- Does AMP Improve Rankings, Engagement, and Conversion?
- This study researches exactly what's in the title; does AMP help your overall performance? And even with a smaller sample size, the results showed a positive effect with 23 out of the 26 websites reporting good results.
- The study also uses search visibility score as a measurement.
- Let it be known that this only relates to search traffic.
- The following are the general results:
- 13.7% increase in organic traffic
- 11.1% increase in SERP impressions
- 23.1% higher SERP click-through rates
- Google Posts Showing in the Local Finder
- A user discovered that Google My Business results were being posted into the search results. And after further discovery, people have come to the conclusion that Google may be running their own tests since no one has been able to replicate it.
- Looking to the future, GMB should become a part of businesses content strategy.
- Anything that you are posting to other social platforms, you should take the time to post to GMB as well.
- If this feature becomes implemented, it will add a more visual component to your search listings which we couldn't be more excited about.
- US Digital Ad Spending Will Surpass Traditional in 2019
- It has been reported that 2/3 of all ad spend will be on digital by 2023.
- Mobile is continuing to dominate the digital spend with 87 billion dollars spent on mobile.
- Out of the top five companies spending on digital ads, Twitter was nowhere to be seen. But Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, and Amazon made the top of the list.
- And with directories down 19%, it's safe to say that this whole internet thing is not a fad.
EP.58
February 22, 2019
Even more Google My Business innovation
In this week's Marketing O'Clock, Greg and Jess talked about even more Google My Business innovation, covered the shocking news that digital is here to stay, and talked about phonebooks and who needs them anymore.
- Skip ahead to your favorite segments
- Digital Marketing News
- Must Read
- Lighting Round - Paid & Non Paid
- WTH
- Cool Tool
- Does Vertical Video Make a Difference? We Spent $6,000 on Tests to Find Out
- With Instagram heavily pushing video toward the vertical side, Buffer wanted to test if it actually made a difference on engagement.
- They looked at Facebook news feeds, Instagram feed and stories, Instagram news feed,
- After all is said and done Buffer stated, "If we were to boil down this research to one key point, it would be that businesses and brands must keep up with mobile-centric video trends if they want to succeed on social media in 2019."
- In conclusion, social media marketing is a major tool to take advantage of in this day and age. And video is even more important to utilize. No matter if it's a high budget film or a video you shot on your phone, video brings in engagement like nothing else.
- Twitter opens applications for its ‘prototype’ program, first tests to focus on fixing conversations
- Amazon Moments’ tool gives brands new way to build, deliver loyalty campaigns
- HubSpot Integrates LinkedIn Ads into Professional and Enterprise Tiers of Marketing Hub
- Product card buttons pop up on desktop search
- Warning: twitter thread coming 🙂 There's some interesting info here for SEOs...
- Improvements to your search term reporting
- Apple buys the voice tech startup behind Hello Barbie
- Google Assistant Actions Total 4,253 in January 2019, Up 2.5x in Past Year but 7.5% the Total Number Alexa Skills in U.S.
- Making our strikes system clear and consistent
- Google: Tagging Internal Links With UTM Tracking Parameters Send Mixed Signals
- Digital Advertising Revenues Rise to $26.2 Billion in Q3 2018, Up 22% Year-Over-Year, According to IAB
- Updates to mobile page speed score on the Landing Pages tab
- Walmart’s US e-commerce sales up 43% in Q4, thanks to growing online grocery business
- Easily find predefined reports for the dataset you’re viewing
Read the Full Show:
Jess & Greg: [00:00:00] On this week's episode of marketing o'clock; Jess talked about even more Google My Business innovation. Greg covered the shocking news that digital is here to stay. Jess and I talked about phonebooks and who needs them anymore. And Greg finally took a stand for physically going into a store. All on today's show.
Greg: [00:00:36] Hey there. I'm Greg Finn.
Jess: [00:00:37] And I'm Jess Budde.
Greg: [00:00:38] And it is officially Marketing O'Clock here on February 22nd 2019. Remember you can catch our famous Friday news shows each and every Friday morning.
