Weekend Musings - 13
Thoughts on Google lead forms, State of SEO 2021, Connected TV in APAC, and Global Media Landscape 2021
45-year-old Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, husband and father of three young boys. He was previously at Wired as the editor in chief and responsible for instituting digital paywalls.
During his time at Wired, digital subscriptions increased almost 300% in the paywall's first year. His professional achievements are endless so it is better you check his Wikipedia page.
Nicholas is also popular in the long-distance circuit. He has documented his running journeys on his website. For me, his article on Wired where he shares his past, his relationship with his father and all the mental efforts he took to run his best marathon at 44 was enriching.
Earlier this year he entered the American record books. He raced 50K in 3:04:36 (just under 6:00 pace) to break the age 45–49 record previously held by ultramarathon legend Michael Wardian. Just take a moment and visualise the pace with an elevation of 640 feet. Check his Strava activity feed to grab more details about the run.
“I don’t think I ever had a moment in life where I imagined I could get an American Record. I wasn’t even the best runner in my high school, and I was the worst recruit on a college team I promptly failed off of. And though I, of course, know the 50k for men over 45 is a soft record (it’s a weird distance, and a weird age), I still can’t believe my name is on any chart right below Bill Rodgers and Bernard Lagat.”
He recently sat down with Chris Illuminati - podcast host of We Run This to talk about his record, the preparation he does, his love for running and how he finds time for running while being a father, CEO and a new pet parent.
He truly is an inspiration for runners like me who are still scraping the surface and trying hard to bring discipline.
Moving on to my weekend musings for this week:
1. How to drive high quality leads on Google
Acquiring new customers or donors is a lifelong challenge for any marketer. One of the reasons why marketers are chasing high quality leads on digital. Facebook is the king when it comes to lead generation - for its cost and reach.
Google originally announced its lead form extensions in 2019, but recently made updates to improve the mobile experience. Set up is easy and a great way to gain first-party data for remarketing but higher ad spend is a big con. According to the Search Engine Journal which recently published a complete guide about Google Ads Lead Forms, one must spend more than $50,000 over the lifetime of an ad account to qualify.
Google has also created a lead-generation advertising guide that can teach you how to drive high-quality leads on Google. This deck covers the foundational products you need, the tools that help make the process easier, and how to use them all together.
2. The State of SEO in 2021
The State of SEO 2021 report asked 2,830 SEO professionals, across the globe: How do you allocate your digital marketing budget? SEO professionals responded that Paid Media most likely gets “Most” of the digital marketing budget, while Content Marketing is more likely than other activities to get “All.”
According to the report: Keyword research (36.3%) and on-page factors (33.4%) were the activities SEO professionals spent most of their time on. Hence keyword ranking was the top-reported metric used for measuring SEO performance (43.9%), followed by page views/ sessions at 32.8%.
Definitely, Core Web Vitals is the most important emergent factor for the next few years. A quarter of SEO professionals consider structured data important. A quarter also thinks that E-A-T is the most important emergent factor. Voice Search is also in the top five.
3. What people see on Facebook or global hub of the plagiarised content
Facebook says that “Transparency is an important part of everything we do at Facebook.”
No comments!
Recently the social networking giant released the Widely Viewed Content Report Q2 2021. The report shares insights into what people see in their Facebook News Feed, the different content types that appear in their Feed and the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.
The report captures views of public content in News Feed, including recommended content, seen in the United States between April 1, 2021, and June 30, 2021.
According to the Facebook findings, a three-year-old Facebook post from Gaur Gopal Das was the most viewed Facebook post.
But Casey points It’s hard to come up with a good idea for a viral social media post. This is probably why most of Facebook’s most popular pages spent the last quarter stealing their ideas from elsewhere.
Take the No. 1 post in the report, a meme from the motivational speaker and author Gaur Gopal Das. It’s a jumble of letters and words underneath the message “First three words u see are your reality.” It was originally posted more than a year ago, but continues to rack up views: 80.6 million people have seen it so far.
But it wasn’t original to Das. The meme had been posted to Twitter two weeks earlier by the Ghanaian rapper M.anifest. (It may not have been original to M.anifest, either; the image he posted looks fairly distressed as if it had been copied and re-copied many times. His tweet is the earliest instance of the meme I could find using Google’s reverse image search, though.)
Facebook is still not a creator network, unlike YouTube. The video social network is the most shared domain on Facebook.
Additionally, Unicef and Gofundme are the other two domains occupying your newsfeed. Unicef’s COVID19 response in India is the top three link that has more than 62M content viewers. Obviously, COVID19 is the reason but as a nonprofit fundraiser, I couldn’t stop myself highlighting it.
4. Rise of Connected TV in APAC
According to a 2020 report by Innovid, connected TV (CTV) takes up 40% of global video impression share by the device. Across countries in APAC, almost two-thirds of the internet population are streaming or watching online TV on an average day.
Google says: a new generation of global viewers is now choosing to watch YouTube primarily on their CTV screens, with casting watch time for YouTube growing by more than 75% year-over-year (YoY).
“This makes CTV the fastest growing type of screen in 2020.4 Across APAC, this trend is picking up momentum, with 20 million people in Japan, 20 million in India, 25 million in Vietnam, and 8 million in Australia specifically watching YouTube on their CTVs.”
According to Google, CTV also presents an opportunity for brands to connect with a highly engaged audience.
“Research shows that viewers tend to spend more time in front of their CTV screens compared with streaming on mobile or desktop devices. They also have a larger appetite for long-form content, with viewers in countries like India watching videos on their CTVs that are up to 200% longer than those they watch on other devices.”
5. Broadcast TV/Video
Broadcast TV remains firmly ahead of streaming says The Global Media Landscape report 2021.”Broadcast TV viewers are more likely than online TV viewers to watch for more than 2 hours per day.”
The report also finds that YouTube takes the ascendancy as the most popular place to watch online videos in all regions, with the exception of North America, where Netflix leads. The below snapshot gives you an idea of where to hedge your bets when it comes to video advertising.
Google and Facebook family has been so far the preferred choices for advertisers. Ignite Visibility’s 2021 paid media study surveyed 200 marketers to find out - “Which platforms marketers will be spending their ad dollars in the next two years.” 66% on Facebook ads and 57% on YouTube ads. Overall the bulk of spending is on Facebook and Google family.
However, TV remains the most effective media channel for consumers to discover brands via advertising.
“TV ads do possess the advantage of being seen in a more positive light. Consumers are more likely to see TV ads as “entertaining” or “informative”, whereas social media and other online ads are more likely to be seen as “excessive” or “intrusive”, says GWI.
That’s all for now. I will see you soon and here is a thought that has stayed with me for a while:
“To Be or To Do”.
Peace and happiness,
PN.