It’s a newsletter from Ercule! 👋 In this issue:
- Third-party cookies are going away. Should you care?
- We use the word “Romanesque”.
- A critical metric most keyword strategies overlook.
- Captioning and content calendaring.
🥠 Goodbye, third-party cookies
Third-party cookies are going away. Safari and Firefox have already blocked these entirely, while Chrome is planning to next year.
Does this matter?
Let’s start by recapping what cookies are: Little bits of tracking info that your browser stores on behalf of sites you visit.
Cookies can be useful. One might store your username for a “Remember me” login box. But it might also store your demographic data for ads.
Third-party cookies take this one step further, storing data from sites you didn’t visit (at least, not directly). They have all the charm of a love note from someone you’ve never met.
So what does it mean that they’re going away?
- It will become a little harder to target ads, and they may get more expensive, too. That means organic channels (like organic search) will become more important.
- Getting your audience onto channels you control – like your email list – will become more important too.
- And in general, content marketing will play a bigger role in lead generation as paid search tactics become more convoluted.
This is good for privacy, too, right?
It’s not bad. But the ad industry is way too big to not track you. So what we’re entering into now is not a golden era of user privacy, but an arms race between advertising technology vendors and users – with Google kind of playing both sides.
⚔️ Tired: Clipart memes
👾 Wired: Romanesque art memes
A lot of people liked our post depicting age-old struggles with Hubspot in medieval tapestry format.
We made it with this very basic tapestry meme builder. It plays with images from the famed 15th-century Bayeux Tapestry.
Honestly, we made a ton of these for our own amusement before we posted that one. Like a lot, OK? Ever since Kid Pix went away there’s a hole in our hearts that can’t be filled.
And now we can all use it to commemorate workplace inside-jokes or condemn a lackluster broadband provider.
“Damn thee, Comcaste!”
🔬Why keywords need a relevance metric
This question has popped up a few times this month. Maybe you’ve been asking it too.
Can I build a keyword strategy on search volume and competition metrics alone?
Determining the relevance of a topic to your brand is a core marketing skill, and it’s overshadowed these days by big data metrics like search volume and competition.
All of them are important – but they should all work together.
You might ultimately choose a keyword that’s easy to win and has high volume even if it’s not the most relevant. Sometimes this makes sense. But if you’re not tracking relevance every time, you’re setting yourself up to chase keywords that won’t ever convert because your brand doesn’t speak to them.
Track volume, competition, relevance for any keyword, and weight each metric accordingly in your calculations. We give you more detail on how to do it in our keyword strategy guide.
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🕵️ About Ercule
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