Jess: [00:00:49] Follow along with us in our show notes. Just head over to Marketing O'Clock dot com for all the links from today's articles.
Greg: [00:00:54] And please subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. Our first story is from Eric Enge and our friends over at Stone Temple who have teamed up with Whomp mobile and had the article "Does AMP improve rankings engagement and conversion." And they put together a study that took a look at AMP and the effect that it's had on the search results that companies had 30 days before and 30 days after. And we've seen a lot of sort of negative AMP stories recently.
Jess: [00:01:27] Many.
Greg: [00:01:27] And the results of this survey were overwhelmingly on the positive side. There wasn't anything that I would say is like completely conclusive and it was a smaller sample size but one of the main points was that 22 of the 26 websites experienced organic search gains on mobile after AMP was installed which is great right. I think that that's cool. So, the one issue with this is this is again it's only for search traffic and many of the articles we've seen before are that were a little critical on AMP, had these AMP traffic not converting well. So you know that's the give and take is if you have a lesser AMP experience that's not converting who really cares if you're getting more search. But this was a good survey that was done and it shows that you know having that little lightning bolt having something that people know is going to be super quick and speedy will can actually help to boost search rankings.
Jess: [00:02:28] That is good to know and for those of you that don't do math because I'm the statistician here that is most of the sites that were so surveyed saw an increase.
Greg: [00:02:36] Breaking news. Breaking news.
Greg: [00:02:36] And again the way it's cool. Go check it out in our show notes and he created what he called the search visibility score to try to measure this because there's just so many different different factors that go into it. And again 23 out of the 26 domains in the article saw an increase in the score and you can get the entire methodology and all the stats so that you can decide for yourself. But don't just use this as the reason to do AMP make sure it works for you make sure you're getting business to your business.
Jess: [00:03:06] I like that. Wise words Greg. This next story comes to us from local search forum dot com and the headline reads "Google posts showing in the local finder." Yes someone spotted content from a Google My Business post as part of the overall listing in the local search results. It was pulled in right underneath the business hours and had a little like blue icon with an exclamation point kind of calling it out. There's a screenshot in the article so you can see exactly what that looked like. It appears though that it's just a test because a lot of people weren't, they tried to replicate it and weren't able to. But test or not, it adds something visually to the listing. It's kind of like when we see you know rich results get pulled in and regular organic, this could definitely be something. It's too early to tell but it might help improve click through rate on businesses that have post versus other businesses that don't. So just something to keep an eye on because if this is going to become a thing it's just another reason we talk about this all the time but keep pushing your social content out to your Google my business profile as well.
Greg: [00:04:04] Yeah I know that Joy Hawkins had found this and she finds everything but many people really be able to replicate this. I couldn't myself but it does seem to be a test not like a glitch or anything like that. Nobody can know these things. But that makes a ton of sense. We've been yammering nonstop on the show about about what is happening with my business. Google's My Business product and we're saying hey these posts, there's a reason. And now it's showing up in more and more places having that content is going to be something that other people might not take the time to do. And if it now shows up here in the local finder that's something. That's gonna be really positive. So you know that's great. Now you can even follow companies on Google Maps like that's a thing. That's a real thing. The sad thing is, this might actually be Google's best social network.
Jess: [00:04:50] Is the Google my business stuff? I know they're doing a really good job. But yeah, don't ignore this people you don't want to be the one guy that isn't posting when all your competitors are.
Greg: [00:05:05] Alright, and next up from eMarketer, The article is, "U.S. digital ad spending will surpass traditional in 2019." I was so surprised that it didn't in 2018.
Jess: [00:05:18] I mean it got close. Right? We're closing in. Closing in on the gap.
Greg: [00:05:22] Yeah. Well here in 2019 digital spans are going to gonna usurp the traditional spends and additionally, there is going to be two thirds of this is gonna be, well I guess, we're kind of at that point right now where we're passing and by 2023 we're gonna be at two thirds of all spends are gonna be digital.
Jess: [00:05:45] That's crazy.
Greg: [00:05:47] I've gonna newsflash again. This digital thing; not a fad. Not a not a fad.
