Multi-image SEO for ecommerce, Google Search Console video indexing report & voice over for YouTube ads

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Show notes and links

In this week's episode, Jack Chambers-Ward is once again joined by his inimitable co-host, Mark Williams-Cook, to discuss all the latest SEO & PPC news. This week, Jack & Mark discuss:

Candour's supporting Break charity

Our "charity single for Break - From Norwich to Berlin:

Donate here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/milesforbreak

• The key factors in getting multi-image thumbnails on SERPs
• Google fights back against 1-star review scammers
• Google Search Console has a new Video Indexing Report
• Google has started automatically upgrading Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max
• Automated voice-over for Youtube ads
• Example of automated voice over for Youtube Ads

Transcript

Jack: Welcome to episode 28 of season two of The Search With Candour podcast, recorded on Friday the 22nd of July 2022. My name is Jack Chambers Ward. I am your host, as usual. This week, I am once again joined by Mr Mark Williams Cook. Hello, Mark.

Mark: Hello.

Jack: How are you?

Mark: I'm very well. Slight clicky jaw. Just been doing my podcast warmups. I'm good to go.

Jack: I don't know if that's warmups… Well, Mark and I have a few things to talk about this week. We'll be talking about the key factors in getting multi-image thumbnails on your SERPS. Google fights back against one-star review scammers. Google Search Console has a new video indexing report and Google has started automatically upgrading smart shopping campaigns to Performance Max.

Jack: Search with Candour is supported by SISTRIX, the SEO's toolbox go. To SISTRIX.com/swc, if you want to check out some of their fantastic free tools, such as their SERP snippet generator, hreflang validator, checking out your site's visibility index or their Google update tracker.

Jack: We will actually be talking about some IndexWatch next week, with my guest, Annie Myhodge. We're talking about TikTok. That is very relevant to Index Watch at the moment. So sorry, Mark. I'm not having you on to talk about TikTok.

Mark: It's probably for the best. I could probably say everything I know about TikTok in about four and a half minutes.

Jack: I believe to quote you, you installed it for about five minutes the other day and then uninstalled it again.

Mark: Yeah. Well, I felt like I had to look at it again, to make sure it was still what I had envisaged. It was, so I removed it from my phone.

Jack: That's fair. Well, look, I will have a TikTok expert on next week. Annie Myhodge will be joining me. We'll be talking about how people using TikTok as a search engine, how that relates to how Google is handling things. We've had comments from Google executives, about that whole thing as well. It's a big topic. It's a very hot topic in SEO at the moment. I'll be talking about that with my guest, Annie Myhodge, all next week.

Mark: I would like to start with a charity piece. So please kind listeners, give me some of your time to talk to you about charity. Do not skip ahead. A thing we do at Candour every year, we tend to nominate a specific charity to work with. In 2022 we have been working with a local charity called, Break, who are a fantastic children's charity, who primarily provides children's homes. So this is a home for children and young people who can't live with their family. They provide fostering services. So obviously getting children into homes who can't live with their birth families and they offer residential short breaks. That's kind of like respite care for disabled children, for their families, so they can have a positive experience away from home. Absolutely fantastic charity. This month in July, Candour has been participating in a 1000-mile challenge.

Mark: So there are around a dozen of us in the office, who, in the month of July, have been walking, slash running a total together of 1,000 miles, which will metaphorically take us all the way from Norridge to Berlin and back again. So quite a distance. It's quite a distance actually, personally, I realize, to walk when I go jogging myself, but considering I mainly walk to my car, drive to work and then go for runs. It's actually a significant extra amount of travelling. If all of that isn't enough, my very musically talented host, Jack has also produced this. [From Norwich to Berlin]

Jack: I think the listeners are probably questioning you calling me musically talented now, but yeah.

Mark: I think it's a sterling effort and if you can, I would very much appreciate it, and I'm sure everyone at Break would, if you do want to donate to this, we're just trying to raise 1,000 pounds in July for Break with this particular effort. If you check out our show notes, search.withcandour.co.uk, there will be a link to the donation page and from the bottom of our heart. We'd thank you if you could donate a little bit to that.

