Facebook: Have you tried turning it off and on again; Tuesday’s daily brief

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and what is content?

I’ve been chatting with someone on the marketing ops side of marketing a few times a month just to get an idea of how they think the upcoming cookieless world will affect things on their end. She was telling me about tagging and attribution in the many CRMs that she helps clients with and the conversation drifted to what happens in “the middle.”

Her work encompasses the beginning (planning campaigns and tagging) and the end (collecting attribution data and making decisions based on it). But she didn’t have a lot of insight into the middle. Her assumption was that all SEO and PPC were essentially just “content.”

We walked through the technical basics of SEO and PPC and she asked, “So does anyone not need content?” And it got me thinking about the definition of content. We just assume it means pages or posts on our sites, but content can also encompass Google My Business and social media posts, ad creative and landing pages, infographics and videos, and more. Content is what makes the web work. It goes beyond both SEO and PPC but is also at the core of what they are.

P.S. Love my musings? Join me for more at my SMX Next keynote. If you don’t, then you should still join for other people’s expert knowledge. :)

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Another Google algorithm update likely happened this weekend

“Many of the tracking tools are showing levels that we have not seen since a Google core update. Moz reported 101 degree weather, Advanced Web Ranking was at the top of its chart,… and the other tools are also super hot,” said Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable. 

The SEO community has only seen some chatter, however, but it was a big deal to some marketers: “USA traffic [is] still way off, down about 30% from the first two weeks of Sept and still dropping. USA has dropped so much that my UK traffic is now 2/3 of USA, for a population 6+X larger,” said one SEO. “Big movements across all topics and countries. The volatility is similar to a core update. It’s the update they started rolling out yesterday,” said another.

Why we care. If you saw big dips in USA traffic last week or over the weekend, it might be attributed to what’s going on algorithm-wise. Let your clients and stakeholders know what happened before they come to you asking about metrics anomalies. 

Facebook and Instagram outages could affect your social advertising metrics

Facebook and Instagram were down for over two hours yesterday. The outrage resulted in quite a few funny tweets, as Twitter was one of the only social media platforms still up at the time. The error message suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error. Those who used Facebook as a login verification for other apps also could not log in to those third-party systems. The outage isn’t the first for Facebook. The app and websites were down in March and July this year, too. 

Why we care. Make sure to mark the outage in your Analytics if you rely heavily on leads or traffic from social. The outage will have a heavy impact on both paid and organic social media campaigns, but fortunately only for a short period of one day.

Also read: What marketers can do next time a major social network (ahem, Facebook) goes down

Search Shorts: Keyword data trends in keyword planner, responsive video ad scripts, deep links with content and PR, and the socialization of GMB

Google is showing trending keyword data within Google keyword planner. “This is a small experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve our experience for our advertisers and users, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a Google Ads spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Hat tip to Arbab Usmani for sending us a screenshot.

Support for Responsive Video Ads in scripts. Reminder: Last week Google Ads launched support for responsive video ads in Google Ads scripts. If you were using the TrueView for action campaign type, you must update your code to use the new video ad type.

How to use content and PR to build deep links. Deep links can drastically improve organic performance in the long term, but they are hard to get and we can’t influence where publishers link to. Screaming Frog has a guide to work around those issues, though.

Google local search trends: Socialization. Google’s local platform — comprising Google My Business, Google Maps, and the local component of Google Search — has become, under our noses, a massive social network. Google has achieved this status not through traditional methods of connecting users to each other, but by allowing and encouraging users to share their experiences, questions, and opinions about local businesses in a variety of forms and at a massive scale. 

What We’re Reading: The podcast ad glossary: A whole slew of new jargon for advertisers

Sure you may know what a pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ad is in podcast advertising, but how about inventory source targeting or a baked-in ad? Podcasting is experiencing a serious boom, and with that comes all the different ways advertisers can reach those very targeted audiences of listeners.

SXM Media recently published a guide to podcast advertising lingo to clarify the new jargon that’s come along since podcasts have really taken off (especially in the ad world).

So a baked-in ad is “part of the actual podcast recording, meaning they live with that episode forever.” This is the opposite of a dynamically inserted ad which gives podcasters “the ability to insert ads, either client-provided, announcer-read, or host-read, at the time of download. This ensures that all ads are relevant to the time of year (we wouldn’t want any holiday ads in the peak of summer) and to the listener themselves.”

Oh, and inventory source targeting is “the ability to target the inventory of your favorite publishers at-scale, like Stitcher or Pandora.” Make sure to check out the guide to stay up to date on the latest podcabulary — there will be a pop quiz later.