from dusty old sites, then maybe you should acquire some new ones. If you have a dusty old site, then maybe you should update and acquire some new links as well. If you’d like to find out more about auditing your links and acquiring new ones, talk to me.

Yes. Next. 

(Linking is almost always beneficial. Google outdid itself when it started to penalise bad neighbourhood links because you could run negative SEO on sites. It’s since learned something of a lesson from that foolishness. If the page you link to is relevant to your content, is of good quality and is useful to the user then you tend to bask in a bit of reflected glory. This is the way it works in academia and in almost every other walk of life. Of course, spamming 1000 links doesn’t benefit you, it makes you look like a try-hard. 

I’ve always told my clients to link to other useful content, even (shock) competitors, because the value you get from being useful always outweighs any value you supposedly give away. So, carry on linking, and contact me if you want to edit content to link to relevant sources.). 

Clearly I opened up my feeds at the “you what?” section today. In this stunning set of revelations, marketers from Google strongly suggest that Google tools are helping them continue to market successfully as we begin to leave the world of third-party cookies behind. What. A. Surprise. 

Undoubtedly, Google tools are well-placed to help marketers overcome the upcoming challenges, they had the data sets and the processing power to start to pull together cohort behaviour and make predictions from there. It’s kind of the same with Facebook, but they lost a lot of their data chunks when iOS started blocking those cookies. 

So. It will be a slightly modified marketing world in the years to come, but it won’t be the end of the world as we know it. Google and others will still have solid sets of data and tools to help. We may have to work slightly harder for the sale however. Contact me if you want to talk about how to transform from a third-party cookie world.

I always use to love cracking open a new ad spot on a site. There was the design phase (where should it go, what should it look like) and then testing phase (will it annoy people, will it actually sell) and then the go-live phase when you ran it properly and watched the pennies roll in. I’m sure in some ways there’s that level of excitement in the Insta offices when they release a new ad spot. In this case on the Explore Home part of the app. Luckily, no major upgrades required and you can target the spot specifically, or let it roll with pot luck if you have the collateral to fit. 

New ad spots are always worth a test as a buyer. There’s usually an enhanced reaction from users who are curious at this new shiny thing on their screen. Try it and see. Contact me if you want to run good quality ads on PPC & Social.