Knowhow Marketing Lab

0:00 - Introduction & Guest Introduction
1:18 - History of WordPress & Greg's Involvement
3:00 - The Latest WordPress 6.6 Update & Community Concerns
5:20 - WordPress: Open Source vs. Automatic
7:00 - The Evolution of the WordPress Block Editor
10:00 - Traditional Themes vs. Block Themes
13:10 - Impact of Block Themes on Site Speed & Builders like Elementor
16:00 - Customization with the Block Editor: The Future of Theme Development
19:00 - How Block Themes Affect Web Design for Businesses
21:30 - Advanced Features in the Block Editor with Cadence
24:00 - Community Feedback on WordPress Changes
27:00 - Future of CMS and Market Share
29:00 - Upcoming: Improving User Experience & Accessibility

[00:00:00] Pip: Good morning. We are here today to go over navigating WordPress the roadmap. So just, this is going to be all about the history, what to expect, what's coming next, and we got our expert, this guy, that guy, Greg. So a lot of today's going to be about questions, but Greg, introduce yourself.

[00:00:20] Greg: Hello everyone. I'm Greg McKinnon with the original 72 creative and we're a full service website, graphic design and digital marketing firm in Vancouver

[00:00:28] Pip: interesting. And I'm Pip, as [00:00:30] Seymour Digital Media, and we collaborate because marketing is a group effort. So if you're joining us, pipe in, say hi at some point. And we should be shared into the group and then pinned to the top of the group. So if you're not seeing us or you're looking for us, come join the Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks Marketing Mixer.

[00:00:49] Pip: We have a secret, which we'll tell you at the end cause we'll share our secret then it's not a secret. Greg, that's not a secret.

[00:00:57] Greg: not a secret.

[00:00:59] Pip: Secret. Okay. [00:01:00] Okay, Greg. So why this came up? I'm like, why this topic came up? Because you seem to pay attention to everything WordPress and I, you started talking about it and you mentioned the originators name.

[00:01:18] Pip: And so I wanted to go first through the history of WordPress, how it started, even how you got involved. So take it away.

[00:01:27] Greg: Yeah I do try as [00:01:30] much as possible to stay up on WordPress, everything WordPress since I'm building WordPress every day. Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to keep up with what's going on just because I'm in the daily building of sites constantly, so news and things like that I gotta find time for.

[00:01:51] Greg: Yeah. But this topic kind of came out of the [00:02:00] last release of WordPress 6. 6, when the community There seemed to be a little bit of a, I don't want to say backlash, but a disappointment with some of the WordPress community on the direction and where WordPress is going or how it's being developed.

[00:02:26] Greg: And people were. I [00:02:30] saw some people talking about whether or not they thought Automatic was really driving the development of WordPress based on Automatic's goals as a business, as opposed to the WordPress community as an open source. platform and input from the community. I had, so it initially, there was a couple of things that came [00:03:00] out when 6.

[00:03:00] Greg: 6 was released, but I haven't heard as much in the last little bit, but there was a flurry of questions on, the direction and who's steering WordPress.

[00:03:14] Pip: So WordPress is a open source software, right?

[00:03:20] Greg: Yes.

[00:03:20] Pip: And you mentioned a company that owns it, or how does that work? Because open source means anyone can go and edit it or use [00:03:30] it.

[00:03:47] Greg: with the community. And Automatic is also a business that gets clients on WordPress on the, so there's WordPress. [00:04:00] com, which is the automatic version, the automatic company who gives you websites on the WordPress.

[00:04:09] Greg: com version, which is a paid service. And then there's WordPress. org, which is the open source, just download WordPress and do everything yourself. So Automatic runs WordPress. com and you can pay them to get your site. It's a slightly different flavor of [00:04:30] WordPress. There's some things that are locked down.

[00:04:32] Greg: Like you can't go to WordPress. com and do whatever you like, like you could with Automatic. Just downloading wordpress. org completely yourself and just doing whatever you want to it a thing. So

[00:04:48] Pip: Now so yeah, 'cause on wordpress.org you can make a WordPress blog, right? With Word, it would be whatever your username or whatever [00:05:00] your name you want is.wordpress.com, right? Oh, wait, that's the.com, not the.org.

[00:05:06] Greg: yeah, wordpress. org is just the place where you can learn about WordPress, the open source content management system and download the software and see plugins that are available and the themes that are available for it all completely free wordpress. com. Is where you would go where [00:05:30] you could it's like the Shopify a thing you go to Shopify You sign up you start paying monthly or whatever package you want And they hold your hand and they do things for you and it's all hosted there and you can select templates from their you know premium templates there and you know get assistance from The wordpress.

[00:05:54] Greg: com people to, to build your site. So it's a more catered type of [00:06:00] service, but it's a pay service. Whereas the wordpress. org, you just download it yourself. You can install it on whatever host

[00:06:08] Pip: and you don't, do you recommend them as a host? I don't usually, they're not my first go to. Okay. [00:06:30] Silence.

[00:06:35] Greg: and your needs for your site.

[00:06:38] Pip: So are you saying that the company that owns wordpress. com makes all the decisions for wordpress. org? Or is it the community that makes the decisions about how the open source is going?

[00:06:52] Greg: That was what came out of that last release was some people were trying to we're [00:07:00] suggesting that maybe automatic, the company behind WordPress itself is, has, And does most of the development of the application maybe they have more, obviously they have more input and direction into where the application is going, but is it too much because they are a business and it.

[00:07:27] Greg: Is an open source application [00:07:30] and how much are they actually listening to input of the open source community on suggestions and where wordpress is going or are they really looking at wordpress as this is where we want to take it. This is where we are taking it and Maybe not as listening to the open source community and people who use it where they want it potentially to go features and stuff like that.[00:08:00]

[00:08:00] Pip: So give me an example Like, where is the community wanting to go and where's, what's the company doing and how do, I guess a lot of people feel this way about WordPress and about the direction. And how does the community have any pull, is another question.

[00:08:15] Greg: The community should have pull. It's a, it's an open source application and, WordPress should be developed based on what the users in the community want the application to be within [00:08:30] like a guideline, like you, the WordPress community can't just be like, Oh we want it to be like this now, and go off in some complete different direction.

[00:08:40] Greg: So automatic is there also to, to make sure that. The overall goal of the application is is achieved. I would say, I don't know how much input they actually do take from the community, and this is why the question came up. [00:09:00] So one of the things that I had heard about was basically they're developing the block editor and block themes.

[00:09:12] Greg: And a lot of the interface on the development to move that direction for WordPress has a much different, user interface for all of that new new functionality. [00:09:30] And so some of the community has been crying for keep the admin UI the same throughout. Don't have old UI in some places and then new UI in other places.

[00:09:46] Greg: They feel like for a better experience for all users that the UI doesn't jump around. So if you're using a block theme, part of your WordPress admin [00:10:00] experience is what people have been used to for the past probably five years.

[00:10:07] Pip: Years

[00:10:08] Greg: And then the new UI for the block editor and block theme is completely different.

[00:10:15] Pip: is that what I'm seeing when I use because I, we use similar programs to you and I'm now seeing this weird. Words. It's all the page stuff is all squi it's super different.

[00:10:28] Greg: yeah, it's a so [00:10:30] yeah, so that's basically the new the newer admin interface that you're seeing in the block experience, the block theme experience and so people, depending on where you go at in any section of the admin, sometimes you'll be seeing that new you I.

[00:10:51] Greg: And sometimes you'll be seeing the old UI and they really are wanting WordPress to be like, if we're changing the UI of the admin [00:11:00] interface, change it everywhere. Let's not have it mismatched and because that just confuses people who are trying to use the application.

[00:11:13] Pip: I agree. Is this where the integration of AI is coming in and confusing things? Or is it they've actually made a new interface and this is how they want it to be? Because I know change is hard and that's sometimes why we don't like things. But! [00:11:30] I would really I don't like the new it's oh, it feels way more overwhelming to me, but maybe that's just cause I'm not a web dude.

[00:11:40] Greg: I don't think that it has anything to do with the introduction of A. I. or the use of A. I. It's really a case of having a new interface for a A new feature in WordPress, the block themes and them not having [00:12:00] that new interface throughout the entire application. They've left the old stuff the old way, and they've put the new stuff, this new admin.

[00:12:11] Greg: interface way. So just they're developing this new stuff and implementing a new UI layout in that, but not touching any of the old, and it's causing a little bit of confusion. I think when people are using the block theme because like you [00:12:30] said, you, You get in there and all of a sudden you're presented with this new layout, and it works differently than the old UI and having both in there, I find is causing confusion for people.

[00:12:47] Pip: I did feel really confused, actually pretty overwhelmed, and just I just got to get what I need done. I don't understand what's going on here. When did we add a new plugin? I didn't know about that's what I actually thought. So isn't that funny? Because I do [00:13:00] notice there's some AI integrations in there.

[00:13:03] Pip: I'm not sure about the automations. And what about the themes and customizations? Has that changed?

[00:13:09] Greg: For the block themes, definitely you're getting that new UI experience and the way that you that you develop your site using a block theme is completely different from how you used to use a traditional theme that has the [00:13:30] customizer where you just go into the customizer and you have the side.

[00:13:33] Greg: A panel of a bunch of sections where you can click into and Okay that I can change my colors here. I can change my fonts here. I can You know, change my post layout there and that type of stuff. The block theme editor is basically creating your entire website in that block theme builder experience.[00:14:00]

[00:14:00] Pip: Is that going to get rid of theme set or no, like, how's that going to work? Ooh

[00:14:05] Greg: themes will definitely be more lightweight because really a theme will be A set of styles that you maybe have predefined but where you where you add your navigation. Where you add your logo the [00:14:30] way you set up your headers and footers it's all done with the block building experience instead of it being pre programmed into the theme and then just going through settings to, turn things on or off.

[00:14:48] Greg: You're actually building it yourself with the blocks available in the block in the block builder.

[00:14:55] Pip: Will that make it oh, goodness oh hold on one second. Can you create your [00:15:00] arena because she's calling. So which means there might be an issue. Cause she knows we're live. So yeah, we'll get that checked right away. That is quite interesting. So I'm wondering when you say the themes are more lightweight, does that mean there'll be faster?

[00:15:13] Pip: Or what about Elementor or the big heavy ones that people use?

[00:15:19] Greg: Yeah. So page builders, if you're using a page builder, you will still have an old an old style theme,

[00:15:29] Pip: Yeah.

[00:15:29] Greg: [00:15:30] not a block. You can't maybe I shouldn't say that. I would assume if you're using a block theme, You're probably not going to use a page builder like Elementor, but you probably still could and just use the block theme to, to build your header, footer and theme.

[00:15:54] Greg: style. But then when it comes to the page, building out your pages, [00:16:00] you could probably still use your preferred page builder instead of the blocks. But I would assume most people, if you're using a block theme and building your site with blocks, you're probably going to build your entire site with the block builder, not install another page editor to

[00:16:18] Pip: okay, so like the, we're talking the beaver builder, is that done then? Or the, I had the muffin builder. I liked origin, site origin was the builders I used. So builders are going to [00:16:30] be passé. Ooh, that's a great.

[00:16:34] Greg: WordPress is trying to move towards a system that you don't need those.

[00:16:43] Pip: Okay.

[00:16:44] Greg: That's the whole reason behind the block editor is to basically get your page editing abilities up to the same as what these page builders could do. The [00:17:00] flexibility that they had. I do see eventually WordPress will go and people will just get used to the block editor and not bother installing a page builder because the block builder basically does You know, 90 percent of what those page builders do.

[00:17:24] Pip: Okay. So there's a couple of really big things in here before we get to like security [00:17:30] and third party integrations and all that but so what happens to people who business owners or people that manage their own sites, which no, you shouldn't I've learned just so you know but For those people that have a website design and stuff and the block builders come into play and business owners sometimes or people want to mess around and learn, right?

[00:17:50] Pip: Especially for people who learn. So is there going to be this cross between some pages are going to have the block builder and some pages will be the theme [00:18:00] builder and there'll be like, it'll be a mishmash of stuff in there?

[00:18:05] Greg: Think of it as two different things, right? You can pick a traditional theme or you can pick a block theme. The only difference is how the theme gets set up, how you create your menus, your headers, your footers your overall theme styles, right? You can go the traditional route, which basically gives you a lot of people are using really highly [00:18:30] customizable.

[00:18:31] Greg: Themes where you can go into the customizer and pick colors and set fonts and, tick on or off a bunch of settings that make the overall theme look and act slightly different depending on how you do it. The block theme is essentially a complete do anything you want. So it's a it is a step up from current themes where you're basically picking [00:19:00] from settings, but maybe have not complete control over the entire header or footer or other elements of the theme.

[00:19:09] Greg: The block themes, you build it completely from scratch with the block editor. And so that's all theme related. Then when you're actually building pages or creating posts on your site, then you can also use [00:19:30] the block builder to create those pages on your site, right? Cause that's the content within the page, not.

[00:19:38] Greg: Not the header, footer, theme related stuff. It's basically just a progression for WordPress to further implement. the block editor within WordPress to give you that high customization option to do and set up [00:20:00] your site however you want all using the block editor.

[00:20:10] Greg: You're muted.

[00:20:12] Pip: Do you like the most common phrase now said in the world according to digital. So do you like the block editor

[00:20:23] Greg: I have been using the block editor ever since it was released because [00:20:30] I am more of a WordPress purist. I tried not to install plugins just for the sake of installing plugins. As a web designer, web developer for over 20 years when I've built web WordPress sites, I had maybe more ability to set up websites for clients where [00:21:00] they didn't just, okay, I set it up.

[00:21:02] Greg: Here's a theme that we've created and then go put all your content in that one big, text block that used to be available for WordPress, right? I was able to set things up so that clients could have. different layouts and do things without the use of page builders. When page builders came around and gave you a little bit more flexibility [00:21:30] on how you could style and create your content on your page it was just such a drastic change from that big, text block that you could just do from former WordPress, like old WordPress that people were like, Oh my God, this is amazing.

[00:21:48] Greg: We can do all these new layouts. So they became super popular really quick, but I never used them because I was able to, as a developer. create [00:22:00] more advanced layouts for clients that, you know, and tell them, put this stuff into the editor, put this into this section using custom fields.

[00:22:10] Greg: We'll create the page. A lot of the page layouts didn't come out cookie cutter, like most WordPress sites. So I never used WordPress the plugins for page builders and was, against them always because I knew how heavy they were how much code [00:22:30] they loaded on the site and drag down your page speeds and things like that

[00:22:35] Greg: then when the block editor came out, cause WordPress saw.

[00:22:39] Greg: The progression of, how people wanted to edit their, the flexibility of editing their content and creating layouts, they introduced the block editors so that it had similar functionality to be able to do those more advanced layouts like the page builders. Because it was default WordPress, [00:23:00] I just started using that for for creating all of my pages and sites.

[00:23:08] Pip: Okay. What about the so for instance, I know you use cadence. Will you still be using cadence once the block editor is like full in there?

[00:23:17] Greg: It is full in there, and I do use cadence as my starting point to customize sites for clients and I completely use the block editor [00:23:30] with the assistance of an additional block plugin to extend the block options. within WordPress. Cause Cadence has a a block plugin to, to give you more advanced features of blocks to throw into your site.

[00:23:50] Pip: Okay. And what are like, what are some give me an example of a more advanced feature.

[00:23:54] Greg: The default blocks for instance, for just a paragraph of [00:24:00] content or a heading, the default block is either a heading block or a paragraph block. But the settings that you can use for those blocks you can change the color, you can change the size, you can bold, you can do normal things like that for text.

[00:24:21] Greg: But if you install an advanced Block plugin, like cadence advanced blocks. You can use a [00:24:30] similar text or heading block that give you way more options to style the text, change it to par, change it to a paragraph, to change it to a span, a diviv. a heading have a background color have highlighted text.

[00:24:49] Greg: There's just a lot more options that you can have with with it because the default one is a [00:25:00] little bit, still a little bit more limited in the settings that you can use to, to make changes to that block's functionality or layout or style.

[00:25:09] Pip: Yeah, how does the community feel about all the changes really, you think on a general level?

[00:25:17] Greg: All the changes to WordPress, it's rough. I think for the most part, the direction of WordPress is still good. The question was really like, what is maybe [00:25:30] the order of where things are going,

[00:25:34] Pip: are doing.

[00:25:34] Pip: I know

[00:25:35] Greg: And

[00:25:35] Pip: who are younger and older,

[00:25:37] Greg: and also depending on, the user feedback and the community how much is that being.

[00:25:47] Greg: Considered for things that are being put into WordPress.

[00:25:53] Pip: Do people often, you think, send them in suggestions or anything? Can

[00:25:57] Greg: Oh, all the time. I'm yeah. [00:26:00] WordPress is like the number one CMS in the world, right?

[00:26:04] Pip: Yeah.

[00:26:05] Greg: power is almost 40 percent of the internet. So I'd be shocked if there's not a ton of,

[00:26:12] Pip: That's a big market share.

[00:26:14] Greg: it's huge.

[00:26:15] Pip: Yeah. I, and isn't it funny because it is my preference. Like when you talk about SEO and things like that it does come down to tiny things that make me prefer, I like more control and I, but I think that people use other [00:26:30] things cause they think that they don't have to worry about things like image weight and things like that, but they do which we've learned, but I just wonder, like, how are they maintaining market share?

[00:26:41] Pip: Because they must have lost some over the years with Squarespace and Wix and Magenta and Magenta might not be one. Is it one? Drupal's kind of passe. Yeah, they didn't make it. They're like the Blackberry of Canada.

[00:26:54] Greg: Is that what they call them? I don't know. I

[00:26:56] Pip: No. That's just what I'm saying. That's so mean. I'm so sorry. I don't know. [00:27:00] Drupal was overwhelming for me. But there are people that you, Pete, there's a lot of content management systems, CMSs, right? Yeah, Zoho has one even.

[00:27:10] Greg: I think because WordPress is beginnings started in 2003, we're like 21 years into this application. And because it was open source and anybody could download it and use it, it just, is by far the most [00:27:30] used application and continues to be.

[00:27:33] Pip: Yeah. And I, that says something about market share at the beginning. And I think that's why some advertisers try to target small beings. Yeah, there's rules against that. Let's quickly dive. We got, oh, we're over. Damn. We missed accessibility and inclusivity and what they're doing there.

[00:27:49] Pip: And yeah, and then business and enterprise. And I think we got it. Most of it all though. I'm really excited about using the new theme. I think a lot of people are are block editor, but [00:28:00] Greg, I'm going to probably need your help.

[00:28:03] Greg: Okay.

[00:28:04] Pip: With all of that, because it is a little bit more now, so if y'all are looking for a web designer, I don't know if but this guy, Greg he's all right, he's all right.

[00:28:13] Pip: So Greg, before we leave, I did pro,

[00:28:18] Greg: Oh, you got muted again.

[00:28:21] Pip: that was weird. I didn't, I maybe I'm not supposed to say anything. Unless you watch the replay or you're here with us now, you won't know this, but we're gonna change [00:28:30] things up. We're just working on some stuff, but I think we are changing our group name because we've been around for a while and we think it's time for a change.

[00:28:39] Pip: Greg, we're not, are we telling people yet?

[00:28:41] Greg: We could just tell people that maybe we're changing because Cyberpunk Geeks Marketing Mixer is a little bit of a tongue twister. I don't know.

[00:28:49] Pip: It is a tongue twister. It is. It's, I always say great name because I came up with it, but great or long, funny name, but great people. And, but it doesn't, it doesn't really [00:29:00] match us any more or we just have some things we want to change and it's time for a refresh.

[00:29:06] Greg: Yeah, I think the new name for me is basically going to be more straight to the point. This is who we are without the trying to be a cyberpunk or a geek or whatever.

[00:29:18] Pip: Yeah I was going to go for a cowboy theme, but I, poo pooed, you guys poo pooed it. And I don't really dig cowboy music. So there's that. But okay. Besides all that. So we'll talk about that more later. We're going to go. What's going on next [00:29:30] week?

[00:29:31] Greg: I know it because I'm doing it.

[00:29:35] Pip: What is it? What is it?

[00:29:36] Greg: It's going to be all about improving user experience, navigation and usability on your site.

[00:29:42] Pip: Oh, I'm so coming to that. And are we talking accessibility too?

[00:29:47] Pip: Yes. Yeah. Okay. And you're doing that with Rina, right?

[00:29:51] Greg: yes.

[00:29:53] Pip: All right. So if you're joining us next week or catching the replay, let us know. We would love to know, and we will see you next week. All [00:30:00] right. Bye.

What if the search world was bigger than just Google? In this eye-opening episode, Pip and Phelan from Seymour Digital Media take you on a journey through the evolving landscape of search engines.

They demystify the differences between browsers and search engines and explore the unique capabilities of platforms like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, and Yandex. But that’s not all – discover how social media giants like TikTok and YouTube are redefining search behavior and reshaping how we find information today.

Tune in for a deep dive into SEO strategies tailored for these diverse platforms, and stay ahead of the curve with insights into upcoming events, including a WordPress roadmap discussion and the launch of cutting-edge SEO and Google Ads courses.

00:00 Introduction and Greetings

00:07 Defining Search Engines

01:01 Search Engines vs. Browsers

02:20 Popular Search Engines

04:48 AI and Search Engines

12:23 Social Media as Search Engines

18:27 SEO Strategies for Different Platforms

25:59 Upcoming Events and Courses

29:03 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:00:40] Google’s Monopoly and the Impact on SEO
[00:01:52] The Google vs. Bing Search Engine Debate
[00:03:12] Apple and Amazon's Market Practices
[00:05:13] Google's Relationship with Mozilla Firefox
[00:08:00] SEO Core Updates & Their Impact on Websites
[00:11:03] SEO Best Practices and Content Quality
[00:12:47] Perplexity vs. ChatGPT for Search
[00:13:34] Website Updates and WordPress Developments
[00:16:47] Unified UI in WordPress and Block Themes
[00:17:42] Free Blogging Platforms: WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace
[00:17:02] Social Media Algorithm Updates

[00:00:00]: This month in the world of marketing search social websites and AI. Hi, I'm Pip Seymour, digital media, and this is. Yes, my name is Phelan. I work with Pip at Seymour Digital Media. And I'm Rina from Little Works Indie Media.

[00:00:14]: And last but not least, I'm Greg with Original 32 Creative. Never least and every month we get on here and talk about marketing and all the things that are happening. We met on Tuesday and went over things. There's a lot going on, isn't there? [00:00:30] Rina, you are out of the gate first this round cause I know you had a lot going on in social and more.

[00:00:40]: Yeah. There are a few things, what have I got here? Oh my goodness. Okay, so Google has been in trouble for Monopoly and they're, it looks like they're looking at how to organize the data so that other other search engines can use it to index sites also. So that looks interesting how that's [00:01:00] going to play out. That was the big topic we talked about on Tuesday, wasn't it?

[00:01:04]: About how, politics and marketing, right? Won't, they have to do the same for a bunch of companies though, if they do it to Google, you think? I think they will. I would think so, but we'll see how that plays out. It is going to be a bit difficult for marketers, I imagine, because all of a sudden SEO will be Changed.

[00:01:29]: I don't [00:01:30] know, I actually don't know the user, numbers for all the other search engines that are on DuckDuckGo and, all the other ones already. So I can't really say if Google is still dominant, but I think it is, but if they actually, Phelan, you were saying that they were thinking about, not populating Chrome as the default.

[00:01:52]: Browser on devices, right? Yeah. So the court case settled on whether they were a monopoly [00:02:00] on a search engine, not even necessarily the website. That's a whole separate thing that they're doing. And I don't think Chrome is going to be. That, that's going to be the issue. It's them as a search engine that they use their position to get Firefox and Apple to use Google as the default.

