Bjork Ostrom: Ben, welcome to the Tiny Bites podcast episode. This is going to be a short and helpful one, but welcome to the podcast.

Ben Holland: Thanks for having me here. I’m excited to talk about this.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so you’ve been talking about this a lot with the Clariti team. You’ve been doing some webinars, a lot of questions about it. It’s kind of right squarely in the world that Clariti operates, which is data and analytics. But before we get into the specifics of this problem of Universal Analytics data going away, let’s roll the tape back a little bit and just give some context for who you are, maybe a little bit of background on Clariti, and then we can dive into some of the specifics here.

Ben Holland: Yeah, sounds great. So my name is Ben Holland. I’m the general manager for Clariti. I’ve been here since 2020, I think is when we started working together. And the idea behind Clariti is really to help those that create content get better insight into what’s going on and to help them manage it. I have a background in data analytics, so I got my master’s degree in business analytics from Arizona State University. And I will also add, I joke about this all the time, that even though I have a data analytics background, it’s still challenging to figure out what things mean in Google Analytics, but that’s beside the point.

Bjork Ostrom: But a lot of the reason why Clariti exists, we’re bringing in Google Analytics data, bringing in Google Search Console data, bringing in WordPress data, and then that’s a lot of data. And then what you and the team work on is how do we make that as actionable and as simple as possible? Because as we all know, more information, more data, more complexity doesn’t always necessarily mean better. And so it’s taking all that information and distilling it down into actionable, insightful information. And we could talk ad nauseam about all the ways to do that within Clariti. But one of the things that we want to focus on right now is specifically the toolset of Universal Analytics in GA4, so Google Analytics 4, and then Clariti’s ability to merge those. But also before we talk about that problem and solution, let’s talk about why that’s important to even do that. So what’s happening, it’s right around the corner here, what’s happening and what should publishers, bloggers, anybody who uses Google Analytics be aware of that’s right around the corner here.

Ben Holland: Yeah. Yeah, so good question. So Google released Universal Analytics a long time ago, and they’ve had different versions of it. Right now, what was called GA3 is also referred to as Universal Analytics. If you were a content creator in the last year or so, then you remember that last year in 2023 in July 1st, Google stopped collecting data for Universal analytics. And there was a big push to basically set up GA4, if you have Google Analytics installed on your site, you probably got a lot of emails, a lot of notices, “Hey, you need to connect the GA4 property,” things like that.

The purpose behind it all is Google is changing the way they collect traffic data and connect users to each other. And so with GA4, it’s a pretty big shift in the way that they collect data and present it. And so there wasn’t really a simple, “Hey, yeah, this old version just kind of translates into the new version of how we collect it,” they wanted to make a clean break. Last year they said, “Hey, you got to set up GA4, or you’re not going to see any data,” on July 1st of last year.

Bjork Ostrom: And people can remember that there’s this big transition over, you had to make sure that you had it set up. And then for anybody, if you’re envisioning Google Analytics, it’s not like that data just then merges with your old data. It’s like a new instance of your Google Analytics data. So you look and at your old data UA4, it’s like all of your traffic, and for a site Pinch of Yum is like 10 years of traffic, and then it just, there’s a cliff and it stops. That’s when data went away, collection around UA, Universal analytics, and then similarly, as soon as you set up when that started. And so for some people, hopefully most people, they set up their GA4 instance before Universal Analytics stop collecting data. So there’s some overlap there. So you could kind of bounce back and forth between those two. So let’s talk about as far as you know, what does that mean? July 1st, 2024 Universal Analytics data is going away? Does that just mean then you log in and it’s not there anymore?

Ben Holland: Yeah, so good question. So last year we spent a lot of time on the Clariti side really trying to figure out how do we make sure that this is a seamless experience. So UA data, like you said, there’s a cliff, and then GA4 data will begin collecting whenever you connected it. And so we tried to make that a very seamless experience. It is a separate property, like you said. So GA4 is its own property. The old UA is its own property.

Bjork Ostrom: In Google, Google Analytics.

Ben Holland: In the Google Analytics Console, yeah. And what Google, I guess during all of this evaluation and investigation, we realized that Google really doesn’t like to store old data. They don’t like to waste the storage space. So in a lot of ways they do sampling to get away with that. They’ll keep just parts of data to give you directionally what’s happening, but they don’t always store all data that’s ever been captured. And so I think it’s with that mentality that Google is coming a year later now. So on July 1st, 2024, Google will be straight up deleting all UA data. All of the data that has been collected for could be over a decade, like you mentioned with Pinch of Yum is just going away. It’s getting deleted and there’s red alerts everywhere. Make sure you migrate it, make sure you do something with it. And that’s sort of where we are seeing that, hey, we kind of thought about this a little bit ahead of time with Clariti, knowing that this could potentially be the case.

Bjork Ostrom: And let’s talk about two different ways to approach it. One is, let’s say if somebody doesn’t use Clariti, that’s not a tool that they have. Or maybe if people do use Clariti and they want to be redundant or get as much of that data as possible, we went through this process, you helped with this where we essentially did a data dump. Even if we’re not going to actively use that data, we want to have it available just in case it’s kind of a technical process, but maybe people have somebody technical on their team that they work with and they want to make sure that they reserve this data. Let’s talk about that instance. Can you talk about what that looks like, how that works, kind of at a high level? You don’t obviously have to get into the technical elements of what it looks like.

Ben Holland: So if you log into the analytics console, analytics.google.com, you’ll see a red pop-up often with a countdown timer, it’s very ominous looking, and there’s a button that’s like, “Learn more how to migrate your data.” And we spent quite a bit of time kind of exploring all of the options. The thing that I think is frustrating is that Google doesn’t really give you this one click button download everything. And I think a lot of the reason for that is that their data is so complex and multifaceted, multidimensional behind the scenes. So when we started going down paths of, okay, well there is data we still know we want to store somewhere. We have the traffic in Clariti. Clariti does store its own version of that. So it’s not going to disappear on July 1st, but there’s all these other reports and dimensions and metrics that we wanted to capture. So Google has some instructions to use a Google Sheet, add-on that, the Google Analytics, Google Sheet add-on, probably the most user-friendly. The challenge is you have to know how to build a report because essentially what Google says is you can download a report, but you can’t just download the raw data.

You have to create a report and a report is created using a dimension, which is usually you think of it as the pivot point. So a date would be a dimension or a page would be a dimension. And that really tells you, okay, what is each row? What separates each row? And then you have to select the metrics. So those would be things like sessions, page views, users, bounce rate, things like that. So those would be a lot of times just a number. So in the Google Sheets you can do that. You have to do it in sections because the Google Sheets does have a limit of number of rows. I think it’s 5,000 rows. So if you have an older site or if you pick a dimension that goes pretty far back, you’re going to hit your limit really fast. There’s also, I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on this one, but there is, if you do have a friend who’s technical or knows anything to do with data, there is a company called Fivetran. It is a data extraction and transformation and loading tool, it’s F-I-V-E-T-R-A-N.com And they do have a Google Analytics connector, and we ended up going this route. What you need to do is set up the Google Analytics connector in Fivetran, and then you also need to create a Google Cloud BigQuery database. Again, I am sure people’s eyes are glazing over, but.

Bjork Ostrom: Most people have fallen asleep by now. No.

Ben Holland: Yeah, most. You can do it that way.

Bjork Ostrom: We were actually, as a quick side note, I was watching the Apple event with a friend. I was like, let’s do lunch and watch the Apple event. This is a friend, Nate is actually Nate who does Snackdive with Lindsay. I was like, “Oh, it’d be really fun.” And at one point they were talking about the new features and updates, and I heard him pretend snoring next to me. But I think it’s important to point out because it’s not like somebody who’s listening to this, who’s a food creator and doing the photography and recipe development will then know Fivetran and BigQuery and the connection. But to your point, to have that information if they do have somebody who knows this or is technical to say to point them in the right direction. So I think it’s important to point it out.

Ben Holland: And that’s generally as deep as I’ll go on that. We do have some Clariti workshops that do go a little bit deeper and we have some videos if you want to reach out to the Clariti team, we’ll absolutely send those out. I don’t necessarily want to overload Fivetran by any means, but it is an opportunity. And the only problem is it does take some time. So I think it took us about a week to get all of the data syncing because Google has API thresholds and other things, and we’re troubleshooting different reports. But the Google Sheets Connector is pretty quick. It is challenging to kind of configure and set up the reports you want, but then the Fivetran to BigQuery, if you’re just the kind of person that like, “Hey, I just want to take this and store it in the attic and I don’t know if I’ll ever look at it ever again, but I want it,” then the Fivetran is another good option if you have somebody technical that I can help you with that.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s kind of like you said, it’s taking all those files, almost like I think of it in the world of taxes. It’s like you don’t want to get rid of them. It’s not like you throw them out every year because you might need to keep it around and refer back to them and who knows the reason why, but it’s just nice to have that data. But you also don’t necessarily want to spend a bunch of time fine-tuning another instance to allow you to analyze all of that data if it’s going to be resource intensive. So you talked about the Google Sheets option, where there’d be a connection there. There’s the BigQuery, Fivetran option that would be more of a connection into Google Analytics and exporting that, storing it. Clariti also has the ability to bring in some of that data and smooth it over and have that available for historical analysis. Can you talk about what that looks like and maybe the parameters around how much data is being brought in for anybody who is a Clariti user?

Ben Holland: So we are proud of the fact that Clariti does pull in its own version of your traffic data. So we’ll pull in page views, sessions and visitors as far back as we can go. Through trial and error, we have kind of determined, I mentioned a sampling thing that Google does. We’ve kind of determined that Google kind of stops storing page-level data past about 26 to 36 months. It’s really fuzzy. We’ve kind of loosely correlated it with a default setting of sampling data. So we’ll go back as far as we can. Oftentimes it’s only about 27 to 36 months. And then what we’ll do in while you’re setting up your Google account is we’ll also blend it with your GA4 property. So we’ll ask you for your UA property and then your GA4 property. And then Clariti is smart enough to kind of know when does one stop collecting and when does the other start.

And then it kind of blends it together. So you’ll see in Clariti, and our existing Clariti users are super excited about this and use it all the time, that there is no Cliff. There’s no gap in data unless you took some time after July 1st of 2023 to set up your GA4 property and there wasn’t data being collected, Clariti automatically smooths it over and your data is there, your UA property and your GA4. And the best part is after July 1st in a few weeks in 2024, Clariti will continue to show that UA data. So it is-

Bjork Ostrom: Clariti brings it in, stores it. So it’s kind of like a light version of that data dump whereas much as possible it brings in. Can you say that again? It was page view session and?

Ben Holland: Page view sessions and visitors by post or by page. So all page level data for those three metrics.

Bjork Ostrom: As much of that that’s available. And like you said, Google does some purging of that data over time where you might not have that information to bring over, but if it is over, if it is available, it’s brought over essentially.

Ben Holland: Yes. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And the key here, in that instance, if anybody is a Clariti user, number one, it’s important for them to make sure that they have both their UA connection and their GA4. So let’s say if somebody signed up recently and you had Google Universal Analytics and a GA4 account, would your recommendation be, “Hey, make sure before July 1st that you connect your UA account as well so that data can be brought in before it goes away?”

Ben Holland: Yes. I would highly recommend that you do that as soon as possible. We don’t know exactly the time of day or when on July 1st that Google will delete the UA data, but we do know that it can take up to 48 hours to sync all of your data. So-

Bjork Ostrom: Into Clariti.

Ben Holland: Into Clariti. So we would encourage you to do it as soon as possible.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And then if somebody signs up new, make sure that you connect both accounts as well and ideally before July 1st when that would go away because you want to bring that in and then also have GA4 set up going forward. Is that right?

Ben Holland: That’s right, that’s right, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Ben Holland: And we have a special offer for those who are not Clariti users currently. Anyone that wants to join Clariti here before July 1st, if they go to clariti.com/google, they’ll get access to a special promotion and be able to get their first month of Clariti for $1. So you can pull in all of your UA data and get access to Clariti can reach out to the team, join one of our workshops, get the most out of Clariti, but we just want people to be able to save this data before it’s too late so you can get your first month of Clariti for $1.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah, we talked about this idea of how do you set up a situation that’s kind of like no-brainer, and this is one of those. It’s like there’s no contract. You don’t have to use it moving forward. You can make that connection, bring it in, get a feel for it, and if you’re like, “Ah,” figure out another solution for the data, or if it’s not the right tool for you, no pressure, but there’s a lot of folks who are using it, really enjoy it. And you and the team have done a great job building that out through the years.

So super important information. Obviously some different approaches for it, depending on your level of need. Number one for the data, there might be some people who are like, “Whatever, I don’t need it.” But generally speaking, as much as possible, if you have that data, you never know when you might want to use it, how you might want to use it in the future.

So figure out some way to do your best to store that, have access to it moving forward. We talked about the Google Sheets option, BigQuery, Fivetran, which we used. Clariti, making that connection, and then that deal clariti.com slash Google if people want to check that out. And then the date coming down the line, July 1st, 2024. My guess is there might be a handful of people then who’d have questions about it, or maybe the people who did fall asleep for 15 minutes and they’re just waking up now and they’re like, “What did I miss?” If they want to reach out to you, the team, if they did have some follow-up questions, if they’re maybe confused about it, you also mentioned the webinar that you’ve done and being able to send that out if people want to watch it. Just whatever we can do to help people out. What’s the best way for people to connect with you or the Clariti team if they do have additional questions?

Ben Holland: Yeah, probably the easiest thing is if you go to clariti.com, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com and click on the little chat button you could get directly connected to one of our team. You can also send a note to support@clariti.com or hello@clariti.com, and one of us will respond to you there. In the link that I mentioned, clariti.com/google, we will have a link to our upcoming workshops. We have I think one or two more workshops on this particular subject coming up this month. So we’ll have those on the calendar there where you can sign up. So a lot of different ways. We love talking to our users, we talk to them all the time, and we want you to reach out. So don’t be afraid. Don’t be shy. We’re here to help.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. You and the team have done a great job with Clariti, Ben, and if there’s one thing that we’ve learned as long as we’ve been doing this, it’s like this is just kind of the world we live in. Technology changes, software changes, you have to adapt to it. And as much as possible, if you can find the solution that makes it as easy as possible, you’re in a much better place. So for those of you who are creators, solopreneurs, or maybe have a really light team, that you can focus on doing the thing that you’re really good at. And for most of us listening, we’re not really good at data or data science or working with BigQuery and Fivetran. We’re good at the content that we create or thinking strategically in that world. And so it’s great to hear as solutions like this that make it a little bit easier. So I’ll just say that one more time, clariti.com/google, we’ll put it in the show notes. And again, reach out to the team if you have any questions. Thanks so much for coming on, Ben for the Tiny Bites episode. Really appreciate it.

Ben Holland: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you’re listening to Tiny Bites. Tiny Bites is a brand new podcast from the Food Blogger Pro team that is a current events podcast. These episodes are going to be a little shorter than our usual podcast episodes, and they won’t be released weekly, but instead whenever we feel like there’s something happening in the food blogging world that we just can’t wait for a regular episode to talk about.

So these episodes might be solo episodes with Bjork, or we might bring in industry experts to help unpack whatever’s going on in the food blogging space. We won’t be releasing these episodes weekly, like I said, but when we do release them, they’ll be coming out on a Thursday or Friday. So just keep an eye on your podcast feed for Tiny Bites episodes on those days of the week.

These episodes won’t have formal introductions and there won’t be any ads, but we will have show notes on the Food Blogger Pro website in our podcast page, where you can find resources and links to learn more. So keep an eye out for those. We’re really excited to be able to bring you a podcast episode that can address current events as quickly as possible, and we really hope you guys will enjoy these episodes. So without further ado, I’m going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Allie, welcome to the podcast.

Alison Bechdol: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re trying something called Tiny Bites, which is kind of a play off of our parent company, which is Tiny Bit, but also it ties into the idea for these podcasts, which is there’s a lot of stuff that happens quickly in our industry and things that we need to know, and we want to do these interviews in a way where we’re able to surface things that people need to know in a timely manner.

So we’re not going to schedule this interview way out. It’ll turn around relatively quickly, and people will get to get this information because it’s important information about things that are happening, specifically around Google Analytics Four. So for those who have maybe put their head in the sand, aren’t aware of what happened, can you talk about Google Analytics Four and the big change that happened this summer?

Alison Bechdol: Sure, definitely. So Google Analytics, as we knew it, was Universal Analytics. Google decided to discontinue use of Universal Analytics starting July 1st of 2023. In its place took Google’s new solution to an analytics platform, which is GA4. GA4, Google Analytics Four, uses and collects data completely differently from Universal Analytics. There’s a lot of setup that needs to happen. There’s some different metrics and definitions, so it’s a completely new ball game, but everyone’s in this learning period right now. So this was not a, hey, let’s do this. It was kind of forced upon everybody, to be honest.

Bjork Ostrom: It wasn’t a choice you had, it just happened.

Alison Bechdol: No. Yes, exactly. And there’s things still evolving. I mean, I even was probably on the record at some point somewhere thinking that they were going to push the date back, that things weren’t ready. It was pretty, I guess, communal that we all thought that it was not quite ready yet. So the fact that we need to do these updates, I was anticipating because hey, Google’s just rolling stuff out as it happens.

Bjork Ostrom: And Google is kind of infamous for being this company that, different than Apple, where Apple waits until everything is perfect and then they release something, Google is known to maybe do that a little bit quicker, or also will push something out when it’s not fully baked and say like, “Hey, we’re going to update this over time. It’s going to get there eventually.”

So on July 1st, that change did indeed happen, and that’s what they’re saying was going to happen. You also had said like, hey, this might not be ready. It kind of wasn’t ready because I mean, it was in the sense that it worked, it was fine, but there’s also a lot of pieces that are like, wait, how do you do this? Does this work? I had this thing before, now I don’t have it. So first of all, the question is what happened to your old account on July 1st when the change switched over?

Alison Bechdol: So you might be surprised. If you do still have a Universal Analytics account, if you saw traffic post July 1st, 2023, you are not alone. So that was definitely something that Google said everyone’s shutting down July one, Universal Analytics is no more. Well, it turns out that actually wasn’t necessarily true because there definitely are accounts that continue to collect data. I have seen it even just recently on some of my accounts, like within the last week that it stopped actually capturing data.

So what that means, though, is that it stopped capturing, but all the data’s still there. Google Analytics hasn’t quite come out with a good solution on what to do with this data yet. I wish it was as easy as export from Universal, import to GA4, but that’s unfortunately not the case. So we are still waiting on what the best practices to do with this data. If you want to get ahead of it, I’d recommend taking a look at some data warehouses, seeing if they have any solutions for you specifically, just to hang onto the data in case you do want to end up using it in the future. Or maybe someday we can actually blend all of this perfectly seamlessly, but that would be my recommendation if you are really worried about your historical data.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Yeah, and it’s interesting, I just pulled up Pinch of Yum Analytics, and you can see July 1st, still working, August 1st, still working, and then last day was August 11th. It goes to zero. So now we have this, and it’s a really valuable tool for publishers, this information, historical information to know, hey, have things grown since 2020? Have things fallen off?

To do that analysis, and one of the things you talked about was a data warehouse, and I know that you helped Pinch of Yum set up something within Google Studio to do some of that compare and contrast. So can you talk about Google Studio? Is that considered a data warehouse or should we look at something else as a solution for that, for data warehouse, whatever?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, yeah, yeah, great question. So yeah, Google Data Studio or Looker Studio, they’ve changed the name in the last six months, that is a data visualization tool. So similar to a Power BI or Tableau, if you’re familiar with those kinds of products out there. Google Looker Studio is their free version of that. One thing that’s really awesome about Looker Studio is that we’re able to take data from third parties, third parties being Universal Analytics, GA4, Facebook even. We can bring Pinterest, we can bring in from a bunch of different third parties and have all of that data live in one spot.

So that dashboard through Looker Studio is a great place, if you do still want to have some of that historical data at least visualized in one place, yes, you can definitely still do that. However, just knowing that there’s not going to be any future Universal Analytics data there. We’re also just not sure from a Google Analytics standpoint how long they’re going to keep the data. So that’s where it says, hey, yeah, we can still access it as long as it’s there, but as soon as Google Analytics says, hey, we’re not holding onto anybody’s Universal Analytics data anymore, that’s where, all right, we need to download it. We need to have it, own it ourselves. Either keep it in a data warehouse, keep it somewhere. That’s going to be kind of the next step there.

So right now, yes, we still can use a data visualization tool native to Google to get some of that data, historical information, but who’s to say that that might be different in a month, unfortunately.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And so Looker Studio, I was just looking this up. I used to call it Google Data Studio.

Alison Bechdol: Data Studio, that’s what it was called. They just changed it.

Bjork Ostrom: And then it looks like Looker was a company that Google acquired, and so now they call it Looker Studio, which is essentially this tool that brings in different metrics from different places. It could be, like you said, Facebook, it could be Google information, but it compiles that and then you’re able to create a graph or you’re able to do charts and things like that. You’re able to just, kind of like a studio for you to create different visuals that help you understand the information that you’re bringing in.

And your point is Universal Analytics can be one of those third party sources that you bring in now, but there’s no guarantee that at some point Google doesn’t say, hey, this is old, we’re going to turn this off. And so if that’s the case, where’s one of these warehouses that you could move it into, and what does that process look like?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, I mean there’s a bunch of different solutions out there. Like I said, I’m not sure what the best practice is quite at this point. I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there that don’t know, but there are a lot of data warehouses, which is essentially just a server that can hold your data for you in a place that is not just on your local device or that, hey, your computer gets stolen or it gets broken or something happens, then all of it’s gone.

And because it’s quite a bit of data, that’s where using a warehouse is such where they can keep it for you and it’s not going to take up a bunch of space or a hard drive or something like that. They’ve got a way to hold it in a better space. So there are, go ahead and take a look at some data warehouse solutions if that is something you wish to move forward with or get ahead of. Like I said, I do hope that Google comes up with something soon, at least a nice way to maybe even just put a bow on it so it’s like, hey, here’s your thing, but one can only help.

Bjork Ostrom: And so there’s not a solution right now.

Alison Bechdol: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: Probably because, well not like a built-in package solution that Google’s like, here’s our recommendation for exporting data from Universal Analytics. And so right now there’s not a huge risk in just continuing to have that information in the old account, but at some point it might make sense and Google would probably make an announcement, hey, we’re turning this off in a year.

At that point, there’d be some solutions that would spin up. People would look into it. They’d have some best practices around getting that information out. If you just wanted to be safe right now, is there a way that you can do an export of your entire Universal Analytics account and just store it locally?

Alison Bechdol: I believe so. I honestly haven’t moved that route myself, but there is a way to export and import data in Universal Analytics. You’ll want to do that on the property level. So that’s going to be in your middle column in your admin console. So there should be an export functionality. Again, it probably is going to be some JSON files, some HTML. I’m sure that there’s a lot of files in there. But yeah, that’s where I would start if you do want to take a look at what that might entail.

Bjork Ostrom: And the idea with that, again, it’s not like you’re going to be using that somewhere or analyzing it. You’re just storing it as just in case.

Alison Bechdol: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s really like a insurance against some weird thing happening where that goes away in Universal Analytics, which we wouldn’t anticipate that happening.

Alison Bechdol: Right, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So how about for the people who haven’t made the switch yet? They would log into their account. Like if we hadn’t made the switch, we would log in and August 11th we suddenly wouldn’t have any information anymore. My guess is most people who are using this frequently would have made the switch over to Google Analytics Four, but let’s say somebody hasn’t. What do they need to do in order to make that switch, and anything they should be aware of in that process?

Alison Bechdol: Definitely. So there’s a couple things that Google did to help people who weren’t in our position, that we were kind of getting ahead of it. What essentially Google did is that it took your Universal Analytics property and did its best to transition it into a GA4 property. With that, there’s obviously, as we mentioned before, it’s not apples to apples. So there is some stuff that feels kind of wonky because it just doesn’t quite fit with the new platform. So it does exist, though, and it very well could be that you do have a GA4 account.

There’s going to be two things that are happening. Either the data is collecting, which is great, which essentially means that you were using a new enough version of the tracking code for Universal Analytics that GA4 was able to jump onto that and then be able to pull data from. So you might be getting data, which is great. You don’t have to do anything at least at this point. The other thing that might be happening is you have no data. You don’t have this new tag or this new code in place, so you need to get it installed.

A couple things we can do there, just depending on your platform. If you’re using a WordPress, go ahead and take a look at Google Site Kit if you’re not using that already. I know Monster Insights also has one, there’s a handful of plugins. Be able to make sure you can just get it installed and running on your site. Google Tag Manager is also an option. A couple different solutions out there.

But yeah, I would definitely just get the code on your site. Google does have a pretty good helping system. It even says you can put your website in and it will scan your website for, hey, this looks like a Shopify website, hey, this looks like a WordPress website. This is how you should go ahead to install this. So there are some. They do try to do a decent job at helping users with that.

Bjork Ostrom: Where is that? Is that like a tool that Google has that you can-

Alison Bechdol: Yes, it’s their setup assistant essentially. So it’s usually at the very top. It’s like you kind have to go through all of the steps. You might also still see this big red scary bar of things that need to be done. There’s just a manual checklist you need to check off once things are going. But yeah, so that’s what I would do. Just get the data running. From there, there’s a lot that can be done with GA4.

Unfortunately, it’s just a very different platform from Universal Analytics and all of us who knew it very truly that this is, I mean, truly a different monster. So understanding what your KPIs are is definitely the next step for me, is usually kind of what I’m helping with people, is all right, what are your KPIs? What’s important-

Bjork Ostrom: KPIs for those who aren’t familiar?

Alison Bechdol: Yes, key performance indicators. So knowing, hey-

Bjork Ostrom: The things that are really important, essentially. Like, what are your important metrics that you want to track?

Alison Bechdol: Exactly. So let’s just say it’s email subscriptions, for the purpose of our conversation. Great. We know that email subscriptions is going to be a goal we want to make sure people are coming to the site and doing. So what are the KPIs that are saying if that’s actually successful or not?

I like to do this method where I kind of visualize myself through the website, what are all of the different web parts that I need to touch in order for me to sign up for that subscription? I need to hit a page, I need to fill out the form, I need to potentially come back if I’m really engaged. So there’s a bunch of things that need to happen.

Once you have those things lined out, pull out all the verbs, all of the verbs are going to essentially tell you what those KPIs are. So page views, that’s going to be one. Form fills, that’s going to be one. So what are all of those different steps that need to take place in order for us to know what we’re tracking? Once we know that data, it gives us a pretty streamlined version of, all right, where do we need to go? What data do we need to be looking at?