Jack: So let's touch on a bit of e-commerce stuff, which we do kind of touched on from every now and then, but it is a really interesting piece from Brodie Clark, who I think is fantastic, basically consistently fantastic with all the advice he gives, really an interesting Twitter follow as well recommend you follow him. That's @BrodieSEO on Twitter.

Mark: Big fan.

Jack: Of course, links in the show notes as always, as you know, but yeah, we'll talk about the nature of image thumbnails, essentially, for your products specifically thinking about eCommerce here, and this is kind of the approach Brodie took is, he dived in doing some research and some comparisons of the different types of image thumbnails you can get with your products from your shopping feeds and things like that, and how you can have a bit more control over that and specifically, how to achieve that kind of coveted multi-image thumbnail for a product of yours.

Brodie does a fantastic job of diving into essentially what are factors that contribute towards this and your ability and your products and your site being able to achieve this multi-image thumbnail for your products, and then things that you might think might be a factor, but actually aren't as well, which I thought was particularly interesting, because that is the thing we really bump into with SEO, as we know. Is it a ranking factor? Is it not a ranking factor? Did this thing actually contribute to this thing or not? Are you controlling this element by doing or changing this or Brodie has done the work for you? It's a really fantastic article from Brodie, talking about how essentially what works, what doesn't and with screenshots and real-life examples, going through the kind of seven top tips for getting a multi-image thumbnail in order of importance as well, which I very much appreciate.

I like the boldness there, because a lot of people would be like,” Oh yeah, just…” but Brodie's gone in number one, image relevance. That makes sense how relevant it is to your product. Image quality again makes sense. Alt text, we know alt text is important, especially with things like accessibility and stuff like that. So it's nice to see it's actually influencing the multi-image thumbnail here as well.

Product title. Of course, that's going to be an important factor. The number of relevant images. Again, that makes sense. The order of appearance as well and the background contrast. Again, kind of a factor of accessibility there as well. So it's nice to see a few different factors of accessibility in there, that I think are kind of things you wouldn't necessarily think would actually help promote this kind of thing. It really shows that Google is taking those into account. Two things that Brodie highlights that are not influencing this multi-image thumbnail, are structured data.

Jack: So you would hope that maybe, oh, I'll put some structured data in and I'll be able to control what has a multi-image and what doesn't. Not the case, at least according to Brodie's research. Also, the CMS you're using does not influence this one way or the other as well.

Mark: I think there's some interesting things here. So image quality is, I think, often overlooked, because there's a lot of chatter about SEO, about performance and image compression and the image must be small, when we know as users, especially in certain types, like jewelry's a really great example. You want high-quality imagery and actually as a casual anecdotal observation, using Google images as well, you, I tend to find fewer, very low-quality images now, cropping up in Google search. Google specifically as well in several of their guidelines for things like discover, specifically lists that you'd need to include high res imagery, if you want to be visible on there as well.

Jack: Yeah. Speaking of Google images there, I remember I always used to click the little HD button as an option and now I don't really need to. I think you're totally right, Mark. We've seen over the last couple of years of that now prioritizing those high-res images. They're kind of the default now, which is lovely like you said, as a user that makes my life a lot easier if I'm searching for a product or download an image for something or I need a logo for whatever it is, finding a high res version of it straightaway is always useful.

Mark: Bundled in with all this as well, we've spoken before about Google's like multimodal search when you're searching by pictures. I think this is going to be advantageous. Well, another reason to use your own photography, different angles, high-quality photography, not just taking stock photography of products.

Jack: Don't use stock images. We've known this for a while. Please don't use stock images. If you're able to do your own photography, if you have someone on staff or a designer or whatever it is, make your images unique. That is a big factor there as well.

Mark: The other thing Brodie mentions in this piece of work he's done as well, is about the accessibility of the images with JavaScript. I found that quite interesting. So it is always something I recommend people do when they're checking outside, auditing them, which is just disabling JavaScript in their browser and continuing to click around the site and see what's broken and what's accessible. This interest me, because I was auditing a site a couple of weeks ago where I was looking through their search console and I noticed they had video traffic coming to their site and then it just nose dive down to zero. This was due to their kind of carousel of images and videos, if you like, on each product required JavaScript to work.