[00:02:17]: Like when you search on their systems that will by default use Google. And I think that was the main, the crux of it, which is an easier case to settle because that was the Microsoft case from back in the day. Was right. We, you [00:02:30] bundle this, Microsoft. Software onto the system so other companies can't even get a chance to get in there to make new search engines or whatever the case might be and so that's the kind of the crux of it And it's still going to be like we're talking years like google's got Billions of dollars to go and fight this for as long as humanly possible.

[00:02:50]: So who knows how it's ultimately going to shake out? It's going to be in the court cases for forever, but it definitely does [00:03:00] open up the Pandora's box. I've heard news of Apple getting. Charged with this as well because of certain ways that they've been doing like devices and then also Amazon, obviously for their marketplace stuff.

[00:03:12]: Like you can't also you can't be a marketplace and then also sell on that platform. Like you have to pick one or the other, which I think is perfectly reasonable. I find it a little interesting that there maybe not picking on Google because it clearly is the, go to search engine [00:03:30] to, to find things.

[00:03:31]: But for. As far as monopolies go the windows operating system comes bundled in your default browser is edge and edges. Default search engine is big. So having Google have agreements with Firefox or other browsers to Have their default search engine from those browsers to be Google, I think is [00:04:00] a leveling of the playing field for the jumpstart that Microsoft edge and Bing have on every windows system that, that is.

[00:04:13]: Yeah and there are a lot of corporate places where you work where you can't get on like socials. You can't get on. You have to use Bing. You don't use. Google, right? Because I don't know, they don't allow it. Yeah, it's security. [00:04:30] So Yeah, it's a lot of like enterprise, they have a special Windows is does a lot of enterprise level stuff.

[00:04:36]: And so if you're at work, you don't get to use whatever website you want to go to. You have to use Bing, you, because it's been secured. And then they also know all the security for your, and people don't even realize. They don't even realize like they, and what were you saying? What were we saying the other day?

[00:04:52]: It was like who's owned, who does Google fund for their browser completely? Oh Mozilla. [00:05:00] So Mozilla who creates Firefox who is the only non corporate entity when they decide on standards for browsers and stuff like that, and SEO stuff, like how All these kind of players all interact with each other.

[00:05:13]: They have a standards so that they could build from there because it's stupid for everyone to build their own JavaScript library or whatever. And so they all, and Google entirely pays for Mozilla. It's a 340 million a year expense that they just donate to Mozilla [00:05:30] in the, hopes that again like, you were saying, Greg, that they they have some competition.

[00:05:36]: They can like, even if they are paying entirely for them, they could at least say, Hey, there's some people here that are like, not our, we're friends, but we're not like, they're going to hold our feet to the fire. And that's been the argument of why they fund Mozilla. I'm interested, not so much in default search browsers and all that.

[00:05:54]: I'm interested in how Google's going to share the data. [00:06:00] That's more along the lines of where my interest goes, especially when it comes to marketing and SEO indexing. Like how does that actually work? Is Bing going to give us a different, does Bing already Bing already indexes a slightly different, but I don't actually go on things.

[00:06:16]: So I don't really know that much. We do some. Yeah, how do they index? Because you guys are the SEO guys. They take a lot of what they do from Google, but we've, there wasn't a big uptick [00:06:30] when the AI started to be used. There wasn't an uptick, but there was an uptick for like perplexity chat, GBT as search, like being used more so we're seeing that more, but still. Most people use Google and maybe that's just because of market share already. Most people use Google in, but not in China because Google's not in China. Yeah. [00:07:00] So with the, there was a leak about four years ago of Yandex's entire code base and so what they had found when they, so when Yandex released their, got their database release, they, people went through it and then they found that they were roughly like, so they said it was like 70 percent of the same results, which is pretty close to what they got on Google based on what they were assuming.[00:07:30]

[00:07:30]: And so what they kind of figure is because these guys all again, Yandex, Mo Mozilla, Google, and Bing all actually sit down and coordinate the SEO and what should we have as ranking signals? So they're not going to be identical overlap, but they do coordinate Hey, we should rank this up.

[00:07:47]: We should promote this type of stuff. So when, like when eat came out, that was across the board because they all agreed Hey, we need to do something about this problem with authoritativeness. Ooh, [00:08:00] that takes us to our next topic. Ha. Search algorithm update. The core update. Yeah.

[00:08:05]: You guys heard about that? Yeah, It's been very volatile. I find that I don't really want to know what's going on until. Closer to the end because I find that there's a lot of movement and then Like it washes out and then you know But a lot of the seos talk about it all the time Like the day it starts to happen what they see what do you guys like that?[00:08:30]

[00:08:30]: What do you want to know about like the core updates in the end?

[00:08:32]: I like, to know how big they are and how volatile that's made some websites. It helps to give me insight. I usually just, my sites, there's really, the only time I noticed a huge shift was last March. There were quite a few clients complaining about their paid ads, but it wasn't, it didn't end up being any, Anything from their paid ads.

[00:08:58]: It was their organic [00:09:00] leads that had dropped in that algorithmic shift in March. I guess it was, other than that. And you can notice quite quickly. So that's the only reason I follow it. Okay. Yeah. I don't follow it. I don't do SEO, so I don't follow it much. I do, we do like to have a general idea.

[00:09:18]: We're not, we're like, we're like, and we, and, we're not, we're not super heavy into it. We're just like, we need to know enough to get by, but we're not doing some of the deep [00:09:30] crawl like, there's people who specialize, like you have a really hard time differentiating yourself if you're not like deeply in the know.

[00:09:38]: And then also what they typically find is, like you were saying, Rina, that things will shift so much. And then what you actually just need to focus on is making sure you have a good product that you know who you're selling it to. And then over time, if you keep consistently working at it, you're going to just slowly rise to the top because your site is an authoritative source of [00:10:00] information for whatever product service you're providing.

[00:10:03]: And over time, that will, as long as you're not doing anything too sketchy, you should do just fine. That was their update to the helpful content update too, is like niche websites. They're looking more closely. It's almost like an eat for niche. So having the niche within your industry, like having the, having your topic [00:10:30] being really niche in that, so there are a lot of websites that are just trying to catch all the things, right?

[00:10:36]: And Google's trying to remove that, that, those big websites, like the small niche ones have a better chance of. Moving up in the, in rank. Yeah. And yeah, we've definitely seen that with, especially with, if you are smaller, you, it is better for you to have a niche that you're going after because you, because you have less competition and then it just [00:11:00] makes it easier for you to rank.

[00:11:01]: And then you can always expand. There's nothing that says that your website has to stay like locked in forever. You're allowed to expand. And like that's often a lot of people think like Oh I have to go after like I have to be the biggest service provider because I want to sell to everyone It's like no, it's actually better to like Niche down really hard at the beginning and then just slowly expand out because then you're you always have an authoritative source within that niche and it's much easier to then get clients [00:11:30] because again, you're competing against the biggest companies for those big keywords.

[00:11:34]: Whereas if you go for the smaller, more focused keywords, much easier for you to rank. Yeah. Yeah. It's totally easier. Yeah. It's a little more costly too, in terms of time, when you're developing it, cause you've got to do all the content building out of the gate, but once it's built, you're solid.

[00:11:55]: Yeah. And you just keep adding on [00:12:00] as you, as you grow. But yeah, but yeah, I think that was part of the, because people keep talking about the same things and it's like, no, just get a niche and stick with it. And then you'll, and if you just do it consistently, you're going to be fine. So much harder for them to say that then for them to go and like speculate on, oh, well, maybe this update has caused X, Y, Z.

[00:12:22]: It's I think it's just. It's not as, it's not as easy as that because it is, it is so volatile, right? If you're, if you have [00:12:30] somebody who has like very specific, like if you're selling sandals and all of a sudden like. Oh, there's a new sandal like law that comes in, like it's like, okay, how do you go about dealing with that?

[00:12:39]: And it's like, that's the kind of stuff that it's harder to track. But again, it's not like the most, it's, there's so many other things to focus on. Like if you're focused on just what Google's algorithm is doing and not like, oh, I need to just keep building stuff because that's ultimately what people are looking for is I have a question and I need it answered.

[00:12:57]: And then [00:13:00] that's where they, that's why Google exists and why search engines exist. Yeah, that's actually so now with the with the AI and the way people are using AI now and writing content people are wondering how Google's going to track AI, like the content written by AI and if it's written well, [00:13:30] will it still rank?

[00:13:31]: And so then people are testing it out and I've seen a couple things where people are, are testing their AI written content and they're ranking just fine. I don't think Google's ever going to penalize you if it's written well and it's good and it's not plagiarized. I think if it's, if it makes sense and it's, helpful.

[00:13:55]: I don't think they're going to, they're going to ding you on that. I'm not seeing [00:14:00] anything that shows that at all. They have said that they are not worried about it. They, their stance has been, Hey, we've had automated content forever and we don't penalize that.

[00:14:12]: And it's about the same thing. And that if, yeah. And that they're much more worried about people getting, crappy content that has a bunch of spelling errors or that's why the whole eat thing came out. And again, as long as you have good content, it's been edited and revised. And again, people are, want to read it and [00:14:30] they find it interesting, then you're going to be fine.

[00:14:32]: I think it's the only thing that maybe happens more is the spamming of these AI tools, right? People just, oh, I can, yeah, I can just flood the world with all this. I can do 2000 blogs in a month and it's like, okay, but why? And what is it doing? Is it helpful? Does anybody care? Who's reading this?

[00:14:49]: Exactly. It's quality over quantity when it comes to that. All right. Let's shift it into something different. What [00:15:00] are you doing on your websites now? For like for to keep people on your website? What's a cool thing you're doing? Give us some insider tips, some things, what you're doing, some fun, new, cool things.

[00:15:16]: Oh, insider tips. I'll tell you what I'm seeing a lot of that I think people should be looking at, but I'm seeing a lot of rotating banner ads like slider banner ads being done through HTML and CSS. And when done right, [00:15:30] they're SEO friendly. If done wrong, it's just a bunch of animated images and you're really getting nothing from it.

[00:15:36]: And they're large, which is another problem. So if you're doing it through HTML and CSS, they're usually smaller in file size. They actually have more SEO value because you're using HTML text versus just text in an image. And it looks cleaner and loads faster. So I see a lot of people using images with text on it.

[00:15:55]: But if you're building it through HTML and CSS, there's more value in that. [00:16:00] And I see a lot of websites starting to switch over to that. So as far as like designing and development and keeping people on websites, you're not really keeping people on the website, but it looks better and it loads faster and they look nicer.

[00:16:13]: And because it's. HTML and CSS. The SEO value is a little bit higher. Oh, all right. That's a cool tip. Thanks, Greg. Phelan, do you have anything? Oh, I was gonna say so something that we've been playing around with is heat mapping tools, and then [00:16:30] actually seeing how people are interacting with the content.

[00:16:32]: So one that we've been playing around with is Microsoft Clarity. It is a free service that you can use and then it'll tell you how people are actually looking at the content that you have on your page and where they're getting hung up, where they're dropping off. That's really interesting.

[00:16:47]: And then, yeah, so what it does is it, yeah, so you set it up and then it just. Over time, it will show you where people are actually clicking, how far down the page they're getting. And you can use that information to be like, okay, I really [00:17:00] need to adjust this button to make sure people are clicking this more and people actually can see the value that we're bringing.

[00:17:06]: So that's been a big thing that we've been focusing on is like seeing how people actually interact. Because otherwise, you, the only way you would know that is, Hey, are people filling out the form? But now you have something a little more granular that you can actually see. And what was the name of that again?

[00:17:21]: It's called Microsoft Clarity. You had me at free. [00:17:30]

[00:17:30]: That's always good. Okay. Rena, do you have anything? I think you're muted, Rena. I think we lost you.

[00:17:39]: Sorry. Yeah. Yes. So that's cool. Thanks guys. So what are you doing in terms of social media? Are you on social media doing any kind of like, are you using any tools on social media that are that are good for people who are building out their websites or creating content?

[00:18:00]: Anything on social media? I mean, I feel like everything you do is should be done in conjunction, but I don't know if we're doing anything necessarily that like we aren't we're testing out various tools to see which one sticks better.

[00:18:13]: I don't know if we've necessarily found one, I think I will say we've done, we've been playing around a little more with like getting getting these tools to auto-generate, like create repurposed content. So just, we've been testing out things like you just use like, we just use like chat GPT to just make like, [00:18:30] Hey, take this blog post and then spin it out into a social media content calendar.

[00:18:33]: And then just use that as the baseline of what we're doing. We haven't, we don't have any specific tools that we've just necessarily, we're necessarily doing in addition to that though. Just trying to take one piece of content and put it everywhere you can. So it's not even like it just building from there.

[00:18:50]: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. We use publer as our scheduler, and that helps us a lot to stay organized and make sure we have everything ready for [00:19:00] the clients. So that way they're, they have a scheduled out 3 months, 6 months, or whatever it is. And that helps out quite a bit. Yeah.

[00:19:10]: Cool. So guys, that's it. That's all the time we have. Thanks so much. This was awesome. I learned a lot. I got some good stuff, some good ideas. So yeah, we'll see you next month. I'm sure. Thanks so much. All right. Thanks. Okay. Bye.

What Is Accessible and Inclusive Design

[00:00:00] Introduction and Welcome
[00:00:32] Importance of Accessibility in Web Design
[00:02:00] SEO and Accessibility
[00:03:00] Design Principles: Color Contrast
[00:06:00] Text Over Images and Responsive Design
[00:10:00] Pattern and Visual Fatigue
[00:13:30] Font Sizes and the Golden Ratio
[00:16:00] Managing Content Layout
[00:17:30] Technical Aspects: ARIA Labels and Keyboard Navigation
[00:18:53] Tabbing and Screen Readers
[00:21:00] Alt Text and Heading Structure
[00:25:49] Accessibility Plugins

[00:00:00] We live. I think we're live. Welcome to this. Yeah. Welcome to this week's Geekspeak where we're going to talk about accessibility and websites. And I am Rina Rina from little works, indie media. And my cohost is Greg McKinnon with original 72 creative. Hello everyone. So let's jump into the topic. Great. Okay. Yeah, I came up with this topic as part of my 12 [00:00:30] 12 topic series for this year.

[00:00:32] And my blog fell by the wayside because I've just been busy doing other stuff. But I think this topic is important, very important moving forward because there is a lot more prominence on Making websites accessible, both the website design itself and also the way it's coded.

[00:00:56] Are you finding that also as you move [00:01:00] forward with a lot of your projects? It is the law. So yes. The provincial governments in BC and Ontario passed it and we're expecting the rest of the provinces to go through, if you are in a province that also has it. As law dropped that province in the comments below because I haven't actually checked into it in a while for other provinces, but yes, we definitely integrate that also because it's a a key factor for SEO [00:01:30] for Google, so it's not just only, you're not only doing it because you're required to, and it's benevolent for all, accessible is is good for, I forgot what I was going to say, what the word is, but anyways it's good for the world.

[00:01:45] Good for the Google. It's good for everyone. So the sooner you hop on board and think of this as a priority on your website, the better off you'll be is my thought. Yeah, absolutely. I think [00:02:00] probably maybe you as well, but Phelan and Pip obviously would be able to speak quite well on the SEO side of.

[00:02:08] accessibility, but obviously Google's always changing their factors. And because it's something that is that is moving forward, something that everybody needs to be looking into. I'm sure they are also. Looking at those factors within their rankings. Yeah. So the word I was looking for was [00:02:30] inclusive. I hate it when those words leave me, but yeah, it's not only for inclusiveness, although that is supposed to be the prime reason.

[00:02:37] And it should be the other motivator is just ranking. So you definitely want to take care of this. All so we the title ended up being designed on its own. So we are going to focus. on design, but we are going to mention some technical aspects too. We are not going to mention all the technical aspects because if you've ever read the requirements on the BC government page, it [00:03:00] is dense and a lot, so there's a lot there, but there are some major tick boxes that if you make these changes and organize these things, then you're definitely heading in the right direction and you'll get the good results that you're looking for.

[00:03:15] So do you want to start us off with some of the design ideas, Greg? Yeah, sure. The main one for design, obviously the biggest is the color contrast. So that is basically having text over [00:03:30] an image or over some background color, the contrast of those two colors. needs to be at a certain percentage to be deemed accessible for the visually Impaired I guess people with bad eyesight and even people with like myself who have pretty good Sometimes it's difficult to to read graphics that people come up with Or even if it's just not even only [00:04:00] graphics, but anywhere on your site where you might have text on an image or a background color is really important that the contrast of those two colors is a certain percentage.

[00:04:13] that would meet the accessibility guidelines. So let's just talk about that a little bit more because people will be asking, what is that percentage? And I don't think that we really need to know that percentage as much as we need to know what that means. So when we're dealing with contrast colors, you [00:04:30] might think that red and green are good contrast colors, but if they're in the same intensity, then they're probably not.

[00:04:36] So what we want to do is, talk about contrast being light and dark together, working with light colors and dark colors together. And red always organizes itself to black if you're not seeing colors. So black and red do not make good high contrast colors even though they appear that way if you are I if your site isn't impaired, that might appear that way.

[00:04:59] It might appear [00:05:00] really poppy and bright, but it's actually can be problematic, but I did want to talk about one thing that you brought up. This idea of text over images on images, when we, when you think about a website, I actually like to pull out the text from the images and lay the text on top of the image.

[00:05:20] On the website platform rather than actually putting the text in the image for two reasons. One is because if the text isn't in the [00:05:30] image and you don't put that on the alt text, if you describe the alt text and you don't get every little piece of text in there because that you can't have a huge alt text.

[00:05:39] If you don't have that, then the electronic readers can't read it. There's going to be something that's missed. If you have text, if you're using headers that are and overlays, text overlays that are part of the, you type it into the website rather than you have an image with it on it, that's going to work better because readers will [00:06:00] read the text that's actually in the text.

[00:06:02] On the website. So that's one important thing. And then the second reason why is because if you put a lot of text and this, I feel like we might be hitting the same age, Greg, or I might be a little older, but more experienced with less eyesight. But If you have your text on your image, and your image is this wide, oopsies, where am I, this wide on the screen, as soon as you go to a mobile, it goes down down, until you can't read that small text on your image [00:06:30] anymore.

[00:06:30] Even with, I'm finding, even with reading glasses it's very hard to read, so that's the second reason why text on images, I try and avoid. It's perfectly fine when you want to send something out on a social post or whatever, and you can put the text in the status, but for websites, it's really important to try and avoid that completely.

[00:06:51] There, there is the ability. And I, again, I like your suggestion of not putting actual text. into the [00:07:00] image itself and exporting the whole thing, unless it's obviously like a social post has got to be like that or something that that doesn't have a lot of text that even one shrunk will still be fairly readable.

[00:07:16] There, there is the option, although I don't suggest doing it like this, I would suggest doing it how you do in being able to. Put in images in your site and when it [00:07:30] scales to mobile, you can use different versions of that image to display it properly. If you really want to control your image exactly how you want you can do that.

[00:07:42] But again, it would be much easier to do it the way that you said. Okay. Yeah, that's true. There are always possibilities. There are always exceptions to the rule, but for instance, this isn't an accessibility thing. It's, it was more for performance optimization [00:08:00] SEO is people who have videos on their, in their hero section, you don't want a video loading probably in your hero section on your mobile.

[00:08:10] So instead on the mobile version, you don't load the video, you load a static image of. That represents that kind of a thing, but why don't you want to put a video up there? I'll give you all the reasons You can but If the video is Large like you're trying to download that [00:08:30] video. And it's directly in your Your hero section.

[00:08:35] So the first thing it's above the fold, right? So it's going to be loading You Right away. It's not going to be, loaded later when you scroll down the page or something. So you can't push it off until, you scroll to it a thing. So the initial load, I always tend to try not to have at least a really large video that.

[00:08:56] Is at the top of the page that plays right away [00:09:00] on your mobile option. And that's another thing is that many browsers and themes won't support video in the header anyways, because it's just not a great idea. What Greg is talking about, if you've got something that's Large to load. That means that the time to see the site takes a long time and people will jump away from your site because they think there's something wrong or they get impatient or whatever the case is.

[00:09:25] So you'll lose that traffic. And then the other thing I was going [00:09:30] to say about Responsive videos and having the mobile different than the the website is that you also have to take into account that what it actually looks like when it becomes responsive. So what I do on my, my Desktop is I will make the browser smaller, because you're going to get people at, I think a standard desktop is 15, but there's also 16 inches.

[00:09:54] So does it go down for the 16? So does it go down? Sorry. So if you're doing it to, If [00:10:00] you're making it look good on a 16 inch screen, does it look good on the 14? Does it look good on the 13? Cause now there are 13 inch screens that are coming up with, I Apple. And then all of the tablets and then down to all of the phones, the big phones, and then they have.

[00:10:15] around. So it can be a bit cumbersome doing that. But and yes. Okay, so I think I've just diverted us back to the first part of our I might have done that. Still good information.

[00:10:28] What we were [00:10:30] talking about color contrast, and then you got into the image aspect and so color contrast, just to wrap up color contrast, I think people get the idea. But there are color contrast checkers on the internet. I can link those in our in the comments later on. And basically colors are scored as a pass or a fail.

[00:10:51] And there's a double a or a triple a. And then so there's not a specific one point where once you pass [00:11:00] this, you're good. There is a range. There's a point where you could pass and it's like a double A, like you're fine with this, but you could be better with a triple A. rating, which is a higher contrast, but there is a threshold where you can go in between to get your color contrast correct.

[00:11:20] And so there are a couple of other things when we think about visual. Because we're really focused on that right now. We'll get into other things a little bit later, but when it comes to contrast that's not [00:11:30] just about colors. It's also about patterns So patterns do very weird things to people's eyes and make it very hard and I think if you've ever looked at brutalist sites, which I think had a comeback I don't remember which time period but the brutalist sites not that long ago.

[00:11:48] They were, I found them very hard to read because they were super bright colors, super intense colors. They were all around the same sort of tone of color. And then they had these things that were moving and these patterns that would [00:12:00] happen. And I found that very fatiguing on my eyes. So it works really well for industries that that sort of, are a little bit like mimic that feeling.

[00:12:10] Like they're trying to get your attention, but they don't need your attention for a long time. Like maybe they're trying to point you to an art show or something like that. And it's really quick. That might work out really well, but you want to think about those patterns. I actually, there's a a yoga studio that I know and they've put patterns in behind their schedule.

[00:12:29] So the [00:12:30] schedule or the schedule is black, Transparent and then right behind it is and it's nice It's these soft dots, but I can imagine there are people that can't read that. So patterns are the other thing You also don't want like really high cross high the same kind of stuff that they used to talk about if you're gonna be on TV being interviewed You know what?

[00:12:48] You don't want to wear black and white stripes because it's weird, all that sort of stuff is the same. So your designer should really be helping you out making these choices and they shouldn't be putting these things before you. That will [00:13:00] be wrong anyways. But so this is really for the DIY folks out there.

[00:13:03] You want to make sure that your, the patterns are nice and easy. And then on top of pattern images along the same, the exact same lines, I would say Patterns for sure, but any like super complicated images with a lot of shapes and detail just that are just all over the place, like the simpler it can be the better.[00:13:30]

[00:13:30] Yeah, there's a great time to employ the kiss method. Yes. I just noticed on screen, my name is like directly in the center of the blue stripe on my shirt. I know, I've been looking at that. It looks like I'm wearing a Greg McKinnon shirt. You're wearing a Greg. We can. I know. I feel like I need, swear.

[00:13:48] I'm really not. I'm not that potential . Alright, so the next thing that I wanted to address is, for a long time, small fonts were all over websites, like really tiny. I think they, they were like eight [00:14:00] point. I never really know what the point is on the website. Like what you choose for points, because it's quite different than what you do in Illustrator or a Photoshop.