We know then, hey, we can build custom reports. We can use Google Data or Looker Studio to do that as well, to help us understand. So there’s a lot of customization. So that is one of the pros of GA4 I will say, is Universal Analytics we were kind of stuck having to use the audience behavior acquisition reports as they were. Now within GA4, we can actually customize all of the reporting, all of the reports that you see that are most helpful to you. So that’s one thing that you don’t need to know everything because you don’t have to. Not everything’s going to be relevant to you and your business. But GA4 is actually able to reflect your business instead of you reflecting your business how your Universal Analytics is set up.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, that makes sense. And I think if you haven’t gone through that process before, it’s a helpful one, to think what do you want people to do when they get to your site? For a lot of people we just think page views, page views, traffic, traffic, but it’s like in service of what, and even if you want to get more page views, you can think about how to do that strategically.

You do want people to sign up for email, so then you can message them after. Or even you want to see how many people are clicking the print button on a recipe. That’s important as well. All of these actions that you can track to start to understand the success that your site is having, given what your hope is in terms of what the outcome would be.

Alison Bechdol: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s also been some changes in terms of just language that’s used to describe users, new users. When I look at the reports snapshot right on the main page when I get in, there’s not really a place where I’m seeing page views, and in our world, people talk about page views a lot. So can you talk about some of the language changes that happened and how we should be thinking about those changes relative to what Universal Analytics was?

Alison Bechdol: Sure. So the biggest thing here is that the data, how the data’s collected is different. So once you understand that, it makes a lot more sense about why things are the way they are in GA4. So in Universal Analytics, how the servers really worked is that there were four different types of hits types. There was event, there was a session-based hit, user-based hit. So essentially just ways to identify these different types of things that are happening.

When those things are happening, Google is having to track them individually, not able to track them seamlessly. GA4 tracks everything the exact same, so everything is seamless. So that is where it’s finding out this user journey and understanding what your users are doing before and after an action is significantly easier in GA4 than it ever was in Universal Analytics. So what we’re trying to do there is the reason that these definitions are going to be different because of how the data is collecting is different.

So obviously users is going to be users. We’re all users, individual users, there’s now going to be engaged users, total users, there’s new users. So there are a couple different deviations of these users, trying to just get you the best information possible. Engaged users essentially is a user that is engaged on your site. New users, people that have never been to the site before. So there’s just different little attributes of these user events or these users that you’re able to see.

So that’s going to be why users might be a little bit different. Specifically GA4 also really specializes, one of their prompts is trying to, I keep using this word, it’s not a real word, de-duplicate users across devices.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah.

Alison Bechdol: So it’s essential. I mean, we’ve all been there, like hey, especially within the food blog industry, how many times do you start looking at a recipe on your phone and you’re like, I’m just going to get my computer because it’s so much easier to just have this in one place instead of having to use my phone all the time.

Great. So GA4, if you’re signed into Google on your phone and you’re signed into Google on your computer, Google can use Google Signals, which is their kind of way of doing that, it’s part of one of their identifiers, to say, hey, great, this user is the same user. So we don’t actually need to count those as two separate users. They are one user having two sessions on two different devices. So you might see a discrepancy I guess, in your data in usership for example, because of this, because things are simplicating, or yeah, I’m just making my own language at this point.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. No, I get it.

Alison Bechdol: So there’s things like that. Just because of how things are collected, the data’s going to be different, the definitions are going to be different. So Google has a really great block in their support, I can even send to you, saying, hey, this is what it was in Universal, here’s what it is in GA4, and how it’s different.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And users can almost be like, I think of it as people.

Alison Bechdol: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s how many people are coming, and if a person is using an iPhone and then they switch to a computer, it’s not a different person. It’s the same person. And so what Google’s doing is tracking that as one person and using all of their fancy technology to do that. And so it’s helpful because you can see, okay, I know that there are 100,000 people coming to my site, 100,000 users, and of those, 50,000 are new users.

Okay, so that means that there’s 100,000 people and 50,000 of those people weren’t new and 50,000 were. Do you know, because Google Analytics Four is new, will it assume starting the first day that you have it, like everybody is going to be a user and a new user until you have some time and then it starts to recognize, because it can’t pull information from Universal Analytics to know if it’s new or not? Does that sound right?

Alison Bechdol: Yes. So that is also my understanding, is that you’re going to see a higher number of new users right away just because there’s new cookies, new data measurement protocol, things in place that is just going to not know that you had already, you’ve got that Universal Analytics cookie, if you do. Yeah, you might see a higher number of new users to begin with.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And then is there an equivalent to page views? There’s users, which that pulls over. Is there page views, and where do you find that?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, how things are now tracked all of the same, I know we’ve talked about this on our other podcast as well, the episode. Everything is now event-based, so event-based meaning hey, if I go to a page, that’s an event. If I click a button, that’s an event. If I download something, that’s an event. So everything tracked as events, again, all the same. So yes, now we have a page view event, so that’s page underscore view in your events report, if you see events.

You also, for the metric, it’s just going to be views. So they kind of got rid of the page part of page views for some reason. And actually I think I know the real reason of that is GA4 really was built to support apps and websites. So when you say views, it’s not explicit to page views. It could be screen views of an app. Anyway, so that’s why you might see it as views, as opposed to page views. But the page view event and the event count of page view events will be your page view number.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. That is really interesting. I see, maybe this is a custom event to Pinch of Yum. Oh, I wonder if it has to do with video. Now I’m just getting into asking you specific questions about RGA. It’s called buffer, but I wonder if that has to do with the video starting. I think this probably has to do with our video.

Alison Bechdol: Probably.

Bjork Ostrom: Buffer-

Alison Bechdol: There’s a couple different video. Yeah, there’s some different listeners, just depending on the video host that you have. If it’s YouTube, obviously that’s Google based. It’s a little bit easier for us to track that out of the box, especially if you’re using Vimeo or something along those lines. You might have access to some different events that might be firing.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. Anything else that you’ve noticed as things that would be worth mentioning or things that have come up when you’ve been working with clients on their GA4, things that are maybe commonly confusing, things like that?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, I think that there’s one. I’d like to say it’s not big, but it’s definitely been a reoccurring problem that I’ve been seeing. This is something to do with reporting identity, and I’m actually going to kind of go back to that Google Signals chat we were just talking about de-duplicating users.

So Google Signals is a way that we have essentially said this is how we are going to be reporting, using Google Signals and these device IDs. And there’s a couple different, I guess really factors that go into identifying a user on your site. So that’s going to be user ID, Google Signals, device ID, and then modeling. Modeling is essentially if you have cookies disabled on your computer, it’s going to find users similar to you and try to guess the data, which I don’t love, but that’s essentially what it’s doing. So using Google Signals and having this essentially blended way of us to be able to understand these users is how GA4 really recommended everybody set up their data using Google Signals.

Now as time has gone on, able to take a look at the data, we’re seeing a couple things. Specifically for users that have eCommerce businesses, specifically if you’re tracking sales, you’re tracking individual downloads and such, from what we’ve understood is that this blended model is not sufficient. Reason being is that, as I mentioned, that modeling, as I mentioned some of the other kind of blended ways that it’s trying to find the data, Google thinks that if there’s not enough of those events or not enough things happening that you as the owner of your analytics or site will be able to figure out that individual user that’s doing those things.

To me, that’s bananas. The fact that first of all, I’m never going to do that. Second of all, who’s going to be tracking on an individual user basis without a user ID or something like that offline. So it’s a very, in my opinion, silly way why it’s doing this. So while that’s happening, it’s not going to be reporting 100% of what’s accurate on your site. So when we see this, I’m seeing sales that are completely different from what we see in Shopify or data that’s completely off. I’ve been seeing that quite a bit, and it’s very concerning to a lot of people, which I completely understand.

The one other thing that this Google Signals and blended model does do is it gives us demographic reports. So it has to be enabled for you to get age demographics, all of that kind of stuff. You have to be using this blended model. However, as I mentioned, you use that blended model, you get your demographics, great. However, your data might not be super accurate compared to what you might be looking for.

So what we can do is go into your analytics admin in your center column, which is that property column, and you’re going to see a note for reporting identity. So you’re going to click that reporting identity. When you click that, you’re going to see that blended is at the top, most likely selected. The second one I think is observed, which is essentially just not using that modeling, and then device based is actually, you can’t even see it. You have to click see all, and then you’ll see that device-based one as the third option.

So when we switch to device-based or device ID, that is essentially as close as we can get to Universal Analytics or what we were seeing from a hey individual user basis. So that’s what we’re at this point, hey, let’s switch back, let’s switch to device-based. Let’s get rid of this blended, just because things are not looking like they should in our opinion.

The good thing about this, yes, you will be potentially losing your demographic info if you switch to device ID. However, you can switch back and forth between blended and device and observed as many times as you want and all the data will reflect that. It is retroactive. So this is just a new setting that you’re going to have to just become familiar with if you are going to be paying attention to your demographic reports, as well as wanting to make sure that your data is potentially as close as possible.

There’s also some data thresholding issues that also happens with this Google Signals. That’s kind of when it says, hey, you might be able to figure out who this is. You might see a little note at the top. I think it’s a little orange triangle with an exclamation point, essentially just saying, hey, this report is being thresholded because of the Google signals. When you turn that off and enable device-based, that will disappear.

So I’m hoping that if you are seeing some data discrepancies in what you might be considering, if you have another system elsewhere and you’re comparing the two, go ahead and switch over to device-based and just take a look at your data and see if it looks better, see if it’s more on track of what you would expect. I think that that has been quite a bit of a thing that I’ve seen at least a lot in the last couple months.

Bjork Ostrom: And is that, I think probably people hear that and they’re like, oh shoot, it’s not actual accurate information. Are you seeing that mostly with people who have tracking around things like commerce, like purchase-based behavior? You buy a thing and you have Shopify and you know that you sold a thousand dollars of product today, but in Google it shows it as 2000 or something like that.

Alison Bechdol: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you seeing that with issues with actual page view tracking and user numbers?

Alison Bechdol: Not necessarily.

Bjork Ostrom: Or mostly just the commerce type stuff? Okay.

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, mostly the commerce stuff. Maybe some events that are firing weird or having too many that you would expect or too few that you would expect, but that’s traditional. Yes, more in the eCommerce space. But again, the demographic point is really where I do tend to find the people that are not in eCommerce space do still tend to care about the demographics, which in case, yeah, you have to have that blended on to be able to do so.

Bjork Ostrom: And can you explain that again? It’s hard to talk through it on a podcast, but you go into Google Analytics and then-

Alison Bechdol: You’ll go to your admin, which is in the bottom left, that little icon on there.

Bjork Ostrom: You click on that little gear in the bottom left and then you go to, under property, you go to property settings?

Alison Bechdol: Nope. So just go keep on going down and you’ll see reporting identity. It’s about three fourths of the way down, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, got it.

Alison Bechdol: So when you click that, yep, you’ll see a box.

Bjork Ostrom: You have two options, blended-

Alison Bechdol: It says two options, observed, and then there’s another see all at the very bottom. Click see all, then you’ll see the third for the device-based. Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And that would be, people would be looking at that, if they have a commerce site, they notice that things are looking a little bit off, that might get them closer to more accurate information, but they would lose the tracking of demographic information, which would be the downside of doing that.

Alison Bechdol: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that would be worth mentioning is for anybody who uses an ad network, making sure that if you are changing or adjusting any of these settings, that doesn’t, because I know some of the reporting on the ad network side, it ties back to it. So checking in with them. The other question that I had was around demographics. I don’t know, I’m trying to see if we have that on. Would you check in property, that property area if you have that on, because I think that would be important?

Alison Bechdol: You’re just going to look at the report itself. So if you have just the standard GA4 reporting setup, you’ll go to reporting, which is that second bubble on the far left hand utility navigation, click that. And then under engagement, I’m sorry, there’s going to be a lifecycle and then user information, that user cycle, I think it should be at the very bottom on the left. Then if you open that, if you expand that, you’ll see demographics is the report in there.

Bjork Ostrom: Demographic details. Okay, got it. Yep. So for anybody who’s listening in and talking through this, so again, it’s reports on the left side and then you go down to under users, user attribute. Then you can click demographic details and you can see the different countries people are coming from, the percentage, and then all the details on those. And you’re saying if you were to switch over to that ID tracking, that would go away?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, you’ll see quite a bit of unassigned, which is still to be expected again, where Google’s trying to still figure out, hey, this is a new system. What’s your gender? What’s your age? Those are obviously things we don’t input into Google usually.

So there still might be some unassigned there, but that’s definitely something that you, and you probably are confused at this point. You’re like, I only see countries, where’s the actual demographic stuff? So if you see there’s actually a dropdown for your primary dimension, you’ll be able to select that and that’s where you’re going to see gender, age, interests, those other demographic reports.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. And my guess is, Allie, there’re going to be people who are listening to this and they’re like, this is all important. I want to do this, but I don’t want to do it by myself. Which is great because you have a service and a little agency that focuses on stuff like this to help bloggers and publishers. Can you talk about how people can work with you if they wanted to connect with you and have some help with all things Google Analytics?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, absolutely. So I have a website, digital-ade.com. So it’s digital-ade.com. On there, feel free to send me a contact form. I’m happy to help. I’m also, actually, this might be new to you as well, Bjork, we are starting kind of a little leg of Digital-ade called The Insite Co, which is going to be specific to data and Looker Studio. So essentially we’ll be building a bunch of different templates that you can just use as is for just a monthly fee, or if you want to have one and then have it customized, that’s also something that we can do for that and support you that way.

So we know that this is important. We know a lot of people want dashboards, they want to visualize their data. GA4 is confusing. It’s a whole new thing to learn. It’s a lot. So if you just don’t want to do that, which I completely understand, feel free to reach out to us. This is, again, you’re not the only one. You’re not alone. We have seen a lot worse than whatever you think you have potentially, or don’t have. So yeah, happy to help out if you just need an ear or someone to talk to about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Allie, thanks so much. We’ll put that link in the show notes if people want to check it out.

Alison Bechdol: Awesome.

Bjork Ostrom: And thanks for doing the first ever bite-size episode here. Appreciate it.

Alison Bechdol: Of course. Thanks for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Thanks.

Emily Walker: Hey there, Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team here. We really hope you enjoyed our first episode of Tiny Bites. And big thanks to Alison for joining us for our inaugural episode. Like I mentioned during the introduction, if you’d like to learn more about the episode, head to foodbloggerpro.com/podcast, where you’ll find the show notes for this episode.

In these show notes, we walk through step-by-step how to do some of the processes that Alison talked about, like changing your reporting identity or finding your demographics reports. We have images and just step-by-step directions that should make it super easy to follow along from at home. So definitely check those out, and we’ll see you again at some point soon for another Tiny Bites episode. Thanks so much for listening.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I dot com. And I’m going to give you a really specific example of how you can use Clariti if you sign up today. And that is poster page specific tracking of changes that you’re making. And you can use the notes area within Clariti to make a note anytime that you make a change. An example of when you’d want to do this, let’s say that you’re switching over some of your YouTube videos to be AdThrive or Mediavine video players. You want to make sure that you’re tracking to see when you look back three months later, the change or the impact that that had. And personally, what we’ve noticed as we’ve worked on content is like you forget. If you don’t have a system, if you’re not making a note of that somewhere, you’ll forget.

And so within Clariti, there’s the ability to leave a note, anytime that you’re making a change or improvement on a piece of content to allow you to go back and see how that change impacted things. There’s lots of other ways that you can use Clariti, but I thought it’d be helpful just to give a really specific example. If you want to see what those other ways are, you can go to clariti.com/food to get 50% off your first month. Again, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I dot come slash food, to get 50% off of your first month. You can start taking notes on the changes you’re making and explore all the other features. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Paul Bannister from Raptive. And I know you might be thinking didn’t Bjork and Paul just talk on the podcast? And you’d be right, but they’re here for a really important time-sensitive conversation today that you won’t want to miss. Paul and Bjork are going to be talking about the future of content creation and protecting your content in a world with AI. As you know, it’s super hard to keep up with AI. The technology, the legislation, our understanding of it, everything is changing so rapidly right now and we want to keep you as up to date as possible.

As content creators, it’s really important that we stay as informed as possible to understand how AI might change the future of food blogging and content creation, and what we need to be doing to stay ahead of these changes. Bjork and Paul discuss how the current AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard are using existing content on the web, just like recipes from food blogs and how online search on Google might change in the coming years with AI, they also share actionable steps that you can be taking today to protect your content and how you might want to start thinking about the future of content creation in a world with AI. It’s really a must listen. I know you’re really going to get a lot out of it, so I’ll just let Bjork and Paul take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Paul, welcome back to the podcast.

Paul Bannister: Hey, Bjork, great to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: This is probably the shortest period we’ve had between interviewing two guests. We’re not going to call it an emergency pod, but sometimes you’ll have these podcasts, social media posts, people get on emergency pod, emergency posts. It’s not that, but it is unique, and that it’s time sensitive to a certain degree, and the reason it’s time sensitive because as we know, technology moves very quick. As we also know, the world of AI moves very quick and one of the things that you are talking about with your team and Raptive and working towards is making sure that we, as publishers understand the implications of AI. And one of the things that you had mentioned that was so great on a call recently was this idea of Napster.

And we think back to Napster for those who are old enough to remember that, I definitely am, it was a sweet spot for me. I was like, “Oh my gosh, free music. Anytime I want it, I can just download it.” And you were saying on a call recently, this idea that the music industry really didn’t move quickly enough to react to Napster in a way where things evolved quickly, it moved past it, and the potential long-term damage that came from them not being able to move quickly, and how potentially we as publishers, creators, people who are writing content, putting it online, creating photos, putting it online, could … the story arc could kind of be the same for us potentially. Can you talk a little bit about that analogy and why we’re right now in the middle of that as publishers?

Paul Bannister: Yeah, and so, to back up even a step further, I try not to be melodramatic or sky is falling, Pollyanna, but there’s a distinct possibility that the rise of generative AI is as big of a deal for society, the world, certainly content creation and the larger industry that that is, that it’s as big of a deal as the printing press, which is sort of a ridiculous statement and why I hate to be melodramatic, but it could actually be. And I was around at the beginning of the web, which was an enormous deal, and I feel like this is as big for sure. So with that as the backdrop, I think that if you agree with the point that AI is a huge deal, if you agree with the point that AI will definitely be very disruptive, then you start asking the question, well, what are the things it’s going to disrupt and what are the challenges it’s going to create?

And I think the pure … again, in the simplest most basic sense, like content creation, which includes writing and photography and art and music and screenwriting, and it’s why the actors and everybody are on strike right now. It affects literally anything where people are creating a content of some form can be disrupted by this. So, if you agree with that as the backdrop of everything, then the Napster analogy I think is a pretty good one where it’s massive disruptive change, that only affected one particular industry, which was the music. And the music companies were like, “Oh, this is fine. Oh, we’re going to use the same old tricks we’ve done before. Oh, we’re going to sue people.” And they sued a bunch of college students and stuff for stealing music.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I remember that. And as a college student, I remember being like, “Oh, no.”

Paul Bannister: Yeah. Yeah, and it clearly backfired because if you look at the … they were slow, they did the wrong things, they were reactionary, they assumed it would go away, and if you look at revenue data for the music industry, I don’t have it in front of me, but I think it took until this year or last year for the music industry to be as big as it was in 2000. They had such a massive hit because they were really behind in terms of the technology. The technology got the better of them, they reacted the wrong way. And ultimately, music is a good example. They have a valuable asset, people who create music, it’s an amazing skill, it’s an amazing art and people will pay for it if it’s packaged the right way. Finally, it’s kind of getting to a place where it is. So I think that that moment for music is now kind of multiplied because it’s for any form of content creation.

So I think that for in the scope of what we’re talking about here, people who create content online food specifically, but really any kind of online content creator, like you’ve got to be looking at AI and saying, can this make better content than me? Is this going to kill my search results? Who’s stealing my content and using it to feed these systems? There’s all these questions that are wrapped up into it that are really complicated and scary, and yeah, if we don’t actively lean into this, we all could be kind of Napterized for the next couple of years.

Bjork Ostrom: If people … Napsterized did you say, was that … yeah, I’m going to figure out how to use that word more often. I love that. The point being, if we just sit back and we’re like, “Whatever, this is just technology, it’s how technology works.” These companies, these AI companies, if there’s not any pushback against it, there’s no incentive for them to be more generous with links or crediting. And so for those who aren’t familiar, can you talk about what’s happening, when you say generative AI, number one, what does that mean? And then number two, how does a company that’s producing generative AI content get to the point where they’re able to do that?

Paul Bannister: Yeah, So generative AI is artificial intelligence technology that can generate new stuff, typically content, and the three forms of content that are mostly being produced today are text-based content, so ChatGPT is the best example, or Google Bard. You go to one of those systems you type in. One of the best scenarios I’ve been using it for is travel. I’m going to Lake George in upstate New York next week, and I typed in, “I have a family of four and I have two kids this age and this age, and we’re going to Lake George and what are some of the places to go that are in the area?” And ChatGPT and Bard gave me great recommendations of things to do, but I dug deeper on afterwards and went to some sites to look at information, but they gave me phenomenal information, so it’s generating content for me.

That’s text. You’ve got image-based generative AI, like Midjourney, people played with that or Stable Diffusion, which honestly both of them are unbelievably amazing to literally be able to type in, “Show me an image of a panda bear wearing a gangster outfit,” and 10 seconds later you’ve got a picture of a panda bear wearing a gangster outfit and it’s unbelievably good. Really cool, and then the newest form, which is still very early days though but kind of works in different forms is generative video. There’s a tool called Runway. There’s some others where you can type in very simple video things and it’ll make you a three or four second video clip out of the blue. And it’s really, really amazing.

So it’s amazing technology. I think a lot of people have used ChatGPT probably the most, but maybe Midjourney, maybe Stable Diffusion, and you can see in a lot of cases how impressive it is and how it can create things in certain scenarios that are almost as good as what a person would make.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and it’s interesting because it’s helping us do what we need to do. So what we need to do as internet users is in this case, it’s information. We need information. We’re doing travel, we need recipe, we need advice. I used it for the context of a conversation, like a problem I was working through just as an experiment. I used Bard like, “Hey, I’m thinking through this. What are your thoughts on it?” And it gave me some great back and forth considerations, but the way that it does that, the reason that it’s able to do that is because it’s taken all of the content of the internet or a lot of it, most of it, the best of it. And it’s essentially just … this isn’t the technical way to describe it, but it’s essentially stuffed it into a big computer brain and then, said it’s kind of like Neo and Matrix, like learn this.

It just plugs in, it learns all of it, and then is conversational. That’s like the intelligence part where you’re able to talk to it and it’s as if it understands you. So you can use natural language, it has historical context around your conversation. Within our industry specifically, what you could do is you could go to Bard and for anybody who hasn’t done this and you’re listening to this podcast, you need to pause the podcast or keep listening to the podcast, do it right now. Go to bard.google.com or search ChatGPt and create an account. It’s free, and at least try some of these prompts just to get an idea of what’s happening. You could say, what’s a good pancake recipe or give me the best chocolate chip cookie recipe, and it will give you a recipe.

And the reason that it’s able to do that is because it’s looked at hundreds of recipes and sometimes cookbooks even that are available online and it’s compiled all of those into its own recipe. So the risk here for creators is that this gets good enough where the problem that somebody has, which is I need a recipe, the solution, that doesn’t change, they’ll still need that. The solution for how they get that could potentially change. And it could go from going to Google and searching for it or going to Pinterest, clicking on an image and instead going to Bard and saying, what’s the best recipe for blueberry pancakes? And it will give it to you. You make it and you’re on with your day, and if a thousand people do that and then 10,000 and then a million, that changes user patterns. Is that an accurate description of the risk analysis?

Paul Bannister: 100% and I think embedded in your statement are two of the fundamental challenges. One is you talked about the prompts. If you go to ChatGPT or Bard, things to try and it’s like show me a good recipe for pancakes. That’s exactly what people are doing now with search and in a world … and today, when you type it into Google, you get 10 blue links back, and if you’ve got a really good pancake recipe and you’re ranking number three, that’s awesome. You win. You get a bunch of traffic. In the world where the AI system is giving the recipe, there’s no necessity for links anymore. The recipe is just given to you there because the system built it for that person, so there’s no links anymore. So that’s issue number one.

And issue number two, as you mentioned that the system has scanned hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of pancake recipes and is basically distilled, what is the essence of a pancake and what makes a great pancake based on 10,000 data points. So effectively, if you’ve got a great pancake recipe that was searching … ranking and search today, that recipe is an input to its ability to make a good pancake recipe, so it’s like they’re taking your content to make a pancake recipe where the system is telling you what it is and they’re no longer sending traffic to you. So both sides of the equation, you are kind of getting the short end of the stick on.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you’ve helped by essentially powering the knowledge that this AI, whether it’s Bard or Bring or ChatGPT, ChatGPT being what is powering Bing, but you’ve given it that, but then you’re also literally just not given any credit. You’re not compensated for allowing that to happen, and there’s also no referral compensation for the link that’s eventually clicked, which is why SEO exists because the thought is you’re going to be able to produce content for less than what you’re getting from when somebody visits your site, whether that’d be buying a product or advertising revenue as is the case with Raptive or selling products. So the question that I have related to that, and we’d be curious to hear your opinion on is let’s use Bard as an example, being that it’s closest to Google or it’s within Google.

The way that Google makes money is by links and including links to sites. And it’s like this massive cash cow, crazy amount of money that they’re making from that. And if you use Bard right now, there’s not any of that. So it’s not like a moneymaking mechanism for it right now. My curiosity is within the context of a search engine or something that was a search engine that now is like an AI chat interface, do you think there’s any potential that Google needs to figure out how to bring links into it because that’s the only way that they’re making money and therefore is the potential with something like Bing or Google where links are being introduced and partial answers are given that result in search traffic? Have you heard any kind of industry chatter around that?

Paul Bannister: I think the scary thing … I’ll do the scary thing and then the comforting thing. The scary thing is that there’s nothing to stop Google from putting paid links into the AI results, but no organic links. And for the vast majority of the people we work with and content creators on the web in general, you don’t pay for links, you get organic links. So they could easily say, “We’re going to put our three paid links on top of the chat results, but then bury or completely disappear the organic links.” That’s like fear number one. I think on the other side, Google at least has a large vested interest in continuing to send traffic to websites. They make money on those websites too. If the results are better, users are happier, they come back more often.

There’s a lot of reasons why they don’t really want to upset the Applecart too much too quickly. So I’m optimistic that that worst case scenario won’t happen soon, but if competitive pressures increase on Google or different things start happening, they may have to move faster, but I’d be optimistic for now, it won’t be that terrible in the near future, but this is all moving very fast and hard to see when things are going to change.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. It’s almost like if you’re using just Google as the AI engine that we’re looking at, maybe the risk isn’t there. It’s actually more for the companies that don’t have an incentive to prioritize links like ChatGPT or whatever next generative AI company comes around and trains on a bunch of content. That’s where the risk is, where it’s a completely new business model, they operate differently and people go there, they start to get into the rhythm around using that as their solution for things. Is that accurate?

