Daily Minute Master Series – February 16, 2021

February 16, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

LinkedIn Launches ‘Return to Growth’ Digital Magazine, Outlining Marketing Tips and Notes

With 2021 – hopefully – a year that sees the economy getting back on track in the wake of the pandemic, many companies are now eyeing the next stage of their growth, or re-growth, as it might be. With that in mind, this week, LinkedIn has published a new digital magazine called ‘Return to Growth 2021’, which outlines a range of insights, case studies, interviews and tips to help businesses map out a more effective marketing strategy for the year ahead.

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Facebook & Instagram Shops Integrate With Shopify

Facebook and Instagram Shops are adding Shopify as a payment option which is estimated to increase conversion rates by 1.72x. All Shopify merchants selling on Facebook and Instagram can now offer Shop Pay as a checkout option for customers. Checking out with Shop Pay is said to be 70% faster than a typical checkout, which is due in large part to how it pre-populates customer details such as billing and shipping information. When a customer uses Shop Pay for the first time their information is stored for future purchases. Next time they checkout with Shop Pay they can speed through the process with a simple tap.

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Pinterest Gaining in Popularity with Gen Z, Millennials & Men

Not sure whether your brand will find an audience on Pinterest? New figures from the visual social network suggest it’s easier than ever before, as monthly average users (MAUs) have increased 37% globally. Although U.S. Pinterest users have grown slower than its international audience, Americans remain the primary source of Pinterest’s revenue and a goldmine of opportunity for marketers to reach and inspire new audiences.

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4 Disruptive, Uncomfortable, Yet Inevitable Martech Trends

Industry veteran Jep Castelein on the future of martech.

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Nano Influencers: Who Are They and How to Work With Them [Infographic]

When mapping out your influencer marketing strategy, the most common approach is to go for the biggest names, who’ll offer you the biggest audience reach, and thus, the best return on your ad spend. But don’t overlook the value of those with smaller, but more engaged, communities, who can also help connect you with the people who are increasingly more likely to buy from your brand. These smaller-scale influencers are called ‘micro’ or ‘nano’ influencers, and they can be highly valuable to your businesses, despite their relative audience size. If a local nano-influencer, for example, only has 1,000 followers, but all of them are local business owners, that can have a significantly larger impact on your promotion than a broader reaching campaign.

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Scaling Marketing Workflow With AI

Scaling the marketing efforts is not heavy lifting for marketers since artificial intelligence merges with marketing workflows. AI is capable of taking away the task-heavy load so that marketers can focus on strategy and creativity. Getting results from marketing is also becoming a more significant challenge due to increased marketing channels and the need to be everywhere. In that regard, AI tools are becoming useful in many aspects of marketing efforts, from customer profiling to automating content research, from making the data personalized to enhancing design capabilities with less effort, from getting more qualified leads to efficient SEO campaigns.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 15, 2021

February 15, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

TikTok Publishes 2021 Content Trends Report, Highlight Rising Subjects of Audience Interest

TikTok has published a new rising trends report, which highlights a range of key topics that saw significant growth in interest on the platform throughout 2020. TikTok’s ‘What’s Next’ overview puts a spotlight on the most consumed and fastest rising content categories on the platform over the past 12 months.

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ClubLink Offers a Better Clubhouse Link for Sharing on Social Media

Although the popular audio chat platform Clubhouse today includes a way to share your upcoming hangouts and events across social media, the resulting link that displays is fairly boring. A new link-sharing tool called ClubLink can help. The tool allows hosts to better promote their events by offering a more customized social media preview featuring a photo that includes the room name, who’s attending, the date and time (using the host’s time zone) and even profile icons of the hosts themselves. The tool was built by two Germany-based colleagues, online marketer Jens Polomski and coder and digital marketer, Peter Thaleikis.

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Is TikTok Marketing Right for Your Business?

As little as three years ago, the term “tick tock” simply conjured the sound of analog chronometers. But today, the term refers to a platform and a digital medium driving several of the hottest cultural trends. Now that same sound is marking off precious seconds for businesses to seize a potentially massive marketing opportunity.

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Real Marketers Don’t Guess!

Real marketing isn’t about guessing because it has a foundation in Market Orientation and research which helps the well-trained marketer answer the question of what a customer wants with the only correct answer: “I don’t know, but I do know how to find out.” So how do we move from guessing to making educated decisions?

