The Daily Carnage

The savvy marketer's hub for industry news, insights, resources, and culture.

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ChatGPT’s Ranking Secrets

How it picks sources.

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How to Get People to Click Naturally (Skip the Click Bait)

AUGUST 3, 2022

In yesterday’s poll, 70% of you said that you fall for click bait.

That’s because it’s purposefully tempting! But intentionally overexaggerated headlines are not typically advised for content. You may just end up with really disappointed readers. There are levels to it, but for the most part the idea of “click bait” can be a misleading title.

Instead, here are some tips for making clickable content that isn’t a fake out:

Meet Expectations: And then possibly exceed them! Acquiring organic clicks is less about getting your readers to click something and more about having them stick around, right? By creating content that is giving people what they want without overpromising, you build audience trust. Plus, high-quality content means sharable content.
Do Your Research: You’re not going to become successful by tricking people into clicking on your links. Don’t act on trendy terms alone. If you want to be successful, you have to create well-researched content that genuinely interests people. That means understanding your audience and topics really well.
Provide Value: As a part of your research, the top priority is understanding what provides the most value to your audience. The goal is to become your audience’s new favorite resource. Ensure that your content is keyword-rich but overall provides thoughtful insights or tools.

Check out the full post by Zero Gravity Marketing for more reasons to avoid click bait (hint, hint, it could hurt your SEO). Need help writing attention-grabbing headlines that also do some research for you? Check out today’s tool down below!

The FTC’s Guides for Using Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising

AUGUST 2, 2022

Did you know there is a right and wrong way to use UGC according to the FTC? Granted, things are still a little fuzzy since it updated the terms this past May. The commission treats endorsements and testimonials the same way. While these aren’t crazy cases that could get you fined millions, you could still get flagged or receive small fines.

To avoid any of that, we wanted to break down the essentials of FTC endorsements and testimonials for marketers to know.

Watch your freebies. If a consumer receives a free product as part of a marketing program and the consumer has the option of writing a review, the consumer’s review would be classified as an endorsement but treated like a partnership that required disclosure.
Watch your UGC. If you are using multiple instances of consumer testimonials, be sure to be backing any over exaggerating claims. Consumer endorsements should be disclosed in some cases (especially on video using disclaimers like “actual customers”).
Watch your partnerships. Advertisers and endorsers (read: influencers and creators) are subject to liability for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements. So be sure to work with experienced partners that know when an ad or review steps into false advertising territory.
Watch your credentials. We’ve all heard some disclaimer terms like “clinically proven” or “backed by health professionals.” Well, be sure that the endorser’s qualifications do in fact give the endorser the expertise to make any claims.
Watch your language. This is a small note for the international advertisers out there, but whatever language your ad is in, your disclosure must be in the same language.

It’s not the most exciting read, but the full guides, details, and even marketing examples can be found on Title 16 CFR pt 255 on the FTC’s website.

12 Ways to Beat Facebook Ad Fatigue

AUGUST 1, 2022

If you are serving an ad too often to your target audience, they will be tired of seeing the same ads over and over again. That’s called ad fatigue. High ad fatigue causes Facebook to severely limit your ad’s deliverability. Luckily, there are ways to avoid it.

Ways to beat ad fatigue:

Automatically pause ads with high frequency: Sometimes it’s just about taking a little break. What’s considered a “healthy frequency”? For most marketers ideal ad frequency is something between 1.01 and 2.99. When ads reach a higher frequency, you want to turn these ads off. Go to your “Automated Rules” and create a rule.
Create new audiences and ads: Pausing is great, but freshening up content is a more active approach. Update your ad creative and audiences so you are serving new looks for campaign messaging.
Automatically decrease budgets for high-frequency ads: Pausing high frequency ads will stop them from ever being served again, but what if it was a high converting ad? If your ad sets are being served to the same people too often, you can decrease their bid/budget to decrease frequency.
Exclude audiences that already engaged with you: If someone engaged with your ad or brand, it’s time to show them something new as they are less likely to interact with the exact same ad. Look to strategy #2 or create a different retargeting ad. But first, you need to separate that engaged audience.
Limit ad deliverability with a schedule (dayparting): Running ads only on certain days and at certain times is great, but a manual and strategic feature. Dayparting, or running ads on a schedule, will run your ads during the best times and days of the week instead of 24/7. This will cut down less useful impressions and decrease ad fatigue.
Use the reach campaign objective: Reach campaigns are usually used to more thoroughly reach larger audiences. The default setting is no more than two impressions every seven days, but you’re able to customize the frequency cap over a time period. The downside is this campaign type can’t be optimized for conversions well.