Paul Bannister: I think that’s exactly right. I think that … I think Google is playing that game where they’re like, we don’t need to blow up the way search works right now. We can improve search, we can iterate on it, we can add AI based features to it. We can make it smarter, but they don’t need to blow it up right now because it’s still their cash cow and there’s a big ecosystem that they’ve built there and they don’t have that pressure. If ChatGPT figures out some amazing new search oriented chat system which ChatGPT, it’s not there yet and users start flocking to it, that’s where Google will start having to be like, “Okay, now we’ve got hard choices to make. Do we chase what ChatGPT is doing to make a user interface or do we account, how do we protect our cash cow that we have today?” So right now that pressure is not there, but it could happen at any point.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, what it takes is a breakthrough product that has quick adoption for users that then makes the current player, Google that’s dominating, have to react to say, we need to keep people from going over there, so we need to create something that’s similar to that.

Paul Bannister: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So where does that put content creators? What do we do? What are our options? And if we talk about these paths forward, where’s the path forward where this continues to be an industry where people can build a business, be successful with it, create content and get compensated for it? Let’s talk about that path.

Paul Bannister: Right, one simple thing, I think every time I’ve been on this podcast, I’ve said the same thing over and over again, which is great quality content wins. So I think step one with all of this from a content creator perspective is keep making good content. The better your content is, the more users will like it. The more people want to send traffic to it, the more people will want to come back. There’s other forms of traffic beyond search, diversify what you’re doing, keep doing a great job, keep engaging your audience. That always has to be the most important thing for sure. So that’s like bucket one. I think bucket two then is starting to look at, again, thinking back to the examples of Napster, looking at what’s happening right now in the world.

And you’ve got all these giant media companies like the New York Times and the Associated Press and Dotdash Meredith and Hearst and others, starting to negotiate with the AI companies for different aspects of their business and trying to figure out, can we be compensated for this? Can we have certain guarantees in place? What are the things to conversations to be having today to reduce the possibility that we all get Napsterized, which I’m going to keep saying.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Paul Bannister: So I think that that’s the other part of it is like what’s the right way to engage in the larger world? To have a seat at the table and figure out what does … no one knows what the world is going to look like five years from now. We all know it’s going to look different, but we don’t know what it’s going to look like and how do we become active participants in setting that future rather than letting it happen to us.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and so when you say these companies are negotiating seat at the table, I hear different companies like Reddit as an example, talking about charging for access to their site. Can you talk about what’s happening there? What does that mean when you look behind the scenes and see the deal that’s being done with an AI company? Have those deals been done or is it just negotiation right now? What does that look like?

Paul Bannister: As far as what is publicly known? Only one deal has been done, which is the Associated Press struck a deal with OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT to allow OpenAI to use a whole bunch … I mean, the Associated Press has content from the last 100 years or something like that. They’ve got enormous amounts of historical information. So they provided that data to OpenAI to use in their system, and that was kind of a paid deal. No one knows what the price was. My guess is it wasn’t that much money, but it sounds really good. That’s the only known deal. There are probably some other deals that happen behind the scenes that are a little bit less clear. We know in the image world there have definitely been deals done there, but in the text oriented world, there’s only been that one public one.

Bjork Ostrom: So in that case, what it was is OpenAI Associated Press said you can’t crawl our site. How did that … do you know functionally how that happened?

Paul Bannister: Yeah, I think part of it for the Associated Press was a bunch of the content they have, they don’t publicly release in a very usable format.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So they maybe … yeah, yeah.

Paul Bannister: They give them special stuff that you can’t get just by scraping a website. So they had a little bit of leverage there, where it was like, we’ve got really important valuable things and you can’t have it otherwise and it’s like, okay, that’s-

Bjork Ostrom: Behind a paywall or abstracted in some way that it couldn’t be crawled. So, it wasn’t a matter of them clawing it back and saying, you can’t have this. It was more a matter of open AI saying, how do we get this? And they’re like, you pay for it versus anything on the open web. Most of the sites that we’re talking about right now, they can just crawl that there’s nothing you can do to stop it at this point. Is that right?

Paul Bannister: There are beginning to be some things you can do to stop it. So OpenAI announced last week, or not sure when this podcast is coming up, but in early August that they have now GPTbot, which is just like this Google bot that cross sites and helps index your site for search. GPTbot is a bot that OpenAI uses to scrape your site to pull your data to use in their system, and you can now block that bot in your CMS from your site going forward. So that’s the first truly controllable thing that’s been put out in the world, but it’s very binary. You’re either like all your information is scraped or you block everything. I think part of it is I think a lot of people would say, “Well, you can take my stuff if you pay me for it.”

And again, no one knows what the model is yet for being paid, but that’s the kind of negotiation that … I think those are the early kinds of conversations that are happening, even though no one quite knows what the model is yet. For now, you can start blocking the ChatGPT bot if you want to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: And how do you do that? It’s similar to a no follow type or a no index type tag that you would do with Google if you don’t want it to index a certain page?

Paul Bannister: So it’s Robots.txt So I think you have to use Yoast or some other plugin like that to modify that on your server. I am not a CMS expert-

Bjork Ostrom: Outside of your expertise. Yeah,

Paul Bannister: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but I think you can do it in Yoast, and I know we publish on our blog information on how to block it if you want to.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. And so Yoast, for those who aren’t familiar, it’s a plugin that is made by a company that specialized, they have lots of different plugins. Yoast was the name. We actually did a Food Blogger Pro interview with him years ago, and they have an SEO plugin. So, the SEO plugin allows you to do certain customizations and specializations. One of the things you can do for those who aren’t familiar is you can tell Google to not index something and you might think, why would you ever do that? Well, maybe you have a certain page on your site that you want to have available, like an email signup page, but you don’t want that to be indexed, but you want it to be available on your website. You might tell Google that the bot that comes and crawls your site, you don’t want that to be indexed.

You couldn’t previously do that with AI, but now, it sounds like with ChatGPT, OpenAI has released some information that is essentially like insect repellent for the spider that comes and crawls your site and you’re like, “No, I don’t want you here. Go away.” So then it just leaves, but then, the flip side of that is you just aren’t going to be included in, in this case results from ChatGPT. Is there any risk that you think with that? I mean, I think the risk would be more so with a Bard if you’re telling, “We don’t want Bard to crawl our site,” which you can’t do now and it would probably be complex, but would there be any risks to say, “Hey, we want to be excluded from ChatGPT,” and then they come out with this gangbusters feature that sends a bunch of traffic? I don’t think that’ll happen, but-

Paul Bannister: Right, right. I think the risks are things that are sort of unknown like that, maybe-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Paul Bannister: And gangbusters saying if you’re not in a system, you lose, you don’t get traffic. That’s a risk. I think if later there is some compensation model where they pay you per article for access to your content and you are out of the index, you don’t get paid, there’s stuff like that, but they’re very unknown. So, I think-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s all speculative.

Paul Bannister: We’re recommending people do it, but it’s not a slam dunk either way. It’s definitely a complicated situation.

Bjork Ostrom: Right, that makes sense. And part of it is there would only be incentive for an OpenAI to pay for content if the majority of the sites that they want to get content from are blocking them and if not, then there’s not incentive because they can just continue to crawl it.

Paul Bannister: The pancake analogy is a great one where it’s like, I don’t … let’s look right now very quickly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Paul Bannister: Pancake recipe returns … well, this is probably wrong, but 599 million results on the web, that’s probably wrong, but let’s assume there are tens of thousands of pancake recipes on the web, even half the people block them, there’s still tens of thousands of pancake recipes that it has access to and therefore it’s hard to cut back on that access at this point.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. So there’s some things that we can do. My guess is you’ll have more control over time of what that looks like. I think the OpenAI note is a great one. I wasn’t aware of that, but we’ll be sure to link to any resources within the show notes so people can check that out. My guess is just with a simple Google search, they’d be able to figure out how to do that. The thing that’s hard for an independent creator is we’re kind of on our own. We’re just trying to figure out how we can produce content, get some stuff up on social media, get a good night sleep, and also spend time with our kids. And then you have the considerations around open AI and these paying for rights to our content. So what does that look like for the independent creator, who we can do little things.

Like you said, we can put a no index bot thing on our site to keep open AI from ingesting our content, but what are the other things that we can be doing? And I know that Raptive is kind of pushing some initiatives forward for independent creators as well. Can you talk about those two?

Paul Bannister: Yeah, sure. So the first one … again, let me step back for a second. I think ultimately, what the collective we would like to do is influence Google, OpenAI, other AI companies to come up with fair models for making sure we all keep getting good search traffic, making sure that if there’s a deal to be done around being compensated for content, that the collective, we are a part of that. And just making sure that there are fair outcomes for creators. That’s what … I think we would all say, those would be good things. We all want those things. If we’re going to influence those companies, you have to think about the ways to influence those companies. Those companies want to make a lot of money. They want to not have governments come down on them in a big way, particularly companies like Google that are enormous and have lots of government pressure on them.

They want have good press, and so they want those things. So, we think about influencing those companies through those things. How do we push them to do things that we collectively want by being in the press? How do we collectively push them to do things we want by influencing advertisers who pay them? How do we collectively push them to do things by talking to governments and saying, “Hey, this is unfair. This is what’s happening.” So those are the kinds of things that we think are important to starting thinking about influencing those companies. So step one is we release an open letter, which you can sign at protectcontentcreators.com. By doing that, you put your name on it. We would also love it for creators, bloggers to share it with their audiences.

We don’t have real people to sign it. We released it a few weeks ago. We have thousands of signatures now. We want to get to way more than that. And I think that proving to the world that people care about content creators, people want them to be compensated for what they do, people want them to be able to make a living like many of your listeners do, is really important. And we want real people to sign that because that’s a real proof point. When people believe something, it goes a long way. That’s bucket one, is the open letter

Bjork Ostrom: And to talk about that a little bit. So protectcontentcreators.com. This can be anybody, it could be my mom, it could be us, it could be anybody who wants to get behind this idea of protecting content creators in the world of AI. And what you’re doing in signing that is just saying, “I believe in this,” and you can see the specifics of what it would be. There’s kind of these three points, main points on the site. Content creators’ interest must be a central consideration, trust and transparency must be preserved, and third, content creators deserve control and compensation. So, it’s essentially this collective effort to say, “Hey, here’s this voice of thousands of people that provides a little bit of evidence, a lot of evidence towards government, towards big companies like Google to say this is important to people and they’re thinking about it. And here’s some evidence as to that.”

Paul Bannister: Yep, yep, because the reverse of that is … and that’s exactly right, the reverse of that is that the White House a month ago or so put out a whole bunch of principles for how to regulate AI. None of them talked about content creators, even though again, that’s where the data all comes from. Then, the EU recently … I don’t if the act is fully in law yet, but they have an AI act which will be the first government action around AI in the world. It doesn’t mention content creators either. So it’s like governments are already going down these paths to put regulations in place, which is probably good. I’m not saying what’s in there isn’t right, but it certainly doesn’t talk about content creators at all.

And we want to make sure that content creators have a seat at the table and real people signing the open letter is a proof point that this is a necessary component of in that case regulation, but other things as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Right, versus an individual company going and being like, “Hey, we think this is important.” It’s kind of like thousands of individuals and thousands of individuals who represent companies going to people and saying, this is important. And also a reminder of there’s thousands of these small businesses who also employ other people that this is really important to … it’s just a reminder for these people who maybe have one filter or one way to look at it that are creating … making decisions to be like, “Oh yeah, this is something that we also need to consider. Whether it be somebody at Google training a model or somebody at some government level that’s creating rules and regulations around it.

If you can tell a story of it being a team of three people in Minnesota and this is their job and livelihood, we need to consider that. That’s kind of what’s happening here.

Paul Bannister: Exactly. Job creation, economic impact of blogging and content creation online is huge and something we’re collecting a lot of data on because it is so important to get people to pay attention.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So you said that’s the first thing you were going to go, and talk about a second consideration.

Paul Bannister: Yeah, the second consideration, again, a little bit of backstory. About two months ago, the Washington Post had an article and released a dataset that is public information, but they basically found … they found where all the data in open AI systems come from and they write it by domain.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Paul Bannister: Two data points came out of that for us that we thought were relevant. So the first thing just to tell a bit of a story, so it’s ranked by domain where the data comes from. The biggest contributor to the OpenAI system is actually Google Patents. Apparently Google Patents at Google.com. If you care about it, has every patent ever published? It is an enormous data set. It is the single largest contributor of information to the OpenAI system. Okay, fine. The second is some UGC side, I forget the name of it. The third is the New York Times. The New York Times contributes 0.06% of all data in the OpenAI system. So think about that. Probably the biggest news organization in the world, it’s only 0.06% of the system. So it’s pretty small in the grand scheme, but it’s still the third biggest. We aggregated all 4,500 of our sites, so we’re almost 5,000 now.

And we represent collectively 0.6. So 10 times more data comes from our creators and comes from the New York Times.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Paul Bannister: So, that’s like 0.1, so we have full scale there. Second, and we’re doing this for other content verticals, but we did it for food, which is relevant to this podcast and of data in the OpenAI system that is food related, over 30% of it comes from Raptive creators. So it is an enormous, enormous, enormous component of dataset. And so what that says to us is that the collective, we are large and have power and should use that and we should really, the New York Times is out there negotiating with these companies. We need to be out there negotiating with these companies on behalf of all of our creators. And that kind of gets to the second thing, which is something we call CARA, which is the Consent to Advocate for Responsible AI. And what that is it’s a short contract that we have now given to our near 5,000 creators, and it’s all opt in.

You don’t have to sign it if you don’t want to, but if you do sign it, what it does is effectively gives us rights to negotiate on your behalf. So we can go to OpenAI, we can go to Google, we can go to the government, we can go to other different bodies and say, “We have rights from all of these creators to have a seat at this table and negotiate a good deal for them and make sure that their traffic is protected, that they get compensated, they can have control of their content, that they understand how it’s being used and all those things.” So that’s the second thing is this document called CARA, which is this short contract.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and so to recap that, was the post called Inside the Secret List of Websites that make AI like ChatGPT Sound Smart?

Paul Bannister: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s a Washington Post article. We’ll link to it. To recap what you’re saying there, essentially what they did is through some learning process, who knows how it was, they took a best guess as to where was this information being pulled from.

Paul Bannister: Is getting into super nerdy-walky stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Paul Bannister: OpenAI got all the data for its system from a different system called Common Crawl, and that data is all public and Washington Post got all the Common Crawl data because it’s public and they reorganized it in a way to make it more useful. So it’s not even the best guess, it is literally where the data comes from that OpenAI, ChatGPT-

Bjork Ostrom: So they went through this process to understand where ChatGPT was training their data from, and when you look at it, your point was New York Times was 0.06?

Paul Bannister: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: 0.06% of that entire body of content. When you roll up all of the Raptive creators, 4,500, 5,000 creators, that also was 0.06 or 0.6?

Paul Bannister: 0.6, so 10 times.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, so 10 times more, which is just incredible kind of the power of the collective voice of 4,500, 5,000 sites. When you look at just the food vertical, which we’re talking about, it represented 30%. So suddenly, it’s like this massive amount of representation for just this Raptive creators. And you have that data because you have all those sites, but my guess is if you expand that out to just independent creators that it becomes 50, 60, 70%, probably more of what ChatGPT is training on is independent creators’ content.

Paul Bannister: Exactly. Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So a lot of the value from anything food related is coming from what we’re creating individually. It’s all wrapped up. It’s like put into this model which then spits out a result based on whatever the prompt is that people have to ask. You were saying creating this initiative, CARA, C-A-R-A to speak on behalf of, in this case, Raptive creators, any of these situations where there is the potential to say, “Hey, we need to get compensated for this, or whatever it might be, TBD on what that is.” How about for the people who aren’t able to do that, that being a Raptive exclusive thing, you’re just an independent creator. Maybe it’s like the Napster comparable, is like you don’t have a label and you’re not signed onto something.

Are there other options for what you can be doing or looking at? What should you be considering? Should you look your attorney up in the White Pages?

Paul Bannister: Yeah. It’s a good question that I don’t have a great answer to yet. I mean, this is all moving very fast and it’s very much at the beginning of all of these things right now. As we go out and start negotiating in bigger ways, who knows, maybe we negotiate things that are broader or OpenAI comes with the system that applies more across the board. None of us quite know how it’s going to shake out. So I think for now, I think probably the most important thing is just be educated, learn about what’s going on, pay attention. Obviously, our blog and other sources have good information about things as they’re happening. So I think that’s probably the most important thing. Then, as this all evolves and changes, there may be other options for people in the future too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How about, has there been any noticeable impact from a search perspective that you’ve seen from the data that you have? It still is that … in my world, at least, when I’m talking to people, I know it’s probably not in your world, but as soon as we get outside of the context of digital publishing in our blog and stuff, people are like, “Oh yeah, AI, I’ve heard of it but how does it work? What do you do with it?” Any of my friends are like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of it.” And I was talking to my friend who’s a professor and I was like, probably kids are using it, and he sent me this block of text and he’s like, do you think this is AI generated? And I did this AI generative test and he is like, “98% probability that this is.”

So you’re starting to see it, but not necessarily … it’s not ubiquitous. It’s not search where everybody is doing it every day, but have you noticed any data around that seeping into search or not yet?

Paul Bannister: Not yet. There is … Google has an experiment running and they call it a search generative experience, SGE, that there’s a beta test you can join and you can check it out if you want to, and it’s sort of Bard but on steroids, but really is a much deeper version of modifying the way search works. If that SGE system was deployed to search, it would definitely be very bad for creators of all shapes and sizes. It is far fewer lengths. It is far more the answers on the page, it’s vertical specific. I think food actually is a more protected content vertical right now, like bots don’t have taste buds so … well, it has a lot of pancake recipes. It really doesn’t know what makes a good pancake at the end of the day. It’s getting better and better and better.

So if that SGE system was … became the main search, it would be very bad. Again, I’m sort of confident that Google isn’t going to upset the Applecart that quickly here. So I think what they’re going to do is take components of that and point into main search over time, but it’s going to take time. Some people are worried that that’s going to happen as soon as the end of this year. Again, we’re more optimistic that it’ll take longer, it’ll be smaller, it’ll change more bits and pieces. Google is certainly thinking about search experiences that are way deprioritizing content creator results.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, because they … and you see this in different instances. They’re incentivized to provide the best answers possible while also getting people to click on paid ads.

Paul Bannister: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Generally speaking, that’s what Google is trying to do, and if they can find ways to provide an experience that will keep people using Google while also continuing to click on ads, that’s what they’re going to optimize around.

Paul Bannister: Exactly. Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Also, the interesting thing within it is also need to figure out how to continue to incentivize creators to create content. In the future, five to 10 years from now, if people aren’t incentivized to create content, then these engines aren’t going to be able to be trained. Not that we know how this will all play out, but it’ll be just so interesting to see like-

Paul Bannister: It’s very right.

Bjork Ostrom: How do incentives change? How does alignment change? And it’s part of the reason why … to go back to the Napster analogy, it’s important to have a voice right now because those decisions are being made and the trajectory is being set, directionally speaking as to where that goes, does that feel accurate?

Paul Bannister: 100%, 100%. I think, yeah, no one knows where this is going to end, but it is going to be a big set of changes and we think the most important thing is just to be … have a seat at the table and be a part of the conversation and not just sitting back and hoping for the best.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great. So as we wrap up, I think it would be good to have an outline. What does it look like for us as creators to continue to do our job well, like you said, it’s like this could be a very big thing, it is a very big thing. It just is. It’s significant. It doesn’t mean that everything is changing right now, but things are changing. So, I think what I’m trying to get at is how do we get to a place where we can stay the course, but also be aware and be educated and maybe recapping what some of those things might be. So for instance, you had mentioned continue to create good content. At its core, whether it’s written on a site, on a blog, on YouTube, the business of engaging with people and being human and connecting with people, that will continue to exist even though what it looks like will change.

Paul Bannister: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So figure out how to continue to get good at that, creating good content, content that connects.

Paul Bannister: I would also have one tweak to that a little bit that I think is more and more important, and the word human is so important here. The world doesn’t need the 47821st pancake recipe. We’ve got it cover. We’ve got our pancakes, but if you as a person are special and interesting and other people like you and believe in you, your pancake recipe can be better because those people care about you. So I think it’s also like, it’s make great content, but be you and be unique and find your audience that loves you and make that new next pancake recipe great and special, not just number 47,821.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s the difference … Content continually in and of itself, information becoming commoditized.

Paul Bannister: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s available, people have it. It’s hard to create an incrementally better pancake recipe, but you have a strategic advantage in being unique with who you are, but the interesting thing with that is it’s a little bit of balancing of these two worlds. One of the worlds is search optimization, which is looking, what are other people doing? How do I rank higher? How do I include that, which is important and it works, but also within that, to not get sucked so deep into that world that you create this faceless content that nobody connects with, even if it ranks well, so there’s this yin and yang balancing act that exists, which I don’t have an answer for it, but it’s just acknowledgement of it.

Paul Bannister: It’s a real challenge, but I think if you could walk that line, that’s where the biggest success is.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and as much as possible figure out how do you position the content that you are creating in a way that is unique, not necessarily just because of the content itself, but also because of who you are. Maybe it’s like your approach to life, how you connect with people, the angle that you take. I talk about this all the time on the podcast, but Kevin Kelly always talks about 1000 True Fans. How do you get those people who are like, “I love this site, I love this person. I love following this because of whatever it is.” How they write. They’re really funny. They always make things in this certain way, like having an angle and being human. I think that’s great, but also, within that, staying educated. So that would be another piece like creating great content, being human, but also not putting your head in the sand and pretending like it doesn’t exist.

You mentioned Raptive’s blog as a place to go. Where are the other places that you can stay educated as to the things that are happening in this world? Twitter probably is a great place for these conversations that are happening.

Paul Bannister: I’ll give a shout. I think Search Engine Land, which is a site that covers news about search engines, particularly Google. If You want the slightly deeper, more technical stuff, it’s a really good site and has tons of good information there on what Google in particular is doing around AI. Then, I think just Google searching in general for what’s the news around ChatGPT, around Google Bard and just following those things.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So I see even here the most recent or a post that came out today while we’re recording Google search generative experience, which you were talking about, adds SGE while browsing. So like, okay, there’s this new update on SGE interface that you talked about and they have some more information on that, so that’s great. So shout out to Search Engine Land. Anything else that you would add for us to be considering for those in the content creation world? The two pillars for this specifically, “Hey, stay the course. Think about creating human centered content, connecting with an audience, not just blindly going after search results to go after search results, but also thinking about how are you connected.

And then how can you be kind of the human competitive advantage, follow along, stay educated, Search Engine Land. We will continue to talk about on this podcast WrapIt blog. Google has their own blog where they talk about stuff that they’re releasing. Any other considerations for us as creators as we go out into the world in regards to this category of content?

Paul Bannister: One of the thing that’s connected to being human I think is also diversifying traffic, which we talked about a little bit before. Search is huge. That’s not going to go away. You got to make content for a search and watch that line that you were talking about before, but I think the more you are you and the more you are unique, the more that people care about you. Then, you can get some traffic from social and you can build your email list and what are ways that you can get traffic? That search is going to be the bulk of traffic for people, for the time being for sure, but every couple of percent that you get from somewhere else is really good and something you can own more. And again, I think uniqueness and being you, I think is a way to help with that. So it’s just a side point, but I think it’s important too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and the fun thing to think about there is the game you play is different. I don’t think about SEO for the podcast and I probably should to some degree. There’s probably considerations around search optimization for podcasts, not within Google, but maybe within a podcast player or things like that, which we do have descriptions and things like that. The podcast is a very different game that doesn’t require me ever to do deep search optimization. Same could be true for the social platforms. They all allow you to play a different game, and so the only game is in search. And I think it’s an important one, especially for sites where you’re publishing stuff, but it’s not the only game. So I think that’s a good reminder to think about diversification on different platforms, not only from a traffic standpoint, but also just from a fan and following standpoint.

Paul Bannister: Yes, totally.

Bjork Ostrom: Paul, if people want to follow along with you, I know that you’re on X. Do you call it X yet? Have you transitioned over into calling it X?

Paul Bannister: I do call it Twitter until the day I die, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, but other places that folks can follow along with you or Raptive or the team?

Paul Bannister: Yeah. I think for me, Twitter is the best place to follow along with what I’m talking about, pbannist is my handle. And I know for Raptive, I know our Instagram is very active, and Twitter, we post things on LinkedIn, we post things on, so definitely check all those out.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Paul, thanks so much for coming back on. Really appreciate it. Great conversation. That was good to nerd out.

Paul Bannister: Always good to nerd out.

Bjork Ostrom: And we’ll be in touch again soon. Thanks.

Paul Bannister: Thanks very much.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there. Alexa here, and thanks for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We really appreciate you being here. And if you really liked this episode, we would so appreciate you leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps the show, get in front of new listeners and it just makes us really happy. We read each and every one and it’s just so great to hear from you what you’re liking and what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. So all you have to do is go and find the Food Blogger Pro podcast on your Apple Podcast app. Scroll down to the readings and reviews section, and then you can rate the show and then, leave a written review if you want to be even more awesome. And while you’re there, we would really appreciate if you subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode.

Maybe you talk about one of your favorite interviews on the show, or maybe you just talk about the show as a whole, but regardless of what you talk about in your review, we appreciate it so, so much. So thanks again for tuning in today. We’ll see you next time and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com. And I’m going to give you a really specific example of how you can use Clariti if you sign up today. And that is post or page specific tracking of changes that you’re making. And you can use the notes area within Clariti to make a note anytime that you make a change. An example of when you’d want to do this, let’s say that you’re switching over some of your YouTube videos to be AdThrive or Mediavine video players. You want to make sure that you’re tracking to see when you look back three months later, the change or the impact that that had.

And personally, what we’ve noticed as we’ve worked on content is you forget. If you don’t have a system, if you’re not making a note of that somewhere, you’ll forget. And so within Clariti, there’s the ability to leave a note anytime that you’re making a change or improvement on a piece of content to allow you to go back and see how that change impacted things. There’s lots of other ways that you can use Clariti, but I thought it’d be helpful just to give a really specific example. If you want to see what those other ways are, you can go to clariti.com/food to get 50% off your first month. Again, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food to get 50% off of your first month. You can start taking notes on the changes you’re making and explore all the other features. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This is episode 418 of the podcast. And today, Bjork is chatting with Lauren Gray from the development agency, Once coupled. Lauren is the Founder and Director of Development at Once Coupled and is also the web development expert here at Food Blogger Pro. She is really, truly an expert in all things web development. We’re talking themes, custom themes, plugins, WordPress, site editor, block editor, all of it. Lauren really knows what she’s talking about, and she does a great job of talking about it in a way that is approachable to food bloggers of all levels.

During today’s interview, Bjork and Lauren are chatting about site editor and block editor on WordPress, whether or not you should invest in a custom theme, what technical debt is and why you need to keep it in mind as you’re growing your website. And Lauren’s recommendations for how beginner food bloggers should progress through their website journey. Lauren also chats a bit more about what Once Coupled does and how they support food bloggers and more about their new plugin company, Small Plugins. It’s a super informative episode as always, and no matter where you are in your blogging journey, I think you’ll get a ton out of it. So we’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Lauren, we’ll come back to the podcast.