Jack: Right.

Mark: They had some dynamic rendering where they had another version for search engines and that actually broke how some of the images and videos worked. This was diagnosed because I noticed the video's vanished. So that had affected again, their visibility of those images. It's not always enough to just, again, look with your default user agent with JavaScript on and be like, okay, well the images are there. You need to make sure that Google can find them. Lastly, I'm pleased Brodie include it. I mean, it's probably obvious to people who have been working in SEO for quite a while, that the content management system doesn't have a direct impact. I'm pleased he said it, because I still hear people saying, oh a WordPress site is more SEO, Google prefers WordPress sites or something like that.

I mean, Google doesn't care. It's just how they present in the front end. I can ruin almost any CMS you give me with a bad front end and a bad styling and a bad theme or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, really helpful research. I suggest you check it out if you're working in ecommerce Images is a whole area that I like to deep dive into in terms of optimization. We discussed it before. A lot of people actually do their shopping via images as well.

Jack: Yeah, absolutely.

Jack: So moving on to some scamming stuff. I know we've talked about this a couple of times already, we're talking about spam. I've talked about some scamming, some black mailings, some threats, all that kind of stuff and a big hat tip to Saijo George and the TLDR newsletter. We've said it a couple of times in the show before, Saijo George is the man, the TLDR newsletter is one of the best newsletters for digital marketing. I highly recommend you go and subscribe to that. This is exactly where I got this information from. Basically, this is a two-part thing where we're talking about the kind of extortion, essentially, of people leaving one-star reviews, basically barraging a particular business or restaurants in particular, in this case, with one-star reviews. Then the owners of that business receive an apologetic email asking for a $75 Google gift card, like for the Google play store basically, to then say, oh, we'll stop leaving one-star reviews if you give us money.

Jack: Super dodgy, super illegal. Yeah, happened to quite a few businesses. I know San Francisco and New York, these really big cities where they have these big like Mitchell And Star, high profile restaurants were getting targeted by this kind of thing. That happened quite a lot. Now on the other side of things, we're now seeing small businesses and small restaurants being threatened for this as well and blackmailing there as well. Google actually gave in a statement, how you can kind of report this through your Google business profile and all this kind of stuff. So really good work finally getting around to sorting out a lot of this scam stuff. Here is the quote from Carra from Google, about their policies and all their updates and how we're kind of fighting back against scam targeting of businesses on Google here.

“We've recently become aware of scams targeting businesses on Google with the threat of one-star reviews, unless they send money via gift cards. Our policies clearly state reviews must be based on real experiences. Our teams are working around the clock to thwart these attacks, remove fraudulent reviews and put protections on business profiles that may have been affected. If your business is being targeted by these scammers, please do not pay them. Instead, please flag the reviews. She says here, there's a link in the show notes as you know, or reach out to Google support via the Help center so that our team can review and remove policy-violating content.If you haven't yet claimed your business profile, you can do so here and still proceed with this process. You can also learn more about how our review moderation systems work to ensure Google reviews remain helpful and authentic.” They're kind of giving you an option there if you have been affected by this. Like I said, I know it's now targeting smaller businesses and smaller restaurants.

So if you are one of the ones that has been affected, there is now a way you can report this through the Google business profile help center and actually get this stuff taken down. I know businesses fighting back against negative reviews has been very controversial in the past and very difficult in the past. It's very difficult to prove or disprove negative reviews. Sometimes some people just have vendettas against certain people and it's not necessarily business related, but yeah, this is a clear indication of it actually working to fight back against scammers, which is nice.

Mark: Yeah. It's something I've advised companies on before, which is where they've had negative reviews from people they don't think have been clients or customers, and because Google doesn't have a real name policy on the reviews, it's basically, yeah, sorry. They're just going to have to stay. So a lot of these companies have just had to reply with we don't have any record of this, contact us, which kind of seems natural, but obviously isn't a great thing. Isn't a great look. Especially if you're being bombarded by them. Interestingly, I don't know if you had seen, Jack, what's happened with Glassdoor and the reviews that have been there recently?