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Content Marketing: The New Name for a Well-Established Discipline

The creation of targeted information—about companies, products, services, and just about anything else—has been around for generations… just under different names. Collateral, sales aids, product literature, brand books… all were the earlier monikers for what’s now lumped into “content.” So the seemingly limitless number of articles, social media and blog posts, podcasts, and God knows what else about the purported nuances of the content marketing discipline reveals one thing: a lack of perspective. That’s why students learn (or are supposed to learn) history in school—to give them a sense that there was a world that existed before they were born.

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Is the Marketing Database Dead?

The evolutions and revolutions in marketing have been and remain relentless. What was once the marketing database has evolved as marketers have adopted customer data platforms (CDPs) and new ecosystems of activation platforms. Perhaps the rise of the CDP brought a sense that marketers were finally mastering first-party data—drawn from their enterprise systems and operational data lakes—and at last making strides in managing customer interactions.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 12, 2021

February 12, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Facebook Adds New Safety Features to Messenger for Safer Internet Day

Facebook has added some new safety and control options to Messenger to coincide with Safer Internet Day, giving users more ways to easily manage who can contact them through the app.

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Shopify Expands its ‘Shop Pay’ In-Stream Payment Process to Facebook and Instagram Shops

Shopify has announced a new integration with Facebook which will enable Shopify users to purchase items via its ‘Shopify Pay’ payment system when buying in Facebook and Instagram Shops.

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Instagram Will Now Limit the Reach of Re-posts from TikTok Within its Reels Clone

Hey, remember how a few weeks back Instagram posted some tips on how to create great Reels content, and within those tips, it sort of, kind of alluded to the fact that it didn’t really like users re-posting their TikTok clips to Reels?

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With Influencer Marketing, You Can’t Afford to Set It and Forget It

Influence is not a static quality. It’s a status one has to earn, then maintain. That, as much as any fact, underlines the importance for a business to pay close attention to the influencers it uses for marketing efforts.

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3 SEO HTML and Coding Issues Answered: Ask an SEO

This lightning round edition answers 3 questions focusing on HTML and coding issues. Learn about button text, how many links are too much, and more.

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Google Adds 12 New Types of Manual Action Penalties

Google has 12 new types of manual action penalties which involve violations of Google News and Google Discover policies. This marks the first time a website could potentially receive a manual penalty for violations of News and Discover policies. Previously, manual actions were limited to violations of Google Search. That’s not to say Google hasn’t been enforcing its policies around News and Discover. It has – but up to this point enforcement has been automated. A manual penalty, unlike an automated penalty, is issued by a human reviewer at Google. The penalty is applied after the reviewer determines the site is not in compliance with Google’s guidelines.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 11, 2021

February 11, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

7 New Social Media Marketing Opportunities on Facebook & More

Make good use of the social media features & platforms at your disposal! Check out 7 new social media marketing opportunities on Facebook, Twitter & more.

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Twitter Posts Record Revenue Result in Q4, Maintains Usage Growth

Twitter has shared its latest earnings results, posting an increase of 5 million daily active users to 192 million, and a record quarterly revenue result, driven by higher ad spend.

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TikTok Lays Out Plans for New eCommerce Integrations as it Eyes the Next Stage

While TikTok continues to grow, it still remains at risk of losing its top creators to other, more established platforms if it’s not able to provide adequate monetization tools and options. Both YouTube and Facebook provide more ways for creators to make money, and while TikTok now has the audience, its advertising system is not up to the same stage to compete on this front, which will become a bigger problem over time, if that gap can’t be addressed.

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Top 5 PPC Tips for Technology Brands

More and more companies are discovering the benefits of a well-run PPC program. However, competitive keywords in certain industries, especially the technology industry, can be extremely costly. $50 CPCs? No, thank you! Do not let expensive keywords prevent you from developing a strategy to reach your target audience in this industry.

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Core Web Vitals Might Include Noindexed Pages

Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller answered questions about Core Web Vitals and how the scores are calculated. He also discussed the possibility of noindexed pages being be used as part of the Core Web Vitals calculation in the new ranking signal that is coming soon.