[00:14:09] What kind of. Font sizes, would you recommend for body copy, for example? Like I think everybody knows to make their titles bigger, but the body copy can sometimes be really small in an eyestrain suggestions. Try to follow the the rule of, what am I trying to say [00:14:30] here? What's the what's the grid?

[00:14:32] The three, 3. 1, the golden ratio. Sorry. I try to follow the golden ratio to create most of my typography. So I will obviously start with the main body text, which I tend. Most of the sites I'm doing these days is about a 17 rem. All right. And sorry, 17 rem or 17 [00:15:00] point, 17, 17 point. And then from that point on, I will try as best as possible to create headings Going up from that based on the golden ratio for as optimal, design and visual as possible, sometimes it doesn't work out exact, but I do try to follow as much as possible that method to create my headings for the sites.[00:15:30]

[00:15:30] Cool. Do you have a little chart or something like that, that you can share with us on the golden moon for font? I have a file that I have that shows what I typically tend to use. Maybe I can share what it looks like. Okay, cool. Then let's look yeah, I'll see if I can find something like that too.

[00:15:50] Oh, I see. There's lots on the internet. Okay. So the other thing that bugs me the most, this is like a big pet peeve. For me is when the [00:16:00] borders are really quite narrow on the sides of the website. And then the paragraph is two or three sentences and it goes all the way from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen.

[00:16:10] I find that so hard to read. Honestly, we could do columns. We could put a photo in, we need to change that up. You don't have to go all the way to the edge. Although I understand that lots of people working with templates and they're built that way, but. Move that padding in a little bit, please. Are you talking about mobile versions of Scythe?

[00:16:28] No. Oh, is it [00:16:30] all Scythe? Yeah, so on the desktop mostly is where I find this. It's just such a long spans of space to actually get your eye across. And I think that probably has more to do with the fact that the person who was putting in that content is not. A designer and yeah, sure, putting in their content.

[00:16:51] They don't consider those things. So yeah, for sure. Yeah. Or they're just using a text box. They've added a text box with [00:17:00] no formatting of the text boxes in. How it should go on the page. Yeah. So that's one thing that can be changed. And and just for the record, I have had designers send me designs with a full page text and I usually send it back, but designers don't save you from that problem all the time.

[00:17:23] I don't know. I can't say. Okay, let's move on from the design stuff into some [00:17:30] of the more not important, more, not more important, but just as important things that are more code related from a code related side. And we have about 10 minutes. I'm just going to fire off a couple and then we can discuss them.

[00:17:44] There's one that I know we talked about in our preview that you're going to get into but I wanted to mention there's I don't know how new they are, but there are ARIA labels that you can put [00:18:00] into your HTML elements that help with accessibility. Focus control is something that's big, and also the one that I know you will get into, the keyboard navigation.

[00:18:12] Yeah. All three of those, I think, are Some of the biggest things for the accessibility on a site. Yeah. So when we're not thinking about most people will look at a site and be able to tell if it's accessible from that perspective, but they don't really think [00:18:30] about other people's disabilities and how that might impede them.

[00:18:34] So for example, using a mouse is is difficult for a lot of people. And so what we want to do, and some people will have an adapted mouse, so they'll be fine or some other way to navigate on their touch pad. But one thing that we want to make sure that we do is organize so that we can tab through the website.

[00:18:53] So tabbing is amazing. I'm going to put a site. That is a really good example of tabbing [00:19:00] and it's for actually a a society that works with people and to get them back into the workspace. So we'll give them a little plug too, by sharing their site. It's a site that we actually developed a number of years ago, in fact for them.

[00:19:14] And for what we did was we may, you make sure that your tab. button works. So you should be able to put your cursor at the top of your site and then tab through and it should go all the through the menu items. And what it does is really neat. It creates a little [00:19:30] colored square so that the people that are tabbing can follow what they're actually what, which element they're actually on.

[00:19:37] And it helps to do things like Get them through the site to the buttons where they can actually fill out forms or to get them to the fields to fill out forms or push buttons or just generally interact do pop ups to get the pop up information to come out without having to scroll. So that I love that for a lot of people.

[00:19:58] And that's one thing that we don't think [00:20:00] about not everybody thinks about when we think about websites. And tabbing is a natural thing on, in HTML. If you hit tab, it will pop up. For forever. For as long as I can remember hitting tab, we'll basically tab through each link in order that they are on the site.

[00:20:18] But even more, more to that, you can actually set a tab index order. So if you want if you want the tab tabbing to happen. [00:20:30] In a very specific way to make it even easier for people to, to navigate the site through that functionality. You can add the tab index attribute and specify how you want. To be able to tap through the site.

[00:20:46] Can I just go back to one thing that we missed out that is super integral, but we just assume that everyone's doing it at this point and that is filling in your alt text on your images. Okay, we didn't actually say that. So I'm just going to cover it in one quick sentence [00:21:00] and what you.

[00:21:00] to do is you actually want to describe the image. We're no longer keyword stuffing those. And that's the piece that Google picks up on. So we actually want to describe the image as what we're seeing. So it would be, if I was to describe Greg's image, I would say man sitting in front of his computer with the camera on, he's wearing a gray shirt and, little descriptions, descript, anything that's possible.

[00:21:23] important in the description to allow somebody who can't see it to actually form a [00:21:30] visual representation in their brain. And the ARIA label that I had mentioned earlier is a similar attribute that you can add to HTML elements to provide additional information. About the purpose and it's mainly to help with screen readers.

[00:21:50] Excellent. Oh, yes. And the screen readers read the H the alt text also. Yeah. Okay. Back to the to the technical bits. Did you have any other [00:22:00] ones to add to that? I think we're, we got five minutes and the other things I wanted to, other than filling in all of these basic things, because it all helps with accessibility is like the alt alt text on images and and even titles on Links and images and all those things there.

[00:22:21] There is also a and I see this all the time is people use heading tags wrong within websites and [00:22:30] one of those things that's really important for accessibility is that you're Heading structure on the page is actually correct because if it's not H1 through like then H2 and then under, if there's H3 is under that, like it, it really, it's really important that those H heading tags are structured properly.

[00:22:50] Yeah, and again, I see this all over and tons of sites that nobody tends to use the headers, right? They use them [00:23:00] more oh, I want the text bigger here. So that's right. I know. I can't tell you how many people I've had to educate on that. So the H tags have a particular function. If you want to change the look of an H tag, because you want a bigger, bolder, whatever, different color, you do it from your global settings.

[00:23:18] And then you use the setting. The H1 tag consistently, H2 tags consistently throughout your site. There should only be one H1 tag. I actually worked on a [00:23:30] site once that had seven H1 tags on one page. And it's a disaster. Google doesn't know what to do with it. What is the title of your page?

[00:23:39] And then and then the Yeah. So make sure you're doing the global changes. If you want a different look, it's really easy to do that. Make sure you're using the, when you format your blog posts, for example, cause these are H2 tags, H3 tags, H4 tags are usually used in longer blog posts.

[00:23:57] And and so you'll use them consistently. [00:24:00] Make sure that. Each priority piece has the same weight of tags. So if you're doing a, doing it on paper, and you're doing like your, you can actually number them if you want. And before you put them in, the second part that I want to say is that you should be using age tags and not formatting your sentences separately.

[00:24:21] This is another thing I come across a lot where people will change the color or they'll bold something. Or they'll put it in italics and make it bigger so that it looks like [00:24:30] it's an H tag because it's a title of some kind, but it actually doesn't have the H tag attached to it. So again, Google's not going to pick up on that and nor will the e readers.

[00:24:39] So that's super, super important. I always tell people, the only time you should be formatting is for those little spots. You want to use it like Like the MLA or the APA. If you're want to emphasize a few words within a sentence, you can definitely make that italics. That's the convention. An underline is actually [00:25:00] what is to indicate italics before we had italics on typewriters.

[00:25:04] So underline and italics is the same function, and if you have italics, you use that, not underline. And bold, you can also use that for to make a couple of words pop, but you would never use a whole sentence or a title. You would Do that through your age tags. All right. That's my, those are my pet peeves.

[00:25:23] Through all of the basics like the majority of the things that people can take [00:25:30] care of themselves, there, there is a lot more to it. The last thing I wanted to say to start the wrap up was that if you don't want to do this yourself on your site, There are services available. Two of them are AccessiBee and UserWay.

[00:25:49] Both of them are accessible plugins that you can install on a WordPress site, which will look at the page [00:26:00] and do all of the things to that page that have not been done to make it accessible. And that's when I, if people notice when they go to a website, there's a little blue circle With a person look like looks like a star person.

[00:26:14] That's the accessibility icon. And if you click that, it will actually give you the accessible version of that page. And so if people don't want to work on all of these things up front and implement them [00:26:30] themselves, they can subscribe to one of these services that. We'll make their site accessible and compliant with the plugin, with the help of a plugin.

[00:26:40] I've heard mixed reviews on how that works, but that I do use tests, testers on sites all the time. So are we wrapping up then? Cause I've got the next week's schedule organized. I think we need to, it's 1130. Yeah, it's 1130, so we are done. Yeah. Next week, please join me and Phelan [00:27:00] for the most helpful tools for your digital journey.

[00:27:03] Search and social. Oh boy. Okay. I got it. I've actually started bookmarking all of my favorite tools last week. So this is just in time for me to finish that task right on. So thanks for joining us. We are live. We go live every week. So wherever you found us, you can come back for next week or you can just catch us on the replay.

[00:27:23] We stream we. Place our stream in multiple places. But if you want to join our group of [00:27:30] people and have discussions in our group, we're in the Facebook group geek speak marketing mixer on Facebook. Join us there. See you next week. Thanks everyone. Bye.

00:00 Welcome & Introduction
02:15 Recognizing Outdated Strategies
07:30 Content Marketing: Quality vs. Quantity
11:45 Algorithm Changes & Their Impact
18:20 Analytics & Measuring Success
24:10 Embracing New Technologies & Trends

[00:00:00] Hi everybody. We are here today. Geek Speak with the two pros in marketing, we left the boys at home today. But today we are talking about signs your digital marketing strategy is outdated and boy, do we have stuff to talk about. And if you are joining us today you'll know my cohort here.

[00:00:25] This is. Rina Little from Littleworks Indie Media. [00:00:30] And I'm Pip Seymour Digital Media and together we make marketing a group effort. And we are here today to talk about how I have failed myself in my marketing because I got too busy and like the cobbler's children, I've screwed it up. So my marketing is no longer outdated.

[00:00:50] But it was outdated. So we thought it was a great topic. And so Rena and I are going to ask each other how we would know if our marketing is outdated. So Rena. [00:01:00] Oh, that wasn't the exact question, but okay. So I wanted Pip to ask Oh yes, go ahead. You go try it. Let's see if you get it right. Let's see if you get the question on point.

[00:01:11] If not, how do you know if you're marketing? How do you know if your marketing's outdated? Is that what you were going to ask me? Yeah, how do you know? Yeah, how do you know? Yeah, so I think we can wrap this up. You know when your marketing is not working if you don't get any sales. But there we go. [00:01:30] Oh, you've gone.

[00:01:31] What happened? Wait, no, but it's not about if you make any it depends on your business. So if you're in commerce, then yes. But if you're a, another business, if you don't get lead, if you don't close the leads and sales different, right? That is true. E commerce leads and sales are the same. The same it's been the same action, but yes, you're absolutely right You do need leads in order to make the sales and marketing people are not responsible for closing up the leads [00:02:00] When all you gotta do is say pips, right?

[00:02:01] Yeah. Yeah Except when the leads are low quality. So it's really important for your marketer person to have conversations with you and be asking you, what's your conversion rate? How are you handling that? And then also to know that as a marketer, I like to ask, what is your sales script like?

[00:02:18] Are are you able to close, because those two things need to be Organized super well in order for the whole thing to work together so if i'm if pip's handing me the most awesome leads and I have [00:02:30] zero sales training I have No script that's organized for my sales people or whoever's taking those calls and i'm not on i'm not I'm just hoping that intuitively people are going to sell buy because I'm not a salesperson.

[00:02:44] I don't want to be a salesperson. Then you're going to have some issues, right? Why is, I can see your lips moving, but nothing's happening. Cause I muted myself so that you were heard better. Oh, I see. We can't hear any of your background, so [00:03:00] you don't have to worry about that. I just get so excited and I'm like, I can do stuff.

[00:03:05] I know it's true. So those two pieces are separate, but they have to play well together. And if your marketer is sending you lots of really, lots of leads and they are not good, so we did run a campaign offshore, an offshore campaign in another country that's what offshore means, duh. But if you send a if you do a campaign in another country sometimes the actions will be different.

[00:03:27] For example, we ran one in the Middle [00:03:30] East where we got a huge click through rate, lots of bookings, but the people were not educated enough on what it was that we were selling in order to be able to make a sale. There needs to be an extra step put in place for that particular campaign. So you just have to know.

[00:03:46] And then on the other hand, um, we had one, one, one person, when you've got one salesperson that closes a large per percentage of your leads, which was happening with another client. And then they switch that [00:04:00] salesperson goes away and then all of a sudden the sales drop, the conversions drop, then we can start to think about what's going on in the sales process, so maybe it's not a marketing, you have to look at the marketing and know what to look for.

[00:04:12] And then you also have to know what to look for in the sales part to actually assess whether or not your marketing strategy is working. That's what I think so that's an interesting answer Because it's different than mine. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I know where you are going And I think that what you're going to [00:04:30] say is going to be equally important to know too But but as a concept this is the space Be thinking about first.

[00:04:37] And then how do you figure out? Where the problems. And I think that's where we're leaning towards. Next five, my five minute solution is not the end of the conversation. It is a really good point because why are we all in business? Yeah. If there's no money, there's no business.

[00:04:54] I think that's correct. That's the thing. So we've got to keep that's why I was so we kill what we eat. [00:05:00] And in, so to speak, and it sounds so brutal. Can we find another metaphor for next time? Yeah, see, I think I'm on a recurring diet. If we're going to, if we're going to make analogies, but the reality is with my marketing strategy.

[00:05:18] So what happened? So you asked me the question you asked me. Yes. How do you know when your digital marketing strategy is outdated? Yeah, so I think you're really right that it is all about conversions in the end. [00:05:30] But for me, how do I know my marketing strategies failed? I log into search console

[00:05:35] Yes, go search console. Yes. And here are the tools to discover. Is it a sales funnel problem or a marketing problem, right? And here we go. And so it's really interesting because what happened with mine and is it a fail? Here's the thing. Okay, so here's what happened. I wrote this. I paid a lot of attention to blogging two years ago.

[00:05:54] I wrote blogs. I was one of the first people to write about Google analytics for, I got [00:06:00] so far up in that, like I got on the first page of Google with some of my people I look up to, I was stoked. It was rockstar, but and, but then I wrote another article or one before that, and I picked the wrong keyword because I could never rank for that keyword.

[00:06:17] So I could maybe. It's super, just the big players are in there. So it'd be really hard. And so let's just, can we just pause and explain one little concept for people who are new on this? Yeah. You know what I'm going to [00:06:30] say? So when you're choosing keywords, you want something that people are looking for, so it has to have a high number of searches, but you also want to make sure that the volume of material that's already out there in Is not ridiculous because and there are strategies to get around that.

[00:06:47] So that's what we're talking about where, when Pip says that she, there was no way she was going to be able to rank for that. That's why. Yeah. So it'd be like in, in the ad sector, it'd be like competing with Walmart, right? Like [00:07:00] you're just, they're, they have a bottomless funnel. A pit of money that I, as a small business can never out, I probably could, but it'd be so for a long tail, longer tail keyword.

[00:07:11] So what happened was there, Google does an algorithm update and all of a sudden all my impressions. So I showed up on the search engine results pages, lots of impressions, hundreds of thousands of impressions, not that many clicks cause I'm on page like a hundred. So slowly over time, over two years, it.

[00:07:28] Went up. So [00:07:30] huge number of impressions, but no clicks. So my click through rate is off. So it's better that I don't rank for that at all. And I just start afresh. Because my, and what is you see instead of that hockey stick effect of going up. You see a tumbling down, and that's what I've seen in the search box.

[00:07:50] Okay, so you said something that piqued my interest. So would you actually start with a fresh new blog with a brand new keyword, or would you attempt to adjust the [00:08:00] keywords in the current blog post to be a long tail keyword that might get you noticed for that sort of really narrowed down niche and just adjust the content on that particular blog post.

[00:08:12] That's my question. Ah, that is a really good question. That brings up some very interesting information. So Google says is it about a single page or is it about your whole website? Does Google look at your whole website or the single page? Technically it is a single page, but when you come across such issues, you should do like a.[00:08:30]

[00:08:30] Website quality audit, at least yearly just to find if you're with a good seo person I think, you're doing quarterly or six month or yearly quality assurance updates to try to, because our job is to just make it so clients keep getting leads and we have to figure out how to prove that it's us that is the bringing the leads.

[00:08:55] Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. And so this is [00:09:00] the piece, this is the piece that I think is so under understood. So misunderstood. So actually misunderstood isn't the right term because once you get it. But so there's no misunderstanding it, but it's not understood at all. By a lot of business owners, I just handed over a beautiful new website.

[00:09:19] We found so many problems on the on the audit that we did. And And implemented like the fixes for all of them and created a structure and a strategy moving forward. And [00:09:30] then they decided to take their website work in house with some people that are not really, don't have enough experience to run this.

[00:09:38] And the reason why I know that is not because I'm judging people, but because their website had become so decrepit in such a short period of time that's the only and in the week that they've had their site There are, I got search console alerts telling me of all of the problems that have happened in one week of them having their site.

[00:09:59] So it's [00:10:00] not a good idea to think that you can run your own website unless you are actually keyed in to SEO. If you are keyed into SEO, then absolutely have at it. But if you are just simply creating content constantly and updating your website with new content, that's only one part of the battle. And that's the thing.

[00:10:20] It can really hurt you. So what most people do is they, Okay. Sorry. I only want to chime in because one of the things that we're [00:10:30] really seeing is with AI right? Or chat GPT. Everybody's so much content is out there now, but like Google's trying to discern because the one thing. Stays true, which is, it's not, it's quality of content, not just quantity.

[00:10:45] Yes, exactly. But it's not even the content that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the simple idea of not creating redirects when you take pages down, like that's, that's the most basic and that's what I'm saying. That's what I've seen happening is that. [00:11:00] People just think that they can take away content and it's no big deal because it doesn't represent their business anymore and they don't see the bigger picture of how that taking that page away affects the little SERP that somewhere on the Google search results that you need to actually take care of that SERP.

[00:11:16] So the content is related to that SERP and you'll always have to be thinking, where is that SERP and how are people going to find that link and where else have I put that link out in the world? And. Is it in a lot of places? If it is, then you're absolutely want to create a [00:11:30] redirect for all that.

[00:11:32] We get hired now just to do that part because a lot of web devs will be like, no, I don't want to do it. Yeah. That's yeah. Job, isn't it? We'll do it. We'll get it done. We'll get it done. And that's what people need to know. So with the marketing, so being outdated, I guess what we're saying is if your sales aren't working, number one, so that's gonna be a huge indicator.

[00:11:57] And then if you're seeing your [00:12:00] stats drop, right? Yeah. So declining in metrics. Yeah. And which metrics. So digging into the data, oh, my favorite. Yeah. So the one the thing that really gets me though is, and I think that probably a lot of business owners are in this position is that the big algorithmic shift that happened in March is still affecting people's results.

[00:12:21] What I noticed in my clients and there's another agency clients that I looked at people thought that Google ads were stopped, had stopped working. They were not working [00:12:30] and they kept contacting their Google ads people. But actually, when you dig into the numbers, that the ads.

[00:12:35] Click through rate and all of that hasn't changed really, but what has changed is that organic number, that organic piece that was helping boost, so your pieces organic and paid and they should be working together. So sometimes when it drops, it looks like the Google ads are dropping. So you really do have to unpack that and look at the numbers.

[00:12:57] Like, where is that? Where was that traffic coming [00:13:00] compared over time? Where are you going to find that? So you're going to. So I was talking about search console earlier, this is Google analytics where you're going to dive into, to see that, because we've actually run across that problem too, where clients like, Oh my God, my leads are down.

[00:13:13] And you're taking all of search. So all of the search engine market, we're only for them. We're only doing the Google ads. So I'm like, you can't blame me if I have no control over the. Yeah. You can't blame the apples when the oranges are [00:13:30] low. It. Yes. Yeah. And so we know that.

[00:13:32] Okay. So inadequate online traffic and conversions. Really there, there's, that's good. What about quantity over quality now? Yes, it's why are we posting stuff? And what do you think about that quantity over quality, Rina? Yeah, I don't like quantity over quality because obviously I think that bar, you want to keep your marketing budget as lean as possible in certain areas and really Put the money where it's well benefited.

[00:13:58] So a good [00:14:00] piece of quality content is much better than a whole bunch of posts that don't do anything. And when I say they don't do anything, I mean that they need to be organized, like people should be organizing their content pillars based on their sales goals. If you're, if your business goals and your content are not related and somehow, and I don't mean make sales on every post at all.

[00:14:22] So please do not understand that. 20, 20 to one differences. And so 20 posts to one sales post, 20 helpful, [00:14:30] entertaining, whatever posts. I don't even put sales posts on my organic at all. I put all of my sales posts on ads so that I'm targeting the people that I want. I don't really care If my, if my friends and family who support me on my social media channels, if they get my sales posts, because they're not going to buy from me, but I do want to be connecting with those people who have who are in certain places down my funnel.

[00:14:55] I want to be connecting that right message with where they are. And you can really do that [00:15:00] effectively on ads, not on organic in my mind. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, so quality over quantity is one thing and people get into this crazy sort of place where they read the gurus, and these people do make money because they're selling education products.

[00:15:16] But but I don't know if they actually do what they say for their own sales funnel. I would doubt it. But. Yeah. So what what they say is you have to post so many posts every day. Especially they say on Instagram, I think is one of the [00:15:30] worst. You have to do five stories, how many reels and a bunch of posts every week, and it's it's a lot.

[00:15:35] So I don't really feel like that's a good use of my time as a business owner, because I've not, I'm, I do get sales leads from Instagram, but, um, yeah. We don't use Instagram as a channel. We just, we're. I like Instagram. I like it too. I'm liking it more over the years actually. Yeah. I think Instagram can bring better results than Facebook organically speaking, for example.[00:16:00]

[00:16:00] And even Tik Tok is so global. It's hard to really, um, I've never done ads on Tik Tok to be honest. But I'm talking organic. I'm talking organic. It's much easier to target my target market on Instagram, even organically speaking, based on the way that hashtags work on that, in that space.

[00:16:19] So I'm pretty good with that. And I do get the calls, um, or the dms mostly. Okay. So that works. Interesting. That works for me. Not as often as other ways, but that's definitely one of my [00:16:30] channels that I pay attention to. But yeah, so qu quantity is not really that great because really quantity is like taking your little machine gun and going and hoping that something sticks rather than organic is to when I think of organic, I want one good piece of.

[00:16:47] I want them to be organized to my content pillars. So they're super strategic. And then I want them to go out at certain times because I'm still, even though I'm global, I am global. I'm still primarily trying to [00:17:00] target businesses in Vancouver or for my organic stuff. And and then and then you want to make sure that content.

[00:17:07] It gets the good content the ad content is where you put most of your effort into and most of the effort should not go into the Well, shouldn't, doesn't necessarily have to go into the content production, but maybe the content distribution. So that's where I put a lot of ad budget behind, I'm getting these Instagram ads all of a sudden.

[00:17:26] Actually I get them on Instagram and Facebook for people, for [00:17:30] companies who do 60, 000 a month on Google ads. So I don't think they're targeting me very well. Do you know what I'm saying? They're not targeting me. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so I find that really intriguing.