Jack: Oh yeah.

Mark: For those that haven't heard, I'll try and get a link in the show notes. A New Zealand court has ordered Glassdoor, I believe, to hand over the identity or the contact details, at least they have of people who left negative reviews of a company they worked at. So despite Glassdoor saying obviously, you can leave a review anonymously when they are ordered by the law and the country they're operating into, to give over that information. They obviously have to, and this comes quite a surprise that they've won this at this stage, at least. I don't know if Glassdoor can appeal or whatever, but it looks like, yeah, they're going to have to hand over the identities of the people who have left these reviews, because in New Zealand, the kind of it's an opinion thing, doesn't have an automatic defence like it does in other countries.

Mark: So it does make me wonder as well, could that potentially apply to things like Google reviews, where people have left negative Google reviews and if they're in New Zealand, can they then push to actually get the identity of those people? In the UK, at least, it is literally illegal to leave fake damaging reviews about businesses. If it's done under the cloak of anonymity, there's not a lot that anyone can do.

Jack: Yeah. It's an interesting thing, isn't it? Going back to, we've talked about privacy so much with Google recently and now we're seeing it kind of swinging back around and the walls of anonymity are being broken down here as well. It's very interesting like you said, moving from what we understand as sort of like UK law and European law, and then going out to what happens in the US or what happens in other parts of the world, in this case, as you said, Mark, in New Zealand, different rules apply. There's very different privacy laws and very different regulations for things like libel and all this kind of stuff that can get you in a lot of trouble if you don't know what you're doing, and if you're doing something dodgy as well and trying to scam people, you can get in a lot of trouble. Or even if you're just leaving negative reviews, you think you can get away with it and you can't. Yeah, very interesting. As we said, links in the show notes for all that stuff at search.withcandour.co.uk.

Mark: There is another new report now available in Google Search Console.

Jack: Nice.

Mark: So taking us, because we are still in my old age view of SEO, the quote, unquote, new version of Google search console, which I guess even now I'm just calling search console. They've added a video indexing report, which is very nice timing actually, because I obviously just earlier in the show was talking about diagnosing issues on a client's site to do with video and the way I had to go about that was, we had video traffic and then it's very suspiciously nose dived to basically zero. Therefore, there must be some kind of problem with the video indexing. Of course we had to go through a manual check, looking at the site with different user agents and with, and without JavaScript to identify the issue there. What this is, is video indexing report. If Google detects videos on your site, you will get a video indexing report appear on the left navigation bar in the coverage section.

If Google has not detected a video on your website, you won't see the report. It's a bit like how the structured data stuff doesn't appear if it doesn't detect it. So if you have video on your site and you don't see it, that's a kind of flag, if you like, to begin with. If it started to detect video on your site, it can now give you more granular detail about why that video hasn't been indexed. So whether it's problems with the thumbnails, whether it's a non-supported video type, it can actually then let you hone in on this. So it will make that job of actually identifying the issues that are easier and make again, like monitoring, a lot easier. So that's available now. It's being rolled out now in Google search console, really helpful again for econ sites. If you've got videos of products and everything, and you want to keep your finger on the pulse of, if they're showing indexing and ranking. So yeah. Video Index import, live now, Google search console, go and check it out.

Mark: We're going to finish up on some PPC news.

Jack: Back on some PPC. I talked a lot about PPC last week, but you weren't here, Mark.

Mark: Oh, okay. I was going to say it's been so long since we've talked about PPC and I do like a bit of PPC news, but this was brought to my attention, because before I even got to work today, I had a text message or WhatsApp message from one of my friends, who works as a freelancer doing PPC. They text me in the morning and said, so Google just automatically, without warning, deleted my smart shopping campaign and replaced it with a Performance Max one. Cool. What's their message? I had actually missed this. I think we've mentioned Performance Max before on the show. So obviously a new campaign type from Google, very highly automated.

Jack: I did talk about it with Alice last week as well. So yeah, if you want to dive into Performance Max from a PPC side, plenty to complain about basically, from what I understand from everybody I talk to previously.

