Edition 14 - I work on the internet, Ma!
Time has gone faster then I thought. I had planned to write something out by Wednesday but its past that already. If you are new, welcome. If you were here before - you’ll notice the change in the title.
I keep seeing Substack newsletters on Twitter so I figured why not brush this old thing off and see if I can reboot it and create some kind of meaningful thing out of it. Even its just mostly me talking about marketing ‘stuff’.
A couple of things caught my eye this week on marketing twttr & linkedin:
A great thread on SEO & Page Load Times and how it effects SEO but to me its almost like A/B testing with 100 monthly visitors to a site. Page load & speed factors into SEO - no doubt. Google has said as much. But focusing on ‘scripts & load times’ without doing basic on/off page SEO + creating a helpful scheme/internal linking structure just means you are putting the cart in-front of the horse. I am no SEO expert but I’ve done it enough. Compete credit to @GoodMarketingHQ for making this an important discussion to have. No doubt some scripts/tools hog resources but pointing to page load times as potentially the ‘only’ factor might be misleading.
Amanda (^) who I’ve never met or came across before this tweet has a great point. However it comes with baggage. Analytics isn’t just GA. Speaking of GA, if I had a penny every time I logged into a clients GA account and wanted to rip everything apart and start over. GA(Google Analytics) is a ‘simple’ web/app analytics tool that nearly everyone uses but no one looks to beyond measuring simple sessions/bounce rates. You can do some sort of basic attribution with GA (30 day lookback window) but the if you don’t have basics setup (goals, channel groupings etc) you won’t get much of it. Sure you can drop $30K on something like Bizible (B2B Attribution) or Appsflyer etc for app installs.
The other beef I have with attribution is not the fact that we do attribution but we want to be obsessively right all the time. We want to believe the dots connect all the time & its a linear journey on a single device within a single session.
On the flip side is all these FB Group threads with 10X ROAS for eComm stores. To me that’s misleading because: Facebook will measure VTC & CTC and possibly assign itself 100% credit for sales within a 30 day window (which is default in most cases). But I say that as someone who’s done minimal eCommerce work. Why it bothers me is telling a business owner you generated $10 in sales for every $1 spent on FB without taking into account other channels/efforts is taking the whole pie home for yourself.
This podcast with the Lime (scooters) president was fantastic. Not only is he an OG internet guy (anyone remember Excite & Alta Vista the search engines?) but he said something interesting - with the scooter “micrp mobility (has a nice ring to it) / transportation wars heating up, some consumers are ‘expressing preference in a world of abundance’. I’ve always been in the ‘walk it’ camp. Thankfully Toronto isn’t overrun by these scooters yet.
Alot more thoughts i’ll try and keep for next week or the week after. I need a system for writing things down before they drift away
Till next time,
Kamil
P.S my good friend Sergey posed an interesting question here. What is the cost of entry to marketing? he contends its learning copy-writing/writing or more on the technical side. I do strongly disagree with the ‘automation takes 1 hour to learn’ for obvious reasons. It’s less about pushing buttons and thinking more about the system / business architecture.