Jess: [00:05:52] And it shouldn't be. I mean why would it this shouldn't come as a surprise to us right? Cause why wouldn't you spend more money in something that you can track meticulously and then refine based on that data. I mean long live digital.
Greg: [00:06:05] Yes. And within this article from eMarketer they talked about the fact that mobile is still dominating the digital spend too. So more than two thirds of digital ad spending or eighty seven billion dollars this year is gonna be on the mobile side. I've got another newsflash. Mobile thing; not a fad.
Jess: [00:06:25] You blew my mind. I wasn't ready for that.
Greg: [00:06:28] There was a few other things that I thought were really interesting here in this in this as well where Amazon had more than 50 percent growth in their revenue that they've created and kind of taken a little chunk out of Google and Facebook. So that I thought was interesting. Do you know what number five was.
Jess: [00:06:46] No.
Greg: [00:06:47] On the digital side?
Jess: [00:06:48] School me.
Greg: [00:06:49] So first was was Google then Facebook then how do I not know this? I don't have it up in front of me. So it's Google and Facebook then Microsoft.
Jess: [00:07:02] Makes sense.
Greg: [00:07:03] But number five was Verizon.
Jess: [00:07:05] Like the phone company.?
Greg: [00:07:08] Yea, the phone company. And like so Verizon was in that. Somebody not on the list in the top five? Twitter.
Jess: [00:07:13] Oh! Well.
Greg: [00:07:15] So that is crazy that that number two is Facebook and they're continuing to to drive to drive ad dollars. But Twitter just is nowhere to be found and so far down it's below Verizon.
Jess: [00:07:29] I mean but we've been complaining a lot on the show I feel about the Twitter ads interface so maybe if they improve that they could beat Verizon right?
Greg: [00:07:36] For good reason we've been complaining. But again that's number one is Google, number two is Facebook, number three is Amazon, number four is Microsoft, and number five is Amazon. So another thing that I just brought some gave me some joy in this was that they took a look at some of the bigger drops out there and the biggest drop, directories down 19 percent.
Jess: [00:07:59] Those should be down 100 percent. I mean it's 2019.
Greg: [00:08:00] Preach It. Yeah I despise it when those unmarked vans come up and like throw like a directory in your drive way like I don't want this you know how many trees died for this? Take your directory and go 19 percent off of here. I don't need this so anyway.
Jess: [00:08:16] Poor talking phonebook.
Greg: [00:08:16] Yes we should make that a law. Get rid of that thing.
Jess: [00:08:19] Get rid of the phonebook or the directory. That's all I know. People don't have landlines.
Greg: [00:08:23] All Of it. No. We have the Internet.
Jess: [00:08:25] We do?
Greg: [00:08:26] Yea mobile. It's not a fad.
Jess: [00:08:27] I thought, oh my God. Blowing my mind.
Greg: [00:08:30] Alright and that brings us to this week's lightning round. Alright first up Twitter has opened applications for its prototype program. This is the program that is trying to fix the conversations. And you can go click through our show notes. There's three questions. It's really simple. There's radio buttons you need to do and then you're in and you are applied. Did you apply?
Jess: [00:08:54] I did not apply.
Greg: [00:08:54] I applied.
Jess: [00:08:54] You did?
Greg: [00:08:55] Yes, because I didn't think there's a problem with Twitter conversations. Then I watch that that Kara Jack with Kara from recode and Jack the founder of Twitter try and have a conversation and you couldn't follow any of it. It was a heck show. So I was like let's see if we can fix the conversations here.
Jess: [00:09:12] Well that's good of you to try and improve.
Greg: [00:09:13] Yeah. Having the like public forum things is really tough. With Twitter. So I take everything I said back. I was wrong.