Mark: So the details of this and there is a kind of, well, there's an announcement from Google and there's of course, a summary article on search engine land, which we'll link to, but essentially for most advertisers, this is something that's going to happen, that Google is rolling out. They call it upgrading. So you're being upgraded to these PMAX accounts. Google apparently will send a notification about two to three weeks before the updates are implemented. So whether this friend of mine just missed the update or whether there are some bugs, I won't be the judge on that. I mean, don't blame the user. Obviously, it wasn't clear enough that was going to happen to their campaign, because it did take them by surprise.

Jack: You would think it would be big red flashing, warning lights and stuff. Wouldn't you? If they're changing something without your consent, essentially.

Mark: Exactly. The only reprieve I think you are going to have on this, that I could find was, where there are some smart shopping campaigns that are using features like vehicle ads. These won't be completed until early next year, so 2023. Search Engine Land did actually cover the learning and history concerns in so far as Google says, when your campaigns go through this process of self upgrading, or if you use the tool to upgrade them, I'll mention that in a second, the learnings from previous smart shopping campaigns can be carried over to the PMAX campaigns to maintain consistent performance. This is one of the downsides of Google automation and machine learning stuff, which is put crap in, get crap out basically. Certainly from the outset, if you have a human managing something, they can apply their experience, knowledge, common sense, human understanding to a campaign to get it off to a good start. Machines, if they don't have the data, the results are going to be bad.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: I've had some very interesting conversations with Google ads reps where their kind of response has been “It just needs to go through this learning process. Don't sort of change anything. It will get better.” Sometimes it does. Sometimes it actually doesn't, but yeah, automatic updates aren't great news if they kind of catch you by surprise. There is a one-click upgrade tool available for this conversion. So it's going to happen. I would recommend if you haven't, it's better that you take that leap. You're prepared for it. You communicate those changes. You can mitigate any kind of risk by doing that, rather than getting caught off the hop. So that is happening. If you're running Google smart shopping campaigns, they are being deleted and replaced or to use Google's terms upgraded to PMAX campaigns.

Jack: So sticking with the ad side of things, last tiny little bit for us here, which is actually included in some Google information here, official documentation just casually dropped in. Then we thought, hold on a minute. Is that a thing that's happening now? That you can add automated voiceover to your YouTube ads? It sounds awful.

Mark: I read this headline from, again, the TLDR news, after I saw this, which was just, give every video add an automatic voiceover. I was like, what? Yeah, it's a thing. People like Sony are doing it.

Jack: Yeah. So here's the example from Sony about their Sony Bravia XR TV.

Sony ad: The Sony Bravia XR TV is the world's first TV with a cognitive processor. It has the power to think like the human brain and truly understands how you see and experience the world, making every picture breathe. The TV brings you closer to reality, surrounding you with the most immersive sound. The Sony Bravia XR TV series.

Jack: I think you'll all agree, if you're a long-term listener, you heard a couple of months ago now, where we generated voiceover stuff ourselves. We did a fake SEO horoscope thing with you typing it into GPT3, Mark and then I put it through Descript, which is a base, you can use the Overdub feature and create a voiceover thing. We had the movie guy voice doing our intro and then a nice, like a lady called Ruth, an AI bot called Ruth, doing our horoscopes at the end of the episode. It sounds like a 100 times better than this thing.

Mark: This is shit. This is actually shit. I couldn't stop laughing when I listened to this, because I'd built myself up. I've been exposed to it. I've been playing around with the Dolly image generation recently, been seeing all the GBT3 stuff. I was like, because Google's description says the voiceovers are near human quality. You've got optimized for advertising. I was like, this is going to be so good.

Jack: I love that you've gone into voiceover mode there, as well.

Mark: Well they can't.

Jack: I know. Yeah.

Mark: Because it's the most soulless, monotonous...

Jack: Robotic.

Mark: Just robotic shite that I've heard. The fact that Sony seems so happy about it.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: So Sony were like “Prior to the availability, the Google's voiceover feature, half our creative did not feature voiceover.” Good, if it sounds like that! Because it's a joke.