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How to Create a Viral Marketing Strategy Using Memes

On Inauguration Day, social media was not fixated on President Biden but rather his former opponent, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders made waves on social media after a photo of him from the event evolved into a meme. Since Inauguration Day, a cross-looking Sanders has been superimposed onto everything from “Sex And The City” scenes to the throne from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s” theme song. Memes are viral by nature. Their success relies on users creating new iterations of recognizable images and sharing them online. The reach they garner and the engagement they foster creates meaningful connections between large groups of social media users. If brands can successfully tap into this, it is a sure-fire way to reach innumerable more social media users.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 10, 2021

February 10, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

Snapchat Posts a 62% Increase in Revenue, Adds 16 Million More Users in Latest Quarterly Update

Snapchat has published its latest performance update, showing a major boost in revenue for Q4 2020, and a solid increase in active users over the period. First off, on usage – Snapchat added 16 million more daily actives in the quarter, taking it to a new high of 265 million DAU.

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Pinterest Rises to 459 Million Users, Posts Strong Revenue Result in Q4

Pinterest has posted its latest performance update, posting a significant jump in revenue, and steady growth in overall usage. First off, on users – Pinterest added 17 million more users in Q4, taking it to 459 million actives.

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YouTube Launches Updated Sports Platform to Cater to Rising Demand for Sports Content

With interest in sports content rising on YouTube, the platform has today announced that it’s updated its YouTube Sports platform, while it’s also expanding its connected TV ad offerings to help brands reach sports fans on the platform.

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Does Influencer Marketing Work For E-Commerce?

There are three prongs in the very subject of this article: who can be an influencer, the importance of influencer marketing in e-commerce and whether or not the former adds value to the latter’s ecosystem.

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Google’s John Mueller Explains Inconsistent Discover Traffic

Google’s John Mueller offers insight into why traffic from Google Discover is likely to be inconsistent from one day to another. This topic is discussed during the Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on February 5. A question is submitted from a site owner concerned about their referral traffic from Google Discover. They say it fluctuates wildly despite no significant changes being made to the site.

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Google: Removing Blog Comments May Impact Search Rankings

Google’s John Mueller advises site owners that removing all comments from a website may adversely impact search rankings. Mueller offers this advice during the Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on February 5. A question is submitted by a site owner asking whether blog comments are factored into Google’s search rankings. They want to remove comments from their site and ask if that can be done without losing rankings.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 9, 2021

February 9, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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News & Updates

The Complete Guide to Reddit Data

430 million average monthly users. 50,000 words posted a minute. 2.5 billion upvotes each month. 1.2 billion comments per year. Reddit is huge, so here is a huge guide to match.

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New Amazon Mobile GetLink for Social Media Affiliate Sharing

Amazon announced a new way to share affiliate links in within social media, in comments and in direct messaging, in addition to sharing in content. It’s called Mobile GetLink, a way to share affiliate links on the go.

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Twitter Quietly Removes its Ads Transparency Center

This is a blow for social ad researchers – late last month, with little fanfare, Twitter sunsetted its Ads Transparency Center, which enabled anyone to view all the ads being run by any Twitter profile at any given time.

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Google Taking Action Against Sites With Inaccurate Pricing

Google will soon start to take action against sites that show a different price at checkout than the one provided through Google Merchant Center. It’s Google Merchant Center policy for retailers to maintain consistency between prices provided to Google and prices offered to customers. Google’s price enforcement efforts previously involved reviewing the accuracy between a retailer’s Merchant Center product data and their landing pages. Until now Google has not checked whether the pricing remains accurate when the product is added to a customer’s cart. In theory the price on a landing page could match the one in Merchant Center, and then suddenly increase with hidden fees when a customer adds it to their cart. That’s a form of deceptive pricing which goes against Merchant Center policies, but it has not been strictly enforced up to this point.

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Google Ads to Phase Out Modified Broad Match

Modified broad match will be sunset, with phrase match taking over. Here’s what this means for advertisers and how queries match to keywords.

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How Influencers Are Good for Your Brand and 5 Tools to Find Them

Influencers are well trusted and have earned authority in their niche. Check out these 5 influencer marketing tools to help you find them.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 8, 2021

February 8, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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Social Media

7 Alternative Social Media Platforms to Consider

Have you seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix? If not, go ahead and watch it if you’re a fan of dystopian horror turned real. If you have, you probably remember the challenge at the end, where you were asked to join the movement and delete your social media accounts. The question is, did you do it?