Jess: [00:09:21] OK. You heard it first you here kids. Next up, Amazon moments tool gives brands a new way to build and deliver loyalty campaigns. This is actually pretty cool. Read the full article for all the details but Amazon is offering an API that integrates with Web sites and apps so that brands can offer rewards to users that complete certain actions. So it's like a loyalty program basically. And it's super easy to set up for the business itself. Amazon does most of the work. They track everything you know keep track of the points the prize redemption and the shipping on the rewards themselves. So marketers if you're interested you can set this up with just a tiny bit of developer help but it's totally free. So that's super cool that even cooler thing about it is all of the payments are done on a CPA basis and it's really more like a PPA because you're only paying so it's cost per action but you're really paying only when the user completes the desired action which is nice. We're seeing a lot more of that in the world the digital world.
Greg: [00:10:21] Yes absolutely. And for more pay for conversion talk we've got something coming your way on Tuesday of next week. All right. And speaking of Amazon, hey I heard there's more Amazon advertising coming up on that last segment I bumbled through in 2019.
Jess: [00:10:36] In 2019 you think it's going to be big?
Greg: [00:10:38] Yes. Next up, a Google Doc has rekindled the myth of click through rates. And last night there was a big ruckus about click through rate and is at a core ranking factor because a it was in the machine learning documentation in the cloud speech to text API under the data logging section. There was a statement that said for example when you click on a link in Google search Google considers your click when ranking that search result in future queries. And everybody that was these core click through rate folks were like look at this. Look at this. And everybody else was like well Google said this isn't a core factor. If you're personalized this may have some sort of impact on you. Nobody knows stop talking about this is basically what everybody in the community is saying. But you know there's some people talking about this. So in the end is click through rate used as a core ranking factor? We don't know and nobody knows. And I'm done with us. So onto the next one. There's no answers.
Jess: [00:11:36] There's no way if there is we'll report on it. How's that?
Greg: [00:11:38] Great.
Jess: [00:11:38] Perfect. Next up product card buttons pop up on desktop search. So according to Search Engine Land, Google has added buttons to the card style PLA's. That's a product listing ads on the right rail of desktop web search results. So these buttons are as follows details reviews and stores and when you click on one it opens up an overlay over the search results and shows you either the details the reviews or the stories where you can get the product. So this is great for giving more information to users to help empower their purchase. But it could absolutely change user behavior and your general performance of your ad so if you're running these pay attention see if this change has any impact for you.
Greg: [00:12:17] All right. I can hardly wait for those to come out. Next up is a tweet thread from our friend of the show Glenn Gabe and he had some information that he added on from the digital marketing side from a paper that Google put out on how they fight disinformation. And he pulled out a couple things that might be helpful to any of you organic search marketers. And he said that well pulled out a couple things that first was when are algorithms detected that a user's query relates to YMYL or your money your life topic. You'll give more weight to our ranking systems to factors like authoritativness expertise and trustworthiness. Spent a whole lot of YMYL and eat talk going on and again this was I was talking about the fact of it's an important thing when finding disinformation and then also talk about page rank and that was included in the google document and Klein had said yep I know this is one of the most scalable ways to tinker with trust. So check out that Twitter thread he has some really good insight that is on the marketing spin and you can also from I think it's the first tweet of his you can hop right in and see that full article from Google. And just a side note, I hate this information it's so ridiculous that we have to report on this and that it's a thing. It's just crazy.
Jess: [00:13:35] Mobile is not a fad. And down with disinformation. Theme of today's episode.
Greg: [00:13:39] Yes. Jess Budde 2020.
Jess: [00:13:43] Thank you. All Right. This is direct from Microsoft. They are bringing you improvements to your search term reporting Bing Ads has expanded search terms management capabilities to include shopping campaigns. So that's nice and they have also updated their online interface. The Bing Ads interface to include a search terms button which it makes things much easier to find if you're looking at the queries that people typed in to have your ads show up the old way if you don't remember it had like a dropdown and it was kind of cryptic and you had to go details and select your keywords to look at it. So I'm all about this Bing thank you for making life easier when big fat Yay to them. This week.
Greg: [00:14:20] All right. Next up the title tells it all from voice dot A.I. that "Google assistant actions total four thousand two hundred and fifty three in January up 2.5 in the past year but still seven point five the number of Alexa scales in the US."
Jess: [00:14:37] That's a very specific number. I like that they didn't round that.