[00:17:44] So if you, and why I bring that up is because you can target people in so many ways on the ads that you can get so niche and that's really where the fun is. And when you get a higher click rate, it means that you're actually got the right [00:18:00] target and you're with the right messaging. And that's really nice.

[00:18:03] So we had one, one campaign recently that had an over 10 percent click through rate on it, which I thought was really good. That's amazing. Yeah. One, one we got, so we, we lost a client a little while, I have to say it's a sad story for the client. Because they feel they got hosed, I think a little bit.

[00:18:24] And we got, they got poached from us being, and it was a bigger company and it's gone all sorts of sideways for [00:18:30] them. But one of the things was that, uh, it will decrease their ROI. Like it will decrease their quality over quantity. And when we gave over the account, I looked at the click through rate and it was like, the conversion rate was great.

[00:18:47] The click through rate was like 6. 84, which on average, if everything's running. Okay. You aim for a 2%, right? 2 percent conversion rate, the [00:19:00] higher the click through rate, the better, because it does mean the more relevant. Oh, except for we had a huge click through rate. I looked at. This client, when they came to us, they had a much bigger click through rate.

[00:19:12] And it was really hard for me to explain why their way, why their result was better than my result. But it was because all of their, All of those click throughs that got to their landing page left immediately. So they weren't targeted well, they had, yeah, they had a [00:19:30] high click through rate and then a gigantic bounce rate.

[00:19:33] So it's that's not helpful. So you actually have to understand these numbers. You have to understand that you want a fairly high click rate, but not so high that it's so general and not so narrow that it's. There's no one going to the site. And then you want the and if that's a traffic if your campaign is a traffic based campaign, that's good.

[00:19:52] And then you're probably going to get a much lower click through rate on a retargeting situation. And also if you're doing display [00:20:00] or a display type of campaign, retargeting display. Because like you can get lots of numbers. The idea is not to get clicks, it's just to get views. Yeah.

[00:20:10] However, and that's that repetition function in your marketing that you want to have happen. And that's why you use different channels and. Different things, if you can, on different channels, not that happens all the time, but, yeah, so it used to be really great to look at the assisted conversions in your Google analytics, because then you could really get a [00:20:30] feel of how many times people had to come into contact with your campaigns and you organically all sorts of different ways before they actually booked that call with you.

[00:20:41] Okay. Yeah. So. And so we have, we're still at basically, so we got sales conversions. We have then like decreasing ROI. So measurements. And quality over quantity. And then this one's a really good one. The ignoring new technology and [00:21:00] trends. And I think this is something you should spend a minute on.

[00:21:03] Yeah. So yeah. So Gary Vernechuk, whatever the heck his name is. Vanderchuk, Gary V. Vanderchuk. Yeah. Thank you. He did a, somebody did a little analysis on him and how he calls the out and it's not out calls it calls. The says how it's going to be, which I thought was pretty interesting because he had made some comments that businesses were going to do great on Tik TOK in 2018, and now [00:21:30] he's saying that LinkedIn is the place.

[00:21:32] And he's still saying LinkedIn. He said LinkedIn last year. I likely, possibly it could also be that this person's data is a little out of date. I didn't fact check it. I didn't, take a look to see any deeper, but I think that if you want to be on the, it depends on what part of the curve you're on, it depends on how much energy you have, and it depends on all of your resources, not just energy.

[00:21:55] So you have to have time, you have to have cash. And you have to [00:22:00] make marketing happen at least one of those. And so you want to think about your budget and how much money you're putting towards your budget. Now, usually they say somewhere between five and 20 percent of your projected sales for the year is what you want to put into towards your marketing.

[00:22:14] And so if you're not, if you're not there yet, then you don't really want to be spread too thin. But if you are if you're, and if your business. If your business is going to bring people if you're looking to target people who are going to be on that sort of early curve of [00:22:30] marketing, then it's good to jump on things.

[00:22:33] But if you're not, if you're like, there's just, there are some companies that I have that I'm just not going to put on Tik TOK. And that's just the way that it is. The we don't offer Tik TOK. We're search focused and don't get me wrong. I love the video algorithm. And I love the search functionality of TikTok, but yeah, what what I do, it's a lot like strategies a lot.

[00:22:53] That's why we stick to, to mainly search. Because it's a lot, it's a lot like, we built strategies [00:23:00] around the Google business profile for bloody sake, for Hub. Yeah. So I think that it's really interesting. You got to pick your channels and then just work on consistency.

[00:23:10] I think. And if you lose consistency, what happens is if you wait too long, you'll be like me, and then you'll see all those numbers going to high health. Now. Granted, I have focused on some local SEO components for our business really well, but I have not focused on like an essential component of regular SEO, which is update your [00:23:30] content.

[00:23:31] If you're getting leads and making sales, then you always want to keep things up to date because you want that little trickle to continue of leads to come in. Because of course we all lose clients from time to time. So you want to make sure you've got somebody coming in to take that space up. What I want to make sure though, because that's clear, because this also came up with the business owner that I've been working with recently, that the way to shift, to be flexible and agile, [00:24:00] and to look at the data and see what's going on is very important.

[00:24:03] To shift from this to this, because somebody told you about local SEO, but if you're not actually a brick and mortar and you're trying to target people in the U. S. Then why would you that's not your main focus. You could implement that when you've got your right. So when you've got your marketing goals all organized, then you might want to add these little things in afterwards that will help boost you.

[00:24:24] But but this notion of this. What do they call that? It's there's a word for that term when you're [00:24:30] grabbing the ring that's constantly moving, and you're never getting a foot in anywhere. You're never staying with one thing with a consistent effort. So there's a difference between being dogged and staying with old strategies.

[00:24:44] That have been outdated for five years. So for example posting every day on Facebook that's just not going to work or that one's out organic on Facebook business pages are really, it's really quite useless. So it sticking with something just because it's been outdated. [00:25:00] Um, five years ago is not really going to be super helpful, but also making changes that aren't based on your data is also foolish.

[00:25:07] So continually jumping around, not going to help, not going to help. Like looking for that, that new shiny thing, not going to help. You need to really have a consistent strategy that you outlive over time. And try and measure the results properly. Yeah. You measure results properly, it is hard because.

[00:25:24] Yeah. As a business owner, you're running around doing everything. And and it's always that hard. It's, you [00:25:30] want to be a little bit too busy, but not too busy. You fail your clients. You want to be, like you, you want to be able to slowly grow consistently as a business owner because you want to be able to service the people.

[00:25:43] So it's a lot of give and take. And. Or you have a different way, a different plan for scaling. If you're a person who has a different plan of scaling, like you can just easily hire and train up if that's a fast and a short process. I don't ever look at hiring as fast and [00:26:00] easy. But that's, no, but there are some.

[00:26:02] But your business is different though. Your business is complex and complicated and technically oriented If you're running a coffee bar might not be quite so much. I know no shade to coffee bars. I have no idea I did but there might there are jobs that are out there that are fairly rote that you have a very easy Sop and that people can implement quite easy So if that's the case then scaling in that manner If you have capital behind you and you can hire [00:26:30] Very talented people, then that is also another way to scale.

[00:26:34] But for small businesses of our size, I think that we've all been in that hiring that awkward, uncomfortable position of where we just have a little bit too much work, but not enough that it's going to pay for another person. And that's always the difficulty. Isn't that funny, right? And when working with new people or younger people, strategies change.

[00:26:57] And you, so maybe [00:27:00] having a a collaborative approach in your office, setting, so you can get different people's opinions because everybody knows something. You don't like every single person's going to know something you don't know. So I think the Virgo in me is going this is the thing.

[00:27:13] This is why, and the other thing is specific industries. Have their niche things, right? Am I going to have an insurance company on TikTok? Maybe not, but maybe if they have, a global strategy and it's not just about having a lizard [00:27:30] or somewhere, but there's strategy involved and then they try to have a measurable outcome depending on the sales cycle.

[00:27:35] So I think, oh, and we are at a time. Wow. So fast, so easy, so great. We are out of time, but not out of touch, just like usual. We will be back next Thursday at 11 a. m. Pacific. If you're going to join us, we would love to see you. I know it's summer. I know it's hard to pay attention. Oh, I missed a comment from Steven here today.

[00:27:58] How often should you relook [00:28:00] at your keywords and search terms? That you're looking for. That is a great question. Before we go, we will answer that. Rina, what do you think? It depends if I've got somebody on a full SEO package, then I'm going to run that report every month. My reporting system will tell me what's working, what's not.

[00:28:17] If I'm looking at the whole site, then I will do that. And again, it depends on the package that the client has with me. I but my, I think optimally I would like to do that quarterly for my own business, so that probably gives you the best idea. [00:28:30] Okay I'll give you quarterly and that's where you can see, quarterly is really good because then you can make some adjustments and you should be building that into the structure of your business and looking at the numbers, which I have to go do now because it's the first of the month.

[00:28:44] All right. So that's a really great question and a really great answer. I think, we are. We're on par about that. We do not golf people. We do not golf. I think par is for golf. Yes. I am just looking at. I have no idea. [00:29:00] Okay. August 8th is next week and we are talking about what is accessible and inclusive design.

[00:29:08] So this is all about how. It's gonna be a great topic. I'm gonna watch it. I'm not talking about it, but we got our web people on it and they're gonna tell us how to do this. And I am gonna throw them an example and talk to them about it on the side. So we will see you next week. Next week. All right. Bye.

This Month In The World Of Marketing

00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:24 - Marketing News Overview
00:01:01 - SEO and AI Updates
00:03:09 - Google's Third-Party Cookies Update
00:05:13 - Google Merchant Center Redesign
00:07:06 - Google Business Profiles: Changes in Messaging and Call Reporting
00:10:14 - Potential Paid Features in Google Business Profiles
00:11:17 - Google Ads Revenue Update
00:13:23 - Google Short Links Deadline and AI Sponsorship
00:14:46 - TikTok’s New Hour-Long Video Feature
00:17:07 - Instagram’s Multiple Audio Tracks in Reels
00:19:36 - Evolution of Video Creation and Editing on Phones
00:21:49 - WordPress Security Update 6.1
00:29:48 - Next Week’s Topic: Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy Outdated?

[00:00:00] Hello there, it is the time again for GeekSpeak. And of course this week I am going to be playing the role of Pip. Because we have a pet emergency and so she is dealing with that right now. You may hear some pet noises in the background. Don't be alarmed. And yeah that's to be expected for this this moment.

[00:00:24] My name is Bailin Lewis with Seymour Digital Media. And this week we are talking about the, what has happened in the world of marketing. Yes. And I'm Reena Little from Littleworks Indie Media, and we're also missing Greg this week. He is recovering from, he's recovering and he will be back probably in the next couple of weeks.

[00:00:44] We'll see. See how that goes. He is fine by the way, all fine. And you can connect with him in the Facebook group if you're interested in doing so, okay. So Phelan, we've got quite a bit of stuff to go through. I think I don't know if you want to start or if you'd like me to start or how you want to do it.

[00:01:01] Usually Pip tells us these things. Yeah. Our fearless leader. Yeah. So I think I'll start off with a couple of just SEO things just because there's some big change that's been happening in the there's supposedly a core update that's on its way. People are, so that's usual for every three months, they generally do a big core update to, fix what's been going on with search online.

[00:01:30] People are expecting this one to be, fairly innocuous. Mostly it's of course going to be dealing with AI stuff because that also came out if someone found that as a. Subsection of the leak was that there's a whole rating system that they were going to use for their generative search and so that was a big one where they're labeling your content as like it's s a b d e and so they didn't apparently the leak didn't go into much detail what those characters like how they identify those characters But it just was that they do identify those characters about your website and it has to do with ai You and how they're going to use it in the future for doing searches.

[00:02:16] so do you think we're going to have some more news about whether AI is fine or how to use it for websites? Because I know that whole subject is a little bit is a little bit misunderstood and there are a lot of different, a lot of different viewpoints on it. Do you think they'll be giving us any more information?

[00:02:40] So I, it's a good question. The, biggest issue right now that they have is that they're like, they can't determine what's been written by person, what's been written by generative AI. Even if you just get notes from it, but so figuring out those parts as like shades of degree, the biggest one that I'm going to put my marker down on is that it will, the amount of money that they've invested into AI, it will burn out.

[00:03:09] And with its figure to be within a year and what's what is going to burn out, so I don't know what it is AI systems like the actual code and like actual computing power that runs AI, is quite intensive and it's been apparently much more intensive than they originally anticipated. Yeah, so the amount of server time that it takes it just doesn't whatever they're charging us it's just not the value to Okay, that's gonna put a little wrench in the whole thing interesting it is on the flip side twitch still runs and it like people run calculations on how much twitch costs to run an hour and It the fundamentals don't make sense there either.

[00:03:57] So I could be just proven wrong by some sort of expedience in the system, but like I would put a little bit of, my view is that I put a little break on it because it's, there's just like a lot of when people run the numbers don't look good. So speaking of that, one other big technical shift to the internet that got stymied this week is, if you like that transition, it's, the Google has backed away from doing third party cookies.

[00:04:33] They were originally going to get rid of them and they were going to have a cookie less future, which I thought was insane and was never going to work because it's just you have a very simple solution and why are you giving this up to it's like reinventing the wheel.

[00:04:50] Like you don't need to do that. You don't need to do this. And So they I guess they've just, cause originally they were going to put us all in a big pool and it was like a consent pool that then based on that, you would then get access, but it didn't make any sense. And so of course they're now backing away because it's basically reinventing the internet and it turns out that's harder than you would think.

[00:05:13] Yeah. That's interesting. That's good. I like that idea that they're backing away. So that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Any anything else for the Google News? Merchant Center is got it's redesigned. So Merchant Center next is what it's called. So anyone who's any e commerce is now going to have it.

[00:05:35] So I knew every new account that I'd send up for us are automatically switched over to the new account. Design and layout. But now it's being hauled out to every retailer that's on their platform. So what does that mean exactly? There's a couple of new features. It's mostly that it's like a, just looks different.

[00:05:55] So it's just it's, just visual reorganization. Does it make it more user friendly? Yeah, I would say I like the new design over the old one. It's, it reminds me very similar to the, New Google ads layout. So go in there, they've got a new layout and most of the things are in the right spot. There's a couple, there's some new features that are in the merchant center that I can't name them off the top of my head.

[00:06:24] It was more just Oh, that's there. Oh, cool. It wasn't like groundbreaking. I wasn't, I wasn't going to lose. Lose it over the new design and it's far less annoying than the new google ads design where they moved everything to just be A little bit off from where it used to be so you can't find anything.

[00:06:43] That's not just the immediate like campaigns and ad copy so I mean I still count it as is this the best use of google's resources right now is to do redesigns on These platforms probably not, that's what we got. And so that's a big one. There's also going off that with platforms, taking stuff away.

[00:07:06] There's going with Google business profiles is taking away messaging and call reporting. Yes. Yeah, that's I'm going to miss the call reporting. I think a little bit. I think that, yeah, that, that is absolutely a big one. Woffin like a misstep on Google's part. There's no reason not to do that. It's so useful for any like business to no.

[00:07:30] Hey, I missed a call from this phone number. Would you like to call them back? It's yeah, to me, I'm like, it's a business owner. I would love to know that information and there's, it, that, that must cost them nothing to store that information and then report it back. yeah. And same with the messaging. I actually know a few businesses that have removed all of their social media accounts, for particular, reasons.

[00:08:00] And then they were relying on Google business listing messaging. Like lots of people were actually sending, I could see, cause I'm an admin on their account, tons of people regularly messaging them to book appointments and to and to ask questions and to find out schedules and and they're moving that's going to, that's going to hit some people.

[00:08:23] Pretty hard, I think too. Not everybody. I don't really get messages from Google business listing. Most people email me from there, but, but I'm sure there must be instance, lots of instances where that's going to be a hangup for people. Yeah I've totally feel you. I have not ever, it's basically like an eight, a 90, 10 kind of split.

[00:08:49] 90 percent of my clients don't get any messages, but the 10 that do, they get a lot. Like it's weird. If you do, you get a lot of them. And if you don't like, yeah. And I get that they're probably thinking like in aggregate, but I would find that probably the intensity of the accounts that get those messages.

[00:09:06] should be, should have been a weight waiting factor for them to be like picking what they were going to do. And yeah, I've got a couple of clients that I know it, it will, they, they just get so many messages on Hey, it's such and such thing available. Do you sell blah, blah, blah just like stuff that is innocuous and probably leads to a sale.

[00:09:28] But for the most part, it's just like being in contact with your clients that it's just a quick one off. It just seems yeah, just a misstep, honestly, for Google to take away something that, compared to the amount of man hours it must have taken to redesign the Merchant Center, that would take a lot of effort to redesign that, and you're doing that, and you're rolling it out in stages, and you're testing it, and that compared to oh, we're just shutting down this recording.

[00:09:58] It just seems yeah, I'm

wondering I wonder if that's gonna become paid features. I feel like that might be when they, I know that they're developing business listing into a bigger thing and when they start to do that, that they may come, back as paid features. So we'll see what happens there.

[00:10:14] 'cause it seems those seem like really good features for business to have. And and I would say that it I totally agree that would be great. And if it's like the paid version and you get a 10 bucks a month. And you get the reporting and the messaging and all that like for a business that was getting that before 10 bucks is probably a rounding error for the amount of sales the amount of leads that you're getting off of That's coming.

[00:10:37] So I would say that to me feels like that would be the route I would go if I were them obviously i'm not google and they're you know I'm sure they have their own internal machinations on how these things get determined for sure anything else on Se or google No, those are the big ones on my end that were the yeah, the core update was a big one Oh, and also that apparently Google Ads The revenue off of Google Ads was surpassed expectations by 12 percent 12 percent Oh, that's pretty good.

[00:11:17] That's pretty good during the apparent the apparently the market is downturned a little bit. That's pretty good. That's encouraging actually Okay, so I have a couple of little tiny Google things in 2018 Google had announced that it's short links G o g l Is being sunset. And basically the deadline is August 25th, 2025.

[00:11:45] So this is there's probably not very many people out here who have used those links, but if you've got them anywhere on your social or website or, anything that you're putting out they need to be switched because they will turn not 404 error messages. And we don't want that. Do we Phelan?

[00:12:05] No, no, one likes broken links. No one likes broken links. Especially not Google SEO, audits, they hate them. Okay. And Google has been named the official AI sponsor for the team USA at the Olympics. And obviously they've put some money into that and there, so you'll be hearing a lot about that if you are attending any of the events.

[00:12:34] Oh, and the one thing that I found, this is just a, random fact, it's not particularly helpful to marketers at all or businesses maybe, but it's something to consider 45 percent of the Amazon warehouse workers were injured on prime days. And I thought that was quite a remarkable stat that I saw online.

[00:12:55] Something to keep in mind. In mind when you're ordering on prime days, and I'm not sure what their health insurance is like over there, but hopefully it's decent. Oh yeah. Google's broad match is now set on by default in, I think that's an ad thing. The broad match? Yeah. So if you're not aware of that, then you might want to go in and check your campaigns or have somebody check your campaigns for you.

[00:13:23] Oh, and this is my favorite one of the month, the, so we all organize our comments on Facebook. And if you are on Meta Instagram and Facebook, if you are managing your conversations if you're doing social media management. And some of those things, some of those strategies include like pinning good comments at the top and hiding comments that are maybe not so positive and dealing with them offline.

[00:13:55] So it seems that they're going to get the AI, the meta AI machine to summarize the comments and. as the top comment or the one that you find at the highest point of your comments, which might be okay and might not be okay. As we understand that AI doesn't always get it right. So they might be adding in the negative comments as important if they come up Once or maybe twice.

[00:14:25] You don't know. So that's gonna be interesting to watch. So watch for that. If anyone has seen that already, I would love to see a screen cap. I have not seen it yet. Just drop that in a comment so that we can see it. That would be, I would really love that, especially if you're in the states, which is where things often get ruled out first.

[00:14:46] Yeah, so that might actually affect the vibe or the branding of your company in ways. TikTok has now allows hour long videos, which I was surprised to read in my notifications the other day. It was last week. It's okay, so we really are going and this really kills me. The idea that you start out with one thing, you've become known for one thing.

[00:15:11] People love you for the one thing, and then you got to take on all the other things, and then all of the platforms start to behave the same. So I don't know if everyone knows, but, TikTok added photos. I think it's called TikTok notes. That's another. Addition to the to the, to the app that I mentioned.

[00:15:34] I think I mentioned it last month and now they're adding hour long videos. So welcome to tick tock, Instagram and tick tock YouTube. And we'll see how that goes. There was a big kerfuffle about adding 10 minute videos and having them be the, or landscape orientation with nothing above and nothing below and how they're privileging that content.

[00:16:00] I did quite a few of those and I didn't see a huge push on that content from my client account. And And I didn't see any ads. I, it had been talked about that. Maybe TikTok was going to put ads in that black space. But I haven't seen any of that yet. So I'm not quite sure what they're doing.

[00:16:20] We'll see. And if you've put up an hour long video, let me know how it plays. I'm going to put up the first hour long video, I think next week on my account and see how that goes. And I'm really plowing through this. It's only 1116 and I've got one more point left so we can do, we can go back and unpack some of the stuff that I've brought up.

[00:16:41] Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And Instagram is now letting users add multiple audio tracks to your reels. You can add up to 20 tracks in a single reel and once you add them, then you can turn them to include, to be included in the part that you want. So that's pretty interesting. I think that's going to change the vibe of Instagram a little bit and, it's going to certainly be different than TikTok.

[00:17:07] So I guess that means that you can put up one, one, video roll. With one track, one video roll with one track, one video, one with one track. For example, that was one way I can see it being used. If you're going to use some, do some kind of mashup, that might be interesting. I can't really see how else that would work.

[00:17:30] It seems that the audio files are. In sequence. They're not over top of each other. At first I thought it was over top of each other, but I don't see that as as being how they work again, I have not seen how the video, multiple video audios work because they haven't been rolled out on any of my accounts.

[00:17:50] So if you've seen it. Put your comments in below. I'd love to hear if you can overlap the audio. Cause that could actually be fun. If you're doing things like soundtracks, like sounds, not music, not multiple music, like one music, one sound like with, with those funny little boings and, gongs and stuff like that.

[00:18:14] And then you could probably also have a voiceover for that. That might be interesting, but let me know if you've played with that. Love to hear, about it in the comments below. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think that would, you could also work that as if you do those like joke voice overdubs, You're like playing a clip from a movie, and then you play a clip from another movie, and then the video is just you doing the overdub of it.

[00:18:42] I think that could probably work as well, like in my mind, that would that would work well in the situation that you're actually creating. An original video, if you wanted to, and you're hoping that will go viral, that would work very well. If you're trying to go viral with sounds that you're dubbing from, that are already viral, then of course we would actually always stick to the original sound in, Yeah, that does make sense.

[00:19:15] Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what these platforms as they're like, almost becoming D, DAWs, which are not something. Yeah, it's something I'm familiar with. It's those soundboards that they have in studios. It's called it's a digital version of that. So it's a digital, it's a digital audio workstation.

[00:19:36] And yeah, it's almost like becoming one of those where you're like mixing different things in together. Actually, that's quite interesting because I do know people who actually make entire videos on editing, Music videos and other types of videos on I like short videos on, on editing platforms, it would be fun to actually create a whole video, do all the editing from start to finish for a short video or music videos and like that, that included all of those interesting, weird, a little things right in Instagram, instead of having to do it

outside of Instagram and then uploading it.

[00:20:12] And then it becomes a separate video. editing platform in addition to a social media platform. Yeah, especially if you have like actual real like fine grain control over like You know to eq something so it's like it doesn't like jump in audio quality from one to the other It's like it's you know If you have more control over that it'd be cool because apparently capcut is quite proficient for doing that kind of Yes, like audio and visual editing that I knew some people that I follow for like audio engineering and they were impressed with how much you can do just like, and it's on your phone.