Lauren Gray: Thanks for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s been like six years, so we’re due for an update here to hear what you’ve been up to, what you’ve been working on. It’s fun for me because we’ve been doing this long enough now where we’ve been able to have these connections to people who have been in the industry for a long time. You’re one of them. So for those who aren’t familiar, can you share a little bit about what you do and kind of what day-to-day looks like for you and your team?

Lauren Gray: Okay. Yeah, I can do that. I can’t believe it’s been six years for real. Yeah, so my pitch that I normally tell people, especially people in real life is I do web development for food bloggers. Just is so easy to the point and fun to share with people. But that has really been a lot more complex than that over the years. So six years ago, I’m pretty sure we spoke about speed, and then I feel like the requirements and technology around speed has moved so much that we really don’t do a lot with speed anymore. But it’s because there’ve been more and more solutions in the niche, which I’m so excited about. So we’ve focused a lot, we still do a lot with speed, but we do it within our custom themes. And that’s the main thing we focused on up until very recently was just doing custom themes and then working on trying to support those themes moving forward and just giving those clients that we’ve worked with a lot of one-on-one time with us.

So mostly we’ve been doing themes since we last spoke, and then recently we’re trying to get more into plugins that just kind of help everyone transition from what I think has been an era of custom themes into hopefully an era of more of the full site editing, the block editor, and I think maybe control of our own sites. And it’s kind of expanding. With custom themes, we’ve had to work with a small subset of people because of the pricing that goes with that. And now I’m hoping with plugins that we can work with a larger group of people and provide more solutions.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. It’s like with any business, there’s these evolutions that have to take place. And when you’ve been doing something for, we talked six years ago, but you’ve been doing this for even longer than that, especially in the world of technology, things advance, things change and the best service that we can offer often changes and evolves. So it’s cool to see you doing that. Your business is called Once Coupled, and the idea, you kind of hinted at it when you were talking about what you do, you build these custom themes, but then the idea of Once Coupled is, what is the bird that is once coupled? Like geese, they are together forever. But point being, that you’re not going to do a custom theme for somebody and then just kind of leave them. You’re going to walk with them and help them along the way. So I love that and how you tie it into the name.

You talked about the transition from how speed is really important, and that was something that you were really focusing on and helping people get sites that load fast. And like you mentioned, there’s some solutions now that help people do that without any custom development or accomplish a lot of that. But one of the things that you talked about was a transition into full site editing, we talked about blocks and how those words all within the context of WordPress. So can you talk about on a general shift that’s happening for those who aren’t technical, who don’t know the industry shifts, what’s actually happening in that world that has resulted in you pivoting with your business?

Lauren Gray: So I think there’s two things that come to mind for me when you’re asking that question. One is kind of how is the niche changing? And our response to that in a little piece. And then the second is the change in technology, and that is more specific to the full site editing and how we’re pivoting there a little bit. I think all of these changes over time, you mentioned just technology changes, and I think that that is so true. I love that in conjunction with that, as food blogging has become something that more and more people are interested in and that there is more revenue coming through it, that there have been more people that specialize in food blogs. And then we get all of these new products that are brought to our niche. So I feel like when I started, which was about 10 years ago now, there weren’t a lot of people that were like, “Oh, I specialize in food blogs.” I mean, I could name a few, but there weren’t that many and now there’s more and more people.

And what I thought was really cool was some people I followed outside of this niche kind of moved into this niche and now I get to work closer with them and I try not to fan girl. And I’m like, “Oh, hey, let’s just have a meeting and talk.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lauren Gray: And so there’s really cool stuff like that. And I feel like because this niche is expanding, there’s so many new avenues people can go. So that’s really vague. But more specifically, Andrew at Nerdpress, I know you guys speak with him pretty often. He has been offering more speed related services and a lot of maintenance stuff that I love to connect my clients with him and say, “He’s providing something like this that’s really cool that you need.” And then Bill Erickson does a lot of custom themes similar to what we do, and depending on what people are looking for, budget, timeline, all of that stuff. I’m like, “Hey, here’s another, you don’t just have us as an option. There are these other developers.” Bill’s just the one I named, because I know you’ve worked with Bill. In fact, I think he was on a podcast with you recently.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I don’t know how recently, but he’s been on the podcast before.

Lauren Gray: Maybe it’s because I spoke with him recently. We were talking about the podcast, but it’s in my mind recently. But I just love that there’s more and more people that enter the niche, and that kind of expands what we can do. So the way I think that relates back to Once Coupled is that because there’s these people that are providing something that I think competes with me or does what I do better, I could be like, “Oh, cool, this person really specializes in this, and I can focus on what I feel like I really specialize in. Or I can explore something new.”

And so that kind of then brings me to the technology change that has led to full site editing, which is now known as just the site editor and the themes that go with that. And then I’m so excited to be able to explore those with my clients that I have and be able to take those … Kind of just explore that little piece of this wider niche in more detail is because I’m not like, “Oh, I have to hold your hand with speed, or I really need to do this type of custom theme, because there’s other people that are doing that.” And I really love that.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s interesting …

Lauren Gray: Other people would be like, “Oh, there’s so much competition. Are you worried about it?” And I’m like, “No, those people are doing crazy cool things.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I think a great way to look at it and to be flexible in your thinking to say, okay, one way you could look at it is like competition. Another way you could look at it is the market is getting bigger, which allows more people to come in, which allows you to specialize in ways that you couldn’t before. It’s kind of like maybe 100 years ago, you wouldn’t have had people who had in the medical world, these specialties because there just wasn’t as much funding and people didn’t have as much disposable income to spend on medical. But now it’s like you have these extreme specialties as that world has advanced, but also as people have more money to spend in that world.

And similar in this, there’s an industry here and people make money from it. And so it allows for specialization in different niches. And I love your take on that to look at and say, “Yeah, you know what? These people are doing really good work. What does that allow me to do if they are going to take that on and be really good at that?” So from the client side, you could probably geek out for a long time on this idea of site-wide editing or the site editor. What does that actually mean for somebody who’s a publisher, a blogger? What change is happening in WordPress? And is that primarily for you as a developer and somebody who’s working with sites that allows you to do things differently? Or am I going to feel anything different as a blogger or a publisher?

Lauren Gray: I think it’s completely for publishers. It makes so many things harder for developers.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Lauren Gray: So it’s totally for publishers. I think that it’s really exciting because what the site editor allows you to do is have full control over something that otherwise might have required a custom theme. I’m not saying that it’s perfectly easy, especially as it’s been out, and I feel like we’ve been working in it for four years, but it still often feels very new, there’s always brand new features to it. But I think that what excites me so much about site editing is that it makes it possible for people with all different types of budgets and all different levels of experience to create really engaging websites that can be really well branded. And at the same time, low cost. And I do say low cost, knowing that there is a time investment cost versus a monetary investment cost and that those are two different forms of costs. And so in some ways, you know, might have to put a lot of time into this, and that’s not going to be a fit for everyone.

But even my more advanced clients that have very custom sites, I’m looking at them and thinking, I think we could put you on a site editor and have all of this be very easy for you to build a team that makes it possible for you to create custom landing pages to edit your content, to just really highlight the important part of your content for your readers. So I feel like it just gives you so much control and almost a way that is kind of hard for me to explain because there’s so much you can do, that how do I focus on one thing that could be accomplished with this?

Bjork Ostrom: If I’m going to paint the picture to provide contrast, is it almost like, let’s say five years ago, you had a custom theme and you wanted a new page on that site. Usually people would go to the developer and say, “Here’s generally what I’m looking for. Can you build this?” Whereas with the site editor, it’s almost getting it more towards Squarespace or some of these web builders that are very consumer focused, where it’s somebody who does pottery, my dad, you want to create a pottery site, you can go in and kind of move things around and adjust things. Or Webflow is another one. Is WordPress kind of trying to move towards that direction? And then what you’re doing is standing in the middle and saying, “It’s not completely there yet. You want it to have some customization. So I’ll sit in the middle to get you to the point where you feel really good about it, but then allow you to do some of the page creation or tweaks or adjustments that you need to do.” Is that kind of what you’re getting at?

Lauren Gray: Almost. So I definitely think that it is WordPress working towards something that is a competitor with Squarespace and Wix and Webflow, and just anything that is more consumer-driven. I think that what we’ll see on the developer side is really more people moving into things like plugins or very specialized solutions, because so much is going to be available to be done by the consumer.

Now, to an extent, and this has been maybe the case with all page builder type things, is you’ll have people that specialize in it. So they’ll just have so much experience that them throwing together a page is just going to be infinitely faster than you trying to sit in there and figure out where do all these settings go? What can I and can’t I do? But I think that that introduces a new form of competition into all the whole WordPress kind of community, because you don’t have to be a developer, you don’t have to know code to do those things.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Lauren Gray: I think the true development aspect is going to be more people moving into plugins. That stuff won’t have to exist in themes in most capacities.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. No, go ahead.

Lauren Gray: You still see builder themes. So when I say builder themes, I’m thinking Elementor or something like that where they had all their own blocks from years ago, and then WordPress implemented their own blocks, and now we have something kind of in between where people are extending the blocks, making core version of blocks that are more advanced. I still think that …

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about what a block is for those who aren’t familiar?

Lauren Gray: Yes. Yeah. So if you’re using the classic editor, you haven’t seen any blocks probably. And if you’re using the classic editor, I think the closest thing would be to think of a widget, and it’s all kind of a self-contained thing. But blocks break it down into even smaller pieces. So your heading will now be considered a heading block. So if you write a title on your page like H2, why do we like this recipe, that is a block, the paragraph underneath it is a block. So every little piece is broken down into blocks, and then you can build them into larger blocks where you have a heading and a paragraph together and you group them into a group block, and then you can style that group. So it can be both really simple and a lot more complex.

Bjork Ostrom: But the basic idea is when you say classic editor, when you think back to WordPress, you kind of go in and it’s more comparable to a Microsoft Word or a Google Doc where you’re opening it up and it’s like, with all of this stuff …

Lauren Gray: You’re just typing in there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You’re typing and it’s all of this stuff is iterations of previous versions. And so with a website, they talk about above the fold, well, what does that mean? It’s when a newspaper was folded over, the most valuable part of it was above the fold, which is the first thing you see. So even language crosses over with websites like first we had a piece of paper, we had it, and we were writing on that piece of paper. And then they’re like, “Oh, let’s take that piece of paper and put it in a typewriter.” So then you typewrite, use a typewriter, and then it was like Microsoft Word comes out, or whatever there was before, there’s a different version before that I think Microsoft acquired, I don’t remember what it was called. And essentially it’s a piece of paper that you’re typing on like you would a typewriter, but it’s on a computer.

And in WordPress, it was that same thing where you open it up and it’s kind of like, oh, WordPress, even when you think of what it was, it was words. You read a bunch of these words. But as the internet evolved, there’s a lot more that’s happening within a site and it becomes a lot more modular. And it’s almost like building blocks. When I think of the word blocks, it’s like you have these parts of a post and a recipe post is maybe a great example of that because it’s like you have H2, so headers, that’s not the first header, but it’s H2. And then you have an FAQ area, that could be a block and paragraphs and the recipe itself.

And so you can start to see how this becomes more modular over time. And I think your example of the classic editor versus the block editor is a great one where it’s like, that’s another evolution that’s happened in the world of WordPress. And so what you’re saying is one of the evolutions that we’ll see is potentially as it becomes easier to do editing on your own for your site, that for somebody who has a development company like yourself, you were doing custom themes before, there’s a likelihood that it’s not as valuable to have a custom theme because it’s easier for people to create their own custom theme. And so what you were saying is some of those developers might start to develop some really cool functionality that would go into one of those blocks that allows you to do creative or cool things. Because what they’ve been doing previously potentially will be replaced by the site editor as people can kind of control that more on their own. Is that a really good, long synopsis of what you were saying?

Lauren Gray: Yeah, I think that’s pretty accurate. I think that we’ll still have developers that do custom themes, and I think there will be value in the forms of custom themes that are done through that, but that so many more people that don’t have a budget for our custom theme are going to be able to create something really close and on par with those custom themes.

Bjork Ostrom: Are we there right now, or is that in the future that will happen for WordPress?

Lauren Gray: I think we’re very, very close.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Lauren Gray: My biggest thing is that right now, the only thing I really see that’s stopping it from being, we’re there, is that it’s so difficult, in my opinion, to do a mobile friendly site and a desktop friendly site. So a custom theme is just going to have a better experience across both devices where I feel like a block theme right now, you’re either going to have a really good mobile site or a really good desktop site. But WordPress is focusing on this thing called intrinsic design where they’re trying not to have breakpoint or anything like that. So it’s very similar on both sides. And that is conceptually difficult for what food bloggers have been able to do in themes in the past.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you mean .. Intrinsic design, is that what you called it?

Lauren Gray: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Is the thought with that like, when you pull up a desktop version, it’s the general flow and look of it is going to be very similar to what the mobile version is, versus you pull up the desktop version, it’s like, oh, there’s like six icons and it’s different categories, and then you go to the mobile version and it kind of shifts and reorders. Are you saying the opinion of WordPress is that those should look similar? Desktop and mobile shouldn’t have this different design feel to it?

Lauren Gray: Well, I definitely wouldn’t try and speak for the opinion of WordPress.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lauren Gray: I think maybe more accurately would be that where they want to start is with this intrinsic design where yes, things are very similar because they don’t want to have maybe … Okay, I feel really bad. I feel like I’m not allowed to speak on behalf of WordPress.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. No, this is … Yeah.

Lauren Gray: My understanding is that the settings as they exist now, they exist and there are no mobile versus tablet versus test desktop because they don’t see those different, again, I’m speaking on their behalf, those different devices just don’t have settings. There is really no standard mobile device, there’s no standard tablet device and there’s no standard desktop. So having something that represents that isn’t really accurate to the technology that we have these days. And the capabilities of trying to implement that is much more complex than probably where WordPress is ready to be.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Lauren Gray: So there’s very much options for, you’re going to do it the same across all of them. And if you don’t want it the same across all of them, which we don’t really, because a lot of food bloggers work with large monitors where people are reading, yes, there are mobile, but there’s I think a large number compared to other niches of desktop users.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. That makes sense.

Lauren Gray: And ads I know are big part of that. Putting a sidebar in a WordPress full site editing theme, block theme is actually really challenging. But for ad networks, you get a large amount of your income from the desktop sidebar, despite the small amount of traffic you have to desktop. So you have to figure that out.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s what I’m trying to get at is I’m curious, in your opinion, for somebody who isn’t super technical, how close are they going to get to where they want to be with the features that are available today versus saying, yeah, in three to four years maybe, you’ll be able to get in and really edit and get it to a point where you’re really proud of it? It’s interesting with something like WordPress, which has so much history and versus some of the more recent, like Webflow as an example, some of the more recent content management systems where they started with this design first mindset and, in my opinion, I haven’t used Webflow a lot. But are better for more of a portfolio type page where you’re a landscaping business and you want a beautiful website, great. Very different than a food site where you’re publishing two pieces of content and want to rank for SEO. That looks different, but it feels like it’s a hard thing for WordPress to evolve into because of the history that it has and that it’s so deeply anchored in.

So I guess the question is, it feels like there’s still this need for custom themes if you want it to look a certain way, operate a certain way, and my question is, do you feel like that’s accurate as of today?

Lauren Gray: Yes, absolutely. I mean, most of our clients, well, all of our clients right now, we’re still on custom themes. We’re working on a few clients that we’re going to do full site, completely block-based, no custom fields through ACF or anything like that for my techie listeners. But they’re just going to use a core block theme. And so we have a couple of people that are doing that, but most of our clients are still on custom themes. I mean, I spoke with Bill, he’s doing custom, and I think that for his clients, for a lot of people, that that makes the most sense. I wouldn’t try and convince any of Bill’s clients, “Hey, let’s do full site editing on your site.”

I think that there are a lot of blogs that would benefit from exploring this, especially if they’re not used to a custom theme, just like you won’t know what you’re missing. So I think there’s so much stuff that can be done, but you do have to give up some of the features that we really love that we know about because we’ve been there. I mean, like a desktop sidebar. If you haven’t been making money on a desktop sidebar and you’re just getting approved for ads, you don’t have a sidebar, put that in your content and keep living that. And I think ads are going to evolve and I think it’ll work out. But for people that are like, “Okay, you’re immediately going to lose revenue if you can’t get the sidebar to work perfectly.” Yeah, don’t switch to it right now. And I think there’s other things like that, just the idea of having two columns on mobile and then four columns on desktop just for some grid kind of featured posts, that’s not possible with core blocks right now. So missing that would feel pretty sad, I think for a lot of people.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you say core blocks, what do you mean by that?

Lauren Gray: If you just installed WordPress and didn’t install any plugins, the blocks that are available.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Lauren Gray: So they have some pretty powerful things you can do with those blocks. So the blocks, like I mentioned, header, paragraph, but then there’s like column block, the road block, stack block, group block, query loop. Yeah, I’m getting a little bit nerdy right there. But a lot of those blocks can create really cool layouts that would not have been possible for someone without a custom theme to even have previously. So the idea that you can have that now I think is for a lot of people really cool. But if you already have an idea of what a food blog is and you want to stick with that, then switching to a block theme is going to feel totally limiting.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you say switching to a block theme, do you mean that there are certain themes? So we all understand themes. So you have WordPress. It’s kind of like you get WordPress and WordPress is kind of the engine of a car. Maybe there’s a frame around it. And then themes are all of the look and feel of that car. Let me know if this analogy breaks down at any point. And then plugins are all the aftermarket parts that you can put on it. So it’s like you have a cool muffler or you get rims on it. Nobody does that anymore. So the engine is WordPress, kind of the frame and the colors and the look and the feels, the theme and some of the functionality as well. And then the plugins are these pieces that you can put in after that allow it to do additional things. When you say a block theme, is it a different type of theme that you’re installing? Is there something functionally different about it within WordPress?

Lauren Gray: Yes. So a block theme fully integrates the site editor, which was for a period known as full site editing. And a classic theme does not. So a classic theme is what most people are used to using.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Lauren Gray: Anyone that’s running Genesis is on a classic theme, and you can use blocks, but you only use them within a post or within a page. And if you want to use them beyond that, you’re getting to plugins that kind of are starting to bridge some gaps there. But if you’re using a block theme that takes full advantage of site editing, you have this whole new interface that lets you use blocks for your header, for your sidebar, for your footer.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Lauren Gray: You can create entire landing pages. You can decide if you want a category to … For anyone that can’t build their content on categories for SEO, because that’s not available for classic themes, there’s some sort of … They’ve had to create a page and then redirect their category to that page. You wouldn’t have to do that with a block theme because you can create a custom landing design for your category.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. That makes sense.

Lauren Gray: And you’re not having to do these redirects or anything like that. So a lot of these hacks that we’ve kind of had to do, those aren’t necessary. Of course, there’s new hacks that we need to backwards maintain stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Always. There’s always hacks.

Lauren Gray: But disregard that.

Bjork Ostrom: So I think one of the things that it is helpful as we talk through it, because even for me, it’s unfamiliar territory as I’ve become less and less technical and involved in the day-to-day specifics through the years. So the block editing then allows you to … Or a block theme essentially unlocks what is similar to let’s say a Squarespace where you are, and for anybody who’s used Squarespace, the basic idea is you’re kind of operating with these well, blocks, I guess, for lack of a better word, where you’re kind of arranging, placing them, shifting things around, saying, “I want this here.” All within some kind of opinions on how the theme would operate.

But a block theme then, like you’re saying, would be like, oh, you go to a category page and you put it in a block there. And what it sounds like, and let me know if this is accurate, is that it allows for more flexibility in certain ways, but in other ways, there’s less flexibility. More flexibility for the non-technical user.

Lauren Gray: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And that can be a really great thing until you get to the point where you’re like, “But I wanted to do this exact thing.” And then you’d be like, “Okay, you probably need a custom solution for that.”

Lauren Gray: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Lauren Gray: And even for a lot of that stuff, for a lot of those custom solutions now, that’s where I think plugins are becoming … We already had a lot of really cool plugins, but now plugins are becoming, they’re often creating blocks that can solve these solutions that you can plug in yourself or have a developer that understands this whole block ecosystem. And instead of them having to go custom create something, they’re able to pull down a plugin that gets them where they need to and then just implement that. So I think everything is just getting brought together a little bit more where developers, there can be different levels of developers that get you to the same place.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So let’s say I’m a blogger. I’m just starting out. Can you talk through in your vision as things are right now, it could be really rough, how would you recommend people progress through their site journey? So for us, when I think back, whatever it was, 13 years, we were on Tumblr and then we’re like, “Oh, this is a terrible solution for what we’re trying to do. We’re going to go to WordPress.” And it’s like we go to WordPress and we installed, I think it was Thesis theme. So that was really popular 10, 12 years ago. And then, so we’re using this theme and we’re kind of dropping our logo in and changing it a little bit, but essentially it looks like all the other themes out there. And then it’s like Genesis. That’s the theme that we try and use. Now Pinch of Yum is on a custom theme. And we paid a lot of money to go through the design process and get it custom developed.

But if you were to say the life of a blog, the life of a website right now from start to fully developed, if you’re just starting out, what would that look like? And then what are the steps along the way where you’d be like, okay, now you’re making a little bit of money, you can pay to upgrade in this way, would you have a general flow that you could walk through in terms of what that might look like and the stepping stones along the way?

Lauren Gray: Yeah, so I guess when you’re first starting out, you would just install WordPress. You’d get your domain set up, you’re hosting, install WordPress. It would come out of the box with a full site editing theme, so a block theme, and you would be able to create everything you want in there. Your header, sidebar, footer, well, I guess not your sidebar, because that’s not a core feature right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Wouldn’t be there.

Lauren Gray: But hopefully it’ll get there. So your header, your footer, but I wouldn’t, even, for most new food bloggers, I wouldn’t have them work on any of that. You just put in some content and then when you’re making some money, then I personally would probably always hire that sort of thing out. I wouldn’t want to do that myself, but you could, you could learn about it if you’re interested in it, and you could put your time into that, or you could hire someone. But even hiring someone, you wouldn’t necessarily have to hire a developer. You can hire anyone that has experience with just this new WordPress core functionality and have them come in and make small changes. And I think that that loop can happen so much more because of how modular everything becomes. So you’ve got some content, you’re like, “Okay, I want a custom logo.” You have someone design that, and then you have someone put it in or you put it in because that would be pretty easy. But you can do a lot of those really small things.

So I would say you’d start with whatever makes you feel happier with your site that makes you feel encouraged to want to work on it. And you’d start with some of those visual things, colors, some design assets, just moving things around to look a little more like you want it to. And then you do something like an SEO audit where they have a opinions on, “This is the user experience we want and these sort of areas, this is the data that we want to be able to be pulled in by Google, make sure that you have it on every page,” that sort of thing. And those little pieces, you wouldn’t … With a custom theme, I normally need to know what are the 12 things you definitely want me to get done? But with this modular block theme, now you can say, okay, tell me what priority to do these in. And then as you’re making money from your site saying, “Okay, now go in and add both published and updated dates to my site,” that sort of thing. Maybe that existed then.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. You could do it piece by piece as opposed to needing to do all of it at once. Where would you find somebody like that? Are you doing that type of work where it’s like somebody pays to have you, your team on a retainer for two hours a month, or is it going to some freelance site? Do you have recommendations on if somebody is, let’s say in the early stages, but they’re like, “I’m willing to invest in this a little bit in order to not feel like I’m banging my head against a wall, trying to figure out WordPress,” which we know as a recurring thing for creators, especially people who love recipe development, photography, that type of work to then get into WordPress and be like, “Now I need to figure out how to do the block editor to get a category in here?”

It’s three hours later and they’re like, “Actually, I don’t like doing this.” Whereas they probably do doing it, but just not that type of work, the creative type. How do you find those people and work with those people? And are you doing that kind of on a retainer basis, or if not, who would?

Lauren Gray: So we’re not currently doing that on a retainer basis. But I think this goes back to the beginning where I was talking about all the competition and the expansion of the niche. I feel like because this stuff is happening, the more people look for it, sure, the more it’ll be available because that competition will be introduced. So we don’t currently do full site editing like, small changes for people because we’re working on moving our kind of custom process into something like that. And then after that, I do envision that our team would be able to help with something like that. In the meantime, we’re basically working on some plugins that would help people do it on their own. We are working on our own kind of custom, but pre-made theme that we could work with people to … The idea with a lot of the block themes is that when you install it kind of sets itself up. So if there was actually something made for food bloggers that had a sidebar that worked, that would be amazing.

So we’re trying to make that happen so that people who want to try it don’t have to start from zero. They can actually get in there, play with it, decide whether they like it or not, and not need as many of these small changes because we know what food bloggers need. We’re trying to implement those out of the box. But I think it’ll kind of be just about asking people what they can do with it. I feel pretty confident that a lot of the developers that are already in this niche could help out with it, especially if they’re already doing a retainer for you. So not to promise that these developers will do it, but I feel like I’m sure that Nerdpress or iMark Interactive, that I’ve got a lot of clients that if they needed help, those developers would be able to do it. I personally, as a developer, I will say, I do get a lot of help off of Upwork, and there’s some people that have good experience that they’re advertising on Upwork and really decent hourly rates for that stuff.

I feel like you’ve got to feel kind of confident in hiring and managing to do something like that. But I personally like that … I feel like the block editor is a little bit easier to hire people on a service like that because you can see what you’re getting. You’re not like, “Oh, I hope the code in the backend is not crazy messy.” I can be like, “You don’t need to write any custom code. Just set up my blocks for me.” There’s no custom theme. You are drag and dropping in the backend, do not write any code. Then I can feel pretty confident. What I see is what I get.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great. And I think worth pointing out, you talk about that idea of hiring off Upwork, and then you’re going to need to manage to some degree and hire, figure out hiring. It’s kind of a decision that you have to make. Either you’re going to figure out how to do it on your own, and that’s going to be something that you own, or you’re going to figure out how to find good people and hire them and manage the project. And it is one or the other, and there’s not going to be a solution where somebody does it, and you don’t have to manage the project. It’s either you or it’s somebody else. And if it’s somebody else, you’re still going to have to be involved to observe and manage.

Lauren Gray: Yeah, to an extent.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, as you get into it, it’s worth …

Lauren Gray: I feel like there are. I mean, ours, our custom theme, you’re not really managing it because I’m managing it for you. If you’re doing something custom like that, but then you’re also paying the premium of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Lauren Gray: So you’re paying for all my experience, my coding knowledge, my person, people knowledge, this much larger piece. Whereas if you’re willing to take on the management side of it, then you can go hire someone from Upwork who’s going to be less expensive. You just need to know how to tell them what you want. But I think with block editing, that’s just so much more achievable than with custom themes.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. That makes sense. Totally.