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Instagram’s Developing a TikTok-Style Vertical Feed for Stories

It’s amazing to consider the impact that TikTok has had on the broader social media landscape. Already, we’ve seen several platforms looking to add TikTok-style feeds of short video clips into their offerings, as they seek to tap into the rising popularity of the app, and now, Instagram has confirmed that it’s internally testing another TikTok copycat functionality, this time within Instagram Stories.

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TikTok Adds New Video Warning Labels to Stop the Spread of Misinformation

TikTok’s looking to do its part to reduce the spread of misinformation by adding new warning labels to clips which have been found to include unsubstantiated – but not definitively untrue – claims.

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Marketing

Difficult Times Breed Innovation: Three Marketing Levers To Position You For Ongoing Success

The article Strategy Under Uncertainty, published by the Harvard Business Review in 1997, shares: “Under uncertainty, traditional approaches to strategic planning can be downright dangerous.” While market uncertainty may look a bit different than it did in 1997, one point really stands out in the current landscape: smart, calculated shifts and pivots are ultimately the most successful and, when done correctly, can be executed with minimal risk.

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How You Should Be Evaluating Your Content Marketing Success

More than 80 percent of organizations use metrics to determine how well their content is performing, according to Content Marketing Institute’s 2021 report. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, because any good marketing tactic has to be measured consistently in order to ensure its effectiveness. However, in this same report, marketers expressed reservations about whether their content efforts led to any actual sales. They were tracking consumer interest, but whether that interest yielded conversions or not was something of a mystery for many.

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Does the Rift in AI Matter to Marketing?

Given all the promises we hear about AI, it might be a surprise to learn that researchers are strongly divided on the question of how the field should develop. The split is between proponents of traditional, logic-based AI, and enthusiasts of neural network modeling. As computer scientist Michael Woolridge puts it in a concise survey of the dispute, “should we model the mind or the brain?” It’s not quite as simple as that of course (with AI, it never is). But hopefully it’s not impossible to explain the difference.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 5, 2021

February 5, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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Social Media

Facebook Provides Tips to Help Brands Increase Customer Loyalty [Infographic]

According to Facebook’s, recent ‘Future of Shopping’ report, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a sharp decrease in consumer brand loyalty, with altered shopping processes pushing many to try out new options. Whether that’s because price comparisons are easier online, or because some brands have simply adapted better to the shifts, brand loyalty, it seems, has become a lesser consideration. And that could end up having long-lasting impacts.

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2021 Video Marketing Insights from Social Media Experts [Infographic]

Are you aligning your strategy with the latest video trends? Video remains a key content option in social media marketing, but a lot has changed in video consumption behavior over the past year. So what kind of content is gaining traction on social today, and how should your brand approach video in 2021?

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How Facebook Ranks News Feed Posts

Facebook published an article that explains how the Facebook News Feed algorithm works. Compared with Facebook’s news feed algorithm patent, both documents explain much about how Facebook ranks posts in the news feed.

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Marketing

Marketers Say COVID Vaccines Create Hope for Quick Return of In-Person Events

With COVID-19 vaccinations underway globally and throughout the United States, marketers are indeed seeing an end to conditions that have made business travel to training seminars, conferences and trade shows unsafe. Caution is still reigning in the short term, but optimism is painting their longer-term views. Nearly 75% of marketers we surveyed in the beginning of 2021 said it was highly unlikely they would attend in-person events in the first half of the year. But that dropped to about 20% when asked about the second half. In fact, 20% of the nearly 200 marketers polled said they felt there was a 5-in-10 chance they would feel safe to travel to events. Even more surprising, 15% of the group said it was “extremely likely.”

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Google Search Console Discover Performance Report Now Includes All Data

Google announced that the Discover performance report within Google Search Console will now include all data, including Chrome data. As you may know, users can access stories from Google Discover in multiple ways. One way is in the Google Search app or on Google.com’s home page. But also, Discover can be seen when you open new tab in Chrome on Android or iOS.

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Google Search Launches About This Result Feature

Google announced it is rolling out a new feature that will communicate to searchers, before they click on the result, more information about that search result snippet they are looking at. This is a “about this result” box that can be triggered if the searcher taps on the three dots on the right top corner of the search result snippet.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 4, 2021

February 4, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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Social Media

Instagram Adds ‘Recently Deleted’ Folder to Safeguard Against Mistaken Post Removal

This will make many Instagrammers very happy – the platform is today adding a new ‘Recently Deleted’ folder which will enable users to restore any feed posts that they’ve deleted for 30 days after the fact.