[00:20:48] So it's not like you have like infinite compute power and it still managed to do a pretty decent job, which is impressive for from like kind of a coding perspective of being able to give people all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I think there was, I had I had a contractor who worked with me, who created an entire video, music video from filming and editing and uploading on her phone in 2010 or 11 or sometime around that time we were working together, which was really quite remarkable at the time.

[00:21:23] And and It was really interesting to see that done and how much further we're able to go now. It's like you pretty much have a studio on your phone. Yeah, exactly. I just realized, I think we did not share this into the group, did we? We did? I'm looking for it right now. Don't mind me. Oh, you mean the stream?

[00:21:49] The live stream? Oh, that's okay. We can upload it afterwards. Yeah, and share it back in. I just wanted everyone else to, because they were wondering where it was, that they would be able to see. And I don't think I'm able to do this, because this is not my computer. I am very much out of my element in how everything is set up.

[00:22:08] So this is, yeah, they're yeah, I think that, I, will say it's just circling back to something you said earlier that I, it, I do find it annoying where all the social media apps basically are out of ideas. And so basically just like crip off of each other and Really try to like make something new or figure out something like all the problem or even like you get feature requests like there's got to be one like yeah it's gonna be hard to set this up, but like the that's why you make all this money is you can spend it on Creating something new so that we get even more enjoyment out of it And it's that's why we give you, you get all this money.

[00:22:55] And that's why these companies are worth so much is because they're supposed to be building new stuff. And it's frustrating that they're not even really trying other than just, yeah, like it's a copying off each other or just like buying out their competition. That's been the tomb.

[00:23:14] Two modes. Yeah. And it's interesting when you think about like how they're, how social media actually reorganize your your dopamine hits like you do go to YouTube for long videos and when you go to YouTube for long videos, that's what you're expecting and that's what you want. So therefore when you are hit with a longer video on tick tock And you're on Tik TOK to get that immediate dopamine hit all the time.

[00:23:40] Like it just doesn't, in my mind, it just doesn't work. And it hasn't worked because when I get the longer videos, they don't reel me in with their riveting information in the 10 minute videos. I just get the heck onto the next one. And I want to know those 10 minute videos. Are they getting how many complete watches are they actually getting?

[00:24:03] Yeah, for sure. And I and I would compare that against a YouTube, where the YouTube they've, they figured out a good play, which is you can make a clip out of your longer video, and so the two are interconnected, so you're just scrolling through, and okay, maybe they get you with the hook, okay, I want to watch the full 10 minute video to go, where this video led you as a little preview of what's going on, so that to me, that's a smart play, but that's because they, on YouTube, they The you are expecting again, expecting the longer form video.

[00:24:34] So if they have a short term video, that's just like a quick hit. And then, Oh, I actually want to find out more about that video. To me, that's a better mindset and way to look at it. I will also say that I, also don't appreciate that all these platforms also are just like. Go streaming, like the going live, like between Instagram live, TikTok live, YouTube live, Twitch, there's so many platforms that are just like, there's no way all these platforms are getting enough, like for the amount of compute.

[00:25:05] Space that they're getting, that it's worth it for them to all be doing this. Yeah. It would be interesting to look up those numbers. I know Tik Tok lives are pretty important and Instagram lives are pretty important. Those have been built in, but I don't really spend that much time on YouTube.

[00:25:21] So I'm not entirely sure. I know they were doing it first, I think. And were they doing it first? You tell me you're more of a YouTube. Yeah. And I'm also a person that I actually know the history of Twitch as a company because I did follow, Y Combinator for a long time. And the founder of Y Combinator was the guy that started Twitch.

[00:25:41] I see. Yeah. So it was called Sam TV because it was, they were just going to live stream this guy's life called Sam. And then everyone realized that it's actually better if you just build a platform for other people because Sam was not very engaging. I can't stop laughing. He did. Okay. They got bought out by Amazon.

[00:26:01] They're doing okay. I don't have to Lose any sleep over it. But yeah, they did get the first one was actually Periscope for live tv. Yes. And that was bought by Twitter and then was sundown in 2018. Yeah, it was. And so that, that was the first one that was like the, you go live on Periscope.

[00:26:23] That was, yeah. I don't know if you know this about me, but I was on Periscope and we were live streaming an art project for one of our clients back in the day. And, public art project. And we were walking this art project all around the scene wall one day, and we had people join us in real life.

[00:26:44] And then I live streamed it on Periscope and we had people, it was, it seemed to be very big in Europe and we had tons of Europeans. Interacting with the artwork as we walked around the seawall. It was very cool. Yeah, that's cool. That's yeah, that's a nice blend of IRL with like digital media.

[00:27:03] Yeah. That's, pretty cool way to be tackling. Yeah. To go through with that. Yeah. And. I had a thought, man Oh no it's all good. It was more just like I had a thought and I could just hear them outside dealing with the dog. And so it was just, just a little distracted.

[00:27:28] Oh, I think that a PIP mentioned that we wanted to say that there was also going to be a WordPress update. No, as it just came to me. Oh, I see. Lemme look at the notes here. I don't think it got added to the notes. Pip just told it to me and I caught that it was, there's a big security update for 6.1.

[00:27:46] So everyone keep your eyes peeled for that. So security updates, just for the people that aren't developers out there, security updates are the ones that you really want to get on fast because they've identified a security issue. And that's a fix for that. With other updates, if it's just not just, but if it's a functionality based, usually we wait a number of days for all of the bugs to be worked out on other people's sites, and then we implement on their sites.

[00:28:16] Next on the next iteration. Security one do right away, please. Yeah. Yeah. Generally a rule of thumb is like the ones that the big number, so there's three numbers, so the first number is like me, it's a major update. So it's like a huge change. Those ones you want to implement slowly because who knows how it's going to interact with your plugins.

[00:28:39] Actually, Phalen, I think this is a really good topic to cover on one of our weekly topic days. Maybe we should add WordPress updates as a topic. Yeah there's definitely enough stuff out there, and especially what those numbers mean. But basically, long and the short of it, just to look brass tacks, is that the third number is usually very minor changes and they're usually like we're talking about security updates that they've identified a day one issue.

[00:29:08] So day one is the developers didn't even code this in. This was just like a vulnerability that existed that someone could exploit. So it was before it's not like you did an update and you didn't. Correct. Yes, it was. It was like before you even knew that this was could have been known to be an issue

and we found it.

[00:29:26] And so those are definitely important ones that you want to update because they're patching in and who knows how people can take advantage of it. And generally, once they've been patched, they're generally pretty good. So that brings us to the end of this segment and do we know what's happening next week?

[00:29:48] I believe we're getting a topic for let me see here. No, I think we Pipp and I talked about one that, yeah, it's Pipp and Rina is your digital marketing strategy outdated. So join us August 1st, we'll be back here live, or you can always come back on the replay wherever you're watching now. If you want to join us.

[00:30:16] In another space, we actually go live, generally speaking in the in the, cyberpunk marketing mixer, Facebook group. So join that group and to have access to us any day of the week. And thanks. Yeah. Thanks. Bye for now. Bye for now.

When Hiring A Google Ad's Person, What Should You Ask?  

00:00 Introduction
02:11 Key Questions to Ask a Google Ads Specialist
05:34 Importance of Experience and Case Studies
09:00 Setting Up and Managing Campaigns
12:47 Understanding Tag Manager and Analytics
18:23 Avoiding Common Pitfalls

[00:00:00] We are here today. We are talking about hiring. We're talking about Google ads. Cause it's a great topic.

[00:00:05] And Rina and I got into this topic. Discussion about, what kind of questions should you ask a Google ads person and yeah, so take it over for a second. I'm going to make sure Rina introduce yourself. Thank you. My name is Rina Little from Little Works Indie Media, and we run a little agency in Vancouver, but I happen to be in Maple Bay at the moment.

[00:00:29] Oh, [00:00:30] yeah, Maple Bay. And there is a user that asked us specifically to make sure they got tagged in the Facebook live. So their name is, if I could bring up my, I'll tag them up. They're going to be so disappointed if I don't tag them up, because I said I would. Give me one second. So Reena, You have a lot of Facebook clients or Google ads clients.

[00:00:56] You do lots of ads, right? Yeah. [00:01:00] I do, it's true. And one of the, there are a couple of things that clients always come to me with, and, it goes in two directions and this is relevant to Facebook ads too. It's. It's they'll have tried Google ads. They may have even tried Google ads a couple of times.

[00:01:19] They may have done it themselves. They may have had providers, but it hasn't worked. And so we get this. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for our business stance. And, [00:01:30] and that just makes me think a lot about it. In terms of what should you be asking your provider that you're, interviewing to find out and figure out if they're going to be the right fit for you.

[00:01:43] Because, The Google ads only work if they are done by somebody who has experience and who has strategy and who understands and has can do them. And it's actually a really easy. Maybe [00:02:00] not so easy, but it's pretty, it's not that hard to get yourself organized to go through the program, take a couple of courses and hang your shingle out and say that you're a Google ads expert.

[00:02:13] When the you're using the Google wizard or the Facebook wizard to set up your campaigns and or you're using the boost post. So I think that. Figuring out who you're working with is the first thing and what to ask for. So this is where we're [00:02:30] going. And the best example that I have for this, why this is so important is because I had one client come to me a few years ago.

[00:02:40] And he had tried Google ads a couple of times. He had his heart set on social media. He wanted social media management. He thought that was going to be the thing. And and I convinced him to take a small Google's Google ads management package out with us. And I bundled it in with a bunch of other stuff that he was looking for.

[00:02:59] And he [00:03:00] said, yes. And we grew his business online e commerce business from 55, 000 a month in sales to 125, 000 a month in sales in 12 months, which I was actually quite surprised about with a 500 ad spend, which is not very much, right? It's very little. That is the minimum we work with. And we never increased that ad spend through the whole 12 months.

[00:03:23] And, and he just had somebody on his that he had hired or that helped [00:03:30] out that wasn't. That wasn't, good, quite frankly. And so you want to watch two things in my mind, and then you can tell me what two things you think. So for me, the two things, the two questions to ask for is for some case studies.

[00:03:46] How long have you been doing it? Do you have any case studies? What have, you worked with? And if somebody answers really positively all the about all of the industries, then they're probably not telling you the truth because there's [00:04:00] some spaces where it's really more difficult.

[00:04:03] So we don't get the results that I just described in every, with every client. And sometimes I have to say to a client I don't really know how it's going to work for you. I like to work with people for three months. I think that's pretty standard across industry to check out the Google algorithm that takes Google and your team about that long to get things optimized and running smoothly.

[00:04:28] I say four, cause it takes a month to [00:04:30] set things up. Okay. Okay. Oh yes. No, the month of setup doesn't count. I don't count in that as three months of running the ad. So I, yeah, you're right. Yeah, so that's, I would agree. And then yeah. And then and then the other and, so if people tell you, yes, you can get remarkable results usually they're pulling your leg.

[00:04:50] It's like the same thing as we can guarantee you're going to get number one on Google organic. It's, actually not, you, no one can tell you that, no one [00:05:00] can tell you that if someone tells you that. Yeah, exactly. So that's, those are indicators. Transparency is another thing I look for and that's our, or that I want people to ask and I usually talk about, and that transparency is about, how you're doing the setup.

[00:05:18] Not necessarily the campaigns, but what type of campaigns you're running, what your keywords are, what the ads look like what, the text actually is for your AdWords [00:05:30] what images you're using. Cause some, I had a contractor that was running that I knew that was running. Not a contractor that's mine, but I saw a contractor running ads for clients where nothing was approved in advance.

[00:05:43] The client had no idea what the ad said, what keywords they were targeting or anything like that was just a big mystery. And then in reporting. So in the setup some people, okay. So the, better quality providers will always [00:06:00] do, usually do tag manager, which is organized. To show the results in Google Analytics, rather than just using the analytics that are in, the Google ad space, because, the clicks on your ads doesn't really matter so much, the impressions shouldn't really matter that much.

[00:06:20] They give you information, but if you don't know how to use that information, it doesn't really matter. So for a client, that shouldn't matter. What should matter are goals, your goals. And [00:06:30] usually you have a conversation with your ads person to decide what are your goals? Because your goals should really be organized easily to happen on your website.

[00:06:41] They should also be goals that are congruent with your business goals. And that's a key piece that a lot of providers don't ask you what your business goals are. They'll just decide what you want and and they're not, able to tell you, you got this many calls from the [00:07:00] ads.

[00:07:00] You got this many calls that were organic. You got this many calls, you got this many forms filled out through ads and of that information isn't particularly, isn't particularly, helpful, but you need to decide what is the information that's helpful. What are those KPIs and your provider should walk you through that.

[00:07:23] Yes, a month is set up because we have so many clients to set up. So it's, you can do, you can usually squeeze it about two, [00:07:30] two weeks. We can squeeze it in. I can't hear you, Pip. Are you on mute? I can see your mouth moving. Yep. I got all excited. I'm like Such good questions, Ora, so let's get to those, but I agree so with the month set up and yeah, it takes a month because when you're talking to your client, you definitely need a strategy and you're not just going to bang up.

[00:07:53] Also, Google ads has changed a lot. So the strategy you come up with, you talk to the clients about, you [00:08:00] agree because. location is a huge thing. And depending on how you're going to set up your campaigns, like you want a strategy you can build upon later. You want maybe if you're a cyclical business turn on and off things like you'll figure out really quickly.

[00:08:17] If your landing page doesn't work in those three months yeah, Google ads is a long game. That's the thing is it's not a, like you can turn them off [00:08:30] and turn them on, but it takes about three weeks to a month to get the ball rolling. There's bidding strategies you have to use to anyway.

[00:08:38] So it takes a long time. Your next question is, oh yeah. Oh no, Rina, no adding. Clarify, just to clarify some of the things that you said, Pip, when you say it takes, three weeks to get the ball rolling, we're talking not only about the manual things that we actually have to do to your account.

[00:08:58] But we are also talking [00:09

:00] about the algorithm that Google uses to figure out who best to serve your ads to. So it is. It's a little bit longer learning than Facebook ads, for example. And and yes, when it comes to strategy, you have to book like we all, both of us book kickoff sessions where we actually ask all the questions and then we have to go and do the research.

[00:09:21] And then we have to there is a process involved and if they're just it is possible to throw up a campaign and and do the research [00:09:30] without the client involvement. And a lot of. Google ads. People do work like that, but I just find that the results, no, it doesn't make sense. You need to work closely with your client because there are things like the negative keywords you want to go through with your client.

[00:09:43] They're going to know their business way better than you are. So why would you make those assumptions? Also, you should get your ads approved because A second set of eyes can always find issues. That's where your branding comes in. If no one's got your [00:10:00] eyeballs on those ads, then you're letting somebody else, organize your branding for you.

[00:10:06] And you should be, your Google ads person should be asking you for your branding document. So that if there's any words in there that you don't want used, so for example, especially in the, real estate space, nobody wants to use bubble in, their languaging at all. And Oh yes. Housing, whatever it's market, but I forgot what the term is, but, and there [00:10:30] are terms that you're, that your clients are going to have that you might not as a provider be aware of.

[00:10:34] So they should be asking and all contractors should always be asking every single one of them for your branding document. I have a branding guide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really important. It's true. Yeah. Google, the questions I think really revolve around types of businesses that I would, make sure to ask for Google ads.

[00:10:54] Did you finish your two? I'm getting two things. The top two things I would say that [00:11:00] a, business owner or somebody hiring somebody should add would be what, kind of accounts have you worked with before? And along with that question, so it's still one question is what. Accounts do you not work with?

[00:11:15] What type of businesses do you not work with? And the reason to ask that is because there's lots of rules in Google ads, like lots of rules. And if you're an experienced Google ads person, you will know what type of [00:11:30] businesses you don't work with. Because I can tell you right now I don't work with hotels generally because it's, I don't work with car dealerships because that's got its own Google ads, ticketing, booze.

[00:11:43] Drugs, guns, all of those, we don't work with those. And the reason being is because we've come up again and again, come up against some things. The other thing to know is if somebody wants to try Google ads for 30 days, we say, no, we won't work with you because it won't [00:12:00] work. And it's the hardest thing as an entrepreneur to say no to money.

[00:12:05] But when you know something's destined for failure, would you do it? Before you go on to your second point, because I know you've got a second one still, can we just answer Ora's question about tag mapping? Because I think that was a really important question. It's a really good question. Yeah.

[00:12:21] It's tag manager is organized on your website to collect the data a little bit differently than Google analytics. And it funnels the information into [00:12:30] it, not funnels. It seg helps you segment the information better in Google analytics, and that's why you want to use it. So we use tag manager to set up for Google ads and for Facebook ads and for LinkedIn ads, and then everything is.

[00:12:44] segmented beautifully in, in analytics and that's how it works. And then you can pull really nice reports from analytics that shows you everything so that you're actually looking at what happened on your site. So if Google ads tells you, and Facebook [00:13:00] ads tells you that you had this number of clicks to your website you want to actually see, did those clicks actually follow through or were they just like clicks and then.

[00:13:09] Flybys, right? So sometimes people click and then they just move on. So you want to see what are the numbers of people that actually landed on your page? How long did they stay on your page? What actions do they take on your page? Those are the good solid pieces of information because with that information, you can actually do some really beautiful organizing of your landing [00:13:30] page.

[00:13:30] And that's the next thing. Do, does your Google, person optimize your landing page? Within your campaign management, do they do that? That's a good question. If they don't do it, does somebody do it? Somebody needs to do that. Who's going to do it? Yeah. And we've come across that because we used to not do it.

[00:13:52] But the thing is, then you have to depend on the client. That's right. And which is a challenge, right? And so we [00:14:00] use, we'll use lead pages. The other thing is so the landing page concept, when nobody can see anything else, so they're not distracted by the next thing they're going to check out like a blog or something.

[00:14:11] So you do potentially want to treat it like Facebook ads. They go to a specific landing page. And that landing page might not be indexed on your website. To, go back to Aura's question, the tag manager, we do the same thing. Now we do a measure set up. And then at the very end of our measure set up, if people are doing Google ads, [00:14:30] then we add we add the conversion tracking there and we connect the Google ads and analytics account on both sides.

[00:14:37] So from Google ads to analytics, then from analytics to Google ads, it's like a double connector. And and that helps us, you, Then you can make audience lists. You could do all these really cool things, but you can then see the, pattern. That people like, Oh, I got this much from ads as much for organic cause Google ads will not report as well anymore [00:15:00] because they've taken away the attribution model that used to be.

[00:15:04] Now it's, their data driven attribution. So you have to use Google analytics to see the real results we've actually, the, some My next point of what to ask if you're hiring a Google ads person would be my first one was what accounts do you work on and then, and because you want to know if they're e commerce, they're, that's their [00:15:30] specialty, right?

[00:15:30] Or if they're lead based, like if I want a form filled out and then the reporting, how do you report or better than that, who owns the account? I think that's, and that goes with the transparency because a lot of if you search, you'll see, have you ever seen search Kings? So they advertise for the States and Canada and there's, they have big pockets to do Google ads [00:16:00] advertising.

[00:16:00] Cause it can cost some industries, a lot of money. So you want to ask them, they own the account though. So here's the thing. If you have a Google account with someone else and you're like, I don't want to do it anymore and they own it. You have to wait for them to close that account before you can open another account and wait 30 days?

[00:16:17] Yeah, we argue about this a lot because here's the thing, campaign camp we never start with somebody else's account anyways. We always start with a fresh account because the setup is different. [00:16:30] Everybody has a slightly different approach to set up. And so working on somebody's account that has been running for ages can sometimes be messy, so we always start with a fresh one. It also gives an ads credit, generally speaking. So we like to do that. And we will, if people want to own their account we have that discussion at the beginning. I usually suggest that. That most most agencies like to start fresh anyway, so it's not no point, but [00:17:00] the reason is because I asked my guy this because I was trying to figure out why, because everything else we usually give over really easily.

[00:17:09] But with the ads account, generally speaking, what ends up happening is we try and close it out and the client never comes in and, accesses it properly. And. Because there's a, there's there's a a step that they need to do that never happens and then it just leaves this empty account.

[00:17:28] That's [00:17:30] problematic. Interesting. Yeah. Oh, and then, so sorry, we're different. We're different. So we want clients to own the account. We want to take them into their account. We want to teach them about Google ads, but Rina and I do this differently. You can really screw up

a Google ads account if you go in and you're touching things or moving things or, You really want to but you can just give you access or just ask the client not to touch anything.

[00:17:56] It is, I think it is theirs. So sure. [00:18:00] Screw it up. Pay me to fix it. Yeah. I'm not too worried about that. Our clients definitely see everything. We give them view access for sure. And we also coordinate with the rest of their team if they have other contractors that need to do something. Steven has a really good question there.

[00:18:15] I think Pip, this is one for you. Cause I don't really know the seven day. Yeah, do you think the data attribution is better than the seven day that they had before? Which one do you feel has generated better results? I, we used to [00:18:30] use linear, so they, had different models. They had first click, last click and then they had linear, and then they had decay.

[00:18:37] Oh my god, I can't believe I remember all of them. Time decay. And it's, so it's just what they measure, and we always pick linear. Which, but now they took away all of that and now you get to do the data driven. So seven days, the attribution was in the seven day one. I said, I don't remember seven day attribution model.

[00:18:56] Cause we always picked linear. [00:19:00] Do I, I don't, I like control. I like having a little, and so it's funny every time they take away some control, you can see Google the Google company makes more money. So they want to be like Facebook. They want to be like, no, you get nothing and just give us money.

[00:19:18] So I think that's funny. Good question. And Oh, what was I thinking? There was something else that came up about service providers and what they do. We were talking about, [00:19:30] okay you Oh, you want me to go? I got so many, I forgot what I was going to say. So I would also ask how how do you strategize?

[00:19:42] To get the best campaign because the secret of secrets to Google ads is the foundation matters. Yeah. What you do and maybe this is why you start a new account each time. I like, I'll pull all the data I can get off there. If [00:20:00] you see their account and it hasn't worked at all, then it is smarter to set up a new account because you can get that, that 600 that whatever they have, you get 1, 800 now if you spend 36.

[00:20:15] Yeah, you need to remember. So the other thing that you want to make sure you're doing and this was really tragic. I have an older client, like elderly client that I love [00:20:30] to work with. And, and so somebody did a sales call with him and he got connected. Apparently he signed a contract, although nobody's been able to produce that contract.

[00:20:42] And, And he signed up for a 3, 000 package on Google ads and, and they accessed the Google ad account from his, Google workspace. So there was like a connection [00:21:00] between, so what ended up from his account, sorry, not Google workspace. So what happened was he was they, he gave them his login to his Google ads account and then they.

[00:21:14] They added and removed him from the account. And so what happened was he, got this whole, a whole bunch of charges and he tried to contest it with his bank because he didn't remember signing up, but he's elderly. [00:21:30] So it's actually possible that he didn't remember, but there was also no contract produced by the company or in his inbox and they they just kept running ads.

[00:21:43] Like he's now. And and the, bank didn't, his credit card did not back him up. So he's been. He has to pay. So make sure that you're not giving your login to a producer. If anything, if you need technical [00:22:00] help what, we generally do, and I think Pip does the same is you walk people through on a zoom call and show them how to add you to their account, or you set up the account and add the client to the account.

[00:22:14] And that's, those are the two ways that should really be happening. Anything else is a compromise, especially if you use the same passwords or similar passwords between your accounts. It can get really scary. And this is what happened. These guys got into his Google workspace and [00:22:30] and then deleted all of the emails between the two companies.

[00:22:33] So he had no proof of a contract, what was said, what was promised or anything. And it was a mess for me to clean up an absolute. And just heartbreaking. You definitely want it. Yeah. Because we had a client who had a, an experience where somebody got ahold of his credit card and used his credit card for Google ads.