Greg: [00:14:40] Yeah and the title is way too much.
Jess: [00:14:45] You don't need to read the article.
Greg: [00:14:46] Like who just listened to what I said? The moral of the story is people are going at more than double the rate with the assistant actions for Google. But the big thing is there's a fraction of assistant actions compared to Alexa skills. So again that is something that is a trend it doesn't mean like Hey alexis going to be this big winner there's probably gonna be a few but right now a lot of times there's trends you look at and there's sort of like when there's smoke there's fire. And right now people are innovating more according to this article. What does it. Ninety two point five percent more with Alexa than they are with Google assistant. So again just something to keep an eye on make sure that all these platforms that you're investing in are actually being worked upon.
Jess: [00:15:30] Perfect. Well said. Next up making our strike system clear and consistent. This comes from YouTube's creators blog. And according to the article itself 98 percent of people can tune me out for a minute here cause this only applies to folks that break community guidelines.
Greg: [00:15:46] Okay so those people that tuned out on that awful headline that I just had you could start tuning out again here.
Jess: [00:15:52] Just keep keep it out. We'll tell you when to come back come back after this story. So if you're a part of that 2 percent what you can expect when you violate rules when you get in trouble first time offenders will get a warning on their channel but not an actual strike or penalty other than having the content in question being removed and getting that warning. So you're aware after that all strikes will carry the same penalty whether it's a problem with your video description the title or some other element or the video itself that didn't used to be the way. So everything carries the same weight these days. And YouTube is touting clearer notifications if and when you violate their policy. So again if you're one of the 2 percent there's a lot more detail on the blog post you can read it. But the rest of you that are out there doing great things it's time to start listening again. And don't worry about YouTube.
Greg: [00:16:37] OK. Let's get into a much better headline here. Google tagging internal links with UTM tracking parameters send mixed signals. Oh wait I was wrong. This is from Berry over at search engine roundtable and in a web master hangout on YouTube which has moved off of Google Plus since the last one I believe. John and Google had talked about the fact that you don't try to put UTM parameters on internal links it makes things messy. I hate it when clients or people do that. It's like we need to track it. This doesn't make any sense like there's other options out there. So don't try to track things internally by putting a bunch of parameters on there.
Jess: [00:17:17] And if you are doing that think about why. Right? Because there's other solutions to your point just go in to tag manager and set up some events on things. Yeah. Wild times.
Greg: [00:17:26] Agree. OK. And then updates to mobile page speed score on the landing pages tab. So with Google ads there was a mobile page speed score that launched in July and you can now see it on the landing pages tab. So it should be a little bit easier. It's on a 10 point scale with 1 being very slow and 10 being extremely fast. So check that out you can now see it on the landing pages tab in Google ads.
Jess: [00:17:53] Awesome. Wal-Mart's U.S. e-commerce sales are up 43 percent in Q4 of 2018 thanks to their growing online grocery business. These headlines are a mouthful this week. This comes from Tech Crunch and that's a really significant uptick. I would say so. I mean the headline says it all so let's just pause for a second here and appreciate the phrase online grocery business. I mean Greg you've been working with the internet for a long time and you know that it's an incredible thing. Did you ever think that grocery shopping would go online?
Greg: [00:18:20] I Mean yeah. I think everything's going to be done online. I think digital is a fad. Like all these directory folks dropping things off in my driveway.
Jess: [00:18:31] You're absolutely right. So this was Wal-Mart's answer to things like insta cart Amazon pantry things like that and it's working quite well for them. So are you using any of these newfangled services?
Greg: [00:18:39] I will not. This is where Grandpa Greg comes out and I think the store is like I don't know I have that affinity towards going and working to get your own things.
Jess: [00:18:55] That's amazing usually you and I are on the opposite page where I'm all about the brick and mortar and you're like no put it online and this is like the first time I've ever seen you flip.
Greg: [00:19:01] You know it's like you we're so removed from like every piece of our food and everything we do and it's all just it's like make it put some little hurdle in front of me getting my food you know I know what I'm out there with this like a bow and arrow taking something down for our meal but.