Jack: I could have done it. First of all, I could have done. I've done voiceover work myself. Sony, if you're listening, give me a call. Second of all, I could have done it auto-generating stuff on my laptop, basically for free. Descript is free by the way. I don't need anything else. There's no excuse.

Mark: Let's hear it.

Jack: Yeah. Here's my version of this with Don from, as I said, the movie guy voice, from Descript and I'll also give you Ethan from Descript as well, which is a much more kind of friendlier kind of tone. Pat's more appropriate, but hopefully, you can notice the difference, listeners, because I think it's much better.

Don via Descript: The Sony Bravia XR TV is the world's first TV with a cognitive processor. It has the power to think like the human brain and truly understands how you see and experience the world, making every picture breathe. The TV brings you closer to reality, surrounding you with the most immersive sound. The Sony Bravia XR TV series.

Ethan via Descript: The Sony Bravia XR TV is the world's first TV with a cognitive processor. It has the power to think like the human brain and truly understands how you see and experience the world, making every picture breathe. The TV brings you closer to reality, surrounding you with the most immersive sound. The Sony Bravia XR TV series.

Mark: Now I know you haven't, as Google has quot "partnered with copywriters and advertising professionals to identify common voiceover styles across a variety of industry verticals and brand personas, and then model those styles on 5,000 YouTube ads to develop seven different voices." That was better. That was honestly better than what I heard from Google.

Jack: I've got, let me just check one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine stock voices built into Descript here, which again, this is not me being like, oh, look at me with my cool technology. Descript have done an amazing job at this. Descript have pushed the boundaries of how voiceover works and this technology, you can just type something straight into Descript and it will read it out for you as if it's voiceover. They also do the other side and they have some of the best transcription software.

Jack: So it's all kind of working together. Credit to Descript and discredit to Google and whatever the hell they're doing with this crap where it's like not for a second did I believe that it wasn't auto-generated speech to text nonsense. It has such a, I was transcribing it earlier, so I could put it into Descript and actually get it working properly. I struggled to work out where which sentence ends and another begins. There's that weird pause. There's the Sony Bravia XR TV is the world's first TV with a cognitive processor. Who cares, first of all? Okay, sure.

Mark: I've got other issues with the script, but we'll leave that.

Jack: It has the power to think like the human brain and truly understand how you see and experience the world.

Mark: Exactly what I want my TV to do.

Jack: Then a separate sentence, making every picture breathe. Okay. That's marketing waffle nonsense. Okay.

Mark: I was thinking last night when I was watching Netflix, I wish my screen would breathe a bit more.

Jack: The upside down in Stranger Things was breathing a bit more. The TV brings you closer to reality. Well, it doesn't, though. Does it? You're looking at a screen.

Mark: I feel we're quite opinionated on this one, but I honestly feel like Google's trying to gaslight me here by being like, it's really good. I'm like sitting here questioning my reality and then refocusing and being like, it's not, and it's not just it's not really good. It's not even okay.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: It's worse than free stuff. I'm very like...

Jack: There are websites you can auto generate speech to text stuff. I did this, I was messaging my wife on WhatsApp, but translating it into like celebrity voices and stuff on a website. It's a bit rubbish, but you understand who it is like, oh, it sounds like Drake. Or it sounds like Beyonce or The Weekend and all this kind of stuff. Those kind of like auto tuned rappers and stuff it works really well for, because they kind of sound robotic. A free website that you just type into, is better than this.

Mark: So interesting question based on this, right?

Jack: How much do I charge for voiceovers? Excellent question, Mark.

Mark: Sony. So, interesting question, based on this I have, right. If we are not using voiceovers on video assets, because of resourcing time issues, whatever, and this gives us the ability to do so, we'll accept that and we'll accept our subjective opinion on, we don't think it's that great, fine. Now what would we do as marketers if actually the response, the reaction, however we're measuring the impact to those videos, the KPI's, is improved, because we've used this? Now again, Google ads by its nature, has always been a very performance driven channel and I've always been very pragmatic in my approach to this type of marketing of, if it works, if numbers are better, do it. I don't kind of care.

Jack: Yeah.

Mark: However, if it's where a percentage of your customers are laughing at your brand, because your advert sounds so ridiculous. Is there a hidden cost to this?