Lauren Gray: So I’m still excited about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. No, that makes sense. So let’s say you go through that process, you’re early on, you have this basic theme, you’re kind of you getting most of what you want, but not exactly. At what point would you go into that more like, “Hey, I want to take to this the next level and make it more custom?” Is it like you’re starting to earn some money or you really want to invest into your site? And at this point, would you still say, we’re going to do a custom theme as opposed to, would you be looking at essentially a custom theme or a custom block theme? Is that kind of the path right now?

Lauren Gray: So this has been a really confusing component for me too, actually, that kind of question of do you go custom theme? When you want something to happen, where do you go to make that happen anymore? And more and more often, my thought is a plugin, you get a plugin that does what you need and you drop that in. So it might be helpful if we had an example. I’m not sure if I can think of one off the bat, but I would say for a lot of things, I would personally as a developer, compromise on a lot of the development things to keep stuff as simple as possible. So to bring up another kind of technical word, we’re talking about technical debt. And if you do too many custom things, or you implement too many plugins or something like that, you just get where you have all this stuff that you’re trying to maintain and it gets more complicated.

So more and more, as I’ve done a lot of custom themes, I’ve worked with a lot of clients over the years. I have to maintain the technical debt that I have put myself into. I feel like I more and more often would encourage people to be as streamlined and simple as possible in their technology, to really focus on their content and the usability changes that aren’t super in depth. But if there is something that needs to happen. So actually I do have a good example. I had a client come to me. She said that I think Casey, sorry if I’m misremembering, but I’m pretty sure it was Casey was recommending that she have an …

Bjork Ostrom: For those who are unfamiliar, Casey Markee. Been on the podcast a lot.

Lauren Gray: Just name-dropping.

Bjork Ostrom: Search expert Media Wyse is the name of his company. It was a SEO recommendation.

Lauren Gray: Yes, that she have a table of contents towards the top of her post, but he wanted it to work in a really specific way. So he wanted this table of contents to show maybe the top three headers and then expand to show the rest of the headings after that. So have a way that the user would click on it to expand those to show more headings. But then of those headings to really make it useful for the user not to include the recipe headers like ingredients, instructions, just one header, recipe card, that type of thing really. Makes a lot of sense from a user experience standpoint but implementing that, nothing currently exists. So where do you do that?

Bjork Ostrom: You mean nothing currently exists as a plug-and-play like plugin that you could just use?

Lauren Gray: Yeah, you don’t just click a button and it works. Even if you wanted to try and make it work with blocks or whatever, it would be really hard to get that to kind of work the way you would expect it to. So X, Y, Z, custom functionality.

Bjork Ostrom: And you cut out there just a little bit. You said …

Lauren Gray: I think that I’ll go get a custom theme. Now you go say, I think maybe I’ll just have someone develop a plugin.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Okay. Yeah. And to fill that in, you cut out a little bit there essentially saying, no, all good, that you’re developing this, it’s custom development. And anytime you’re doing custom development, one of the things that you mentioned that I think is so true is this idea that you will forever have to support that.

Lauren Gray: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s what technical debt is. It’s not debt in terms of money debt, but it’s debt in terms of this obligation that you have to previous technical things. And so an example would be if you … We come to Once Coupled and we’re like, “Any time that somebody gives a five star review, we want to have a smiley face pop on the screen and then it does a little dance, and we think that’ll be really cool.” And then it’s like, okay, that’s awesome. Let’s do it.

But then what happens is that’s now something you have to support and continually develop and test against new versions of WordPress. And obviously we’d never actually do that, but just for an extreme example of what technical debt looks like. And so what you’re saying is, and this is as an entrepreneur, as a creator, we have to make these decisions. What do we feel like is going to be helpful enough to the point where we’re willing to support it and continually evolve that piece of code or that plugin even versus not including it in service of simplicity or where’s that middle ground, where it’s something that gets there, but it’s not the full-fledged, 100% functionality that we’re wanting, but it’s good enough to get what we need to get? Does that feel accurate in terms of the decision making that goes into that process?

Lauren Gray: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And so in the case of the table of contents, what did you end up doing?

Lauren Gray: So right now, that client that brought me the idea is having a developer custom do a solution for her. So now she’ll have a custom plugin on her site that she’ll need to forever maintain on her site, which should be fine. It’s in a plugin. But in the future, I think that really where that’ll go is creating a custom block that does this.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Lauren Gray: So when she inserts that block, instead of having a custom theme or as part of a custom theme, which I would say might have been done a few years ago as part of a custom theme, really that’s functionality. It goes on a plugin. But now I think instead of even just being a plugin that modifies an existing feature, it would become its own block.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Lauren Gray: And then I think that that gives some benefits in that it’s part of a plugin. So if you change your theme, this still exists, you still have this functionality that you need. And that’s always been the goal, but maybe not as easily achieved. But with blocks, because that’s like user inserted, it is a little more achievable now, in my opinion but it also makes it easier to replace in some ways. So going through and converting that to a new block in the future, if you decide that this one isn’t there, even if you just delete that plugin, that block just won’t load on the front end now. So you can easily strip out a bunch of content, hopefully intentionally by removing some support that you no longer want and just a piece of it because it’s a plugin.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Speaking of plugins, you’re starting to build a plugin’s business. This makes sense when you’re kind of thinking about where your head’s at and where you think things are going. So you have Once Coupled, which is working with kind of one-on-one basis creators, publishers in the food space, primarily, custom themes or maybe kind of evolving what that looks like, block themes. But then you’re also creating some of these lightweight, highly functional plugins at smallplugins.com. Can you talk a little bit about what the idea is with that, what you’re going to be focusing on at first and who it might be a fit for?

Lauren Gray: So as I get more and more excited about full site editing and block themes, that sort of thing, definitely looking at creating some plugins that are really targeted in what they’re trying to deliver. Sorry, I’ll back up. I shouldn’t get too technical there. I think that just having a really targeted goal will keep these plugins just really maintainable and easy for clients to decide whether they want them or not. So the goal with Small Plugins is to release, I think we have six planned that we want to do this year. And so we’re working on creating all of these plugins that are geared towards food bloggers, features we know that they need, features that we’ve done in our custom themes that really had to be part of the custom theme. But now with these block themes, this site editor, if I can bring this functionality to more people, then these features that people have wanted that they don’t want to get a custom theme, now it just becomes so much more attainable for them.

And so I think it’s not necessarily for a type of blogger that’s any particular place, because I think that you could be a more advanced blogger. And when I say advanced, I just mean more experience, you’ve done a lot more WordPress, and you just want to play with this, you want to be able to do this yourself. You haven’t done a custom theme because you maybe want that control because playing in WordPress is fun for you versus someone that’s newer to WordPress and they’ll only know the block theme. And being able to pop something in like this, I don’t think they’ll understand how much people used to be like, “Oh, I want that feature” and it be totally unattainable.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That makes sense.

Lauren Gray: And so I want to be able to introduce that to more people just in a further reaching way. I feel like Skylar at Feast has had a similar kind of approach or goal where he has his plugin that he’s trying to make more features available. And I love that he’s doing that. And I want to bring that to blocks now.

Bjork Ostrom: And so an example would be one of the plugins is Dynamic Connector. And so the little tagline for the first time ever, you can insert curated content into multiple posts and use logic to determine what displays site-wide. So idea being people are like, “I released the cookbook and I really want the cookbook promo to show up in all of my posts. How do I do that?” The idea with this is that you could use Dynamic Connector to more easily do that on your site without having to have somebody custom code it?

Lauren Gray: A little bit, yes. So we specifically did it, and we might market it front end this way, so they’ll probably be, we’ll call it a lot, category specific opt-ins.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Lauren Gray: Because I feel like that’s going to resonate a little bit better. The first one’s maybe what I will call it. But the goal really isn’t to insert content into all of your posts, but wherever you insert this block to be able to change the logic to display the most relevant information. So let’s say you do insert it into all of your posts instead of just being able to say like, “Okay, here’s my cookbook. Show that everywhere.” Now you could say, “Here are my dinners in a cookbook, and then here are my desserts in a cookbook.” And you don’t have to go into all of your dinner posts and insert the dinner cookbook and all of your dessert posts and insert the dessert cookbook.

You’ll have a management area where you can say, “If the category is dinner, insert this book. If the category is dessert, insert this other book.” And then you can do a fallback. If it doesn’t have any of those categories, show both. You can do whatever you want. So it has that level logic to it. And the goal is really to help people like display super curated content without having to do as much content editing. Yeah, I don’t think I really mentioned that I think there will be a lot of content editing that comes with this new block editor, but I think it’s a good thing, and I hope that this plugin reduces some of that kind of hassle.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Totally. So if people are interested in … Do you want to talk about what each one of those are and at what stage is Small Plugins at? Can people go and sign up and buy them? I mean, it looks like it. I know it’s still kind of … You have some more coming down the line. But can you talk about where things are at and what that looks like in terms of who might be a good fit for it and how they can find out more about it?

Lauren Gray: So Small Plugins does have a website. We exist, we’re in the wild, and we have two plugins that are available there, the one we just talked about. And then we have one called Category Labels, which is just very full site editing geared towards displaying specific categories, like a smaller subset. So we’ve got those two plugins available. We’re hoping to release four more in the coming months. And what we want to do for anyone listening to the podcast is offer a 70% off discount. So that’ll be included with the show notes on how you can take advantage of that. But that’ll be available on our website and you’ll be able to get access to the current plugins and then future plugins if you want to take advantage of that.

The plugin totally works, especially Dynamic Connector block/category specific opt-ins. And so it’s like we are using it on a couple of client sites. It’s ready to go out into the wild. We would really, really love for feedback on it, on what people want videos on, on how to use it or ideas or what are their questions. So if we can give and take, we would love to help people implement it in order to provide feedback and to get feedback.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Lauren Gray: But that’s completely available. And I think it’s going to be a game changer for a lot of people and in being able to specifically build your newsletter with very targeted opt-ins. So that was the initial intent for it. And it just is so much more powerful than that in what it can do.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s like an exact use case of something that we were talking about this morning, which is that exact scenario. How do we get more targeted with opt-ins on our different pages? And trying to make decisions around what that looks like and how do we do that. So I can see the need for it and how it would be really helpful. And then how about on the Once Coupled side, are you still working with clients? Can people follow up there? I’m guessing that’s still a business that’s a huge part of your day-to-day. What does that look like?

Lauren Gray: Yes, absolutely. So Once coupled, still doing custom themes, we do fewer, we try and book further out so that we can really do a lot with the clients that we’re working with. So we do book kind of far out, but we love to work on it. And anyone that is interested in doing full site editing, we really want to move to more block themes. So anyone that is that early adopter that wants to play with a block theme, we are looking at making really beautiful themes that are very integrated with CORE and growing with the WordPress community in this new direction. So we would love to work with anyone that is particularly interested in that kind of theme. And playing with that with us.

Right now, we’re doing just custom themes through Once Coupled and then retainers for our custom theme clients. And so in this case, when I say custom theme, I also mean these block themes that we’re doing now. But I think in the future, we’ll also do more content related stuff because I think that there will be a greater need for kind of removing the technical debt to go into this newer phase of WordPress. And that’ll be a lot of updating content. And so we’re looking at ways to work one-on-one with people who need a lot of content changes on their side as well to be able to better adopt block themes.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So cool. That’s awesome. It’s a lot and it’s great that people like you exist, Lauren, because there’s a lot of other people who don’t love doing this kind of stuff, and it’s a great resource to have. So thanks for coming and sharing about what you’re up to, but also sharing your insights in terms of where the industry’s going and what people can be doing, oncecoupled.com, smallplugins.com, we’ll link to them in the show notes. Thanks so much for coming on.

Lauren Gray: Yeah, absolutely.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey, Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Thank you for tuning in. I wanted to let you know that we have an live Q&A coming up. We typically have a live Q&A every single month for our Food Blogger Pro community, for our Food Blogger pro members. And if you’re not a member or maybe you’re a new member of the community, maybe you don’t know what they are. So I wanted to give you a quick rundown on what you could expect from a live Q&A at Food Blogger Pro. So like I mentioned, we have one per month and in these live Q&As, we typically focus on a specific topic. So whether that be photography, SEO, WordPress, developing recipes, we kind of cover everything and anything on these live Q&As.

And then Bjork or sometimes Bjork and a guest and industry expert come on and answer all of our community’s questions live. So our community submits questions and then Bjork and whoever is joining him in that specific Q&A will answer the questions live, and all of our past live Q&As are available for all members. So they are just such a great time and we love being able to connect in a way that’s sort of face-to-face in a virtual setting. So if you’re interested in joining our next Q&A and you’re not already a member, be sure to head over to foodbloggerpro.com/join so you can learn a little bit more about the community and sign up there. And then if you are already a member of the community, hello, hello. We hope to see you at our next one soon, and you can head over to the live tab whenever you log into the site to get access and register for our next live Q&A. So thanks again for tuning into this episode of the podcast. We appreciate you so much and we’ll see you next time. Make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Duett. If you currently have an email list, you may feel like one of these three things here. Number one, you don’t know what to actually send to your list or how often. Number two, your email list is a bit of an afterthought once you create new content. Or, number three, you’re not even scratching the surface of what you could be doing with it or all of the above. I think that’s usually the case with us. It’s all three of those things. If any of those sound like you, you should really check out Duett. They are a team of email strategists and copywriters backed by Allie Drummer, who you’ve probably heard here on the podcast a few times, and they help bloggers like you engage readers and send traffic back to your site from email. As you’ve heard time and time again on this podcast, your email list is one of the most valuable assets as a business owner. You own your list, so you’re not impacted by constantly changing social algorithms or Google updates or all of those other things that we have to deal with.

But instead, you can decide what your audience sees and when, you have control. Duett can help you by giving you feedback on your existing email strategy and by actually writing emails and getting email sequences set up within your account. By working with the Duett team, you’ll feel better about how you’re showing up for your audience consistently send valuable traffic back to your site and feel more confident connecting with your subscribers. Here’s what you have to do. Head to duett.co/foodbloggerpro, that’s DUETT.co/foodbloggerpro, all one word, to download a guide to help you welcome new subscribers to your email list, that’s a really important thing that new subscriber series that you have, and learn more about how the Duett team can help you leverage your email list for even more traffic and engagement, which is what we’re all about and what we’re all after. This is also really cool and I would encourage you to check this out. You can book a free discovery call on that page if you’re interested in learning more about how Duett can help you. Again, that’s duett.co/foodbloggerpro, and thanks to Duett for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey, there. This is Emily and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Paul Bannister, who is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Raptive. Right off the bat, I just wanted to say that this interview was conducted in mid-April, so over the course of the interview, they’re going to mention AdThrive and CafeMedia quite a bit, but at the end of April, AdThrive and CafeMedia rebranded to become Raptive, so I just wanted to clear any confusion out of the way and let you know that they are all the same thing, but now they are called Raptive.

Anyways, it’s a really great interview, they’re talking about all sorts of hot topics in the blogging and text space, including the removal of third party cookies, ChatGPT and AI and how it might affect content creation, the rapid growth of video and how it’s changing advertising and lots more. They also touch on the transition from Universal Analytics to GA4 and how it might affect Raptive’s eligibility criteria and more about the new standards for video advertising. It’s a really interesting episode and we know you’re going to get a lot out of it, so I’ll just let Bjork kick it off.

Bjork Ostrom: Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Bannister: Great to be here, Bjork. Thanks very much.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, welcome back. You’ve been on, I think a few different times. You have a depth of expertise, specifically in the world that a lot of people who listen to this podcast would be interested in, which is revenue, advertising. Your role officially is strategy officer, chief strategy officer at AdThrive CafeMedia. Is that correct?

Paul Bannister: That is correct.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Previously though, in the research, now we do these research for these podcasts, so then I get these notes and I’m like, “Wait a minute, I didn’t know this”, your role previously was the founder of a very early and one of the most popular online gaming review sites. What was the site? Tell us a little bit about that.

Paul Bannister: Yeah. To date myself, I have the great benefit of getting out of college in the mid–90s when the web was being born. Used the earliest web browsers, even ones that didn’t even have graphics, like real early days.

Bjork Ostrom: Gopher mail. What was the email client that was the first email client that people had used?

Paul Bannister: I used Elm and Pine, remember all the email, like wood names. It was like Unix stuff, like real super, super early. I got out at that point in time and considered taking a traditional job, and on the side, did some traditional stuff, but I decided in my parents’ basement to start a website. Love playing video games. I still do as much as I can these days. Back then, I was like, I’m going to play video games, review them, write tips and hints and whatever else, and got it off the ground. It started doing really well. I started hiring freelancers. I hired some people to help me.

A good friend of mine built out the backend, and it was before there wasn’t like, WordPress didn’t exist, there was no CMS that existed. You had to build it all yourself, and so we built all these different things. Then, this was starting in ’95 when we started the site, it did pretty well pretty quickly, and we immediately got interest from somebody who wanted to buy advertising on the site. I think the first ad on the web was on hotwire.com, which was in ’94. We had ads on our site in ’95, so we were not far behind that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s so crazy.

Paul Bannister: Very, very beginning. I think made a thousand dollars from selling a banner ad. There was no ad server. You didn’t count … there was no viewability, there were no impressions, clickthrough rate today, you’re happy if you get a 0.1% clickthrough rate. Back then, the clickthrough rate was 4% or something astronomical. Very different time. I ran it for a couple of years and eventually sold it to a publishing company that had a video game magazine, and it became the companion website of the magazine. It was really interesting. It was a great experience. I had already been very interested in media and publishing, and I worked on the school newspaper in college and the university TV station and whatever else, and so it was part of my passion was content and making and running my own website was a great way to get out of college and really get into the thick of it.

Bjork Ostrom: Is it right that it was a top 100 website in the world? Like on all the World Wide Web?

Paul Bannister: Yeah. This is so early, where I think most sites, any site we work with today, we would be big enough to qualify for AdThrive, but we wouldn’t be enormous. Back then, there weren’t that many people on the web, so it was super.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. But it looked different too because the pool wasn’t as big, and so the percentage of attention that you had for people using the web, that’s really cool. One of the things that’s so interesting with anybody who has the experience like you do is you view all of this differently. For somebody who comes in and starts yesterday, the way that they understand the context, the history, it’s like, I remember in high school having these teachers who had taught for a long time or even history teachers, and they have a different appreciation for the way that things work because they have this long context around changes and patterns. A lot of the things that we’re going to be talking about on this podcast are things that are changing and evolving.

But when you’ve watched those changes happen for 25 years, I would assume you feel differently about it than you would if it’s like you’ve been here three years and there’s a big change happening. Does that resonate? Does that feel true in terms of your response to things that sometimes seem like, “Oh my gosh, this huge thing is changing,” but for you, you have experience with things changing so much through the years that it’s like that’s part of the deal with the web?

Paul Bannister: Yeah. It’s a really good point. It’s funny, I can’t speak for the other side, so I don’t know how other people feel when some big thing comes out and it’s scary. I do know for me when, because I think you’re right on the money, when something comes out that seems scary and big and like “Oh my God, what is this thing?”, for a little bit, I’m like, “Oh my God, this is horrifying.” Then, I quickly get to, “All right, what do we do? How do we get ahead of this? What’s the opportunity? How do we turn lemons into lemonade? What’s the right way to deal with this?” I’m working on a presentation now, actually almost to this exact point where it’s like, we thought cookies going away was the big thing, but actually probably AI is the big thing.

Then, give me some other thing, we’re like, “Oh, the AI thing is nothing. Forget about that.” We’ve all lived. Anyone who’s been in the business for 10 years has lived through the pivot to mobile, the pivot to video, what are apps going to do? Search engine changes, all these different things. I think the more you’ve done it, the more you just realize, “All right, put your head down, keep working and keep doing your thing and figure out how to move to the next level.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You mentioned two things there that I think people would be really interested to talk through. The first one, if we were to have talked six months ago, a year ago, definitely would’ve been top of the list, and that’s the removal of the cookie and specifically that happening with Google. Can you talk a little bit about what that is for those who aren’t familiar, and then we can talk about why that’s important to be aware of?

Paul Bannister: Yeah. Most of digital advertising today is based on a technology called Third Party Cookies, which is a feature in browsers that lets people track you across the web. For mainly motivated by privacy reasons, many browsers have been getting rid of third party cookies, so Safari on iOS and Apple Mac devices and Firefox and other browsers have gotten rid of those cookies. At this point, Chrome, Google’s browser is the only one that still has third party cookies. They announced in 2020 that they were going to get rid of them by 2022. That has now been delayed several times, and now they’re saying that that deadline is the middle of next year. It’s a big deal because so much of the foundation of advertising is based on this technology. A lot of time has been spent over the last couple of years like rebuilding technology, figuring out new solutions, figuring out what is much more proof preserving privacy-friendly, user-friendly, and making a better advertising set of systems.

We’ve been working on that since the beginning back in 2020, even when we’re working on things pre–2020, and with the delays it has, in some regards, it saps some energy from the process because a lot of companies are like, “Ah, Google’s never going to do this. I don’t believe it’s going to happen. I’m not going to waste my time on this.” But it does seem, to those of us who are very close to it and we’re very close to it, that Google is getting more and more serious about it now. They really are investing a lot of resources and across the board. I can’t speak to you for sure it will happen next year, but I think it’s much more likely it’s going to happen next year than at the same point in the process a year or two ago, so I really believe it’s going to happen at this point and we’re really spending time getting ahead of it.

I’m also more confident than I have been in the past where in the beginning maybe a little bit to your point, it’s like, “Oh my God, this guy’s thought going away, but what are we going to do?” Now, I’m like, “All right, there is a raft of new technology being built. The foundations are being re-architected and restructured. This will be okay and we’re going to get through this and figuring it out. It’ll probably be a little bumpy, but I don’t think it will massively change from a publisher or a user or some other perspective, really heavily change the way things work.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Help me understand a little bit the why behind it, because with Safari, so that’s Apple’s browser, that makes sense. Safari, Apple’s extremely privacy-focused, they don’t have any downside in removing cookies because they’re not an advertiser, they don’t make their money from advertising. Same with Firefox, Mozilla is a non-profit. Is that right?

Paul Bannister: Yep, that’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Non-profit, they don’t have, it’s not like they’re advertising. Their primary focus is, how do we create the best browser possible? One of the ways is to make browsing more private, so we’re going to remove a third party cookie, and the basic idea is you can’t be tracked across sites in the same way. Would the basic example be like, if I’m on Amazon and then I’m looking at footballs and then I go to another site, then I won’t see an ad for footballs because I’m not being tracked across sites. Is that a good example of a third party cookie? Okay. It makes sense for Safari, it makes sense for Firefox, but Chrome is a little bit, it’s owned by Google and Google’s cash cow is advertising, and that’s how they make all their money.

What is the motivation for a company like Google that makes all of their money from advertising to say, “We’re going to take away one of the most effective ways for us to advertise”? Is it just they know they’re going to lose users if that goes away? Or, is it European rules around tracking and needing to make a browser accessible to Europe as well as the US?

Paul Bannister: I think it is. I’ll talk about a positive and negative, if there is the right way to frame it. The first point is what you said about regulation, the way the wind is blowing, what users want, it’s changing and it’s harder and harder for Google to be this outcast where they’re not doing what everybody else has done and they’re getting pressure from regulators and from different governmental bodies around the world, but they have to do more to protect privacy and they just know they have to do it. I think the reason they’re doing it is really that external pressure, which is sure heavily governmental, but there’s other factors too.

Bjork Ostrom: The market in general is shifting and there’s recognition of that, yeah.

Paul Bannister: The other thing, from an advertising perspective, to massively oversimplify, Google has three parts of their business that are driven by advertising. They have some non-advertising parts of their business, but there are three core parts of Google that run on advertising. There is Google search, there is YouTube and there is Google Ads. Google search, we all know. You go to google.com, you search stuff, you see search ads. That is their cash cow that makes them gobs and gobs of money that relies on third-party cookies nearly not at all, because it’s based on a search term.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s based on a search term.

Paul Bannister: By the way, you’re logged in. Most people are logged into Google anyway, so they know a lot about you regardless. The huge bucket of their money is unaffected. Bucket number two is YouTube, which is small but growing and they really believe in it and it’s video and video is the future, and there’s a big investment there. Also relatively unaffected by third party cookies because so much of it’s about what you’re watching on YouTube.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. You’re watching an insurance video and they show an insurance ad.

Paul Bannister: Exactly. They can also share the data across google.com and youtube.com because you’re logged in and you’re using them. They don’t need third party cookies or anything to do that, so those two parts of the business, which are by far and away the largest and the most profitable parts of their business, pretty protected from this change. Google Ads, which is the part that you and us and any publisher on the web uses, that part is the least protected, but it’s also Google’s smallest business and it’s a bit of a problem. What they’re trying to do is saying, on the Chrome side of their business, how do we get rid of these things? How do we build some new technologies into Chrome to make it so advertising still works? Then, the Google Ads part is saying, okay, how do we use these new technologies to build things on top of it and really continue what we’re doing, continue providing value to advertisers.

The big difference, I think, again, I buried it in there, but between Apple and Firefox and others is, they took away third party cookies and they added nothing to support advertising. Chrome is saying we’re going to take away third party cookies and we’re building a whole bunch of new tech that you can use also, and that new tech is really interesting and really cool, and that’s where a lot of the focus is on building into those new tech technologies.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say you can use, are you referring to ad network like AdThrive?

Paul Bannister: Yeah, exactly. Ad-driven companies can build on top of that technology.

Bjork Ostrom: Is there an example that you could give what that looks like? Or is it pretty technical in nature? I’m guessing regardless it’s technical in nature, but if not third party cookies, I’m trying to think through, does it have to do with logged in behavior and incentivizing that in some way?

Paul Bannister: To use your football example, in the current world, I think you said Amazon. If you go to Amazon and you search for a football, the Amazon servers and other companies that Amazon work with store that data about you and attach it to your third party cookie. When they see you on another site, that Amazon server sees you on that site also because Amazon code is running on that site for a variety of reasons, and they say, “Ooh, this is Bjork. He’s looking for a football, let me show them a football ad,” and that’s the way it works today. When third party cookies go away, that technological method goes away.

One of the new features Chrome is building as a technology they call Fledge. Fledge makes the same system work, but none of the data goes to the servers. The browser itself keeps the data, so it’s protected from servers. Amazon knows that about you, but they can’t see you in other places, but they can still target ads of you because of this new technology where the data itself is in the browser, so it’s your data, it’s on your computer, advertisers can still use it in a private way. It’s a very different way of thinking about it. What the advertiser needs is still possible to execute on, but it’s done so in a way that the data’s not shared back with the companies.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is one of the big issues that is, there’s a shift happening and the shift is who owns this data? I’m giving you this data, does the company own it? Well, technically it’s my data, I should own it. There’s all different degrees on how government weighs in on that from the least regulated to the most regulated US in general on not as regulated, maybe European countries more regulated, and then California in the middle.