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Twitter Provides Customer Care Tips to Help Maximize Connection [Infographic]

With an increasing number of people now shopping online, your digital customer support process is more important than ever, and Twitter can serve an important purpose in this respect. The quickfire, public nature of tweets often makes it a better channel for getting brands to respond quickly, and many people now seek to use this to advantage. That can have negative impacts, if your brand is in the midst of a crisis, and doesn’t have the answers that people are seeking. But it can also be hugely beneficial for increasing brand loyalty, facilitating greater connection, and delivering better results.

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Facebook’s Oculus VR Arm Outlines Significant Growth, Announces Messenger Integration

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on everyone in different ways, the global lockdowns and mitigation efforts have accelerated the usage of digital platforms for social connection, shopping, work – basically every function in some form. One of the key beneficiaries of that has been VR, which has seen a surge in popularity as people look to alternate forms of home entertainment. Indeed, in Facebook’s most recent performance update, the company’s ‘Other Revenue’ figure (i.e. revenue not generated from ads) was more than double the same period in 2019.

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Marketing

How to Compete Against Larger Websites

Concentrating on your competitor, and not your own site is a losing situation. Learn the smart strategy to use when competing with bigger websites.

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How to Quickly Compare Your Website With Your Competitors

As challenges and obstacles to reaching the top of the SERPs and staying there have continued to grow, competitor analysis has become more important than ever. Although Google webmaster guidelines haven’t changed much over the years, the core algorithm certainly has. What’s more, the evolution of that algorithm is happening at a much faster pace. The introduction of Knowledge Graph, Hummingbird, RankBrain, and BERT into the Google algorithm has made it much harder for SEO professionals to game the system.

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Filtering Referral Spam in Universal Analytics & Google Analytics 4

Referral spammers have been making their way into our Google Analytics (GA) data without ever actually visiting our websites since around 2013. Referral spam may show up to administrators as either a fake traffic referral, a search term, or a direct visit. Referral spambots hijack the referrer that displays in your GA referral traffic, indicating a page visit from their preferred site even though a user has not viewed the page. Referral spam can’t actually harm your site by triggering a fake visit (as long as you don’t click on the spam link). The problem is that marketers have to manually decipher and filter this type of traffic out of their GA data to make proper sense of it.

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Daily Minute Master Series – February 3, 2021

February 3, 2021/by Corey Padveen

The Marketing Rundown

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Social Media

Social Platforms Launch New Initiatives to Celebrate Black History Month

February is Black History Month, and this week, all of the major social platforms have announced new programs and initiatives to celebrate Black stories, and highlight the contributions of people of color, as part of the event. Here’s a look at what each platform has announced, and how you can take part in the various events and happenings.

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Facebook Tests New Prompts to Encourage Users to Allow Data Tracking as IDFA Changes Loom

This week, Facebook has shared an update in its approach to Apple’s coming IDFA changes, which are expected to have a significant impact on its data-tracking capability, and reduce the performance of its ad products. Apple is expected to release its IDFA update very soon, which will add new, in-app prompts that alert users to the data being tracked by each app they use. Users will then have the option to switch off data tracking, if they choose.

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Twitter Embraces Imperfection With Its Fresh New Look

It’s been five years since Twitter last upgraded their branding. However, upon assessment of the current state of their creative expression, their marketing team felt it was time for a change.

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Marketing

Google Adds Black-Owned Business Label to Product Results

Google announced that black-owned businesses can now also show a special label or indicator in their product and shopping results within Google Search. The label reads “identifies as Black-owned” and shows in the product listing results within Google Shopping.

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WordPress 5.7 Will Feature Updated Admin Colors

WordPress announced a WordPress 5.7 milestone in updating the admin color palette. The new palette produces higher contrast and is easier to read. It represents a step forward in making the WordPress admin backend more accessible.

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Google: Duplicate Content is Not a Negative Ranking Factor

Google’s John Mueller clarifies a misconception about duplicate content, saying it’s not a negative search ranking factor. Having the same content repeated across multiple pages is not something that would cause a site to rank lower in search results. Mueller says it’s normal for sites to have a certain amount of duplicate content. Google’s algorithms are built to handle it.

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