Example Signals Issue - Flywheel Digital

January 2023

Welcome to Signals, Flywheel Digital‘s monthly newsletter on technical marketing and how it affects your growth strategy.

I’ve been in digital marketing since 2008. In my opinion, more has changed in the last 18 months than in the 10 years before it. We haven’t seen this rate of change since Facebook introduced the News Feed.

The changes are mostly related to privacy and the recent Cambrian explosion in AI and the world’s reactions to it. The biggest change? No more shortcuts. Average marketing execution is getting swallowed up in a sea of algorithmic noise, while those who remain technically and strategically sharp are gaining even more ground.

This issue focuses on the practices that will separate great marketing from the bots (including how to understand the bots).

– Michael Steele

Michael Steele

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[ Top of Mind ]

These are the tactics, strategies, and industry changes that our team are talking about most.

E-E-A-T 🍽

Google’s just released a huge new update on how they evaluate content. They used to grade on Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Now they’ve added another E, Experience: do they believe that a real (read: non-AI) person wrote the article based on something they actually did?

Why this matters: Google, like the rest of the world, is scrambling to catch up with the rise of AI-generated content. Since AI can most easily write content in an objective, 3rd-person voice, this is designed to address it. Our SEO team is bracing for a ton of upcoming rankings changes.

What you can do: Take stock of your top landing pages and blog posts. Ensure they reflect your distinct brand or author voice and incorporate multimedia wherever possible. For example, Reels, screen recordings, or photography. AI can’t mimic those… yet.

Death of the Bounce Rate 📉

One of the biggest changes in GA4 is that Google has removed the bounce rate metric altogether, replacing it with Engagement rate, a measure of the % of your visitors that stay at least 10 seconds or click an internal link.

Why this matters: Bounce rate was a favourite for junior marketers, but it was never actually that useful to begin with. Some pages, like articles, will naturally have a high bounce rate, and bounce rate rarely corellates with conversion rate. We’re hopeful this makes people think critically about what they’re measuring.

What you can do: For a better leading indicator of conversions, enable GA4’s built-in scroll depth metric (“Scrolls”) and review Scroll % instead of bounce rate.

Modular Creative 🧱

Since iOS14.5, we’ve been moving all our clients’ social ads towards a modular creative framework. What does this mean?

Instead of rolling out an ad for our clients, or even ad variants, we “modularize” the creative into its individual parts. For example, instead of rolling out a single, 15-second video, we’ll chop that video into 3-second cuts, and reconfigure the hook, order, and accompanying copy, in 5 different ways.

Why this matters: Most people don’t watch an ad past the first 2 seconds. If you’re spending $10,000 producing a social ad video and only advertising 1 or 2 versions of it, you might be missing out on 90% of the ROAS that just a few hours of editing could’ve earned you.

What you can do: Start by adding a custom “Thumbstop rate” metric to your Meta ads account (below). This will show you what ads are doing the best job of hooking people in – the first step in modular creative.

[ 90-Second Galaxy Brain ]

One quick, actionable screen recording to make you a more technically-savvy marketer:

Most people read their Search Console reports all wrong. They either get unnecessarily spooked or not spooked enough.

Here’s how actually know if Google is reading your site properly:

Reviewing Indexing Within Sitemaps

[ The Take: How to Not Get Lost in Industry Changes ]

The Take is a deep-dive from our founder, Michael Steele, into the areas of digital strategy that people often overlook.

In high school history, the first thing I learned is the difference between primary and secondary sources.

Primary sources are from someone who was actually there. Secondary sources are from someone who wasn’t there but analyzed what happened. Neither is inherently better or worse. But they’re useful in different ways.

Primary sources can be biased, but they help confirm facts. Secondary sources can’t confirm facts, but they can provide additional insight.

Best practices in digital marketing constantly change. Many digital marketers get completely lost (or stuck in the past) because they don’t know how to find primary sources for digital marketing.

They learn through forums, newsletters, courses, or (worst case scenario) Neil Patel. These secondary sources are helpful for understanding best practices at that moment.

But as soon as the facts change, they are completely lost.

Since they aren’t grounded in the facts, they don’t know how to interpret a change for themselves unless someone interprets it for them.

There is only one type of primary source in digital marketing: platform documentation.

I know, pretty dry, but these are the sacred texts of digital marketing.

Platforms like Google and Meta regularly go out of their way to explain to us how they decide what performs well and what doesn’t.

For example, did you know Google has a set of explicit guidelines on how it decides what a “good” search result is? It literally has a giant team of people reviewing Google searches, manually rating each result using these guidelines, and feeding that back into the algorithm to affect rankings. Google’s search central blog takes this even further.

Meta can be a little cagier about what “good” looks like for them, but the texts are all there in their documentation. For example, they make clear in this article that as a rule of thumb, your daily budget should be at least 10 times the average cost of your optimization event (such as a Purchase).

Like any primary source, we need to consider the biases: Meta and Google both want us to spend more, with less discrimination. But the great thing about digital is we can test for that. For example, I can confirm from experience that a daily budget of 10x your optimization event is indeed about right.

Less thought leaders, more performance historians.

[ What’s Flywheel about? ]

Our agency creates repeatable growth systems for digital products. We are deeply technical marketers with a holistic, strategic approach.

We work best with sophisticated marketing leaders who are looking to level up their channel performance through SEO, Paid, or Analytics.

Right now, our most interesting projects include a programmatic SEO build and implementing server-side tracking for online courses.

If you’re interested in learning more, just respond to this email – they go right to my personal inbox.

– Michael and the Flywheel team

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