All of these restrictions that are in place. But inevitably, what’s going to happen is the trend is towards users owning their data, and so one way to get around that, while still doing some version of targeted ads is to let the user maintain their data in their browser, they can slide it on or slide it off or as you see, if you use an iPhone, you get a prompt all the time. This app wants to track using Bluetooth, allow or disallow? That trend makes sense and you can start to see, like you said, how the building in tools to replicate what it was doing before, while also solving for a problem, which is a company owning a user’s data.

Paul Bannister: Right, exactly. Hundred percent. Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Really interesting. The date for that change is when? In 2024? Is there an actual date that you know that that will happen?

Paul Bannister: There’s none actually. I think it’s third quarter, so August, September is what they’re saying. There’s a lot of steps also between now and then. This August I think, they actually will have, assuming they hit their goals, the new technologies will be fully turned on in Chrome. Cookies will still be there, but the new technology will be there fully as well. Right now, it’s only about 5% of Chrome browsers now have the technology. The other 95%, will get it over the next four or five months.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Got it. One of the other things that exists in my head as a potential outcome of this, you can say if it’s accurate, not accurate, or somewhere in the middle. Third party cookies go away, a company has less ability to track somebody, let’s say it’s a chicken company and they say, “Great, we want to track people who have searched on Google for chicken recipes and then end up somewhere else in show them an ad on that.”

That goes away, what it seems like might happen is there would be a benefit given to curated groups of large pools of content like an ad network, where then a company can come to them and say, this chicken company can come to them and say, it’s Tyson Chicken, they come to them and say, “We want to show our ads and we want to do it in a way that we know it’s effective. We can’t right now exactly replicate what we did before, so we want to come to you and say, ‘Hey, on any of your content in your network that has a chicken recipe show a chicken ad.’ Is there any truth to that or will these tools that come in to replace some of the third party cookie stuff essentially stand in the middle and not require that?

Paul Bannister: I think you’re totally right. We very much believe in that. One of our big investments this year is in direct sales, is in increasing the size of our sales team that goes directly to advertisers. We hired a few months ago a woman named Marla Newman, she was the president of Dotdash Meredith, which is a huge publishing company.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh wow, yep.

Paul Bannister: People magazine and all recipes and 50 other big publications and websites. She ran all of their sales and now she’s moved over to our team and we’re growing that team very significantly, because we really believe what you’re saying and we’re seeing it to be true, where while some of the things that advertisers want to do will be replaced with a new technology, and so the technology can enable that and that’s great, some things are just going to go away, and so advertisers who want to reach those audiences are going to be working directly with publishers and ad networks like us that, to your point, have that large scale, have that aggregation with the right kinds of content, have the right aggregation of the right kinds of audiences, and really can help them achieve their goals. We are seeing that trend happen and we’re investing in it because we know it’s part of the way the wind is blowing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. When you look at it at a macro level over the last 10 years, it’s interesting to see. Essentially, what it is is just companies trying to figure out where their dollar goes the furthest. Ten years ago, it’s direct sales because there wasn’t technology there is today to do programmatic advertising third party cookies. It shifts way over over time. Like “Hey, we can target not only people who are looking for a chicken recipe but are also between the ages of 25 and 35 and live in the suburbs of Minnesota,” you can get hypertargeted. As that starts to go away, potentially there’s a shift back towards direct sales because the impact of the dollar spent could potentially go further. It’s to be determined still, we don’t know yet, but interesting to hear your thoughts and reflections on that.

That’s coming down the line, TBD, we don’t know exactly what it’ll look like. Like you said, it will probably be bumpy to some degree as companies are trying to figure it out and dollars get reallocated and systems get figured out. One of the things you said that’s this new reality that we’re all navigating is artificial intelligence and amazing how quickly it’s adopted. I think it’s a hundred million people are using or signed up for ChatGPT within three months or something. I don’t remember exactly.

Paul Bannister: The fastest growth to a hundred million users of any technology ever.

Bjork Ostrom: Anything ever. Lindsay is now at the point where she just kind of rolls her eyes. It was just an hour ago, we’re sitting down in a meeting, I was like, “A friend coded up this little AI chatbot that brought in all of Pinch of Yum content and we could interact with it and be like, ”I’m going to a friend’s house tonight. What’s the best dessert recipe to bring?” You’re starting to see people use it, but it’s really impactful for the world of content. You can write an essay in 10 seconds on best chicken recipes or whatever it is, as you’ve watched this so quickly become used by so many people and also not only are so many people using it, but it’s also good. It’s really good at creating content and interacting with people and solving problems. Where do you think that leaves us as content creators? How do we approach it and what should our mindset be?

Paul Bannister: I think there’s a lot of different angles to it, obviously. Two very big buckets are content creation and content distribution. In the content creation world, you’ve got the risks of, can people just use ChatGPT or some other system like that to create content that’s as good as mine or better or nearly as good, but to a massive scale. Can the internet be flooded with a trillion new pieces of content written by a chatbot that are pretty good? Maybe not perfect, but pretty good and just overwhelm the human generated content in a bad way, so you’ve got risks like that. On the other side. You’ve got the way we view it a lot of the time is, what’s the opportunity there where we’ve had a technology for a year and a half or so now called Topic, which is based on GPT, which is the underlying platform that does content inspiration.

It’s like how can you use these chatbot and AI technologies to help you figure out what content should I make next? When I write that content, what should be included in it? Give me some ideas. You know what I know, writer’s block is a real thing that is hard to deal with sometimes, to use those tools to help you figure out what to do and where to go can be really powerful. There’s other applications like that, like your point about using your content to answer questions as a component of the chatbot is super interesting and there’s lots of things down that path. In the world of content creation, you’ve got a lot of things where there are some risks, there are some real ways to use this tech that could be really interesting.

I do think a big factor with content creation that’s important that the technology is moving fast, but I think this is a while before it gets there, is the point of trust. Recipes is an easy example where yes, you can ask ChatGPT today to give you a recipe for chicken Parmesan. I don’t know if I want to cook that recipe. I think I’d rather go to Pinch of Yum and say, they’ve got a chicken … I don’t know if you have a chicken Parmesan recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah.

Paul Bannister: I’m going to trust Lindsay and Bjork and what their recipe is, and I think that’s the right way to do it. I think trust is a really big factor that I think publishers should keep relying on and leaning on. We are all real people. We want to hear what other real people have to say. We want things that are tested and true and real and something that I can believe. I think that’s where the AI stuff is not there yet. On the other side, you’ve got content distribution, and I think the risk there is with Google’s Bard and BingGPT, is a progression of what Google and Bing have been doing for years now, which is the zero click search. If they can answer the user’s question on the search page and they don’t need to send the traffic, they have shown over the years to do that significantly.

Will these technologies make it so more and more types of content can be disintermediated that way where no one needs to go to Pinch if Yum anymore because there’s a recipe that’s on the Google results page and what’s the dynamic there and how do you do that? I think, again, there it’s a real risk. I think there’s a question of how do you get ahead of it by owning more and more of your audience, finding other platforms and ways to reach your audience, what’s the right way to keep moving forward? We’re thinking a lot about those things. Anyway, I think you’ve thought about it, I’m sure as much as I have, there’s a tremendous number of things that are a little scary and then there’s a tremendous number of things you’re like, “Holy cow, I can do that. That’s going to be amazing. How do I get ahead of that?” You can do all those pieces.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like the hard thing to do in a situation like this, is to know that nothing lasts forever. I think this is maybe more a more poetic version of it, but I just came across that Robert Frost poem, I think it’s called Nothing Gold Can Stay. His is more pontificating on life and its beauty and whatnot. I think it’s also true in business. It’s not like 20 years from now we’re going to be doing the exact same thing, so the question is, to what degree are you willing to be light on your feet and say, “What are my skills? What are the abilities that I have? How can those be adapted to a new reality?” One of the things that I do think will happen is, and you alluded to this, there’s a shift from information to, I think what’s happened, especially in the last three months, there’s been a value shift in terms of your ability to produce information versus your ability to connect and engage.

The value of information, meaning top 10 healthy coffees to get from Starbucks, that’s become less valuable as a piece of content because it’s purely informational. There’s not a huge element of your humanity wrapped up within that as opposed to somebody who says, here’s my story in transitioning my habits around drinking really unhealthy drinks from Starbucks to figuring out how to still get my fix from Starbucks but not have a bunch of sugar. It shifts it from story experience person or towards that away from just information, and I think the stuff that’s really at risk is just pure information.

Paul Bannister: I agree.

Bjork Ostrom: Best places, most affordable places to stay in Minneapolis or whatever it is, stuff like that. For a content creator, somebody who’s like, “Is this going to take over what I’m going to do, and now my skills are no longer valuable?” Or, “I’ve worked really hard to build this following on the blog, does all the search traffic go away?” Do you have any advice just from a mindset perspective how to approach it and even any ideas on, you maybe alluded to this a little bit, but where the opportunity might lie within some of these changes for people not to be discouraged by it, but encouraged by it.

Paul Bannister: Yep, yep. That’s a big question. I think it’s a personal question. It’s specific to each person to some level.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Bannister: Another good saying I’ve heard recently that I’ve used a lot with these things is that we will overestimate the impact of it in the short term and underestimate the impact in the long term, in the sense that, right now everyone’s like, “Oh my God, it’s going to destroy the world. What’s going to happen?” That’s probably not true. We have time. These technologies take, even though this is moving fast, we, it will take a time for it to get to it. To some level for today, keep doing what you’re doing, build your audience, create great content. To your point, imbue your humanity into what you do. Those are things that you are good at and you can keep being good at and keep refining.

Then, I think for the longer term it is start thinking about how can you use these different tools that are being created to go faster, do more, do better, improve what you’re doing. I think it is, in the short and medium term, stress and agitation is not valuable, it just creates angst and doesn’t make you feel good. Focus on what you’re great at and then for the longer term, really thinking about, “Okay, how do I use this stuff? How do I do more? How do I go to the next level and figure out what to do next?” That’s my best advice.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s great and the idea of not will this replace me in what I’m doing, but how do I use this to make what I’m doing better? That, to me, is a really interesting question. Even for me, what I’ve tried to do is I’ve tried to have ChatGPT up on another screen, and as much as possible when I run into something where I’m like, “I wonder about this,” I try using it to help me understand like building a job description, like “Hey, here’s the components. Can you help me build a job description?” It’s questions about, I was doing some math, what does that look like? Or spreadsheet analysis? Starting to do these things that I otherwise would have to make some brain space for and I outsource that brain space a little bit. It’s not replacing the core function of me doing a podcast as an example, although there are some examples of people doing AI podcasts and having conversations, which is novel in itself.

One of the things that I heard you say, and I think it’s an important thing to reiterate, is what’s true today? Using that as your foundation for making decisions, not what might be true in the future, because we don’t know and like we talked about, things change on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. There’s pivots, but what’s true today? What’s true today is people connect with people. When I think of following along and learning, the places that I go to are people who have a story that they’ve been through, that they can teach me what they did. We’re still at our core humans who connect with other humans. If you can get good at figuring out how to help people or figuring out how to entertain people, there’s an opportunity for you to create things online and build a following, and I think that’s an important reminder of what’s true today. How that looks will always be changing, but your skill and ability to do that over time is what you should really refine.

Paul Bannister: I agree with all that. One funny quick story to the point of, we can’t anticipate where this will end up. A long time ago, someone who I used to work with ended up moving on to a company that was a very early creator of an aggregator of YouTube content. This was like 2008, 2007, it’s been a long time ago. I had lunch with him soon after he started there and he’s explaining to me these videos people were watching on YouTube, and I walked away from this conversation. I was like, “What are you talking about? This makes no sense.”

What literally a year and a half later I realized he was explaining unboxing videos to me. I was like, “Who would watch a person open toys.” This is the most nonsensical thing I’ve ever heard. Now, it’s this enormous business. None of us can anticipate where the world is going and what seems utterly illogical and crazy today can be a big thing. It’s already getting stressed, because some new opportunities will come and keep your eye on what’s out there and be like, “That’s really interesting. I could do that.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. My dad has this phrase that he always talks about or mentions in any season of stress where he talks, he says ambiguity creates stress, and I think that’s largely what is happening here is there’s a transition. The transition could potentially be significant, but it’s also ambiguous, and I think that’s the piece that’s stressful. Whereas, for a long stretch of time, there were changes, but they weren’t changes in this way, and I think this is significant enough that it creates ambiguity. But like you said, the important thing to know is out of every shift, there comes new opportunities that we never could have thought of before. We don’t know what those are until we see them, and then five years later we look back and we’re like, “Oh yeah, of course. If only I would’ve started unboxed therapy 10 years ago and then have 10 million followers or whatever by opening new like iPhones and computers,” but those opportunities will exist as well and it’s just a matter of being curious and paying attention to them.

Paul Bannister: Yep, hundred percent.

Bjork Ostrom: This one isn’t quite as juicy and not quite as maybe a big of a shift, but another big change that’s happening in the world of content is the shift from Universal Analytics to GA4. Would be curious to hear any thoughts that you have on that or just within AdThrive, thoughts that you have around that shift changing. Then, one of the questions that came up actually within that, there’s a lot of people who are excited about potentially joining, but there’s these markers around page views and numbers, and people have those as the markers they want to get to. Will that change with the shift to GA4 for what you need to get in or to be able to apply to get accepted to AdThrive? Two questions, just general thoughts around that shift, and then does that impact how you view analytics internally?

Paul Bannister: At a general level, right now, I would say we are very much in the thick of just dealing with the change ourselves. We’ve got 4400, 4500 sites we work with. They are almost all still running Universal Analytics, the old version of GA. They’re all shifting over the next couple of months to GA4, and so we had to change all of our backend systems, all of our reporting, all of our analytics, all of our things to work with the new system. Google as in normal form, the documentation isn’t that great and it’s missing and things that they say work don’t work, but then there’s no one to talk to. We’re I think dealing with a lot of the same problems that almost anybody who’s dealing with the transition themselves is dealing with and just trying to get through this window of time.

I do think that there are some interesting features that it has. It is another thing out in the world driven by privacy. A lot of the changes in GA4 are really around privacy and really protecting user data and doing all this in a way that it is much more privacy-friendly. That’s a real underlying trend on all of these things. I do think that once we all get through this transition, there’s some interesting things we can do with it and better analytics we can pull out of it and ways that ways to help. That’s my 50,000-foot view of things. In terms of our application process and those markers, we don’t plan to change them. We’re monitoring what’s going on closely. We don’t see a huge difference in terms of GA4 versus Universal Analytics’ numbers today. Maybe a couple of percent, but not enough for us to really rethink it, but as we continue down this process, down this pathway, we’re always looking at it and always trying to think about, does this make sense? Should we change what we’re doing here and make sure we’re doing it in a logical way?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. For those who are listening, we have a couple of GA4 podcasts that we can link do in the show notes that we dive deep on that and also, for Food Blogger Pro members, we have some courses and information on that, so we can check that out as well. One of the things that you talked about earlier is you said video is the future. Can you talk about what that means and why you believe that?

Paul Bannister: I believe that the greatest areas of growth on the internet today are still video. YouTube continues to grow fast. TikTok is crazy. Snapchat is big. There’s Lemonade, which is a TikTok competitor. There’s another TikTok competitor out there that’s pretty big that I’m forgetting the name of, and that’s a vertical video case. Then there’s the continued rise of what’s called connected television, which is watching TV on a Roku or Apple TV or a smart TV or something like that, and the ability to, everything’s on demand, all those different things. One of the biggest trends in the digital markets and then the digital ad markets specifically, is really this continued very heavy growth in the world of video. An enormous amount of people’s time every day spent watching video in many different formats and types and much more and more of that is moving into the digital world, so that’s a really big transition and a big moment.

At a macro level, I said that because it is where people’s time is spent and it is transitioning the way it works from the old way of sitting down at 8:00 at night to watch plus CTV on NBC and watching, sitting through commercials and talking friends about it the next day to this highly fast-moving, highly decentralized world, where there’s a million shows on Netflix you can watch and a million shows on Prime and a million shows on Hulu, and then a trillion things on YouTube and a trillion things on TikTok, and everybody’s watching something different. It’s a very big transition. We are continuing to build things in video, do more things in video because we know it’s where there’s just very significant growth and a lot of people’s time is spent there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things I love doing is zooming out, and we can do this with your story, because you had a website in 1995. Looking at the changes and the why behind it and you can hear, video is the future. Okay, well, why is that? Well, if you look at any progression of or snapshot of the web, in 1995, there was text and there were links, maybe there was images, but they would’ve load loaded really slow. Part of it is, it’s not like suddenly somebody had an idea and was like, “Oh, images, we should do images. Brilliant idea. Let’s do.” Part of it just has to do with the capability of the internet. As images became more easily distributed through faster internet, suddenly you started to see images show up more on websites and then it was maybe gifs or moving images or the pip art stuff. You’d start to see that because you could do that, and it feels like, correct me if I’m wrong on this, but it feels like within the last five years really one of the shifts that’s happened is mobile, but then also video capable mobile.

When phones were first coming out, the idea that you’d be on a cell connection and then watch a video at hi-def quality, there would’ve been a lot of difficulty delivering that video that just doesn’t exist today. Is that one of the reasons why there is this shift? It’s just because it’s now capable for a computer, a phone, a tablet, all of these devices can easily stream video and people can more easily create the video as well. Not only is the demand going up, but the supply is starting to match that demand and that’s where then advertising comes in to sit in the middle of that and say like, “Okay, a lot of people wanting to watch this, we’re going to run ads against it. There’s a decent amount of people creating it who can create income from it.” Does that feel like an accurate portrayal of the shift that’s happened?

Paul Bannister: Yeah, I think a hundred percent. It’s also, part of it’s not new, when we’re talking about this a minute ago, it’s not new time spent watching, it’s time shifting from traditional television to these new types of video as well as new moments. My family went to France for spring break a few weeks ago. We took the train at the end because we were flying out of London. We took the train from Paris to London, and so we’re going through the French countryside of 200 miles an hour and all four of us are on phones or iPads, not TV now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Paul Bannister: And it’s like-

Bjork Ostrom: Wait a minute-

Paul Bannister: What is this? This is unbelievable.

Bjork Ostrom: Pause.

Paul Bannister: Tell that story to somebody from 10 years ago and they would be blown away, and now you’re having a very mundane experience. To your point, it’s just the capabilities and the ability for this to work didn’t exist and now it does, and it’s creating a lot of changes and a lot of opportunities.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. If you were to go a hundred years ago, it’s not that the attention wouldn’t have been there, it just would’ve been in different places. You would’ve had a newspaper, and in the newspaper there would’ve been ads, and it’s the same general concept, it’s just that the medium is shifting to different delivery platforms and different ways of being consumed.

Paul Bannister: Hundred percent.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s also been, this is now drilling into the video world a little bit, some shifts in the world of advertising as it relates to video ads. Can you talk a little bit about what’s happened there and for creators who do have video content or even sometimes if they don’t have video content, how they can take advantage of the premium that comes with running video ads?

Paul Bannister: Yep, for sure. This is weedy because it’s technical stuff, so I’m going to keep it high-level, tell me where I’m going off track.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Paul Bannister: The way video ads have worked for a number of years, to simplify, is what are called Instream ads and Outstream ads. Instream ads are, you’re watching TV and you’re watching a show, and then there’s a break and there’s commercials. Those are Instream. You see that on the web, you see that on YouTube, you see that on TikTok, you see that in different formats where there’s video content and then there’s video ads as a component of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and the content, we could view it as the stream of the video, and then, within in that video is an ad, so Instream. Okay.

Paul Bannister: Exactly. Then, outstream is video ads that are just ads. They don’t have any video content with them. That is, you’re on a website and you see in the middle of the text there’s just a video there, or there’s a video player that’s sticking somewhere that just has ads playing it and no video content. That’s like the other bucket and that’s the way buyers bought video ads to date, really. That’s just the way it’s worked.

Bjork Ostrom: Those two buckets. My guess is Instream is more valuable because the assumption is somebody clicks, they’re watching, you have their attention and ad runs, there’s going to be more visibility for that ad.

Paul Bannister: Yep, exactly. The challenge was there was a disconnect between what publishers thought was an Instream video and what advertisers thought was an Instream video. For publishers, they very much went by the, and us and big publishers and whatever went this way, where it was really about that content. If there’s content with video ads, that’s Instream, and if there’s not, that’s Outstream. That meant we have a video player that we make available to a lot of our publishers where you can take your video content, you can put it in our player, we will play it on your site, and then video ads will come next to it, and in many cases, those video players are just on pages. The user didn’t necessarily intend to watch that video. There’s part of the experience. Advertisers had a different perception of what Instream versus Outstream meant. For them, Instream often meant things like watching TV, where it really was the user intended to watch, they were like, “I wanted to watch this video, and that’s what it was.” That’s TV, that’s connected television.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s pressing play on a video player?

Paul Bannister: Exactly. Pressing play on a video player. If it’s a YouTube-like experience where you’re searching and then you go to a video, it’s those experiences. It’s really about intent, and so we realized that-

Bjork Ostrom: Versus scrolling past a video that starts to play.

Paul Bannister: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And you may or may not see it, yeah.

Paul Bannister: Exactly. This definition gap has existed for a while. There’s an industry trade group called the IAB Tech Lab, which defines the standards for how advertising works in digital media. I’m on the board of the IAB Tech Lab. We undertook an effort to redefine those video standards to make it so it was more clear. Now, I think I’m oversimplifying to some level, now there are three kinds of video. There’s Instream, we kept the old name, which really means has content and the user really wanted to watch this. That is click-to-play video players, it is connected television, it is things like YouTube, it’s those experiences. There’s Outstream, which is just ads, no content. Then there’s this middle ground that we created called Accompanying Content. That means that it wasn’t necessarily the user’s intent to watch it, but there is content here, because, we all speak personally for me, I believe that video ads perform better when they’re connected to content, when they are something the user could be interested in watching when they are part of the experience a little bit more, and that creates that second tier.

Now that makes it so now the definition is clear for both buyers and sellers, and there’s not this definition gap anymore. That’s a brand new standard that was released two weeks ago and now there’s a process of people have to rebuild their systems and there’s going to be a little bit of a time, but I would say in about the next six months or so, all the systems will change to deal with the fact that there’s this new Middle-tier, and that will change how advertisers buy and probably pricing for things and things like that, and so that’s the weedy story.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that makes sense.

Paul Bannister: Hopefully, boil down in a way.

Bjork Ostrom: It reminds me a lot of when viewability became something in the traditional advertising world where they said, “If you have a traditional ad, it has to be at least 50% viewable, like 50% of it on the screen for one second.” Again, my guess is that there’s a gap where publishers were like, “Hey, I have this ad, I’m on my site, but it’s embedded in the footer, nobody ever sees it, and the advertiser’s like, ”It’s not going to make me any sales if nobody sees it,” so you have to close that gap by defining better what it actually is. It seems like a similar thing in the video world where you’re not going to pay a premium rate if it’s an autoplay video that somebody hasn’t opted into watching. It’s still valuable, there’s still something there, but it’s not as valuable as somebody putting their eyes on a video player clicking play and saying, I’m going to watch it.

Paul Bannister: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: What does that mean for publishers knowing that video is the future, knowing that video is important, knowing that it’s one of the best ways to create advertising revenue and will only become more important. What does that mean for us in terms of how we approach video content on our sites?

Paul Bannister: I think probably the same as what we were talking about AI in a funny way. I think for today, keep doing what you’re doing, keep making video content, keep trying to get it in front of your users. We’ve seen a lot of proof that even when a video is autoplayed, if the video matches the content of the page, that will perform better, that drives higher value in the ad format, it gets more attention from the user, so that’s a really important thing and that that’s really good.

Bjork Ostrom: Meaning, if the video is, in our world, if the video is a recipe and the recipe is the same as the one that you’re on the page for, yeah.

Paul Bannister: Exactly. Yeah. That will just do better. I don’t know if we published data on this, we’ve even seen some search benefit where, if you have matching video content and text content together, you can get the search benefit out of that too. There’s a lot of reasons why you want to make video content and get it in front of users, and then also work on experiences and what we’re doing this as well, what are experiences you can build where those click-to-play experiences can work better and get more eyeballs on them, and again, try to figure out more ways to engage your users.

Honestly, also, I think for people, this isn’t for everybody, but I think for people who are predisposed to it, YouTube is fantastic, TikTok is fantastic. These different platforms are great ways if you’ve got the voice and persona to really get out there and do that and be a part of those platforms also. There are real opportunities there that are great also, so thinking outside the box of, I’ve got a website and that’s great, but what can I do more? How do I reach my audience in different ways? Those video platforms can be really good also.

Bjork Ostrom: As a last topic, speaking of diversification of platforms, one of the things that I’ve noticed within AdThrive is diversification of revenue and starting to place an emphasis on helping creators great revenue in other ways and e-commerce type thing, subscriptions, affiliate. Can you talk a little bit about that transition away from just advertising? Maybe why it’s important for publishers to consider that and why internally those changes or improvements or enhancements are being made within AdThrive?

Paul Bannister: Yeah. Many of those are pretty early. I think affiliate might be one of the further ones along. We’ve got a bunch of sites we’re piloting things with right now and probably have more plans to roll things out later this year. From our perspective, and this gets into the much bigger picture, we view us and all of the creators and publishers we work with as competing with really big media companies. You’re doing search in other places today where for every search term you rank for, you’re competing against Conde Nast and Dotdash Meredith and Hearst and all these giant media and Disney and dotcom or whatever else, and they are ranking in search. You’re competing for audience against those sites, but you’re competing for ad dollars and we’re dealing with that. You’re competing for showing value to your audience and we think affiliate’s such an amazing way to do that where if you can actually convince someone in your audience to buy a product, that’s such a show of the trust that that person is built in you and believe and what you’re about.

That’s obviously a great way to, again, build trust with your audience but also monetize and make money. We’re building more and more of these services to help all of our creators and publishers really compete more with big media companies and really building that trust, building their audience and two more there. We think diversification is just good. We’re not changing from ad management first and that being our core, we believe in ads, we are massively invested and it’s all of our biggest teams work on that and that alone, but we know that there’s much, much more that the people we work with can do and we want to just help enable that and help kind of scale that up for people.

Bjork Ostrom: We really think about all of the potential paths you could go down, if you had the bandwidth, you have however many thousand, hundreds of thousands of people coming to your site, advertising is a great way to create income from that, capture some of the value that you’re creating. But there’s probably, 10 other ways that you could be running a business by getting traffic from search and social in addition to advertising, and it’s one of the things that we try and bring up, we probably don’t talk about it enough on the podcast is, not just thinking about how do I get more traffic but thinking about how do I create more revenue and being strategic not only about getting more of the same thing but diversifying and saying like, “Okay, if we wanted business to double a year from now but we knew that traffic couldn’t, what would we have to do in order to make that happen?”

Those thinking strategically about those other avenues of revenue is a great way to do that. We could talk for hours about all things old and new, things coming down the line, best practices, but want to be respectful of your time and really appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights. I know these are episodes that people always get a lot out of. Paul, if people want to connect with you or I know that you’re writing on the blog as well, maybe following along with news and best practices as you’re seeing it or as you and your colleagues are seeing it. Can you talk a little bit about best way to do that and how people can stay connected?