Check out the other 6 ways to avoid fatigue on the full post by Revealbot.

4 Ways to Disclose Advertising Content

JULY 31, 2022

Ad and affiliate marketing transparency is important to users. They want to know if biased content is in their feeds. While the industry as a whole has been leaving the responsibility of disclosure up to the influencer who is sharing content, brands should still be aware of the best ways to disclose a partnership or UGC turned into an ad.

Here are four easy ways to keep it real with your audience in a way that leaves your ads intact, but with another layer of authenticity:

Use a hashtag: #Ad #PaidPromotion #Sponsored #Partnership are some examples. It’s not hard, but it’s also not the prettiest method.
Use the caption: Keep it short, sweet, and simple. Just write within the post that it’s part of a paid partnership or relationship between the influencer and the brand.
Use a voice: Sometimes you can just say it. Verbal disclosure in video content is still disclosure so long as it’s clear. Best practice is to include the disclosure in written form, especially if you don’t have closed captioning.
Use the platform: Instagram and Facebook provide easy labeling for paid post tagging. Check out your chosen platform’s policies and features to see how you can build in disclosure to your ads.

Regulations can be tough to navigate, so sometimes it’s best to err on the side of caution when it comes to partnered content. Check out the full post of disclosure advice and more tips on the Ad Standards blog post.

10 Top Link-Building Services to Improve Your SEO (+ 10 Places to Use Them)

JULY 27, 2022

Link building is a labor of love that can pay off for more organic traffic through high search engine rankings. Here are some experts in link building to help you out! But then what? We’ve also got you covered with some of the best link-building strategies if you want to do it yourself, as well.

10 best link-building services:

OutreachZ.com
RankZ.co
Page One Power
uSERP
Newswire
From The Future
Siege Media
Whitespark
The Upper Ranks
FATJOE

10 best link-building places:

Resource pages
Guest posting
High DA websites
Infographics
Broken link building
Ask content scrapers to link back to you
Press releases
Q&A websites
YouTube
Blog commenting

Check out the full post by Search Engine Land for in-depth service reviews, link types, and bonus strategies!

How Content “Freshness” Applies to Your Google Rankings

JULY 26, 2022

We’re taking it back to 2017. Google’s Freshness Update that year included a significant algorithm update that introduced time as a relevance indicator. It caused some confusion for marketers, many of whom misunderstood the update to prioritize recent publication dates in raking results.

3 types of queries that “Freshness” algorithms apply to:

Recent events
Regularly recurring events
Frequently updated topics

Freshness vs. Frequency:

With that third query in mind, Google doesn’t directly care how frequently you post or if you keep changing the date of a post. That matters more for search parameters from a user directly. Google cares about the relevancy of that topic.

So frequency is the rate at which you publish content, while freshness is directed towards the date a page was originally published. Google understands people want to know the latest trends, not outdated ones.

The Freshness Ranking Combination

So in an attempt to match the results to fit the user’s intent, they will take into account:

the original publishing date + the possibly changed date
“Significant” content changes

If you do not have both factors on a page, Google may skip over it in SERPs.

Wanna see direct examples of this at work? Check out the full Search Engine Journal post for details and direct sources from Google.

Top 5 Internal Site Search Practices

JULY 25, 2022

Is your site searchable? That can be a great thing for users, SEO, and site behavior data. This is especially true for eCommerce sites, because who doesn’t love to window shop online nowadays? 🙋

But not all site search features are created equally. When you are setting up your internal site search, or requesting it from developers, you better have the best practices in mind for UX and your own analytics.