[00:22:51] Now there are bad players that will try to take over an account and direct them because direct spend your money and direct them to [00:23:00] their site. So you do want to be careful if you want to ask. Things like how many accounts do you manage and what is your like, so when we talk about logging in really important, you can lock down your account by having it only the URLs that you want.

[00:23:19] able to get into the account. That's a security feature. Yeah, you can. So we, when we add our MCC account and then we show the owner how to, Oh, that's [00:23:30] your, it's a management account. It's one, one account to rule them all. You know what I mean? And I don't, I, I'm sure there's a limitation but it's, so you can go in and you can see all the data together.

[00:23:43] So you're not like logging in. Logging out. So any professional Google ads person should have an MCC account. So that's that's one of those sneaky questions. And if you ask these type of questions, Yeah. Then you're like, the person will know that [00:24:00] stuff. And so then there's no messing around.

[00:24:04] Google ads, can be a game changer for some businesses. I say, can, it is a game changer for some businesses. It is colder traffic than a referral, but it is still there. They're intentionally looking for the service. So that's really great. Yeah. Yeah. MCC account. So what are our four questions so far?

[00:24:26] What experience do you have? [00:24:30] I don't know, there were so many good ones. I can't believe you were going to recap that because I can't remember. I can, I'll recap it. I'll watch the replay. And then like, how do you structure an account? That's what you want to ask. How do you approach reporting?

[00:24:49] Yes. Explain your process for building and managing. So that's where you want to hear things like, yeah, we'd like to meet you every week or every month. We're in the account at [00:25:00] least three times a week. When we launch, we don't launch on Fridays because if anything goes awry, who's paying attention, right?

[00:25:06] Things like that. Yeah. Those are the kind of answers you want to hear. And then another good question is what tools do you use to help optimize your campaign? Yeah. And if they lay some cool tools you can look up that you won't understand at all. Yeah there's, some great ones out there that, we use to help us.

[00:25:28] Cause we use [00:25:30] machines, we use people, we use our brains, all of that. Any other things you would ask Reena, if you were hiring a Google Ads person? Yeah. The one thing that I like to do, which I don't, I'm not sure. I don't think, I'm not sure if you guys do, but I like to utilize, a system of working with Facebook ads and Google ads so that they work together.

[00:25:52] And so that to me is my sort of my superpower. That's how I feel like I get a lot of really good results, but doesn't always [00:26:00] work for everybody. But, but you want to find out, are they working in a silo or are they actually integrated with the rest of your, So can they work with a team? Yeah. Yeah, because that's another thing. When trying to access, if you're working with a team, are you going to be able to get easy access to the analytics? I had this issue just last week where I'm asking for admin access on the analytics and I'm not getting it Begging.

[00:26:27] It's frustrating because some people get really territorial [00:26:30] and competitive and unfortunately that's not helpful and having a collaborative mindset is way better. It's oh God Mona, I'm trying to get rid of this so I can put up your beautiful picture. How you doing? It's so true, what you said.

[00:26:52] And that's why we get along. We do get along.

Slightly competitive, but A little competitive. [00:27:00] I'm like, you do Google Ads wrong, Rina. No, we work really well together. Only, with access, but I like what you do. I like, the client centered approach of the trying to get them that free 600 or whatever when you sign up.

[00:27:15] So that's a good one. Keep your eye out for that. There's like the integration. I think that is a huge, maybe the final point we're going to come up with today because that integration. Of working with other people. I've been locked out of [00:27:30] a website by, the web dev of some companies because he doesn't like me.

[00:27:35] I'm like, so that's not about the client though. And so that's bad. It's helpful. It's very unhelpful. It's, and nobody wins with that. With that. No, they think they win. They think they win and they think they'll have the client, but eventually they'll learn. Client doesn't win with that attitude is the problem.

[00:27:54] And we need to make sure that the clients come first. That's the most important thing. Just, despite of [00:28:00] your feelings don't matter about the other people it's it's hard. The great thing about Google ads is if you do them well, Most of the time people stay with you.

[00:28:12] Some people leave because they get poached or this or that, but so maybe asking like, how long is your longest client in Google ads? Because then, that it's been successful. I would like to also point out one thing because I think this is the [00:28:30] misunderstanding that I get a lot is that once you get your ads optimized to a point your conversions are going to pretty much stay similar until you Two weeks and then goes on a scale.

[00:28:44] Yeah, that's true if no one's paying attention to the count. But if you've got a professional who's paying attention to the count, it should stay fairly similar over time because you're paying for that number of ads. So if you want more, it's not gonna go continually go up like that. [00:29:00] And that a lot of people have that expectation.

[00:29:02] But if you wanna get more, conversions, you need to scale your ad spend. That's the best way to, to to increase your. Your conversions or your phone calls or whatever it is that you're looking to have. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. Actually, do you know just, a slight side story, but the other day I had a phone call from a potential client and at the end of the call, and it was somebody I already talked to, but at the end of the call, he's should I call you back at this number?

[00:29:27] And he spouted off some weird number. And I was like, [00:29:30] No, and I'm like, I'll give you my number. But it's cause Google ads, if you do the phone call, it'll replace your number, right? With a trackable number. So I'm going to have a conversion for my ad because I answered the phone. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting.

[00:29:49] So the other thing to note before we go, and I know this is like something to drop last minute, but if you're here, then you get to hear this, which is. That huge Google leak [00:30:00] that happens there, they're saying, some people are saying that if you do, it's smarter to do a little tiny campaign for yourself because it affects your SEO.

[00:30:14] But Hey man, I just work here. I don't know the, I don't know the little black box, but I do know that I think you do better if you have a brand campaign going. Okay. Good, tip. With that, we are out of time. [00:30:30] Not out of touch. Just out of time. Next week. Oh, guess what next week is? Ah, it's the what's, happened in the last month of marketing.

[00:30:44] So every, Third Thursday, fourth Thursday, fourth, because that's the 25th every fourth Thursday in our group. We do a recap on all the crazy stuff that's happened in the last month and search social and websites. So you will see [00:31:00] the whole gang here, me, Rina, Greg, and what's that guy's name? Freeland.

[00:31:07] So we will see you next week. Thank you so much for joining us today and have a wonderful happy summery. Bye. Bye.

00:00 Introduction To The Podcast
02:11 Making A Blog Post Mobile Friendly
05:34 How To Convert Traffic & Why Mobile Matters
09:00 Mobile Specific Errors
12:47 Mobile Optimization
18:23 Types of Page Speed Test

Pip: [00:00:00] Now, who wants to have a conversation about mobile marketing? Hi, Tim! Hi! It's Phelan and I today, so Pip, Seymour Digital Media, Phelan, what, Fuzz Marketing, Phelan, Seymour Digital Media? What's going on there? Yeah?  

Phelan: It's still the same, yeah. Seymour Digital Media. Yeah.  

Pip: Look and I've dressed up a little because we're going we're going to a good meeting after this with one of our best clients, so I'm very excited. 

But, in between then and now we're talking mobile marketing. Sorry about the hiccups. And the hiccups with the live, we figured it out. It's cause I was testing zoom yesterday with Ecam and I'm almost perfect. Phelan, like our names are so close to being like, even, but let's get into the mobile marketing. 

I got a whole list of things we want to talk about. So Phelan is a stand in for Greg because Greg got Caught in traffic I think, and so we didn't want him on his phone driving. We were trying to be all cool. Yeah.  

Phelan: Yeah. [00:01:00] We don't want to, you don't want to do a live while you're sitting in your car. 

That's not preferred.  

Pip: No, especially without air conditioner right now in BC right? So I've got my handy dandy notes up and because we do search engine marketing and Greg does websites and Phelan does websites, we've a lot to say on the mobile, mobile first issue. Phil, and maybe we can look at this like a standpoint. 

You have the standpoint of like the SEO and I'll do Google ads or we'll just switch back and forth. I have a number of things I want to get to Google with its mobile first indexing. And so I want to talk about ads and SEO. You're going to do more, of the knowing the website stuff. 

Cause I have an issue sometimes when I go and I make an image and say the image Text in it, which is, something I might have because we do SEO and I like numbers. When I go and add that to a blog post, a lot of the time, like if I don't check it on a mobile phone, it looks like [00:02:00] crap. If then, two weeks later, go look at it on a mobile phone. 

Do you, is there an easy way as a user that someone can make sure it's a 100 percent accurate? Mobile first, when I'm adding stuff to my website.  

Phelan: Yeah. So most like Shopify, WordPress, they now have a preview button in the top right hand corner. So you usually see it set up by default in desktop mode. 

And so you could easily switch to mobile and see how the spacing works with like your images and make sure to like your cutoff points, like you. You generally want to have if you got a big landscape picture, that you have all the important stuff in the center, so that if the other stuff gets cut off, that it still has it's, that's the rule of thumb that I would go with. 

You can, Shopify makes multiple copies of your images, like 26 different copies, and so it'll insert the one that's correct, but they'll still do cutoffs and stuff like that as well, so that's just something to keep in mind. Yeah, nowadays it's a lot of these website builders have a default like, Hey, do you want to see [00:03:00] this on mobile? 

And then you can just easily switch over and so you can get a really good feel for it without even having to whip out your phone.  

Pip: And why do we want to think mobile first?  

Phelan: Like you said at the top if you're doing SEO, you want to be looking at making sure it's optimized for people on their phones. 

You'll go through the analytics. I haven't seen a website. I think there's been one or two that have, That are very B2B, but most of the time, if you have any sort of like end user, or you're bringing in like lots of traffic, you're going to get at least 50 percent of it's going to be mobile. 

Pip: At least, and we're seeing, so I think it's, I think it's a new, really smart strategy to focus on mobile. Because the most people have their phone in their pocket. Most people go from their phone to the computer. How many people have their phone sitting right by them? And phones convert better as, as well. 

Phelan: I would also say that there's an unintentional side effect of focusing on mobile [00:04:00] first, which is that phones aren't as powerful as desktops. So if you're optimized for a phone, you've already by default optimized for a desktop because like the speed and loading issues that are going to be ranking factors and user experience. 

And that also goes to the ads because it counts as landing page experience. So all these things, if you optimize for mobile, you're in. And unintentionally optimizing for the whole website overall, because you have to do all these extra things to make it run very efficiently, which is a good thing. 

We want that. Like you want the end user to have a fast loading, even on mobile website.  

Pip: It is true. And we see it like if it's, that's such a good fact. So if everybody actually, we should drop the everybody probably knows, but the speed test from Google, that's where you go, and and you. Test it, it'll give you the desktop, I think, back first, which is really funny because if you actually optimize for the mobile and get that solid in and out of the way, and this is where we see most problems, right? Is the [00:05:00] loading of websites and the load, even in Google ads, we'll stop doing your Google ads, your pages don't load, right? 

Cause you're just wasting money. And so it will give you the competitive advantage to think mobile first. And we're not talking today about Hey, Shoot people a text for advertising. I'm not the biggest fan of that. I don't like even getting reminders for text. Text is I don't know. I just keep it a little less dingy. 

It's always dinging. So we're not talking about that today. We're talking about how to convert traffic and why mobile matters and how, if you want to win with your marketing, how you should be thinking about it from a search perspective, of course, I think it's pretty searchy.  

Phelan: Yeah. Yeah. I would say that it's it's definitely worth it to think about it as well as like your conversion rate optimization stuff. 

So once they're on the page that you have things ordered in the right way that because like in desktop, you can let yourself get too busy. like too smart by half and then make it too busy. Whereas mobile is you've got to be pretty clear [00:06:00] and get people through a land on their on a page on their phone. 

You want to get them from point A to conversion as quick as you can. And so making sure that you've optimized for that as well will be beneficial for you in the long run of how to Optimize your website and get it to convert.  

Pip: Especially if you have like automatic things set up in your phone, you're just, or or a human has their automatic things set up on their phone, right? 

Cause you could instantly fill things in. Some people can instantly pay for things like it, and it just helps from every angle and from a perspective where if you're, so I think. Speed is the most important. That's what we'll say. I think, and from a Google ads perspective and a conversion rate optimization perspective, phones convert better and more people have them. 

Lots of people don't have computers, like older people might have iPads. It's all right. So yeah. And then there's a mobile first content so shorter paragraphs, more bullet points, clear headings. So the same thing as SEO. [00:07:00] Like that you want on your page. And then many mobile search searches, this is local SEO, right? 

Have local intent. So if you're a local business I would definitely be focusing on this. And checking everything. Like every time you update your website, check it on a phone and we all forget. Who doesn't forget, it's funny cause I, we do check it now all the time, but I don't think even with clients, it's something that I think we need to train ourselves to do more and more. 

Phelan: Yeah. Yeah. And I would say as well to trade to look at it on multiple devices, you can inspect element and then it will let you cycle through different types of devices to see how they all interact.  

Pip: Ooh, one day we'll be able to show people that because I'm working on my Skittles with video, right? 

Because I can be like, I'm talking now. And then I can be like, Oh, I'm talking again. 

Phelan: Yeah, let's not. We're back.  

Pip: We're back. Sorry. Got excited there. Got excited about showing my skills, but where were we? We were talking about mobile, and what were you just saying, [00:08:00] Phelan? I'm so sorry.  

Phelan: Yeah, so I was saying that with yeah, now I've actually lost my train of thought. That's okay, I got,  

Pip: yeah. 

Phelan: Talking about inspecting element. And so that's another way that you can test it's a little more advanced as a feature, but generally nine times out of 10, if you just use one of those preview mobile it's still, it's worth it to check on a phone because sometimes how the preview on mobile renders versus how your phone actually renders it, not always. 

So it is still good to have a backup to check those just in case, because they do render sometimes a little weird with like mobile browsers and stuff like that. They they're not a perfect, what your desktop is trying to imitate is not always a perfect reflection of what's actually in the real world. 

Pip: You want to check your phones, your friends phones. Other people's phones fail and I both have different phones. We work together and so we can see differences. That was on purpose. But it is interesting because no matter what you do, it might be off somewhere, but if you're optimizing for it Then it'll work out better. 

There's [00:09:00] like mobile specific errors on say Google search console failing. We're going to see things like blocked JavaScript. Is that right? And CSS issues, right? Image files. And so those things, if we optimize for those. I think it'll make our phones better. No, you know this, but I like block JavaScript. 

You can, you got to explain that more.  

Phelan: So yeah what happens is so JavaScript, which is like how you interact with it, you click a button, the button does something that's all done through JavaScript The images is the other one. So images, yeah, we definitely, we've talked about that. You want to have them optimized, but for the JavaScript, one of the big ones is that I've noticed is Chrome. 

We'll just straight up, not render something. Cause it's yeah, that was a lot of work and we don't have enough bandwidth. So we're just not going to render stuff. Which is, what does that  

Pip: mean?  

Phelan: It means Oh, this function was going to take up too much compute power. We're just not going to run that function. 

And so that's why [00:10:00] when I talked about at the top of optimizing for mobile and like getting a lot of that heavy work and making sure you don't have like extra plugins that are just bloating your website, you don't have extra code on there. That's again, the PageSpeed Insights will tell you a lot of that. 

It'll say  

Pip: people look at those, but people look at the page speed insights. And they look at it and honestly it's pretty overwhelming. It starts with the first paint and the second paint and, people don't even know what paint is , yeah. So it's hard for a regular user.  

Phelan: Yeah, it is. 

It is something that's gonna be a little more technical, especially in fixing the issues. It's go, it's not. It's not as simple as resizing an image and it's just like you resize it and you're done. This is much, a little more complicated but it's well worth it again, because the faster you speed up your phone for mobile where it helps across the board. 

Cause your desktop's also going to get those improvements.  

Pip: And so  

Phelan: I think that's good.  

Pip: That's a huge win [00:11:00] right there in and of itself. We can close the podcast now we've done it all. Said all the things. Yeah. . Yeah, that's fair. But with I think there's also, I also learned some information about email opens it's more likely that people read e email newsletters on their phone. 

I don't read email newsletters often I read, I'm on my desktop a lot. Yeah, but I am going to start I think we're going to be implementing this strategy ourselves. Because not only do more people have phones than have computers, but if we focus on mobile first for all that we're doing, we know it converts better on ads, which means overall, if you do mobile first, I bet you'll convert better, right? 

Phelan: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.  

Pip: Yeah. We should test that. You can see in Google Search Console mobile devices and what's going on there. You can do page speeds tests. You can look in Google Analytics and you can separate out your traffic. You would segment it, right Phelan, to look at [00:12:00] mobile and look at the comparison. 

Phelan: Yeah. In the new system, the way they've laid it out, it used to be that you go to a tech tab. But now what you would do is I would. Go to reports and then acquisition and then traffic acquisition. And so that shows you the traffic and then just above, there's a plus icon in the, just above the names of each of the different platforms. 

So you can put a secondary filter and that filter can have tech. Interesting. So you can do I've got, for my Google organic traffic, I've got 60 percent desktop and 40 percent mobile. You can start to see that and see it by the different channels and then see how you're, You want to be optimizing for each channel, or maybe there's one that's bringing you a lot more mobile traffic that you weren't anticipating. 

Pip: So this is where the data driven insights really do help and affect everything we do. And is, I think, when you get right into the nitty gritty of this, Optimizing things for Google ads or [00:13:00] SEO. You're in there looking at this type of data, right? You're cross comparing. 

And there are so many industries and so many businesses that have done marketing that we can learn from what they've done. So finding industry specific things like what converts better for. Say coaches like and do mobile convert better like I know people test longer and shorter form. 

Everything's a test but when you get to go and try to optimize for this specific thing and if it could the knockdown effects That can help it. If you optimize for mobile technically, I think you're also optimizing for voice right  

Phelan: there. There's gonna be a lot of the best practices that'll make it easy for all those systems. 

Sorry about that. .  

Pip: It's pressing buttons. Say that again.  

Phelan: Okay. I was gonna say that 'cause going back to your earlier point of like you're talking about semantic, HTML, basically laying it out in a structure that's easy for. Systems to read it and then in and [00:14:00] digest the information and so that's going to be good for crawlers whether it's like voice content or pretty much anyone the easier you make it to read and to analyze the easier it's going to be for someone else to share that information because that's just Kind of the way these callers work. 

Pip: And when you look inside like Google Analytics, can you see, can you look at a phone and then the pages they land on, can you do the whole path? Can you look at the whole path and segment?  

Phelan: Not anymore. That's one of the reports that people were really hoping was going to get brought over, but it wasn't 

Pip: Analyze and measure the way we want to measure on mobile devices. Wasn't that the whole reason?  

Phelan: It was designed for apps. And so the apps would have specific events of login screen reached payment screen reached. Um, like it would have it as the event would be the page that they make it to. 

Pip: Okay. Oh, okay. And So you'd think it'd be all [00:15:00] mobile first and they'd give us as much data as possible. Who am I kidding? They try not to tell us some things, right?  

Phelan: Yeah, it's one of the more annoying reports that they didn't create was like each step. So you could see if maybe there's a drop off so you do landing pages to completion. 

One of the pages that they see along the journey, they don't really tell you that information. If someone does know of how to get there. Report then feel free to let me know in the comments, but I haven't found  

Pip: it. New things show up there every day.  

Phelan: This is also true. Yeah.  

Pip: Which is exciting. 

And so the whole thing with Google ads is that we want to, and with SEO is we want to help people make purchases faster or get the information they're looking for faster, right? And if they're on their phone and yeah, we're going to have such an easier time of it. The thing is, it is hard. 

To optimize for a phone because it is hard to speed up your website, right? It is a lot of technical stuff that the regular Joe can't do and not like you have to be a [00:16:00] technical SEO to keep plugging away at it And there's some things in there that aren't great. Like the number goes up and down  

Phelan: Yeah, and also that, uh, in this current age, there's actually a lot more resources for how to do stuff. 

So I just helped out someone else yesterday that we're consulting with, and they were asking how do I speed up the website for mobile on Squarespace? And sure enough, there's a, I typed it in and they had a help doc on going through here's a list of things you can do for Squarespace that will help you speed up your website. 

And they were all reasonably easy things for anyone. Yeah, they were simple things to get done. I wouldn't say that they were gonna, yeah, they weren't revolutionary. It wasn't like you were having to write JavaScript or anything like that. It was more kind of all the things we've been talking about. 

As well as some setting things that you wanted to have checked off in certain ways. And but that tells you that Wix and Squarespace and Shopify, they all have like ways that you can speed up their websites. And you gotta play by their  

Pip: rules, right? So here's the thing. [00:17:00] You get a Shopify site or a Wix site or Squarespace sites and you're like, oh, okay, I don't have to worry about images. 

And you just upload images, but they actually have image size recommendation, even though they size them down for you, but you, a lot of people go over that anyway, right? So we spend a lot of time fixing the weight of images.  

Phelan: Yeah. There's still that. It's still a function of limitation on the speed of light, right? 

Like at the end of the day if the website's load is determined by how much like bits can go through the internet and Like the more you could do to reduce those bits that are going through the better It's gonna be especially for mobile phones that are you know? You're on a 2g network for a little bit because it's You just happen to be shifting between two towers. 

And so you got to be thinking in all those different use cases as well.  

Pip: Yeah, we did have the experience a few days ago of one of our team members downloading Screaming Frog. And the next day it took the [00:18:00] next day it was very strange because they said to us basically, Oh my God it's taken a day and I was like that's weird. 

And that's when I call you in failing. And that's when we checked it was the. Speed of their internet connection. That was the main issue. So that was pretty interesting to pay attention to you. Cause you could get pretty frustrated as a user. And that's one thing to check. So it, it's all connected. 

Phelan: Yeah. I would say one last thing as well that I didn't get to touch on. there's actually two PageSpeed tests. so there's one that if you go to PageSpeed pagespeed. web. dev which is the PageSpeed Insights. Also, in your browser, you can also do a PageSpeed test. So it localizes it to your internet connection, connecting to their website. 

So it's not like this so what you do is you go to the developer tools, and it's the last option on your Chrome. It's called Lighthouse.  

Pip: Wait, so how we get to the developer tools is go to our website, or go to our computer and right click, [00:19:00] right?  

Phelan: That, or the other one is to open up so we're getting, we want to  

Pip: inspect, right? 

Inspect. Right click on your computer and then inspect and that takes you to the developer tools. Is that correct? Okay. Or can you just right click on your computer and then go to, no, you can't just go to developer tools. Damn. So inspect. Correct.  

Phelan: The. The second way is you go in your browser menu along the very top where it says Chrome, File, Edit, View, you go to View, then Developer, and then Developer Tools. 

That's another way.  

Pip: Developer, okay, Developer, yes, and then Developer Tools. Oh, bam! Look at that, Sunshine. So those are two great ways to get there, and I, it might look like a lot of gobbledygook. But it is very interesting because this is how you find out what website somebody's on or I have, we have this in our spying on the, on, on our competition class which is a, oh, I don't think that's part of the free section of our [00:20:00] course. 

So yeah, it's part of the paid course, but you can learn how to do this very easily.  

Phelan: Yeah but yeah, once you're in there, you'll see something that says Elements, Console, and then there'll be a bunch of options like Network, but the very last one says Lighthouse, and then you can just run it from there. 

Pip: I have Lighthouse, Recorder, and then Performance Insights. Lighthouse, and then, yes, and then analyze low page load. Nice. Oh, it turns it into kind of a phone. Isn't that interesting? Is this what you do, Phelan? Because I haven't done this. This is exciting.  

Phelan: I do it if there's like a big discrepancy. 

From what I'm seeing to what PageSpeed Insights is seeing, then I'll bust out this tool as well. But that being said, we have to go. We do!  

Pip: Hard out at 1130. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so sorry. We were a little bit late. That was me connecting Zoom and Ecamm for trying new things. 

We will be here next week. On Thursday at 11 [00:21:00] Pacific, if you want to join us live and ask your questions, we are, we pay attention to our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks, Marketing Mixer, and YouTube and LinkedIn. We'll be here next Thursday, 11 AM Pacific time talking about Dun, do you know what we're talking about? 