Paul Bannister: I think the best way is following our blog. I think we are trying more and more to get information out there and get all the things out there. I would say follow me on Twitter, because I do tweet a fair amount, but I also tweet about super nerdy privacy and digital ad things, which if you’re in super nerdy privacy and digital ad things, go for it. Otherwise, the blog is probably a pretty good way to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Twitter is one of those places where you can get super niche into the strangest topics and have a community. My guess is you have your people who are also right there with you weighing in on it and commenting and giving their feedback or thoughts and opinions.

Paul Bannister: I’m going to a conference next week and we’ve already got a drink set up with a bunch of Twitter nerds to talk about in real life.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Paul Bannister: It’s a funny world.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. We’ll link to your Twitter in the show notes, so people can check that out as well. Paul, thanks so much for coming on.

Paul Bannister: Thanks Bjork, always fantastic.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there, Alexa here. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. If you are sitting there thinking, “Man, someday I’m going to start my own food blog.” Or maybe you’re sitting there thinking, “I just started my food blog and I have no idea what to do next.” Don’t worry. We’ve all been there and we actually have a free e-book just for you and it’s called the Food Blogger Starter Kit and it’s full of different resources just to help you along the journey as you’re getting up and running with your very own food blog.

You’ll get access to our free course all about setting up your food blog, some of our favorite podcast episode recommendations, some tips about plugins and photography, and then just some other ways to continuously learn and get a tiny bit better every day. If you’re interested in downloading that ebook for free, just go to foodbloggerpro.com/podcast-start and you can download it right there for free. We’ll have a link to it in the show notes as well, so you can easily click on that there. Otherwise, you can just go to that URL, foodbloggerpro.com/podcast-start to download that Food Blogger starter kit pdf for free. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in again and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I, and I kid you not, I was going to record this half an hour ago, but I was in Clariti and realized there’s an opportunity for Pinch of Yum that is a project we should move forward with. So I created a video, communicated it with the Pinch of Yum team and said, “Hey, we should move forward on this and really get to work cleaning this up.”

In our case, what I had done is I said, “Hey, show me all of the posts in the past year on Pinch of Yum,” and then I sort ordered that in reverse order by page use. So I was looking at pages that on Pinch of Yum in the last year got zero page use, and I realized we have a lot of really thin, not valuable content, and it’s important to clean that up. In our case, we’re going to delete a lot of that content and we should have done that a long time ago, but we just didn’t get around to it. It wasn’t until I was using Clariti that I realized that that was something that we should have done. I was able to see that. There’s a lot of old giveaway posts and things like that.

So we’re going to move forward with that and clean up Pinch of Yum, and that’s what Clariti is for. It’s to help you discover that actionable information to create a project around it, and either you can follow the project or you can assign it to somebody within your team, and then track the impact that that has by making notes or seeing when you made those changes over time. We bring all the information in from WordPress, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. You hook it all up and then you can sort order and use Clariti like a Swiss Army knife for your content.

So if you’re interested in checking it out, go to clariti.com/food, C-L-A-R–I-T-I dot com slash food, and that will get you 50% off your first month. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Hey there. It’s Bjork here. Jumping in quick for a little update. Something that we’re excited about, it’s one of the things that we get most excited about here at Food Blogger Pro is bringing somebody new onto the team. One of the things that we’re constantly trying to do, specifically within Food Blogger Pro, is figure out how can we create the best product possible and the product, a lot of it at least for Food Blogger Pro, is the content that we’re creating. It’s really, we think of it as two things, the content and the community. You know the content from this podcast. That’s one of the things that we do, but that’s the free version of the content. We also have the premium version of content, which is what you get when you sign up to become a Food Blogger Pro member.

We want to continue to invest resources, time, and energy into that area, so we’re bringing on somebody that we’re calling a content creator and editor. So this would be somebody who’s really interested and fascinated in two categories. One would be the world of technical expertise, and WordPress, and software tools that you can use to build and grow your blog. I’m guessing there’s a lot of people who listen to this podcast that would fall into that category. One of the things that you love about the process of building a following is learning the best practices, learning the things that are really working well for people who want to grow an audience and grow their blog. So that would be one piece.

The second piece would be somebody who’s a good teacher and educator, somebody who likes the process of thinking about something, learning about something, and then distilling that information down into actionable, insightful, and helpful media. So that usually, for us, for Food Blogger Pro, means recordings and screen recordings and walking people through certain processes, but we also do blog posts and podcasts and things like that.

So the position is content creator and editor, and specifically in a sentence, what you’ll do is you’ll be editing, auditing, and creating course content for Food Blogger Pro. We have lots of people who are creating content. If you’re a Food Blogger Pro member, you know that there’s all sorts of different people who are creating content, so you wouldn’t be the sole individual creating the content, but you would be going through the process of learning information or distilling down what you already know into actionable, insightful information for Food Blogger Pro members.

So an example of some other things you do, so plan an outline, recording course content, editing course content that’s been created by somebody else. So if you’re somebody who really loves the process of editing video and getting that organized and uploading it, maintaining a course auditing process. We have a lot of courses on Food Blogger Pro and we want to make sure that we’re staying up-to-date with that information, so having a process to make sure that information is all up-to-date, and just planning, outlining, writing, maybe proofreading content about growing an online food business, which is what we talk about on this podcast.

So it’s a part-time position. 20 hours a week is what we’re thinking for this, Monday through Friday. It’s remote, so you can work anywhere in the US, US preferred or at least US time zones so we’re overlapping. Starting date would be mid-May, and this would be a good fit for you if you feel comfortable breaking down technical topics into understandable points, you know how to run a blog on WordPress, you understand how food creators create and share content online, so different social media platforms.

This one I think is really important, that you have a deep desire to teach and to mentor others, that’s just a part of who you are. Maybe you get really excited when a family member or a friend wants to learn something new and you can teach them. This is also important, but having a positive, helpful attitude. It’s not only our technical expertise, but the spirit in which we interact with others, we think that’s really important as well.

There’s some additional benefits even for part-time employees that we have. We have a 401(k) plan with a 4% match, vacation days, sick days. We take the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, and you’ll get a new computer, and some money, a thousand dollars to build your home office. So even for a part-time position, there’s some great benefits that come along with working with the team, and we’d love to hear from you if you’re interested.

So if you feel like this would be something you want to at least learn more about, potentially go through the process of applying, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/creator. Again, that’s foodbloggerpro.com/creator and see if it’s a good fit for you, go through the application process. We’d love to have a conversation with you and we’d love to add somebody not only smart, sharp, and capable, but also kind and helpful to our team. So if that sounds like you, we’d love to hear more from you and would love to have a conversation with you. Again, check that out by going to foodblogger pro.com/creator. All right. Let’s check out this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Andrew Wilder from the NerdPress team, and he also happens to be the Food Blogger Pro WordPress support expert. Andrew has been on the podcast countless times and with good reason. He’s super effective at explaining really technical, complicated topics to the Food Blogger Pro community, and we always learn a ton when he’s on the podcast.

In this episode, Andrew’s taking a deep dive into Core Web Vitals and explains how they’re calculated and why it’s important to optimize your site with Core Web Vitals in mind. Andrew and Bjork also discussed the best practices for blog image sizes, including the best method for compressing your images and even more frequently asked questions about featured images.

It’s a really great episode. Some of the topics they talk on are a little bit more advanced, so don’t get overwhelmed if you don’t understand everything. It’s one of those great episodes to keep in your back pocket because they talk about a lot of really valuable information that will come up at some point along your blogging journey. So I won’t keep you waiting. We’ll just kick things off and I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Wilder: Hello, Bjork. Glad to be back.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost as if we’ve done this before.

Andrew Wilder: Just a couple of times.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s great to have you back. I feel like you are one of those connections that we have in this space where it’s like you’ve always been around. We’ve been around forever, you’ve been around forever, and here we are, we’re still around doing our thing.

Andrew Wilder: When I started my food blog in 2010, I thought I was late to the party.

Bjork Ostrom: Isn’t that interesting?

Andrew Wilder: Crazy.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the things that I see as a throughline. It feels like there’s always this like, “Oh, is it too late to start?” Like you said, 2010, “Is it too late to start?” People are still saying, 2022, “Is it too late to start?” A lot of stuff happening in the world, but I’m a big believer in if you have the ability to create content that connects with people, things are going to change, but if you have a skill in a specific area and you can communicate well, you’re going to find success with that.

One of the ways that we talk a lot about that people are finding success with that is publishing content online on a blog. Obviously, it’s the name of the podcast, Food Blogger Pro. You work with a lot of bloggers, hundreds and hundreds of bloggers with your business. As we get into it, just so people have a little bit of a reference point, my guess is most people who listen are familiar with you, familiar with your service, and my guess is a lot of people actually work with you at NerdPress, but can you talk a little bit about your history, give a little backstory, and talk about what NerdPress is before we jump into the nerdy part of NerdPress?

Andrew Wilder: Sure. So my company is called NerdPress. We are a website support and maintenance company. We work exclusively with WordPress sites and we’re a bunch of nerds. So there’s the name for you. I started my own food blog in 2010 as a career change from my previous career in theater. So now, this is, I guess, the third career change. I had always dabbled in websites. I built my first website in 1998, I think it was.

So when I started my food blog, I knew what I was doing. I had done SEO work, so it was doing pretty well with Google. Then I found the food blogging community. I went to the International Food Bloggers Conference in Seattle and had an amazing time, and it grew from there as I started to meet people and fall in love with food bloggers as well and the whole community.

Then when people found out I knew what I was talking about with the technical stuff, they’re like, “Hey, can I hire you to fix this? Can you help me with this?” I like to help people, so I said yes, and it grew more and more and people needed more help. Then I found out or realized I was doing the same kind of stuff every time where I was setting up backups and fixing security issues. So I started to standardize this into a package of services and we made it a subscription so we could do ongoing support. I think that was 2013 that I started doing that.

So I say we now, I, at the time it was just me, was one of the first people doing WordPress maintenance and support. It was me and WP Site Care and that was it. Now, obviously, there’s a whole industry of WordPress help because there’s so many websites and so many people that help.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s 42% of the web, I saw it. I looked up runs on WordPress. Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: So I set up that subscription model and started helping people on an ongoing basis. Then in 2017, I hired Sergio for help because I was drowning by myself. Then by the start of 2020, we were five people, and now we are actually 19 people.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s crazy. I remember some of the times, those early times when you’re hiring and we’re having conversations around, “Hey, what does it look like to hire your onboard?” Now, it’s 19 people.

Andrew Wilder: It’s nuts. It’s nuts.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like you blink and suddenly it’s like, “Wow, this is a business with lots of different people and looks very different than it did in 2017, let alone 2013.” It feels like a great example of that adage around people underestimate what you can do in 10 years and overestimate what you can do in a year, and it’s that perfect point of 10 years. To look back at that and be like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s incredible,” it’s a testament to the work that you do, both the technical side but also the people side.

One of the things I’ve realized doing what we do as long as we have is you have to have both of those. You have to make people feel … It’s like going to a doctor. One of the things that’s most important with the doctor that you see is not only their ability to assess and diagnose an issue that you’re having, but also the spirit in which they do it, and NerdPress does such a good example of balancing those two things and excelling at both of those things. So it makes sense that you’ve grown in the way that you have.

One of the things that I love about interviewing people like you is that you have a really unique view on … It’s like somebody who’s a banker and you get to see a bunch of bank accounts. For you and your team, you work with a bunch of bloggers and you get to see a bunch of the inner workings of websites and the things that make them tick and the things that make them successful from a technical aspect.

One of those pieces that we haven’t talked about in a long time on the podcast, and maybe last time we talked about when it was with you is these technical considerations from Google. So it’s a search-related consideration called Core Web Vitals. Can you talk about what those are and just give us a high level of refresher on why it’s important for us as creators to pay attention to this technical thing called Core Web Vitals?

Andrew Wilder: Sure, but first, can I say that was a masterful transition?

Bjork Ostrom: Good. All right.

Andrew Wilder: Well done.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost as if we’ve done 400 podcasts.

Andrew Wilder: That was very impressive. So Core Web Vitals, I think we last talked about this on the podcast, I think it was almost two years ago. So when we were talking about what we could talk about, I’m like, “Hey, let’s do a Core Web Vitals where are they now episode,” because when we were talking about it, it wasn’t yet a ranking factor. It was just about to roll out. Google gave us warning and said, “Hey, hey, this thing’s coming. Look alive.”

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about, and for those who aren’t familiar with the idea of a ranking factor, what that is and how those get added?

Andrew Wilder: Well, Google’s job is to take all the information on the internet and give you an answer to your query, right? So there are the search results and it has to rank the search results and say, “Here’s your first search result. We think it’s the most likely one, but maybe number two or three or 10 are better answers,” and you get to pick what you want to see. So the way it does this is it looks at hundreds of different factors, we call them ranking factors, and it basically looks at the site and all the links and all the details.

What those ranking factors are usually is trade secret. That is Google’s special sauce. People are constantly trying to reverse engineer this, and that’s why you have tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs that look at data and try to piece together and reverse engineer the Google algorithms that do this. Google doesn’t even know what the algorithms are. This could be a whole other podcast, but they’re using AI and have been for years. So you couldn’t ask a Google engineer who’s in the search department what are the 200 ranking factors. They can’t tell you, but we do know broad strokes, and there are some ranking factors where Google has said, “Hey, this is a ranking factor.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yup, and whenever we get that information, it’s like this little golden nugget because what we’re trying to do in this world is create content that people see. One of the best ways for people to see content, the type of content that we’re creating at least, is through search, and because most of it, the algorithm, is obscured, you don’t know what it is. You know general best practice, but when Google does say, “Hey, we’re going to let you know this is important,” it’s like, “Great, you’ve given us the answer key. Now we just need to complete, fill it out,” but that’s the hard part is it’s technical and that’s why NerdPress exists.

So we have this ranking factor. We know it’s important. Google has told us, “Hey, this is now a ranking factor.” So if you’re better at this, it’s going to help improve your search results, but what within Core Web Vitals are those things?

Andrew Wilder: What are those things? Sure. So Core Web Vitals is basically looking at performance or speed and user experience. They started with three metrics. So they’re basically saying, “Okay. We’re going to start with these three things that you can be scored on that are quantifiable and things that you can improve. So we’re going to grade you on these three metrics,” and we can talk about the specifics. They’ve also said, “Over time, there may be others.” So they left it open. They haven’t added any new ones yet. So two of them are actually really about speed and performance. One is about user experience right now. So should I do a quick recap of that?

Bjork Ostrom: That’d be great, yeah.

Andrew Wilder: Okay. So the primary performance one is called largest contentful paint or LCP, and that is how long it takes, the biggest thing that’s visible when the page loads to load. So usually, that’s your biggest image or it might be your … If it’s a really long post title, it might be the post title. Whatever the thing is that’s visible before you scroll, whatever the biggest thing is, however long that takes, that’s your largest contentful paint time. It’s just measured in time, in seconds.

So if it’s below two and a half seconds, that’s considered good, actually, or below or equal to two and a half seconds. So every time a person goes to your page, goes to your homepage or goes to a blog post, if they’re using the Chrome browser, Google tracks that time and sends that data back to Google headquarters. So Google collects all this data of the performance data and says, “Hey, on average, this blog post has an LCP time of 1.8 seconds,” which would be very good. 1.8 is fantastic, actually, or it might be 3.8 seconds and that’s going to land you in the needs improvement range or if it’s over four seconds, you’re in the evil poor range, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: So that’s largest contentful paint. The second one is called first input delay.

Bjork Ostrom: Real quick on largest contentful paint. One of the things I always find so helpful with any technical thing is creating a visual to try and understand what it’s actually saying. So largest we get contentful meaning content like thing, so largest thing paint. Is that essentially saying how long? If you imagine a canvas, is the idea like it’s painting it onto a canvas? So how long does it take if the browser is a canvas or the largest piece of content to get painted onto the canvas? Is that me extrapolating too much from that phrase or is that essentially what it’s trying to say?

Andrew Wilder: That’s exactly what it’s trying to say, yeah. To take it a step further, there is another metric. This was not one of the ranking factors, but they do return this in the PageSpeed Insights dashboard when you test one of your pages called First Contentful Paint. So that’s how long it takes for the very first thing to appear because when you go to a website, you just get this white screen at first, and the browser has to go get the document from the server, the HTML document, get that, that’s the roadmap to building the page. Then it has to download some resources like JavaScript and images, and then it starts to draw something or paint on the page.

So the first contentful metric is how long it takes for the first thing to appear, whatever it is that’s visible. Could be a font, it could be an outline, it could be a picture, whatever it is. Then the largest contentful paint is how long does it take for the biggest thing to appear. So the reason they’re using largest contentful paint as the metric for ranking is that’s a proxy for speed. So they’ve decided first contentful paint isn’t really that good. Yeah, you’re seeing something happen, but it could take another 10 seconds.

Bjork Ostrom: You could manipulate it where you’re maybe loading in something really small just to get a good first contentful paint score.

Andrew Wilder: Actually, first content happening soon is also really good because once the user sees something happening, they’re going to stick around and watch it load. If you wait two and a half seconds and then everything appears, that feels a lot longer than waiting half a second and then things appear over the next two seconds, if that makes sense. So there’s a human timeframe and perception thing at play here, but I think largest contentful paint is a pretty solid stand-in if you’re going to pick one score. So I don’t begrudge Google for picking that one, to be honest.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. Great. So that’s the first one.

Andrew Wilder: That’s the first one.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. Second one is?

Andrew Wilder: First input delay. That is basically the amount of time that once the user tries to do anything, like click or scroll, what the response time is of the website and how long it takes. The good news is we can ignore this one on most food blogs and blogs in general. We don’t see it being an issue. So I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it. It’s very rare. I think one out of 500 sites we’ve found it an issue. So if there’s something really bogging down the page and it’s like the page is non-responsive, we might have an issue, but normally, this is not an issue at all, thankfully.

Bjork Ostrom: So the idea with this would be everything is loaded and then you go to interact with the page, click on a link, scroll, how much of a delay is there? Maybe we would use the term snappy, like how snappy is the site when you’re interacting with it. What I hear you saying is it’s usually not an issue. This isn’t something on a normal WordPress site where unless there’s some weird circumstance where there’s broken code or who knows what, you’re not going to run into an issue here. So this is good to know what it is, good to understand it, but it’s not the kind of thing where most people are going to be spending a lot of time troubleshooting it.

Andrew Wilder: Yup. I think we have literally spent zero time on it, so thankfully you don’t have to worry about FID, first input delay. Then the third one, and this is definitely the hardest one, is called cumulative layout shift, and that’s a measurement of how much things move around on the page once they’re loaded. So this is the user experience metric because how many times have you gone to click a button and then something loads right above and pushes the button down the page and you end up clicking a picture, which is a link that takes you to another thing. So that’s a really bad experience.

So when something loads on the page, it should stay in that place. So that’s called cumulative layout shift. So layout shift is pretty easy to understand. Things are shifting around in the layout of the page. The cumulative score is the tricky part. This measures across the entire user’s experience on the page from top to bottom. So as they scroll, if things keep moving, and every time something moves, it adds to the score. It’s a cumulative score for that page view.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s not just like a pass, fail. It’s not like did something move, you get a fail. It’s how much shifting was there? The page loads, and then an ad goes in and it shifts it down, and then that ad, a different one loads and it changes sizes, so then it shifts again or maybe you have a really big image that takes a while to load and populates and it shifts things around. All of that adds up to get the score for the cumulative layout shift. You don’t want that because it’s a bad user experience.

What’s interesting to point out with this and maybe a good reminder is these are all just … Google isn’t the government. It’s not like you’re going to get punished or get a ticket for it. It’s just a company that’s making up these rules based on what they want to see and what their goal is, and what the goal of a search engine is is to give people the best experience possible.

It’s interesting to think about with Google where they have some control over the experience. They have all control over the experience on the search result page, but they don’t have control once somebody leaves the page and goes to another site, even though it might reflect on Google as a company and their ability to surface a good piece of content.

So it’s like, correct me if I’m wrong on this, but it’s like Google trying to control the experience that people have once they leave Google and wanting it to be a really good experience and saying, “If you’re not going to do this, then we’re not going to show you as high up because we want people to have a really good experience.” Is that what’s happening with this?

Andrew Wilder: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Period. All right. Yes, period.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s in Google’s best interest. I mean, you said Google’s just a company. They’re a insanely powerful company, right? It doesn’t have a lot of competition, not really, but I think it is aligned. Core Web Vitals are frustrating because they’re really hard, but I think it’s aligned with everybody’s best interest. It’s good for visitors, it’s good for Google. Everybody wins when sites are loading fast and smooth. So I think it is a good thing for the web.

Now, should you have a private company, one of the most powerful companies in the world dictating what those standards are on the web? That’s a philosophical question we could spend a whole podcast on, but that’s what it is, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yup, and in a lot of ways, like you said, these initiatives that they have make the web a better place. It’s better for a user in general if you go to a website and it’s not shifting around all over the place or if it loads quickly or a big one years ago was if it’s a secure URL, so HTTPS versus HTTP, and inevitably what happens then is everybody scrambles to get their site to have an HTTPS URL because Google has said, “Oh, this is going to be a ranking factor and so they can push that stuff forward.”

The hard part here with any of this, and I think a lot of people will resonate who listen to this is most people get into this because, and we actually did a survey with Food Blocker Pro members like, “What do you love most about it?” Most people don’t say Core Web Vitals and troubleshooting IT issues. It’s like recipe development, photography, maybe, it’s writing. It’s more of the creative elements that go into publishing. Now, for some people, they do love that stuff, but for somebody who … Yeah, go ahead.

Andrew Wilder: I was going to say I’m guilty of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly, and that’s why you do what you do, but if somebody’s getting into this and they’re like, “I want to make sure that I have good Core Web Vitals,” one of the easiest ways is if they have the ability and the budget and the bandwidth is to work with an expert, to work with the NerdPress, and that’s the easy answer. You guys eat, sleep, and breathe this. If somebody wants to tiptoe into trying to understand it themselves or even do as much as they can, what does it look like to be aware of best practices with Core Web Vitals and pursue the best possible score that you can?

Andrew Wilder: I mean, we could do many, many podcasts on that. So all the blog posts out there that are like, “How to score well on Core Web Vitals?” make it sound really easy. It’s not. This is an incredibly complex thing because the web is very complex. To distill it down, I think the best thing you can do is start with the right theme, the right web hosting. Start building your site or make sure your site is built well from the ground up with the tools you’re using that aren’t going to work with you instead of against you. For example-

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about some of those? I know you have service providers you work with, theme companies. You see a lot of the ins and outs of those. Who are your favorites?

Andrew Wilder: So perfect example is the Feast Plugin and the Feast Theme. Skylar’s doing great work. He’s staying on top of best practices. When a new client comes to us and they’re already set up with the Feast in an ecosystem of the Genesis theme plus the Feast Foodie Pro or one of the other themes, plus the Feast Plugin, we know it’s going to be pretty easy for us to optimize. We still have to do some work, but out of the box, it’s pretty close.

So then we add optimization plugins on top. So our preferred tool is WP Rocket. We also use Perfmatters. We won’t use Perfmatters on its own because it doesn’t cache HTML. That’s a whole other thing. So you want to have as little stuff on the page as possible, so you have to optimize less. When you’re installing 20 different plugins that all have lots of JavaScript that are giving you bells and whistles on the page, all that stuff has to be loaded. So it makes it harder to perform well on the Core Web Vitals. So the first step is really start with the minimum tools you need that are coded well, and then get rid of the stuff you don’t need, and then optimize from there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and when you say stuff, do you mean plugins and themes? Do you want to be running lean and you don’t want to have a bunch of croft weighing you down?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, exactly. I think as a non-technical person, it’s hard to tell what has croft and what doesn’t. There’s a very popular contact form plugin called Contact Form 7, which it does a perfectly fine job as a contact form, but it also adds a style sheet and a JavaScript to every page on your site, even if the content form isn’t on that page. Well, that’s silly. I don’t mean to call them out necessarily, but I mean, that’s totally unnecessary, “I’m going to slow your site down,” and as the site owner, unless you’re willing to dig into the code on this, you’re never going to know that.

So I think it is at the point where it makes sense to have someone who does this stuff all day long, look at it and say, “Hey, wait, if we get rid of this plugin, we’re going to solve this problem. We don’t have to optimize that.” It’s like a domino effect of things too. Older themes that need a certain JavaScript library to make your menu load, well, if it’s in your menu, it’s above the fold, so we can’t delay it, and that’s going to hurt your LCP score, right? Stuff like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yup. You had mentioned this PageSpeed Insights. Can you talk about what that is and how do people use that tool and what’s happening with that when you go and put your URL in there?

Andrew Wilder: Sure. So PageSpeed Insights is a webpage testing tool that Google provides. Let me get the address here real quick. It’s pagespeed.web.dev, D-E-V. I’m sure we can link to it in the show notes. I think we did a whole episode on this a while back. We should dig that one up and link to it too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’ll link to that. I’m trying to remember. So we’ve had a lot of Core Web Vitals conversations, whether on the podcast or live Q&As.

Andrew Wilder: So real quick, PageSpeed Insights is basically a free testing tool where you can put a URL from your site into the tool and it runs some tests, and there’s two components to it. The first at the top, it’ll return the actual Core Web Vitals metrics, which is the real world user data that it collects through the Chrome browser. Then below that, it will actually show the results of a simulated test and it’ll give you a big score. I hate the big score. I wish they’d get rid of it because it doesn’t actually mean anything and people freak out when it’s not very good, but it tests several other metrics and then gives you that big score. So that’s just a tool for helping optimize your site so that in the real world performance it’ll be improved.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say a big score, you mean it’s an overall score that it’s giving you in terms of like, “You got A on this paper”?

Andrew Wilder: Yes. It gives you literally a score of zero to a hundred. It’s ridiculous because it doesn’t mean anything. They look at-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not like if you get 80 out of a hundred, it’s not going to show you as high. It’s just like a score to help you understand out of a hundred what’s your opportunity, what’s the gap between getting to perfect.

Andrew Wilder: A lot of people see that score change and get really worried. Unless something’s changed on their site, they’re probably fine if they’re already in the good range in Core Web Vitals. So the top metrics, the Core Web Vitals, the largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift, those will show right at the top of PageSpeed Insights. You can also see this data in your Google Search Console under the performance section or Core Web Vitals section, and that shows you pages that are in the good, needs improvement or poor ranges.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about what Google Search Console is and why people should have that set up?