Jess: [00:19:16] I'd like to see that.
Greg: [00:19:17] At least go to the store or something there's gotta be some kind of friction there for me. All right. Or I just don't feel like I'm doing anything. But that's just me I'm a crazy person.
Jess: [00:19:26] That's valid I like having my groceries delivered but to each their own.
Greg: [00:19:30] Alright, next up easily find predefined reports for the data set your viewing and this comes from the Google ads support section of the site. And there were predefined reports and every time you had to reload all your information in you now can pull a predefined report for the information you're looking at in Google ads. Super cool. Not really that much of a actual feature. It's just you can get the information you're looking at and one of those predefined reports instantly.
Jess: [00:19:56] That's nice.
Greg: [00:19:57] Just like your groceries. OK. Next up google search console is sending alerts for big ranking or traffic drops. This is from Barry again over search engine land and spotted in the wild by Vance Moore the third or Vance Moore III. Also can't we have a better way of showing that somehow like III?
Jess: [00:20:17] They should just write out the third in words.
Greg: [00:20:20] Maybe use an eye emoji. And you have three eyes or something.
Jess: [00:20:24] So what's a junior like a winking face?
Greg: [00:20:26] I don't know.
Jess: [00:20:27] I'm gonna go with yes.
Greg: [00:20:27] Maybe do half or no juniors two. I don't know. Nobody knows.
Jess: [00:20:32] But Junior is different than the second. We could have a whole entire show on that.
Greg: [00:20:36] Yes. Anyway Vance Moore III found a report that came from Google when there was not just a traffic drop but a ranking drop from search console. So that's cool. Like if something really important happens. That's a nice feature to get. You get an e-mail saying hey something's hecked up over on your site. Go check it out. So. All right. Next up from this morning again things that we just hate reporting on. There's fallout from YouTube advertisers. AT&T Hasbro epic games there's a long list now of folks that are pulling their YouTube ads due to some softcore pedophilia concerns. I tried to figure out what these concerns were. I just can't take it. It's gross. It's basically I dunno. There's some unsavory stuff out there. So if you are somebody that is really wants your ads on specific crafted messages you want to make sure you're as far away as you can be from any controversy. Maybe wait till some of this stuff gets gets cleaned up on YouTube and pause your ads. If that is the most significance to you it didn't seem like it's anything illegal it's just super creepy and gross. So if you want to go check it out you can go through that CNBC link on our site and then somehow you're gonna have to figure it out.
Jess: [00:21:54] Those those are those people fall the 2 percent right that we were referring to before so you should give yourselves a strike.
Greg: [00:21:58] I hope it's not 2 percent.
Jess: [00:22:02] Yeah they should be giving themselves a strike don't wait for YouTube. Strike Yourself.
Greg: [00:22:08] All right, next up in our last article in a lightning round is from HubSpot HubSpot integrates Linkedin ads into professional and enterprise tiers a marketing hub. And hey remember back in the well is it like three months ago Hubspot's like hey ads work now you can use ads.
Jess: [00:22:23] Oh yea that's right that was big news.
Greg: [00:22:25] So I guess Linkedin ads work now cause Hubspot used it. So yea is you use the professional era enterprise tiers you can now see LinkedIn ads. It took them till to 2019 but hey Linkedin ads now work.
Jess: [00:22:36] Ads are not a fad either then.
Greg: [00:22:38] No not a fad.
Jess: [00:22:39] A lot of mainstays in this digital world.
Greg: [00:22:41] Wow. What A day. All right. That brings us to this week's W T H. W T H. All right first. This is from The Verge. And it's called this person does not exist dot com uses AI to generate endless fake faces and this has got a little bit of a marketing twinge do it because Philip W. a software over it a software engineer over at Uber used research to figure out how to create a stream of fake portraits. All these people that don't exist. But when you go to the site everything looks like it exists.
Jess: [00:23:15] It's crazy.
Greg: [00:23:15] It is really creepy and you just go to agin this person does not exist dot com and you see a picture of a creepy face just showing up. And you're like I think I've seen this person and they're not real. And then sometimes like you can see like it's there's like a man chin or something and then like a very different head. And it's just a weird weird weird thing.