Phelan: You and Rena are talking about Google ads. Yes.  

Pip: All about Google ads. I think that's because of our upcoming class. Anyway, we will see you next week. Lovely to see y'all here today and we'll chat soon.  

Phelan: Bye. 

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast
01:23 Understanding Artificial Intelligence (AI)
03:45 Ethical Considerations in AI Development
06:12 Applications of AI in Healthcare
09:30 AI in Business and Automation
12:15 The Future of AI: Opportunities and Challenges
15:40 How AI is Transforming Education
18:05 Conclusion and Closing Thoughts

[00:00:00] Hello, I'm back in an original seat and we are here for the day. Okay. For the moment, we're talking Google ads, 2024 today. So if you're joining us, pipe in, if you use Google ads with a yes, and if you don't use Google ads with a no, and this is. Phelan, I work with Pip who forgot to introduce herself and but we work together at Seymour Digital Media and we spend a lot of time thinking about Google ads.

[00:00:27] So we thought it'd be a good time to take, I [00:00:30] think after in the wake of the Google IO for this year where there was a lot of changes, I think it was good to talk about what's going on with the big. Themes and the big trends that are happening in Google ads, right? So Phelan can you share this over to the group just to make sure that it gets in there because there's no Yeah, that'll go in with it and yes, so We do get on here weekly and yes, I am Pip [00:01:00] and together Phelan and I, we run Seymour Digital Media and Know How Marketing Lab, which is our school, the digital media, which is our agency.

[00:01:09] Now Phelan we do a lot of Google ads. Yeah. Yes. A lot. And it's really changed in the last year or two, would you say? It does some big jumps every year, I would say. Yeah, I would say it's more crystallizing a lot of trends or solidifying a lot of trends that have been ongoing in Google Ads for a while.

[00:01:29] [00:01:30] Now we have a whole agenda today. So we want to go through, I'm going to list it off the headings quickly, and we'll try to get to all of these today, but we're going to talk about Google ads and how it's changed with deprecation of third party tools. Then we have first party data and we have AI integration.

[00:01:48] I know you guys are super excited about all this and we have the new Google ads design performance, max enhancements, expanded search ad experience, which is interesting. There's some video changes [00:02:00] and bidding strategy changes. So I think first and foremost, we'll do the cookie stuff cause that's hard.

[00:02:06] And then I think we should jump right into the interface and how it's changed and why we're. Doing a Google ads course coming up. Yeah. So yeah, I guess the, so cookies, it's a big one. It's already happened for Facebook. So it's the same principles. It's a, basically they want to have it they want to have it set up like a conversion API.

[00:02:27] They don't like having the third party tools because that could be a [00:02:30] privacy leak. So what do they mean by that is basically you have JavaScript that's on the page itself. And so when the page loads, Yeah. It actually reaches out to a third party with the script and then grabs the code. And so what they want is you to have it already connected on the backend.

[00:02:45] So when the page loads, the Google ads conversion tracking loads with the website itself. So it all looks like it's coming from one source, not that someone's added an extra bit of code. That's going to be doing stuff stuff. And so that's the idea behind it is [00:03:00] that it's show, it's Verifying to the browser and the user that, Hey, this actually loaded from this person's website.

[00:03:07] So it's first party. Okay. Okay. So if I have Google analytics on my website, that's first party. If you set up Google analytics in the traditional way, then no, it is not first party. It's the traditional way is to paste it into the head coat. Okay. And that's third party because it doesn't load when the webpage loads it.

[00:03:29] [00:03:30] It's a code that. Fires once the page is there so it means it puts in everything for the website And then it makes an extra call out to Google Analytics to start firing the Google Analytics Okay, so if I put it through tag manager, is it third party? That's still third party. What you would need to do is have some sort of So if you're on WordPress, there's a pixel My site is one that I've used for Facebook pixel, but it also has an analytics input [00:04:00] Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager integration.

[00:04:02] So that's how I would set that up. And so what they do is it's basically it's a simple plugin on the backend. And all you do is load in your Google Tag Manager ID or your Google Analytics ID, and then it just loads it for you as if. It was loading with the page itself. Yeah. So this is how we do it.

[00:04:21] Yeah. If you're doing something like Shopify, they have the conversion API already set up out of the box because [00:04:30] you add it to your store and then it's just a function of your store. That's actually loading this information. And yeah it's, it sounds way more complicated than it is, but basically you just want to have something that does conversion API for Facebook and see if they have a Google analytics component and then you're good.

[00:04:47] Okay. That's something to note for. And so when you're setting up Google ads, one of the things you do, or one of the things we do is we set up conversion tracking, because if you're doing Google ads and you don't have conversion tracking, you [00:05:00] can't track the leads that are coming in, right? And this is what we see with business owners or, and businesses they'll have done or tried Google ads, but they won't have done this, the most important part.

[00:05:11] And that's because it's probably overwhelming and confusing. Has Google made that any easier with this third party cookie, first party cookie stuff? I don't think Google has made it easier. I would say that I had just hopped off a call where literally that was the case with I was asking. This contact, [00:05:30] I was asking him if he had ever run Google ads and he said he did and then just told me, Oh, they weren't very good.

[00:05:36] I don't think I got a lot of return. And then we talked about are you tracking things correctly? So you can actually show where things are coming from and how these are connecting. Google. Still leaves a little bit to be desired for business owners right out of the gate to get the most out of it for them.

[00:05:53] Not to say it, so yeah, it could be, they could do a better job on Google side of explaining what a [00:06:00] conversion is and how to set it up. Generally though It's like Shopify and WooCommerce that are generally pretty good because that's the bread and butter is to give you an ROI. And so they help you tie those things together.

[00:06:12] But generally, yeah, there's no really good out of the box solutions that I've noticed. Even ones like say a Squarespace and they do all the forms and they do all of the and you put in the Google Analytics in their system. They don't, Spit out a, an event saying Hey, contact form filled. Which is weird that doesn't they, [00:06:30] don't they?

[00:06:31] No, I haven't really yeah, they do for some, but like they do for forums being submitted. But there's there again, there's some parts of it to be desired that I feel like that websites, especially if they're hosted by someone else that they could help you with a lot more. Okay. And then let's, okay, so let's dive into the interface.

[00:06:54] Cause I think that's pretty interesting. And one of the reasons we've decided to do our Google ads course, and then we can jump back into [00:07:00] the AI integration and things like that, the new Google ads design. So Google was testing a bunch of different designs and they found a winner.

[00:07:10] I always say chicken dinner. I'm, that must be from a commercial, I'm sure, right? But they have this winning design and they've taken everything that was, you On the top of the dashboard on the right hand side to the they've made it on a horizontal dashboard on the left hand side now, instead of [00:07:30] a vertical, no, they've made it a vertical dashboard on the left hand side and it used to be a horizontal dashboard across the top.

[00:07:38] Like a menu. Yeah. I think that's how they chat. And they've added some interesting little things in there that I don't think anybody's really mentioned anywhere that I've seen so far, but they have, how we have, so in Google ads, one of the major strategies we, we do is we work with our clients to look at the search terms that come in and see if we want to negative them [00:08:00] out or add them.

[00:08:00] And we do this with the clients as often as possible. And But they have a new list. So we have a negative keyword list, which is now called I forget. It's not called it's called egg exemption list or exclusion list. Yeah. exclusion list. And that's the exclusion list.

[00:08:21] You can negative out at the campaign level, right? And you could add all your campaigns, which you would assume would be at the account level, but it is in [00:08:30] fact at, they have a negative a thousand negative keywords you can have at the account level. And so anything you never want to show up for, but you have to go to a new place, which is when you're setting up the Google ads account, or when you've set it up, you just go in there and add it.

[00:08:47] And there it's a, it looks like a regular campaign, the regular campaign settings, only it's for the account. Section it's down the admin. Which is, so that's a new feature we're [00:09:00] seeing. There's also, and the interface is a little bit different instead of just the wrench icon. It's a wrench and it's a wrench and something else pliers, scissors, something.

[00:09:09] So now you can't just say at the wrench icon. Yeah. You got the tool settings. They look like tools now. And, yeah I find the new interface to be annoying in that it's like the uncanny valley where things are just off, just enough to be annoying, where you expect, most things are where [00:09:30] you would expect them to be, but there's like some subtle differences on Oh, it's actually, you go under this folder to get this, or do they renamed like accounts, linked accounts to be data manager.

[00:09:40] Yeah. But they never like told anyone that there was no, Oh, where's that? Where you would have connected your Google analytics with your Google ads account, it's now called, it's now called data manager. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Which it's fine that they did that. It's just, I wish they had, I [00:10:00] wish they had told us more about it because like they made a big deal about how they were changing the login screen for Google and then, but they didn't even tell us like any sort of.

[00:10:09] Advanced knowledge about Hey, we're going to rename all these features to these things. Big, have a blog post written up about this is now this, or if you want to find this, it's out here which would have been very helpful. And I think was a missed opportunity for Google to make it easier if they wanted people to get used to this new interface.

[00:10:25] Yeah, it does. I, we'll get used to it. So when change is hard to accept. So [00:10:30] do you think that possibly you don't like it because change is hard, right? I'm used to one pattern of doing things and they've decided to change that pattern, but not really tell us that they had changed the pattern.

[00:10:42] That's what I find annoying. Is that I'm okay if you say, Hey, we're moving these things to here. You can, it used to be called this, now it's called that. At least if they told me, then I could go, okay, update, like how I go through the system, but if you just don't tell me, and it's just there, it's just Oh, guessing game, guess where it goes.

[00:10:58] And you feel dumb, right? You go [00:11:00] in there with a client. You're like, Oh used to be there and now it's got a different name, which is, normal and. We've learned there's always things to learn in Google ads. You're always going to be learning if you're in Google ads, because they'll add new things or because you work with a certain type of clients, you're not going to use some elements and vice versa.

[00:11:18] You learn. What you're allowed to do, what you're not allowed to do as you go through it, even if you take the Google ads test, which is interesting. So the interface is changed. And with the interface, we've also seen [00:11:30] lots of changes. Like we don't have the expanded. Search ads anymore.

[00:11:35] We don't have now it's just the responsive search ads. Yeah. And so I find that interesting. It's a whole new build and where we've changed how we Build campaigns because of all these changes. But I think how we build campaigns is basically also based on the broad match integration and the smart fitting.

[00:11:56] And the expanded search ad experience. Oh, [00:12:00] do you remember that when they were like. The Google ads was showing up on search partners and people had unchecked the box saying, I don't want to show up on search partners. And then they were like we'll just take away the box. So you don't get the choice.

[00:12:20] Yeah, that was a, it was really nice. One of them that yeah yeah, it's one of those ones where Google is definitely push forcing the hand a little bit on like [00:12:30] limitations that they're obviously pushing for more of the automations, more of it which I had with the client where they had blown the entire campaign budget within a couple hours.

[00:12:38] And No one can tell me why that had happened. And they, cause they're basically the poor staff guys are just saying it's the automations. they blamed you. They blamed you. So we have learned, like when you launch a campaign, you've got to watch it like a hawk for the first few days. Like you're, you literally leave the tab open and just keep looking.

[00:12:58] And keep seeing, [00:13:00] because we literally had a campaign that if you change, so bidding strategy is huge and this is bidding strategy has changed and there's even bidding strategies. Like I haven't really used much of there's a shared portfolio bidding strategy we haven't dived into.

[00:13:16] I've just started really diving into ROAS and what is the other one? Where where you. Give it like there's the way you do this strategy around bidding is huge, right? Cause you either start off [00:13:30] with maximize clicks or manual bidding. You don't start off with maximize conversion, although that would seem like a natural thing to do, but you want a certain number of conversions before you change to that.

[00:13:43] And then before you change to row as you want a certain number of it's a progression. of how well the account's doing over time. Yeah, it's definitely one that you don't, you're definitely going to pick different bidding strategies for different stages of the campaign. It's, so [00:14:00] as a a mature campaign you want to have with a target CPA or a max conversion.

[00:14:04] Or a ROAS, so if it's an e commerce. Or if you do actually do know your numbers. That's another one. And that's also sorry. That just reminds me to go with the bidding strategy. One other big one. That's goes with the privacy component and the changing of bidding strategies is a lot more customer match lists and a lot more offline conversions.

[00:14:22] If you can suck them up So additional signals. Yeah, additional signals that you could send to Google that, [00:14:30] Hey, find me more people like this list of emails, right? If you already have your customer list, that's a customer match list. Or if you have like your CRM. And because Google is now, they have a little window that I'm interested to see what it's going to look like in the future.

[00:14:43] But it says, you, visitors, To raw leads and then they have qualified leads. So my guess is that's what was built for the sales force and HubSpot people that as you get people Not not only are you collecting leads, but like you can then [00:15:00] of those leads how many actually became customers and you can signal that Yeah, go on.

[00:15:04] Sorry yeah, so that way you could signal say it's offline meaning that it's like not On a website someone just showing up and converting it's offline in the sense that you're in a crm that has its own little ecosystem, they make it through your funnel and then they become a customer, then you could send that signal that, Oh, actually that person did integrate.

[00:15:24] And more I'm talking about this, the more I realized. So yeah, it is Salesforce and [00:15:30] HubSpot purpose. Yeah. So does that. And those are the only two CRMs that connect. The API, is that correct? Out of the box. Oh. You could set up your own integration. If you have a developer and say you have we could connect a Google Sheet.

[00:15:47] And then it just has as a row, it has a customer and say we change their status. You could set up your own, it's just you have to be technically proficient to go connect to it. Out of the gate HubSpot. Okay. So if you're choosing a new [00:16:00] CRM, those might, and you're planning on doing Google ads, that might be something to consider because things do all integrate, right?

[00:16:08] You see this with real estate agents too, right? We all want to see that person coming from our website. Say they came from Google ads, they go to our website and they end up in our customer management system. And then your customer management system and your content management system could work together and you know what your customers want.

[00:16:28] So then you write content. [00:16:30] Anyway, that's, so that's where marketing and sales combine. And instead of the funnel being a V it's now that hourglass, with the sale being in the middle. And yeah, anyway, it's all integrated now, people all integrated. So let's get back to Google. I was just gonna, I was just gonna say, just to put a bow on it is that the more data the more data we can feed Google that's Especially of conversions, anything like that, the better Google's going to perform, especially in an age where it's [00:17:00] just trying to automate everything.

[00:17:01] And everything's going to be that they want to supercharge that component. So yeah, more data, you can give it the clean data of these are people I want more of the better it's going to do. Yeah. And you can't just go buy in lists, right? That's not legal. But so with all of these changes, so it used to be, you had to spend a certain amount of money to use the customer match list.

[00:17:21] So that's an add on. That people can really get behind right the AI what I think Google's trying to do is to let [00:17:30] people use AI, but also help people realize that it's pretty intensive Google ads. Now we were going to think that they were going to AI us out of there or try to, and the reality is that they've made so many bells and whistles and bobbins and knobbins that you need an expert to know where to go or else you just blindly spend money. Yeah, or you open yourself up like we had a client that Google had turned on generate assets for you and it was [00:18:00] listing them with Disney and the title, which I'm like, I couldn't write that into the ad copy if I wanted to, because that's copywritten term and they were advertising with Disney.

[00:18:09] They had no association with them whatsoever. So it was like. Totally misguided. I turned on the automation to try it with our own account. And then we were listed like one of our images was furniture. It was like, yeah, but that's because we work with a furniture store. So I thought that was very strange.

[00:18:25] But there are new enhancements coming. There's a new place you [00:18:30] can in the assets section, right? Where you can see the combinations of your images with your text. Because Google wants to. Be more like Facebook and give you not just words to use, but actual media, right? More media type of files. So images, your logo, you can put in there, you have to verify your ad account so you can start an ad account, but then you have to verify your ad account.

[00:18:56] And we've had some definite struggles [00:19:00] with the verification of as a business owner, I have my own personal credit card. And I had, and I might use it for my business once in a while. And two, if I'm doing that with Google ads, I want to use my business name, but it might not let me for the verification because.

[00:19:20] Maybe some of my documents say my name. It's a whole thing. So and They're also getting rid of credit card payments. No, I don't know if this is for the smaller fry [00:19:30] business owner, but I know for Google 360 clients they are phasing out the payment by credit card in favor of what nothing Like it's, they're taking it out of the bank account now.

[00:19:44] They don't want to pay the 2%. So will they lose business? Is this a good time to leave Google ads because of this? Is this going to affect all business owners? And we have, I was going to say we're out of time, but we have a few more minutes to [00:20:00] talk about how strategies are different as well.

[00:20:04] Yeah, I definitely wanted to. So one other thing just. To quickly note they're also putting a mandatory end date by the end of the year. Every campaign will have to so you can't just leave your campaigns running indefinitely. You have to set it, even if it's for a year, you have to set it. Yeah, so I dig that though because when I go in and pause things if people don't want to run I pause the Keywords, I pause the ad groups.

[00:20:26] I pause the ads I pause the campaigns [00:20:30] I'd pause like my left finger if I could because I feel like Google the machine might turn it on One day and I don't want our class to be charged if they're not running yeah, absolutely. I agree with you on that. It's nice, but it also makes me suspicious of Google, because I'm like, why are you doing this?

[00:20:46] You're leaving money on the table. Maybe they've been sued. Possible, but that's what I mean. It's there's gotta be some sort of weird reason that they did it. They're not just doing it to save time. Advertisers. Yeah. That's [00:21:00] true. It's you usually see big changes with Google ads and their money in conjunction with one another, right?

[00:21:09] They make more money if they do certain things. And that brings us to the bidding and the match types, which leads us right into campaign strategies, right? Yeah, if anybody's wondering, that's our rooster in the background. I can't hear him. I know I can hear him, but I don't think that's getting picked up on the mic.

[00:21:28] But yeah, [00:21:30] campaign strategy. So a big launch at IO was the change of the meta on how you set up your campaigns. It's basically that Google is pushing for two types of campaigns. Obviously the classic search we all know and love. And then as well, the secondary one is performance max, they're pushing for it.

[00:21:48] They are trying to get it because it covers all of your top of funnel and retargeting at the same time. And so having like asset groups that are focused around different [00:22:00] services. So your asset group is like an ad group. It's got your ads, it's got your videos, it's got your images all put together.

[00:22:06] All grouped together. Yeah. And so you would have it around like a theme or like a service. So like we might have one that's Google ads and it's all about how we can help you optimize your Google ads. And then another one's SEO and all the copy and all the images and all the videos are all about SEO.

[00:22:23] When you get Google ads, and it's the right business. Where people are searching on Google, it can like, it [00:22:30] can have big effects. We have clients that they, one of their own, like one of their only strategies where they might have other strategies, but the main. The main one is Google ads and that's what brings them a lot of business, right?

[00:22:45] Yeah, and so we're seeing they've changed that they've changed So there are still the three match types. We got rid of the fourth which was broad match modified which marketers we Google ads people we just bloody loved and so that's gone And [00:23:00] so I mean i've heard of other ads people just getting rid of phrase match, because phrase and exact are very much more similar now.

[00:23:09] And so that type of thing does affect strategy. So we have gone are the days, I don't even need to say this, but gone are the days of skags and that's single keyword ad groups. And so now you're are we putting more keywords in an ad group? Yes. Are they more themed together?

[00:23:25] Yes. AI can tell, words that should like, or [00:23:30] themes that should go together like professional and service. Might be like, somebody might be like professional dishwasher or higher dishwasher service, like it's really the same. So do you need the word higher in there?

[00:23:42] For best in there. We used to have to put the word best or maybe structures of campaigns should be now more top of funnel, middle of funnel bottom of funnel. In Google ads, you could do that. But Google ads is essentially. The very bottom of the funnel [00:24:00] like it. That's what we want.

[00:24:01] We want people that are going to click and go to buy, right? That's what you want. Yeah and that's why it's getting paired with the performance max, right? It's going to be showing some YouTube and display ads to people that aren't even aware of you. I heard that you should use You should segment, inside the Google ads account.

[00:24:18] Now at the campaign level, you can, there's a section for new versus returning users. And there's a strategy where if you're using P max, PMAX [00:24:30] should be for the new users, like how we use shopping. There's shopping in PMAX and you create shopping campaigns first. But then what do you do with the PMAX, Phelan?

[00:24:41] Is it for your best products or is it just for introductory of products like a top of funnel PMAX? Yeah the PMAX, I would look at it more like it is its own funnel one asset group. So if I, if I'm doing e commerce, that's an easy one you put all your shirt products [00:25:00] together.

[00:25:00] And so all your ad copies about the shirts, all your images are about the shirts and then you have another asset group that's about pants. Okay. Now, if you had shopping ads at a performance max. How would you separate the two audiences or the two people searching? Would it be like, I have a shopping campaign for all my products and then for my best products, I use a P max or is it opposite? Sorry. I'm a little confused. Could you reword? [00:25:30] When I'm creating a Google ads account, I, as a search specialist, I'll do it with text, like search text ads as a comparison. Okay. So if I am creating a campaign for search, yeah, I have search ads and I want to do a P max, but I don't want the crossover of audiences. So I only want, do I want my performance max for top of the funnel people, or do I want my search campaign for top of the funnel [00:26:00] people? So one thing to keep in mind is that they're not competing because you can't, you use search themes in performance max that doesn't use specific keywords. So it's going to be there.

[00:26:10] There won't be as much crossover. The only time you'll, you might see a bit of crossover is they it does performance X does include search. So if you see your cost per click, jump up like to 5 or something like that would normally like a search. Sure. That's when you would see the, that it would, might be competing with it.

[00:26:28] But generally because it's using every [00:26:30] other asset that Google has. So your YouTube, your display, your shopping, it's going to be spending most of its time on those ad placements because Google. That's why they're doing performance max is they have a bunch of inventory and all these different platforms that's not being used correct or it's not being filled out.

[00:26:48] And so they just have an automated system to fill those out. That's its goal. So what I'm trying to get at, it's the, and I'll bring back the comparison of the performance max and the shopping campaign. [00:27:00] So whether or not they're really converting, if I want it, and I got to separate out between new customers and existing customers, yeah.

[00:27:10] Say I have a shopping campaign for all my products and then I have a performance max campaign. Do I keep my best products just for shopping, or do I take my best products and put them in performance bags for returning users? Yeah. We are running up against time. I know. [00:27:30] But I will answer this because it's a good question.

[00:27:32] Your question is multivariant on what you're trying to get at. So you have, yes, you can have new performance max campaigns bid solely on new customers, so really good for e commerce, right? I got people that are buying, but I need to get new people. You can totally pull those out. And then you can also make a product group.

[00:27:52] And so the product group can be all your best performing. So you can, you have a lot of like metrics there, so I could do it by product category. I could do it by [00:28:00] product. So Oh, this one's getting me really good return on ad spend. Let's carve them out into a new product group and then put that with our new Kim, our new customers.

[00:28:11] So you can look at it in a multifaceted way. And so that's one to keep in mind when you're looking at how to do that. Generally though, what I would say is start simple. Don't overcomplicate it for yourself. These features, yeah, these features that we just talked about, those are when you've, [00:28:30] your funnels going, your ad copies working, your landing pages are converting, like all these things and then you, yeah.

[00:28:35] And then you're looking at it's costing me a lot. Like maybe I want to carve out and just have a campaign that's only going after new customers to get them in. But generally don't overburden yourself with these ones. Google is. It's both trying to take away features and then give you features that will overcomplicate it for you.

[00:28:53] Try not to overdo it. Try to keep it as simple as possible because you're gonna have a lot of [00:29:00] these features out of the gate. One other thing I don't think, I think we've implied it, but I want to make it explicit. Right now, generating assets in Google is just, do not do that. It is okay.

