The Disturbingly Low-Effort Path to Millions of Facebook Views
Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:
SEO: Surprising Results From The Largest CTR Study Ever Conducted
PLATFORMS: Instagram Attempts to Reel in Your Attention
REELS: It’s New if You Don’t Have TikTok
META: The Most Viewed Posts On Facebook
Below is the transcription from this weeks topics
SEO: Surprising Results From The Largest CTR Study Ever Conducted
We begin today with some surprising details regarding click-through rates on Google.
seoClarity has conducted what they say is the largest CTR study ever. CTRs were analyzed by position, device (mobile and desktop), country, seasonality and even industry across over 750+ billion impressions and 17+ billion unique keywords.
Here are the results.
Click-through rates have declined significantly - especially for top positions - since their last study.
Searches with no clicks on an organic result on page 1 or page 2 account for an estimated 65% of searches.
Mobile users are less likely to click top-ranked listings than desktop users.
Click-through rate for position 1 decreases from 8.17% on desktop to 6.74% on mobile devices.
May and December are the months with the lowest click-through rates, and July through to September are the highest.
CTRs by position vary significantly from industry to industry. The industry you operate in can also have a significant impact on users' search behaviours.
‘Real Estate’ has the highest average CTR across the top 10 positions (2.45%), and ‘Apparel & Fashion’ has the lowest (1.43%)
Knowing what device will have a higher clickthrough rate provides marketers with valuable insight into their targeting.
Quoting the report again:
In ‘fashion’, you achieve a higher CTR on desktop than you do on mobile. CTR in Business & Industrial is also higher on mobile.
Based on its data volume alone, the full report contains a great deal of detail and provides reliable metrics to search marketers.
PLATFORMS: Meta Gets Creative
On today’s episode of Who’s Copying Who?! Today’s contestant: Facebook copying Snapchat!
With the announcement of its new Creative App Platform for Facebook Stories, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, could score a few points for creativity.
Quoting the company:
We worked to understand how Sharing to Stories could further support the unique needs of our creative app partners. We found that app discovery is a key issue - in a competitive and rapidly expanding market, it is expensive and difficult for our partners to reach the people...
In response, we’ve built the Creative App Platform - a new concept that allows people to discover creative apps directly in Facebook Stories...
What are they talking about here with apps? They don't mean mobile apps. They mean mini-apps — like Snapchat's implementation, which they literally call ‘Minis’, in which developers share micro-versions of their full apps within Snap.
Facebook's variation is limited to Stories, and has attracted several developers for the first phase including VivaVideo and Vita, Camera360 and Sweet Selfie.
Creative App Platform is still in beta, but it seems it is part of Meta's broader effort to regain young users.
LimeCall is a lead engagement solution that boosts conversions and customer experience using a callback widget, call scheduling, call tracking, analytics, and more.
PLATFORMS: Instagram Attempts to Reel in Your Attention
How well is Instagram's copying of TikTok going? Their version, which they call Reels, might not be doing as well as they say.
Why else would they announce this today — they're ready to straight-up bribe people to post on Reels.
The company says users will be rewarded for posting short-form content on Reels instead of TikTok under Instagram's new incentive program.
It's possible to earn up to $10,000 for posting Reels on Instagram…
But here's the catch:
Nobody knows how Instagram's bonus offers are calculated or what factors determine how big of a bonus they're eligible for.
One Reddit user was offered up to $35,000 for 58 million views in a month.
On the other hand, a Twitch streamer with around 800 Instagram followers, was offered $8,500 for 9.28M views in a month.
Instagram is paying up to $8.5K for reels posts for the next month?! But look at the requirement views needed to make the full bag
So, $0.0009 per view?
Instagram's Help Center doesn't offer much help:
Bonuses are opportunities for you to earn money directly from Instagram. If you qualify to earn a bonus, you’ll be notified in the Instagram App to onboard and enable bonus payouts.
You’ll receive bonus earnings if you meet the requirements for each bonus.
According to the Reels Play Bonus Program Rules page, the feature is slowly rolling out and may not be available to you yet.
REELS: It’s New if You Don’t Have TikTok
Speaking of Reels, Instagram is finally introducing new Voice Effects and Text-to-Speech features — bringing them up to parity with the TikTok version.
Text-to-Speech allows an auto-generated voice to read your text aloud… and the voice effect will make you sound like a chipmunk or robot, and so on.
And honestly, it’s about time... that was one of the biggest gaps between the two.
So will this convince marketers to create more original content for Reels, as opposed to removing watermarks from TikTok videos and then posting to Instagram?
META: The Most Viewed Posts On Facebook
Meta's Transparency Center has provided marketers with some insight into the most viewed Facebook posts for this quarter.
If there is anything we can learn from these posts... It's to stop trying so hard.
The majority of the “widely viewed” posts were in the form of text posts, with a "Facebook background" behind the text (you know, the big wall of colour), and in the form of a question.
The top five posts on the platform in Q3 were all that format, and they read:
Who can honestly say they never had a DUI I'll wait
Spell your name, but for each letter press the first word that comes up in your predictive text...
What has EARS But doesn't listen?
Who the heck sleeps with a Fan and AC on?
Name something that a lot of people like, but you can't stand
So yeah, not exactly Pulitzer prize winners.
And since it's just a big block of text, you don’t even have to go to the trouble of finding a stock photo or creating original content.
It appears that if you want 16M comments, all you have to do is ask people if they have a DUI.
Oh, one interesting note I realized — since that post format is not in the API, each of the top five posts on the platform had to have been posted by
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com