Jess: [00:23:36] There's definitely some visual cues and some of them that you're like OK this isn't real but I mean I sent you one the other day I was like I've seen this woman before and there's like a a like twinge of familiarity in every single face but there's one that I saw that had two people in it and the person that doesn't exist you know was like the feature the main person in the image and then they had a person like they were kind of like standing with who I assume is fake too but they didn't even try. It was just like a face layered on top of a face. This guy had two sets of eyes. It's really really fun to just look at. So I don't know it's the weirdest thing ever and I kind of love it but it is creepy.
Greg: [00:24:11] Yeah. And so it's a W. had said that each time you refresh the site the network will generate a new facial image from scratch and then he went on to talk about the fact that most people do not understand how good AI will be at synthesizing images in the future. So how are we going to be reporting on this down the road. Probably the fact that there's deep fakes going on with people changing faces around there's political sabotage and there's more just unsavory content with people that didn't really do it. So great. That's what we have to look forward to.
Jess: [00:24:43] Can't wait.
Greg: [00:24:44] Perfect thank you.
Jess: [00:24:46] Yeah but for now it's just fun. So go to this person does not exist dot com and take a look.
Greg: [00:24:51] All right. And that brings us to this week's Cool Tool. Cool tool.
Jess: [00:24:56] This week's Cool Tool is speed monitor dot IO and helps you track the performance of your Web site. So it does what it does it does what it says it monitors the speed of your site. So it's pretty sweet. Again it's speed monitor dot IO. And they describe themselves perfectly on their site. So here goes. Well "speed monitor dot Io uses the Google page speed insights to check the performance of your Web site. We keep a historical log to track changes over time get notified when your page speed score drops." So that's the part that I think is the nicest because you can get the same information from page beaten sites but all you have to do is register you just give them your name an email address to notify you and your domain. And they will send you email alerts anything's wrong. So I signed up last night just a play with it. It's really really nice it breaks everything down for you spells out what each of the factors are that they're checking for. It gives you a little bit of explanation. So it's great for like screenshoting if you want to send something to clients that looks really nice. It's maybe a little bit easier to digest than some of the stuff in Google's tools. So if you don't feel like manually checking on your site speed all the time this is a great tool for you.
Greg: [00:25:59] Yeah. And now I think in the past quarter for our cool tool section alone we've had three site performance tools for you to check out. So you don't have any reason not to be able to track your performance now.
Jess: [00:26:12] Yes. And keep record of everything too.
Greg: [00:26:14] Absolutely.
Jess: [00:26:14] It's amazing.
Greg: [00:26:15] All right. That brings us to our Must read marketing article of the week an article so in-depth so detailed that we simply cannot cover in its entirety here on the show in this week's episode comes from Brian Peters over at Buffer and they put together this is how you write a headline folks by the way. "Does vertical video make a difference. We spent six thousand dollars on tests to find out.".
Jess: [00:26:36] Like that you didn't give away the punch line you just lead into it.
Greg: [00:26:40] And so what they did is they took a look at vertical versus square video. They took the different types of videos and tested it out on the Facebook News Feed the Instagram news feed within Instagram Stories and then they reported back on what that six thousand dollars did. They talked about and it was really interesting because some of the results differed and weren't what you thought would they take a look at what the overall cost per clicks were. The CPM is the CPV's which again they look at all these different things. The one network they didn't put in there. I mean because this doesn't have ads was student voices stories unlinked in it. You remember those. I I just I was thinking I'm like all these stories that and then I started thinking. How are student voices gone.
Jess: [00:27:21] They're probably not. I don't think anyones using it. They probably tried to study it really well. We don't have a sample size big enough to work with.
Greg: [00:27:27] So I just thought of that and it made me laugh. But anyway check it out it's over on buffer and there's a lot of really great takeaways on there and some of the things are differing than the others. So really cool. Check it out. Thank you Brian.
Jess: [00:27:42] And that does it for today's show.
Greg: [00:27:44] It is now officially not marketing o'clock.