[00:29:12] And no, and we should preface, don't click on the just automated assets, automated keywords, automated anything. Just be slow and steady, because they're working there with the kinks still. We are out of time not out of touch. Just at a time might start singing songs [00:29:30] today. I thought that was quite funny.

[00:29:31] I did sure Okay. We're out of here, but we are here next Thursday Same bad time same that place is places. Yeah if you miss this, you can catch it on the replay on YouTube or Facebook or our podcast. And if you are interested in Google ads, we do have a training coming up. That might be helpful for you or your team.

[00:29:55] If you want to do ads yourself, if you don't want to do ads, cause this sounds well too [00:30:00] complicated. Just get in touch and we'll help direct. Yeah. Phelan, do you know what's happening next week? Yes, you and Greg are going to be talking about mobile matters. Your customer is on their phone. Mobile does matter.

[00:30:14] It's insane how much it matters. So here's a quick sneak peek. When you get your website done or updated, do you check your phone to make sure it looks good on your phone or your friend's phone? So that's what we'll be talking about next week. Join us then, Greg and I, and if [00:30:30] you have any questions, concerns, needs, or wants to Join us in the Facebook group or on one of our social marketing channels.

[00:30:35] Seymour Digital Media and Cyberpunk Geeks Marketing Mixer is the Facebook group where we go live every week and we help other marketers do their marketing because marketing is a group effort. So join us there. Okay. Bye. All right. Bye.

[00:00:00] Hello everyone! Today we are talking search social websites and AI. This is the time we come together to talk everything digital marketing, bring you up to speed with what we know in our specific professions.

[00:00:13] So I'm Pip, Seymour Digital Media, and this is with also with Seymour Digital Media. And can someone share this into the group? Because I, on this computer, I'm not able to do that. And I'm Rina from LittleWorks Indie [00:00:30] Media. And I'm Greg McKinnon with Original72 Creative. And today it's really interesting.

[00:00:38] We're going to dive into Google leaks, social stuff. Let's take it all away with Rina cause she's always over prepared. Okay. There's a bit, I'm just going to hit some highlights and you guys can chime in. If anything sounds interesting. One of the things that I wanted to bring up, which is really exciting is that YouTube has brought out thumbnail tester.

[00:00:59] So you can [00:01:00] upload your thumbnail into YouTube and it will tell you what it looks like in all the various configurations that you might want it for. So that's been great. It was supposed to roll out a couple of weeks ago. I haven't actually seen it on my account yet, but I will be signing in after this to find it.

[00:01:16] Wait. I'm interested. So Phelan, you're going to share it over because you know how to do that better than me. So if you could, and Rina, so YouTube thumbnails. Yes. What? Tell me more, what's going on? [00:01:30] It's a multivariate tester. So you put in your thumbnail and it tells you if it's going to work for all of the different device aspect ratios, yeah. And also different ones. Cause I know like Mr. Beast, he was the biggest YouTuber. He does multivariate testing with all his thumbnails. Cause that's the biggest component. So if you can have someone automating that rather than doing it manually. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of YouTubers are going to try that where it's going to, because I've noticed if you pay attention to your subscribe feed, when it first launches a video, usually it'll be [00:02:00] one and then they'll swap it out for a new one that they'll test within an hour to see, because the first hour is really the crucial time to try out different variants as it gets released.

[00:02:10] Crazy! Yeah. So that's great. So what you're saying is the funny face still shot before your video is not the best thing to use. Is that what you mean? It depends. It actually works really well in short form content. It's it ranks better, but I think if you're concerned about branding and [00:02:30] the long form content, I think works pretty well with them.

[00:02:33] As much as possible, I'd always advocate for people to have a specifically created. Image to represent whatever they're Oh, really? That's not so the short form videos get higher click rate when there isn't a branded thumbnail. Um, short form videos, or are you talking about shorts form videos?

[00:02:53] No, shorts get covers. Shorts. They took covers away from shorts. Sorry, I'm not talking about YouTube in particular. I'm [00:03:00] talking about video in general. So if you're putting it out on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram the research has. Suggesting that putting branded thumbnails on those is not really working because it's a live situation or it's meant to be live situation.

[00:03:17] So people want to follow people who are on Tik reels, that type of thing. But on YouTube, yep. You can't put It automatically does something on YouTube for your shorts and then when it comes to long form, I'm [00:03:30] still using thumbnails for for longer videos, regular videos on YouTube. Yeah, I am too.

[00:03:36] So this sounds interesting to pay attention to. All right, we'll come back to any other news on YouTube? Not on YouTube, but I have a lot more. If you want to get it, come on. There is a new piece of research out. I'll put the link in the comments regarding a disabling social media comments and how that affects your audience.

[00:03:58] It's pretty interesting. [00:04:00] Basically, I think we could probably all guess that people notice it and they don't like it. And the research is particular to influencers and individuals, celebrities, but I'm pretty sure. It would translate quite well to brands in addition. So the idea of being on social media is being social.

[00:04:19] So if you're just posting your stuff and disabling comments or not getting back to comments, it's probably not great for your brand. It is a pretty interesting piece [00:04:30] of research, so I highly recommend everybody read it. Can you share a link to that after the live in the feed? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Yeah, so that seems pretty straightforward, yes? Yes we all love social stuff, and I think it's now a combination of search social websites. Using AI, that's really going to help brands along. And that's why we do this monthly and we just added in the AI stuff. And is there any other news associated with some [00:05:00] social stuff?

[00:05:00] I know you're all excited. Two more pieces that I'd love to hit if I get the time. So you get the time. Yeah. We all heard, I'm not sure if it was this month or last month, but Adobe had put out their terms of services that they're taking all of the imagery that we're making on Adobe and using it to inform, not, that's not the word, it's not inform, it is, um, where is it?

[00:05:21] Aggregate into their, like their US training data. There is a word that they use though. And I want it to be particular about it, but I'll find it in a [00:05:30] sec. So what and Meta is also doing the same thing. Um, this month they announced that and it is actually really hard to opt out of Facebook AI content.

[00:05:42] If you're, if you want to get out of it, you actually have to set up answer a form stating why you want to be. Not included in that to opt out, which is an extra step. So probably a lot of people won't even bother doing that. And then I'm not even sure if they approve it or how it works on their [00:06:00] end.

[00:06:00] But that's one thing. And they are being sued by the European yeah. Um, although Google and open a, I have already gone through being sued and organized with the European union. They're not doing it. They're just doing it very particular. And then let's see here where, oh yes. So the, so Facebook has faced 11 legal challenges in Europe.

[00:06:22] So we'll see how that organizes out. Interestingly enough, Facebook says that they want to do it differently than everyone else because they want to be [00:06:30] transparent, but they don't say Or they don't even say they want to be better than anyone else. They just say that they want to be more transparent, but they don't say more transparent than what or who.

[00:06:39] So that'll be interesting to see what that is. So I feel like Facebook is constantly throwing the transparency word around there's that's a big piece of its branding, which I find really intriguing because it's almost a. Of a concept less word, like everybody has a different idea of what it means.

[00:06:56] It doesn't have, it's not really grounded in any kind of definition or [00:07:00] meaning on their part. So that's interesting. That is interesting. Say before we jump off it Adobe has actually already changed the TOS. So the TOS change that was in section 4. 2 that you were, it's already been updated. So back down and they're not, oh, that's good.

[00:07:18] Oh, that's why I missed that. Okay. Just so everybody knows, because I wanted to bring this up as well, was that the whole the whole shady thing for the Adobe [00:07:30] change of terms. to have everybody accept. And so that it would give them the right to all of the works that are being produced on their platforms and they could go in.

[00:07:45] And they essentially owned rights to it as well, which was Is a massive no for that industry and really anybody who is trying to produce or do work [00:08:00] for any of their clients on, like, it's their work. Yeah, because who owns it then, right? Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

[00:08:09] Who's contract trumps? Yeah, they haven't integrated copyright law into this at all. I don't know what who is the copyright, the default copyright holder in the U S but in Canada, the producer is the copyright holder, unless they've signed an agreement with an agency or a client. But it didn't always used to be like that.

[00:08:26] When I first started out in in the arts, the [00:08:30] copyright was owned by the person who paid for it to a certain extent, and it depended on what your work was being used for. But it was we never had that issue before, but now then the copyright rules changed. I forgot when it was changed.

[00:08:44] It was in the nineties or something where it rev, reversed. The default was always the producer. So the photographer or the graphic designer in particular even if they're working for an agency, so unless there's a better agreement in place. Yeah. Cause I'm always looking at, I'm that's in [00:09:00] my my contractors.

[00:09:01] We always deal with that. If you're a freelancer or if you're an agency, you should have a piece about who owns the copyright to be produced so that you don't come up against problems. And usually what it is people can resell things at a later date or use them in there's one big designer, I forgot his name, but he did a retrospective exhibition of all of his work at the gallery.

[00:09:24] So he definitely owns all of his work, but if a company owned their work with him, then he wouldn't [00:09:30] be able to put that into his retrospective. So there's, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. Or is joined us. Hold on. Let me say what I always talked about. Disabled comments, bugger. She missed the YouTube tips.

[00:09:41] Yeah. And go back and see those. Those are good ones. And then the license, the 4. 2 license to your content solely for the purpose of operating or improving the service and software you grant is not again, lots of interesting stuff. That's very legal speak ish. But this is something really to pay attention to, [00:10:00] right?

[00:10:00] About like images, video. And yeah, you can't, I actually just ran into someone who's taking images off the internet, thinking that because it was on a public space for her to view it, that she could just use those photos in her marketing. I had, I was really quite. a little bit, there was still somebody in there in that, in the sphere that thought that was okay.

[00:10:23] Cause when I asked, where did you get the photo and did you purchase a license for it? Or is it fine to use? [00:10:30] That was the answer I got. I found it online and it's that's not really specific. So out there, people are still doing that. You do get a licensing fee. What they call, it's not really a fine if they can't call it a fine.

[00:10:42] It's called a retroactive license fee and it's quite a lot. It's more than hiring. It's annoyingly high. It's way higher than what it would have cost you to bought the image and buy the image in the first place. But it's much, it's just a little bit less than what it would cost to have a lawyer look at it.

[00:10:58] for you and write you a letter [00:11:00] that was done on purpose. Exactly. Totally. So people have to pay these things and it comes up from time to time. Just to be clear as well, the whole point of AI is it's an obfuscation machine for licensing and copyright. The whole purpose is that you put it in a bunch of images, it goes into the AI thing, and then you ask it to spit out an image.

[00:11:22] Yeah, it doesn't it's supposed to obfuscate who actually created that image. That's why anytime they ask them Hey, how did where did [00:11:30] you get all these images to feed this machine? And they stammer and they don't answer the question Yeah, what they want to do is just say we just generated it Out a whole cloth out of taking all this and so it's a new thing that doesn't have any copyright associated with it Because they've already had one legal case go through Where they had a completely auto generated comic and it was deemed that no one had the copyright to it by the courts.

[00:11:51] Yeah. Yeah. So that makes it even more interesting. Did you know for just an aside with the AI stuff, there was a photography competition [00:12:00] and it was backwards as to what one, it was an AI competition and the photo that one was a guy that put in a real human photo and so that human photo one.

[00:12:10] That tells you a bit about perspective. It's going to be very interesting for the psychology of things. Things and the digital marketing. Ooh, Phelan, you're doing a PIP. What is going on? I saw that. Oh, Greg's like wrong section of it for me. I was like, Oh, that was great. That's exactly what I was hoping for.

[00:12:29] Greg got a little [00:12:30] snicker out of that. Didn't he? It's what's PIP doing now? It's not me, buddy. So on the computer. On a similar topic, there is integrated ad science, which is a company is working on a brand new safety tool designed to keep deep fake content away from ad content so that proximity is important for branding.

[00:12:55] When you think about putting your ads online, do we always know what [00:13:00] our ads are going next to? I'm sure you've seen those ads at the bottom of kind of shady magazines where you read a good article. Autumn has got terrible they look like blog articles. Yeah. They're just awful. So this is going to help with spam.

[00:13:12] Yeah. So this is going to help brands stay away from that, which is really great. And open AI has already started their own version of that too. So that's good. I'm encouraged about that. And Because the most there's this one line that I got out of this that says most analysis say [00:13:30] that issues of deep fake ad adjacency is likely to worsen in the coming years as generative AI becomes more widely available, which I agree with.

[00:13:38] Lots of deep fake stuff. And actually, interestingly enough there's a bunch of ads that are just circulating on Tik Tok that were made by deep. They're deep fakes and they're AI generated and they are actual politicians making really outlandish yes, they're making these awful interesting and people are believing it because that looks [00:14:00] like the person that they see on the news all the time.

[00:14:02] So yeah, this is, it's going to be so messy. Election time is going to be so messy is well, it's going to be interesting with interference. Go on. On that note, I was just going to say, I'm not sure if anybody else heard this news, but I had recently seen that it was found that a specific account, I believe it was that was doing like pro Trump propaganda.

[00:14:28] Was basically [00:14:30] a Russian bot and proved that it was like, it was taken down, but it just goes to show that, people from anywhere can create these big accounts and bots and. Propagate whatever message they want to message to, to interfere with or sway people's votes or anything else for that agenda.

[00:14:54] We're going to learn so much probably after the election the American election, [00:15:00] right? Just to see what's happened because it sounds like deep fake. So what is the outcome? I know Phelan is going to jump in, but it's don't believe what you read. Don't believe what don't believe what you hear always take that experimental view of, let me get more data, right?

[00:15:14] Yeah. Steven's got a question here after Reena. Yeah. You have to really understand what critical thinking actually means. And that is a methodology that has certain steps. So if you can only find an article in three places and you've never heard of [00:15:30] those those before, then chances are, it's not real.

[00:15:34] That's usually fine. What? Okay. Stephen's wondering now, you mentioned that there's a question on who created the work as a freelancer. Yeah. Versus agency. So this is for Reena. Yeah. What happens when you consider the client any ideas on who would own the work? Yep. And how could that be argued? It really depends on how agencies organize their contracts [00:16:00] with their freelancers and with their clients.

[00:16:03] So generally speaking, it is custom to, for the agency to want the rights of ownership over the freelancer. And if they're paying well enough that's the ideas that you usually, that's a leverage point for freelancers to take. Charge a good amount. If you're working with the client, usually in the contract with the client, there's a section that tells the client how they can use it.

[00:16:28] Because, of course, if you're using any [00:16:30] stock photography, which I know is not what exactly what we're talking about right now, there's only a certain number of uses you can use that stock photography license for. So similarly there's usually some parameters around what the client can use. So how many prints can they make?

[00:16:45] Like they can't just make 50 years of brochures with this one brochure. They're usually limited by print run or they're limited by how they use it. So it could be that, you would give a logo with the intention that they could, [00:17:00] And you provide them with the files that they could use it anywhere.

[00:17:03] But if you're doing something that's more specific their use the wording is usually around, you're allowed to use this, the business is allowed to use it for its own marketing purposes. It's not allowed to use it for anything else. So they can't resell it to another business. They can't use it in an art show.

[00:17:20] They can't create a calendar or a a table book. Where would people find this information? I [00:17:30] don't know. I've, I had my lawyer write my piece up, but I'm sure that there are templates online that you could get some wording from, and then have your legal representative, because of course, we're in Canada, and each province, and each government, Country is going to be slightly different on how they can do things and how they should say things So you want to make sure that you've got that covered?

[00:17:51] That's what I would say check a template. Welcome to social media turning into politics and rules It's very interesting behind the scenes of [00:18:00] all the things we need to know, right? Speaking of websites and images or images and then moving to website. Oh failing. Yep We, before we jump off that, you, we missed one piece that was in that, that I think is going to be super important for everyone, which is the FTC is suing Adobe over dark patterns, which is a big thing for, so basically a dark pattern is like you design the website so it leads you away from actually [00:18:30] canceling your subscription.

[00:18:30] That's specifically what they went after them for. Thank you, Amazon. Did Amazon get sued? And also, it was for hiding their cancellation fees and things like that. If you did want to cancel early. They bury that stuff so far that nobody Ever knows about that's another reason that they're suing.

[00:18:55] Yeah. It's all crazy It's all part of like dark basically you're getting sued over dark [00:19:00] patterns It's like when how that kind of comes to that's why when legal experts were talking about this they mentioned the dark patterns as being the more That this is going to be used as a means to go after other companies, like Amazon, who's notoriously has a 14 step you have to go through 14 pages to cancel your Amazon account.

[00:19:17] They're like, Oh my God. Yeah. Like they will make you like, and they'll, they make the button to like, cancel, like to not cancel so big. And then the other one to actually move forward with the cancel, it's like really small. It's like [00:19:30] part of the text. And so like they, like all these, so really What's it what's important about it to my mind is not necessarily Adobe but it's that the government can go after companies for doing this and that opens up the Pandora's box that hey You can't actually all these bad behaviors that they've been doing that they actually aren't gonna be You know taken down and goes back to what you said about the Facebook and making it these extra steps to canceling now if they're like being sued over it and now they're being forced to actually comply with [00:20:00] Not having these dark patterns and making it easy for people.

[00:20:03] These are going to be things that I think is going to be a real shake up for a lot of these big companies that have been used to doing it their own way of having these dark patterns of people. So that's why I wanted to really emphasize it. I totally agree because I had two Amazon accounts. I thought they were the same cause they had the same password and I thought it was one account, but you could flip between shopping in us and shopping in Canada.

[00:20:28] It turns out I was paying for [00:20:30] prime on both accounts for quite some time and it took me forever to detangle that situation cause I couldn't, I thought I was getting charged twice. And of course I wasn't. And so it is purposefully up until hopefully this will change, but as purposefully opaque on how you do any of this, how you set things up, you're just usually wizard through things to set up and then you can't find how to get out of it.

[00:20:54] I it's frustrating. Yeah, it is. It's intentional [00:21:00] how they do that stuff of, that they are doing these things in order to get you to walk down the primrose path and you don't even realize it. Like you didn't want to go down that path. You actually wanted to detour slightly. Yeah, actually they, it's really sketchy that you can have more than one account with like emails.

[00:21:17] Like you can actually, for the, I think I had two different. I don't know the cause what, not just Amazon, it's also Audible does the same thing. Oh, yeah, I know. Exactly. [00:21:30] And who doesn't have more than one email and who doesn't have more than one Audible or Amazon account. And I will tell you, yeah, it's all a mess out there with these big companies screwing you and nickel and diming you a little bit, right?

[00:21:44] I am. I did get two Audible accounts merged. You can do that, just in case anyone's wondering. Yeah. You know what I'd like? I'd really like Audible and Google Books to like work together. Yeah. Can we all just work [00:22:00] together, be friends, do we have any, yeah, do we have any website updates? Yeah.

[00:22:06] I was just going to mention The fact that there was a security release just in the last week that people probably had their sites automatically uploaded the new updated to the new version. But the bigger thing was the next release of WordPress 6. 6, which is scheduled for. Next month on the 16th currently and [00:22:30] that's the one that a lot of people are excited for that has updated patterns and the ability to my brain part is forgetting what they refer to as edit, editable patterns.

[00:22:46] Anyways, you can create patterns, but you can only lock. The design aspect of it and allow customers to change the content part of it. Currently patterns, and they're [00:23:00] locked and you can't change anything about them unless you unlock them and then they're not part of the pattern anymore. They're a separate item.

[00:23:07] Oh, it's called partial pattern partial pattern sync. So now you can create a pattern and have certain parts of it locked. So the design stays how designers design it. But the clients can insert these, this pattern all over the place and change the content that they need to change within it. But then if you want to change the design or [00:23:30] change the color in it, it will still be able to be changed and flow across all of the synced patterns, but not affect the content that the customer has used in wherever they've used it.

[00:23:45] Oh, that's terrific. I love that. I think we're that's amazing Patterns because what I like designers like myself and Rina's team we're going to be able to create patterns for customers [00:24:00] that have a specific look that when they're building out their site say they have a team page And we create a card for the way the person You know the person's bio headshot looks and then their name and whatever other details you have, and this card is used everywhere on their site.

[00:24:17] So that's created as a synced pattern. They can get a new team member, throw in that synced pattern. Change the name and the image and what they need, but the style of everything stays the [00:24:30] same. And if you change it in the future, everything will change except for the content that you're doing. It's the power of that is going to be really good because we have access to help our clients keep their sites more consistent in the design by creating these patterns that they can just throw in.

[00:24:48] And keeps the site a lot nicer and allows them to change the content, but doesn't, it doesn't, they don't have to worry about the design of it. I'd like to know, [00:25:00] will it be responsive to the amount of texts that they put in? So let's say we create a nice little small box that we want to fit on this part of the page.

[00:25:10] And we've got a couple of other things over here and they take that piece and then they have Three times to put in, is it going to go all the way down or will it constrain them to test? Won't constrain them. Okay. They will need to adhere [00:25:30] to these, like if, for instance, if it's that, bio team page kind of a thing, and they have a certain amount of text underneath each person's bio.

[00:25:40] They need to understand that they can't just write five paragraphs of stuff. It's not gonna stop them from being stupid like that, but maybe it'll give a, you know how you, with blog posts, you have to read more? And then it opens up further? It all really depends on how [00:26:00] we design the blocks what the constraints are.

[00:26:03] But you could have a block that you design and put in half a column, but you could also put that block in a full column and have it go both like it could be good, less of a width than full width. But it'll look the same. So it'll be like it really depends on how you build each of these blocks.

[00:26:24] Yeah Depending on if you set a fixed like this is only going to be 100 pixels versus A [00:26:30] hundred percent. If you do a percentage, it's just going to match to whatever the text is that you put in, right? It's just going to be filling in, whereas if you just give it a fixed amount, then it's just going to be the fixed amount.

[00:26:39] So I think that's how people work around it. It's they're going to put in percentages rather than it'll be really good for the types of sites where you have the same bits of content that you want on multiple pages, but maybe change slight wording. It'll be really good for that kind of a thing.[00:27:00]

[00:27:00] That sounds great. Okay. We are wait. I'm cutting you off, people. We are out of time, and we have not touched on search, which is really interesting because Phelan and I are actually going to do a separate live, probably this weekend, about the algorithm leak from Google because it's a whole thing.

[00:27:18] Google Ads changed a bunch of stuff on their interface. We'll talk more about that next week. And what are we talking about next week? There is, there's a spam update. There's lots to [00:27:30] go in to search, but we'll get more into that. There's also some big news coming up about our Facebook group and what we're going to be doing on Fridays with interviews.

[00:27:38] We're going to be interviewing business owners and other marketers to see their secrets. So stay tuned for that. Next week. Do we know who is doing the chat? It's you and Phelan next week, talking about Google ads and Basically what everybody needs to know. Yeah. Yeah. So that'll be great with the new update.

[00:27:59] So [00:28:00] No, it's only half hour so there's time for but there's so many changes right in this market It's so much. It's so much. So stay tuned join us next week thursday inside the facebook group or on linkedin or facebook business page or youtube. We are around And we are happy. We all connect and communicate in the Facebook group, cyberpunk geeks, marketing mixer, but there are other places to connect with each of us.

[00:28:25] And re oh, wait, last thing, aura told us that professional [00:28:30] photographers of Canada, C A P I C have some templates for the user contract. So what we, Rina was talking about earlier. Yeah. So thanks. Awesome. Yeah. And anybody with any links or anything about the stuff we talked about, we'll try to share them in the chat.

[00:28:47] Phelan, you were going to say something? No, just looking beautiful. All right. I can't wait to be home in my spot near Phelan and I love seeing you guys. I can't wait to see we're such a good, cool cohort. And [00:29:00] just a big shout out. I want to do a big shout out to someone. We all know who's very dear to us.

[00:29:06] Glenna just putting it out there that you're a rock star. We can't wait to see you on Friday. Maybe if you're coming to Rina's happy. Anyway, we'll talk soon. Okay. Bye everybody. Bye everyone.