Here are five best practices to implement on your internal site search:

Prioritize Attractiveness over Relevance: Relvancy is just one factor for a good UX in search. A balanced combination of relevance, attractiveness, and personalized attractiveness ensures that customers get what they actually want.
Personalize Site Search Results for Individuals: This is especially true for stores. Once you have enough data about a specific user’s preferences, you can begin ranking products specifically for that user to give you the best chance of converting them.
Effective and Transparent AI Tools: If you are using AI to manage your search capabilities, you may run into a lot of “zero results” pages. When choosing these tools, be sure they are adaptable to overlapping and synonymous terms as well as hands-on adjustments when needed.
Enable Robust Merchant Tooling: Ever heard the term “searchandising” before? This is where your search tools can understand how to combine the most relevant results with your high-value products and offerings. This can include promoting newest arrivals or current campaign focuses.
Improve Autocomplete: We’re saving the best for last here. Autocomplete is your biggest UX helper for search. This includes strong AI capabilities to correct misspellings, rank words by importance in a string, and preview search results when applicable.

Check out the full post by Constructor.io for more tips on search functions and boosting eCommerce.

9 Marketing Channels + How to Use Them

JULY 24, 2022

We’ve all heard of marketing channels by now. We want to cover the most common channels to keep an eye on and how to use them for marketing.

Let’s start from the top with the top 9 marketing channels:

Content Marketing
Video Marketing
Social Media
SEO
SEM
Mobile Marketing
Email Marketing
Display Ads
Affiliate Marketing

How to choose the best marketing channels:

Marketing channels can be used in different combinations to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, increase sales, generate leads, or other goals depending on the business model. How do you find the right combination?

Define goals on a smaller scale. First, have your brand’s goals in mind. Then, define goals for each marketing channel you could be marketing on. That way you can fine-tune more effectively as you revisit channels.
Understand your audience. You’ll never reach your goals if your audience isn’t using a channel in the first place. Identify at least three marketing channels that your target audience prefers to use more frequently than others. Then study the channels used by your main competitors to see if that’s where your target audience is hiding.
Budget for long-term. Bidding on keywords and buying social ads can feel like real-time budgeting. You must think about big-picture video production, content writing, and tool investments. Check out today’s Tool for content help!
Run a marketing campaign. Test out all of your channels with a full-fledged campaign, not just branded tidbits in each. That way you can test consistent messaging on all channels to get a better idea of performance.
Analyze the results and repeat. Regularly test and optimize your campaigns. Repeat on channels where you see ROI, and retry on channels where you don’t see it yet.

Check out the full post by Awware to get tips for marketing on each channel.

5 Signs You Need to Hire a Marketing Agency

JULY 20, 2022

Spinning your wheels constantly and spending your budget wisley is hard to do. Is it time for a little outside perspective or experts on deck?

Here are some signs that it’s time to get agency assistance:

You don’t have enough time: Marketing takes up a lot of time and energy. Plus, things move so fast that right when you think you’ve gotten somewhere, algorithms and trends may have moved on without you. You may need an agency to help you hone in on the big picture and implement plans, while staying on top of changes and reporting.
You don’t have any leads: Marketing and sales are part of a “chicken and egg” cycle where you can’t have one without the other. Sales needs marketing for leads, and marketing needs sales to close leads. Otherwise, no one gets results. An agency can align your sales team with your marketing campaigns, supplying them with more effective leads.
You don’t have an in-house budget: Hiring an in-house, full-time, fully staffed marketing team can be very expensive. Not only does that include compensation and benefits, that includes their tech needs and a space to put them (if not fully remote). A strong marketing agency has your entire knowledgeable team on deck.
You don’t have the skill set: Maybe you’re an amazing brand manager but need help with design, or writing, or campaigns, or SEO rankings, etc. Supplement your skills with an agency’s specialities to build your brand.
You don’t have a plan: That is A-OK to say, in this crazy industry, that you don’t have a concrete plan. There are rarely set blueprints for anything in marketing anymore. Agencies can be your compass to get you started in the right direction or even take you from planning to execution.

So how many of these signs apply to you? Maybe it’s time to hire an agency for a boost! Check out the full post by The Talented Ladies Club for more details on the benefits of agency consulting.