Jess: [00:27:47] Remember you can catch everything from this show on marketingoclock.com. And please be sure to subscribe while you're there so you don't miss a single episode.
[00:27:53] And we will see you next week. Thanks for listening to marketing the clock. Is today's show was a value to you. Please subscribe leave a review or share with a colleague. If you are looking for more information on today's topics head over to marketing Clark com for links to all the articles that we covered.
Greg: [00:28:15] Welcome to this week's shooting the heck. Where after our famous Friday new shows we don't talk about marketing anymore.
Jess: [00:28:20] We just shoot the heck.
Greg: [00:28:22] And this week I've got kind of gross one. I have two four year old twins and they do and then say a lot of really gross stuff. So I've got four different gross things that they've said and I want you to rank them on a gross scale. So 10 being the grossest. One being not that gross. OK.
Jess: [00:28:44] I'm excited because I'm not very easily grossed out but kids are a whole other level.
Greg: [00:28:49] Yeah. And again they do a lot of actually gross stuff these are just kind of funny gross things. All right. So first making them dinner the boy sitting at the plate at the table. I look over there something on his plate and he has both of his socks off of his feet on to his plate and says who likes sock food. I do.
Jess: [00:29:10] That's it. Is that the thing that's gross?
Greg: [00:29:12] Yes.
Jess: [00:29:12] That's gross. I give that a one.
Greg: [00:29:14] Okay good. This is me just testing your scale.
Jess: [00:29:17] Okay. Yeah. No no no. That's very mild. I remember it. Do you know when you take that or at least when you were a kid you would take your socks off there would be like lint between your toes. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Greg: [00:29:23] Yes I do I just I'm cringing at what's coming next.
Jess: [00:29:27] My mom used to call it sock cheese so sock food is nothing.
Greg: [00:29:32] Okay well I give that about a five on the gross scale. Sock cheese.
Jess: [00:29:35] It's really gross. Worse than it actually is.
Greg: [00:29:38] Yes. All right. So next up we're going into establishment to eat eat dinner and it's like one of those where there's like you know it's like a hamburger joint or something like that. And so we get in there and all of a sudden both my kids get really excited and they're looking under the table and the girl goes, "Oh look are already fries here!"
Jess: [00:30:06] That's not gross. Unless they eat those.That's adorable and also like clean up your restaurant. What are these people doing. Oh that's great. That made me smile. I give that a just because of the possibility I think she probably would have eaten them if you'd let her. I'ma give that a three.
Greg: [00:30:25] Okay okay. Here right here. Here we go. All right. So then we're eating dinner one night. And the girl full of sass. Right.
Jess: [00:30:32] Of course she's the girl.
Greg: [00:30:33] The boys eating pizza. And he likes blue cheese on his pizza he calls it Bleuch.
Jess: [00:30:38] I give that a 10. That's disgusting.
Greg: [00:30:42] I'm not even there yet. And So is eating this pizza. And he's got blue cheese all over one side of his face because he's a maniac and he and he looks like two face with like blue cheese all over the side of his face.
Jess: [00:30:54] I'm going to throw up with this story.
Greg: [00:30:57] And so the girl goes to him, "You have so much blue cheese in your face, I can't even look at you right now."
Jess: [00:31:09] That is a woman after my own heart phrase.
Greg: [00:31:13] Just the situation in general is OK.
Jess: [00:31:15] The situation in general is gonna get an eight for me just because that's and I know kids are messy but blue cheese. Who want. That's not good for your skin. None of it. Okay. None of it. Eight.
Greg: [00:31:26] And so this was. Here is the last part is his clap back to her oh so this was before they were about to go for a nap and he looks right back at her and says. "It's OK. I'll just sleep on the other side of my face."
Jess: [00:31:48] He's not going to clean up? He's just gonna sleep on the other side. Oh that's really gross because you know he's gonna roll over while he's sleeping and smear it all on the pillow. That's an 11 situation that's like a five alarm fire or whatever the phrase.
Greg: [00:32:07] All right this worked better than I thought and we'll see you next week.
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