Jack: That's very interesting, like negative marketing almost where you like yeah. The opposite of brand awareness where you think like, oh God, Sony's doing a thing again. Sony, a weird company in general, they're very like technology forward. Then very backwards in many ways. They're rooted in weird business traditions and all kinds of stuff. Anyway, they actually claim to have some data here from... Google claimed to have the data from Sony here. This is the example, the Sony team selected a voiceover for their 15 and 32nd video ads and using video experiments, proved that the voiceover ads drove 25% higher ad recall and 50% lower cost per lifted user than the original asset with background music alone.

Mark: So yeah, this is the point.

Jack: The data, right?

Mark: This is the same argument that I have though with people who, for instance, do cold emailing. So the conversation I've had is, I get cold email and it's bad and it annoys me. It irritates me.

Jack: Yep.

Mark: To the point where, when I get them and especially when people follow up, I'm of the opinion, I'm not going to do business with you, because I don't like how you're going about this. Obviously, they've just bought my email from somewhere and like family...

Jack: The example you always give is the people cold emailing you about lead generation tools, which I absolutely love, need to generate more leads. I'm cold emailing you it's like, why aren't you using your lead generation tool to get more leads then?

Mark: The argument that these people have though is, well it works, because I emailed these 5,000 people, whatever, and we got 20 responses, 10 leads, two bits of new business and I'm like fine. What you're not measuring is the people like me, who you've alienated now, who may have done business with you if we had interacted through another channel and that's kind of my thinking about this from, is it going to alienate some people where they're like, oh this is bad. Sony is meant to be like this high-end audio-visual technology company. I'm seeing this kind of ad. Then you know the general, hey, how we're measuring uplift and recall is higher. It's like is okay, recall's higher. Is it positive recall? Or is it like, hey, did you see that Sony ad?

Jack: Oh my God, did you hear that terrible voice? Oh wow. What an idiot. Wow. What was Sony thinking? Yeah. Maybe. Recall is a weird measurement as well. It's just one of those kind of focus group of things where it's like, did you remember it two weeks later? I'm like, well, yeah I was part of your focus group. Why wouldn't I remember that? There's so many different facts in that. Ad recall isn't necessarily a good thing. You're totally right, Mark, where they're using it as this kind of, I wonder if it's pick and choosing the data basically and had a bunch of people being like, this sounds terrible, but they don't want to publish. 80% of the people we asked, said it was terrible, but 25% more said they remembered it. I was like, okay, sure.

Mark: Well, we've been over this a couple of times with Microsoft and Google when they introduce new, especially search and paid search features where the kind of case study of, oh the people that did this got 300% more conversions. It's like, well, everyone knows. It's a bit like when you buy a car, it tells you know how many miles it does on a tank. Everyone knows in the real world, it's not going to be that effect, but it's there, it's live, have a play with it, experiment.

Jack: Yeah. You can access it directly on your asset library and Google ads. If you want to play around with it and test it and stuff, like I said, there are multiple different voices to choose from. So maybe this is just a weird, bad example that Sony have picked for whatever reason. Yeah, if you are running YouTube ads, through Google ads, you can play around with that sort of stuff and try out some new voiceovers. Or if you need a voiceover person, hire us, we're podcasters. We talk. It's fine.

Jack: That's all the time we have for this week. We've covered a bit of SEO, a bit of PPC, a bit of everything. I will be back next week, as I mentioned, talking about TikTok and basically diving into TikTok more than we have done on the show before. We've touched on it a couple of times. We scratched the surface, but I'm looking forward to my conversation with Annie-Mai and really diving into it from somebody who is way more tuned into social media, than Mark and I am.

Mark: Give to our charity cause search.withcandour.co.uk. Thank you.

Jack: I will put links in the show notes as well. So not even in the search.withcandour. There'll be a link for the charity thing actually in the podcast subscription on the podcast app of your choice as well. So wherever you are listening to this, there'll be a link to donate to Break and support us and support them, more specifically, by just clicking on the link in the show notes on the podcast description as well. Very much appreciate your donations. We very much appreciate you listening. Hope you have a lovely week and thank you very much.