Andrew Wilder: Sure. So Search Console is another free tool from Google. You can create an account that basically … If you have a Google account, you basically just go to Search Console and you’re logged in with your Google account, and then you can add your website to it. They call it a property. So you can add multiple domains there if you have multiple sites. Once you add, you prove that you are an authorized owner of the domain. Once you prove that, you’ll get all this information from Google about how Google sees your site. It’s super helpful. If you’re just starting out, it is the best free tool available, really. You can drill down on search queries and top pages. You can look at back links. You can look at all this other stuff. So it’s a super useful tool that if you aren’t set up for Search Console already, you definitely should get that, and it’s free.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like getting a little bit of analogy on the fly here. It’s like if you had a neighbor and you did one of those yarn cups telephones, yarn telephone cups, stick with me here, and your neighbor is Google and you are yourself, the publisher, it’s the closest thing you can get to communicating back and forth with Google or at least hearing what Google is saying. It plugs in directly to the Google’s view of your site. It’s interesting even, I have it pulled up here as we’re talking, there’s even just a Core Web Vitals section that is poor, needs improvement or good. It just tells you, “These are the pages on your site. Are they good? Do they need improvement or are they poor, and we’ll give you information on those.”

There’s been a few times I’ve connected with publishers and they’re like, “Yeah, I haven’t set up Google Search Console,” and it’s like, “Oh, my gosh.” It’s like you said, such a great free tool. So PageSpeed Insights, free. Search Console, free. This will surface the information for you. Like we’ve said, there’s some really technical pieces that go into actually achieving some of the best practices around Core Web Vitals. Good to have an idea of what those are. Probably not on this podcast.

Can we jump into each one of those and say, “Here’s what you need to tweak and change and adjust in order to fix all of the thousands of different instances that you’d need to fix or improve”? There are other things that we can be thinking about as creators that are just going to increase the user experience that somebody has when they go to our site, and one of those is the general speed of how quickly the site loads or a food site, one of the primary ways you can do that is by making sure your images aren’t like elephants in that instead they are cheetahs.

A lot of times what will happen is we will be running sites and all our images are elephants. They’re huge, they weigh a lot, and they’re slow moving, and we want to get to cheetah images, which are fast and quick and create a good user experience. That’s my analogy. Can you talk about behind the scenes what that actually means? You have an image, it’s really heavy. What’s happening and why is that bad?

Andrew Wilder: So not only do you have that, but you have to balance that with you want a beautiful cheetah, a cheetah that look great, especially food bloggers. You want your pictures of food or whatever to look beautiful and enticing, so you have to balance that, right? So with images, basically, the thing that slows you down is the file size, how many kilobytes or megabytes is that actual image, because the browser has to download that file before it can show it to the visitor. Keep in mind, most visitors are aren’t mobile these days and they may be not on a wifi connection, right? So you need to-

Bjork Ostrom: Real quick as a note for a takeaway for people. If the only way that you are using your site right now is by pulling up your laptop and visiting your site, at least once a week take some time to just browse your own site on your phone because I think what happens is we are so used to desktop and probably 70% to 80% of anybody who’s visiting your site is doing it on mobile. So I’m glad that you said that. It’s an important call out and a good reminder.

Andrew Wilder: If you’re not happy with how the images look, go look on your phone because that tiny phone screen, it might actually look good to you. Keeping in mind, your visitors are not going to scrutinize your images the same way that you do, which is totally fair, that you’re going to be picky, I get it, but on that little phone screen, the resolution on those screens is beautiful. It may look great on that three-inch or two-inch wide image when it doesn’t look great on desktop. So you just have to balance that, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Great. So important takeaway, mobile versus desktop. Talk about what we can be doing as creators when it comes to setting ourselves up for success for those cheetah images, they look good and they’re fast. Obviously, we want to be exporting images. Well, I won’t even assume. Start to finish, what does the process look like and what are best practices when it comes to good-looking but also fast images?

Andrew Wilder: So there’s two things that impact, well, three things that impact the size of the image. I’m going to oversimplify a little bit. When I say size, I mean file size. The first is the physical size, how wide is it and how tall is it. That’s measured in pixels. So when you take a picture from your camera phone, there’s a 20-megapixel camera or whatever it is now, and the image might be 4,000 something pixels by 3,000 pixels or they might be even higher on a higher resolution camera. That’s way bigger than you need for the web. The trick is every pixel contains color information and hue, saturation, brightness. All that stuff is crammed into each of those pixels. So when you take 4,000 pixels and you multiply it by 3,000 pixels, that’s millions of these data points, right?

So if you scale your image down, it’s an exponential difference. If you cut that from 4,000 pixels wide to 2,000 pixels wide, you’re also cutting the other dimension in half proportionally. So cutting the width in half actually means it’s going to use about a quarter of the same file size because it’s height times width. So the size of the image is one of the most important things you can pay attention to.

We recommend 1200 pixels wide for blogs. In almost every case, that works perfectly. We started that recommendation a couple of years ago. The number originally came from Google, go figure, not actually for webpages, but for the Discover feed. Google says if you want to be in the, quote, unquote, “Discover feed”, if you want a large thumbnail in the Discover feed, make sure you have at least one 1200 pixel wide image on the page somewhere. The one time Google has said a pixel size, they said 1200, point blank.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about what the Discover feed is for those who aren’t familiar?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. Basically, on mobile in the Google app, there’s this algorithm that says, “Hey, you might also like these things,” and it’s like a newsfeed. I think it’s more popular on Chrome or on Android devices, but if you just load the Google app on any device, I think it has it in there.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting because it’s a way that you can get traffic through Google Discover, and what’s interesting is it’s not search, it’s Discover. It’s surfacing in a similar way to a For You page on an Instagram or Twitter. It would maybe randomly surface information that you could interact with that you’re not necessarily following or you didn’t seek out. It feels like Google’s answer to a feed that you might not be following, but they think it’s content you’re interested in. So it’d be even, for myself, a good reminder to go back and use that app a little bit because we’ve occasionally had stuff get picked up on there and there’s some post that Lindsay had about our grocery store like Aldi post, and it got 70,000 views in a couple days, page views because it was on Discover.

Andrew Wilder: I have a client who in February had a post that was featured at the top of Discover and one and a half million page views that day.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, my gosh. That is so awesome.

Andrew Wilder: It’s insane. The crazy thing is it’s been tumbleweeds ever since, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, right. It’s very spiky.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, like web stories taking off. So don’t spend all day trying to get in the Discover feed because that’s not going to work, but you want to make sure that when you do get in the Discover feed, you’re going to get a large thumbnail and the 1200 pixel wide. So 1200 pixel wide image recommendation originally came from there, but what we’ve found is on retina displays, which are the 4K displays or the really high resolution, which most screens are these days, you’re actually cramming more pixels in to the same amount of space, so it gets really confusing, but on desktop, the width of the content area is roughly 800 pixels wide in the old school non-retina version, but you can take a 1200 pixel wide image and squeeze it down into those 800 pixels and it looks really sharp. One and a half times is about the right ratio to get a really nice looking sharp photograph. If you’re on a desktop monitor and you just put an 800 pixel of white image there, it’s going to feel a little fuzzy because our eyes got that sharpness.

Bjork Ostrom: It reminds me a little bit, our daughter Selvi, she’s four years old and she has went to a friend’s house and they did these coloring things where it was a really big piece of plastic, I don’t know what it is, what the material is, and they color it and then you bake it for 15 minutes and it comes out and it’s this tiny little piece of jewelry that looks like super shiny and it looks you really professional, but when you start with it, you’re just doing these big lines and you’re coloring, but then it shrinks it down and then it looks super sharp. It’s a similar thing happening with the images where it’s a little bit bigger and it might look a little bit soft and it’s bigger, but then when you shrink it, when you bake it, it comes out looking a little bit sharper.

Andrew Wilder: You are on fire with the analogies today.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s my role. You just do the technical stuff and then I’ll do a real life applicable analogy. So images, we want to have a larger image, essentially a larger image than the space that it’s going in.

Andrew Wilder: Just slightly, just slightly. Be careful because people are like, “I don’t want people to hear, ‘Oh, a larger image is better.’” You don’t need it to be any larger than 1200 pixels wide except in rare cases. So on a food blog, 1200 is plenty. That’s also enough to be future-proof for a long time. Pre–2020 or so, people were uploading 600 pixel wide, and then the content area got 800 and that was too small and we found 1200. We’ve been making that recommendation for a couple years, and that’s holding up because, really, we’ve reached saturation of how big we want things to get, and it’s not going to get a lot larger, but if you were to put a 2400 pixel wide image there, it’s going to be four times larger in terms of download, but there won’t be a noticeable increase or improvement in quality. So 1200 is that sweet spot, and we’re talking about width here too. The height should be whatever is appropriate for the image, whether it’s vertical or horizontal.

Bjork Ostrom: So you set the width when you’re exporting. Let’s say you use Lightroom. You set the width at 1200, you export. Are you setting a quality within Lightroom or do you have a recommendation for that?

Andrew Wilder: So that’s the second factor that really heavily influences the file size. Most of the time … The third factor is the file type. Actually, let me talk about file type first because it’s a little easier and not all of them have quality settings. So the two most common file types right now that you’ll encounter are .jpeg and .png. I’m trying to remember what .jpeg stands for. .png is portable network graphics, but .jpeg is really good for photographs. .png is really good for line art, illustrations, logos, things like that. .png can have transparency so you can have something floating over something else, but .png is not good at photographs, and .jpeg-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s Joint Photographic Experts Group.

Andrew Wilder: Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is the group that created the .jpeg standard. I’m learning as we go.

Andrew Wilder: That’s very self-referential. That’s actually why sometimes you’ll see .jpeg and sometimes you’ll see JPG as extensions, and they’re the same thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Look at that. Great.

Andrew Wilder: You learn something every day.

Bjork Ostrom: So we’ve got .png, .jpeg.

Andrew Wilder: So it’s important to use the right format. If it’s a photo, use .jpeg. If it’s a text or illustration, use .png. If it’s something that has both like a Pinterest image where you have a photo with text overlay, usually .jpeg is the way to go.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Andrew Wilder: So choose the right format. Can’t stress that enough. Photos in the .png format tend to be 10 times larger. So something that could be 30 kilobytes as a .jpeg might be 300 as a .png.

Bjork Ostrom: The reason that you would want that is because it’s going to look better, it’s going to be sharper. If it’s a logo or something transparent, that’s just going to be better in that format, but you wouldn’t want to do that format if it’s just going to be an image.

Andrew Wilder: Right, and .jpeg is also not great at doing sharp lines like text. It gets a little blurry around the edges. So that’s why you don’t want to use .jpeg for your logo. You don’t want to use .png.

There’s a newer format called .webp out there. That was developed by Google, so it’s their newer format. Generally, it does compress better for more things, but it’s not compatible with everything. There’s a whole layer of complexity of the transition from .jpeg to .webp right now that makes it very complicated. So let’s not worry about .webp for the moment, but as you’re exporting from-

Bjork Ostrom: To put a pin or not necessarily put a pin in that, but to wrap that conversation on .webp, the reason why, even though it might be a better image, the reason why you wouldn’t want to do it is because you said compatibility, meaning there might be a browser that on somebody’s phone or desktop where it doesn’t know how to load that image. Is that what you’re saying?

Andrew Wilder: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Andrew Wilder: Most browsers now are pretty good. It’s been long enough and they’ve built the feature, but there are many other purposes or ways images get used. Facebook needs to be able to download your image for previews on Facebook. That’s just one example. I think it can handle web piece, but there are other services that may not handle it just yet. Over time, that’s going to change and improve.

The bigger challenge with .webp is because we’ve got sites now that have all these .jpeg images, are we going to duplicate all those files and create .webps and have to store all those files and back up all those files. So it gets complicated. So I don’t want to go too far in the weeds on that.

Also, I don’t know if your image editor can export in .webp to start with. I know you can upload a .webp format. It’s just another format. It’s a way of saving data. The idea with all these formats is to try to get the best picture quality in the smallest amount of file size.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s what we’re after. So 1200 pixels wide, probably most of the time you’re going to be doing .jpeg. Let’s say it is in Lightroom, it’s been years since I’ve used Lightroom, but are you picking a quality size when you’re exporting from Lightroom?

Andrew Wilder: Yes. So .jpeg has a variable quality option. The different tools have different scales, but we could say zero to 100 or I think one is zero to 11. So 10 out of 100 will be very low quality, so it’s going to be super blurry and pixelated and look horrible, but this file size is going to be really low. It’s going to be very small and load quickly. That’s not going to look so great, but you don’t want to set it at 99 or 100 because the file size is going to be huge because it’s basically how much compression there is on the image.

So what you want to do is find that sweet spot where you’re just before looking back because once it looks good, you don’t need to dial back the compression anymore. All you’re going to do is get a bigger file and it’s not going to look any better.

Bjork Ostrom: So you’re exporting it, again, .jpeg, 1200 pixels wide, you want to get it to the point where it’s not getting too soft where it’s noticeable. You export it, but then when you’re importing it to your website, is compression happening again at that point?

Andrew Wilder: Before we get there … The answer is maybe, but before we get there, I want to talk a little bit more about exporting real quick. So you’ve got the variable quality. I know in some tools you can specify a file size output. You don’t want to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: You can pick, “I want it to be 100 kilobytes.”

Andrew Wilder: Exactly, and what it will do is just adjust the quality to hit 100 kilobytes. You don’t want to do that. We do tell people if you’re exporting a 1200 by 1800 pixel image, say, you want that to be around 200 to 400 kilobytes at the most when you export. The reason we say 200 to 400 is it’s going to vary depending on what the image is. .jpeg is not great at compressing things with a lot of texture and detail because of the way the algorithm works. It samples pixels next to it and compresses those together.

So if you’ve got a picture of a table with a burlap background and something that has lots, like a salad that has lots of sesame seeds on it, whether you’ve got all this really fine detail, that is going to need to be a bigger file to look good. If you have something that’s like a chocolate chip cookie on a white tablecloth, all that white can get compressed into very little space. So that might be on the 100 or 200 kilobyte range. What you don’t want to do is say, “Hey, make them all 100 kilobytes,” because the big images are going to get too blurry and the small images may have larger file size than they need to be.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So if you’re doing an export of 10 images, you don’t want to say, “Make them all 100 kilobytes,” because you need to treat each image specially or the type of image it is. Is it complex? Are there a lot of colors? Is there a lot of contrast or is it a picture of the night sky and it’s black?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s going to be a lighter image.

Andrew Wilder: I think you will have to test for yourself because everybody’s photos are different, your camera’s different, you might be using Photoshop or Lightroom. So I recommend experimenting. Once you find that quality setting, let’s say it’s 78%, you look at the pictures after they’re exported from Photoshop or Lightroom and you go, “Hey, those look pretty good,” and the file sizes are generally between 100 and 400 kilobytes and you’re not seeing 1.5 megabytes.

Once you figure this out, you probably don’t have to tweak it much after that. You’re going to go, “Okay, this is good for my workflow. Now I’ve got these five images for this blog post that are all 200 or 300 kilobytes each. Now I can put them into WordPress.”

Bjork Ostrom: For those who aren’t watching, that was Andrew extending his hands out saying, “Followup question?”

Andrew Wilder: Pass the ball back.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, pass the ball back. Love that. At that point, there’s also a compression happening or there could be a compression happening on your site. So the export from Lightroom or Photoshop, you’re compressing the image, so it’s not the full image which we just talked about, but a lot of sites have this functionality happening when you’re loading it into your site. So how do you know that you’re not overcompressing something?

Andrew Wilder: Well, before that even happens, as soon as you upload an image to WordPress, it generates what are called thumbnails. The number of thumbnails will vary based on your theme and your plugin because those can say, “Hey, give me more thumbnails,” but by default, I think there’s four thumbnail sizes. If you go to settings media, you’ll see them, the creatively named thumbnail, thumbnail size, then there’s medium large. Actually, those are the three sizes in the settings. Then there’s also one called medium large that doesn’t have a setting. I think that’s 768 pixels wide.

So what happens is you upload an image and WordPress says, “Okay, great. I’m going to make copies of this image but make them smaller.” So it’ll create anywhere from five to 50 smaller versions of that same file.

Bjork Ostrom: You have more. If there’s a plugin you use that needs different sizes or a theme, they’re going to potentially automatically create those additional image sizes.

Andrew Wilder: Yup, and so if you install WP Recipe Maker, it’s going to say, “Hey, I need these four other image sizes at 500 pixels wide at this format,” because it knows Google needs that for the recipe, so it sizes that correctly. So on average, we’ll see anywhere from 10 to 20 thumbnails created per site. So just be aware that as soon as you upload an image, it does that little processing thing while you wait. What it’s doing is generating all those thumbnails.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s when if you’re on your homepage on desktop and you right click on a thumbnail for a post and you say, “copy image URL,” and paste it in, a lot of times it’ll be like … you know on Pinch of Yum I’m looking at one, it’s like butter chicken dash 400 x 400. Lindsay didn’t upload that image, but when she uploaded the original image, WordPress created a square image that’s 400 by 400.

Andrew Wilder: Yup. So those are your thumbnails. Thumbnails are great. On mobile, those will also be used as part of the image source set, so it probably won’t serve the full size on your mobile. You’ll serve a thumbnail that’s smaller, so that helps speeds things up. So yeah, they’ll be anywhere from 10 to 20 thumbnails that are generated.

Now, that right there on your server, there are going to be settings that are controlled by your hosting company of what tools are doing that scaling. That scaling algorithm is not going to be as good as what’s in Photoshop or Lightroom. Those are the pro tools. A web server isn’t designed to scale images. So there’s going to be some quality loss. The reason I bring that up is it’s another reason not to upload huge images to your site.

When you upload, let’s say, right out of your camera at 4,000 by 3,000, the first thing that happens actually is WordPress will scale that down before making the thumbnails. I think if it’s over 2560 in either direction, I think that’s the number, what it’ll do is actually say, “Hey, that’s too big. I’m going to create one that’s 2560 by however tall,” and it’ll append dash scaled to the file name instead of a number. The dash scaled is 2560 in either direction. Then if you scale down from there, you’re going to do a second scaling algorithm. That’s going to then go through that process and possibly degrade the quality a little bit more.

Bjork Ostrom: So the thumbnails are created off of a scaled version.

Andrew Wilder: I believe so, but actually, don’t hold me to that, but now, getting to your question about other optimization happening on the server, there are a lot of image optimization plugins that basically take the images that are on the server, the one you uploaded and all the thumbnails, and then do a further compression or optimization algorithm on them. The two most popular are ShortPixel and Imagify. Actually, I should say those are the two most popular paid versions. A very popular free one is Smush. The free version of Smush doesn’t really do that much. So take that info when you will.

There’s a number of these plug-ins out there, and what these are doing is applying a very sophisticated algorithm to try to shrink the size without hurting the quality to varying effect or to varying success, but these are very aggressive algorithms that are smarter than the original .jpeg algorithm. So when you export from Photoshop, you’re using the classic .jpeg. These newer algorithms are basically taking that and applying human psychology and how our eyes see things and getting rid of the extra pixels we don’t really need and shrinking the images really more.

What we found is if you start with a really big image like one and a half megabytes, it probably won’t get, ShortPixel for example, won’t get you down to 200 kilobytes. It might get that big one down to 400 kilobytes, but if you start with an image that looks good at 400 kilobytes, it might compress it down to 150 or 200 kilobytes and look just as good. So that’s why you want to have it pretty well-optimized when you upload so then ShortPixel or Imagify can then take it to the next level and shrink it down even more.

Bjork Ostrom: Do the last 20% of polish on the compression.

Andrew Wilder: Exactly. Actually, it can be a lot more than 20%. It’s pretty impressive what they can do. Depends on the image again. So going back to the scaled algorithm thing, what you don’t want to have happen is uploading large images, scaling them down, and then compressing them. So since we recommend 1200 pixels wide, you can have ShortPixel also scale things to 1200 pixels maximum. If you’re optimizing your existing library, you uploaded lots of large images in the past, it’s really helpful because you can say, “Hey, scale all these down to 1200 pixels.” So that’ll speed things up if you’ve been blogging for years.

In general going forward, you don’t want to upload something. Imagine you uploaded something right of your camera that’s 4,000 by 6,000 or 4,000 by 3,000. WordPress then scales it down to 2560 by whatever, then ShortPixel causes it to be scaled down to 1200 pixels and then it compresses it. So all these steps, there’s a little bit of quality loss every time. So by uploading at 1200 pixels, you’re already skipping those and you’re starting with a higher quality source image that’s going to help preserve the quality.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You’re controlling it a little bit more along the way as opposed to releasing control of compression and the quality ending up with something that maybe looks really soft because it goes through multiple versions of compression without you picking what that level is. That makes sense.

Andrew Wilder: .jpeg is what’s called a lossy algorithm. You actually do lose quality every time you recompress with .jpeg. So the trick is the fewer times you have to do that, the better.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. That makes sense. Great. So before we wrap up, sometimes I’d just like to ask as a catchall, anything else that you feel like is important or any questions that you’ve heard come up a lot or anything that you feel like as creators we should be thinking about from a web optimization, Core Web Vitals, site speed perspective?

Andrew Wilder: Well, there’s one tip I want to give everybody about featured images, actually, that we didn’t hit on yet. We’ve been recommending to make them 1200 pixels wide by 1200 pixels tall, so making them square. The reason we do that is because they’re going to get cropped in all sorts of which ways. The featured image, we usually set the featured image on the post and also on the recipe card using the same image. You’ve probably noticed in Google search results, they don’t use square images, they always crop it, but in different formats they crop it differently. So on mobile and desktop, they crop it different ways.

So making them square makes it work out in all formats, but here’s the secret to making sure your thumbnails look good when they’re shown on Google because it’s going to get cropped. Make sure on your featured images the focal point is in the center of the image because that won’t get cropped out. If you have this cool angled view, a 45-degree angled view of your dish and the focal point is in the very front or at the very bottom of the image, that’s going to get cropped out or might, and then the rest looks blurry.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Andrew Wilder: Google’s going to butcher your image bottom line, right? They’re going to do what they’re going to do. So that’s a way to help guarantee that your thumbnail looks good in the search results, which will hopefully get you more clickthroughs.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So featured image, when you talk about that, is that within the recipe card itself? So you have a recipe card, there’s a featured image within that recipe card. Is the recommendation for that to be 1200 by 1200?

Andrew Wilder: Yes, that and also on the blog post in WordPress there’s a thing called featured image.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Andrew Wilder: You don’t have to set that one square, but it’s easier. So we’ll usually set that one to square as well. Your theme will use the blog post’s featured image when it shows on the homepage or on your archive pages. So you may want to change that to look right for whatever the proportions are for your thumbnails in your recipe index or your homepage, but definitely on the recipe card going square is usually the best way to go.

Bjork Ostrom: Square and 1200. Is the 1200 because of Google Discover like we were talking about before?

Andrew Wilder: It’s really more just for consistency. When we’re talking about this stuff, if I say to everybody, “Just use 1200 pixels wide and, hey, make your recipe image square, it’s still 1200,” it’s easy and it works. There’s no downside to doing that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yup. Great. That’s awesome.

Andrew Wilder: If you’ve been using 900 by 900, you don’t need to go back and edit all your recipes. So I don’t want anybody to freak out about that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, but just moving forward as general best practice.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, or if you’re updating an old post, that’s a good time to use larger images if you need to.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. That’s great. My guess is there are going to be people who are listening to this, and at this point they’ll have some steam coming out of their ears because they’re trying to comprehend all this along with the other a hundred things that have to go into the day-to-day of creating a site and publishing content and taking pictures. The good thing is there’s companies like NerdPress that exist, and really, NerdPress is a company that’s specialized in the food space. I know it’s not the only type of site that you work with, but you really understand. I mean, you said it yourself when at the beginning you started with a food site, you knew people who had food blogs because you met at conferences, they asked you to help, and now here we are 10 years later continuing these conversations around optimization and site maintenance.

For those who are interested in not figuring this out on their own, there’s a great opportunity to work with NerdPress, and I know some of the most popular blogs in the world, food blogs in the world are clients of yours. Can you talk about if somebody wants to follow up with you, at what point would that make sense? What’s the best way to connect? What does that process look like because I know coming out of this there will be people who would be interested in connecting with you and the NerdPress team?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, absolutely. So we are a team and we have our core value is always be helpful. So we’re a helpful bunch. So anytime you want to contact us and have questions, we’re happy to jump in and help. So the first step is to go to our website, of course. That’s nerdpress.net. If you want to reach out, you can email us at support@nerdpress.net, but we have information about our support plans and what’s included in all the plans on our site. We actually just launched a new Frequently Asked questions. I’m very proud of it. We actually went through our last year of frequently asked questions-

Bjork Ostrom: Nice. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Andrew Wilder: … and put them in order for most asked to least asked. So hopefully that will be useful for everybody, but yeah, take a look at our site. You’ll see we have three different plan levels. So we’re trying to meet you where you are on your blogging journey. Our goal really is to take all this technical stuff off your plate and be a trusted partner to help you through your blogging journey so you can spend a lot more time doing what you love, which I assume is not figuring out how-

Bjork Ostrom: Core Web Vitals.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, and instead freeing you up to focus more on great food photography and developing recipes and all of those things you love to do. So we found it’s a really good match because we’re a bunch of nerds who like to … We’re problem solvers. You should see it in our Slack channel. If somebody emails us with a really new, interesting, tricky thing, everybody piles on and wants to help. We’re like, “Ooh, a new problem to solve.”

Bjork Ostrom: Naturally, those are the people that do that type of work are people who like to solve technical problems. Yeah. That’s great.

Andrew Wilder: For me, that’s always interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that’s really great about the site is you are featuring all of the different dogs of the NerdPress team. So if nothing else, it’s a good reason to go and check out all of these awesome dogs, real life NerdPress team members.

Well, thank you, Andrew. You’re a huge help to this community, podcast listeners, Food Blogger Pro community. I know that over the years people have gotten not only inspiration, but also really actionable information from you and your team, and you do really good work. So thanks for all you do on a broad level, and also thanks specifically for coming on the podcast today.

Andrew Wilder: Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there, Alexa here from the Food Bugger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this episode and thanks so much for tuning in. This podcast is just one of our favorite things. It allows us to connect with so many creators, so many people doing awesome things in the world of food and online business. We just so appreciate you being here and listening.

The podcast is not the only thing we have going on. We actually have a membership called the Food Blogger Pro membership, and their members get access to courses and forum discussions and discounts and events exclusively for them. In this content, we like to talk about timely strategies and things that can just help you do what you love to do a little bit better. It’s a great place to be, and if you’re interested in joining, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join, but I wanted to give you a quick little sneak peek into what we have going on on Food Blogger Pro this month.

So on the fourth, we have our coaching call, and it’s with Brendan from drinkingcoffee.com, and in that call, Bjork and Brendan talk about finding consistent success, defining a desired vision for running a blog, building a team, and selling products. It’s a good one, and Brendan has such a cool, cool site. So we’re really excited to share that with our members.

Next on May 11th, we’re talking with our email marketing expert, Allie. You’ve heard of her on the podcast many, many times, and she’s going to be talking about choosing an email service platform and creating opt-ins for your audience. So members will have a chance to ask their specific questions to Allie before and on that call, and it’s just going to be a great one.

Then on the 18th, we have a really exciting new course coming. It’s all about InShot. InShot is one of those apps that have just been really, really popular these days for helping creators make reels and TikTok videos. We’re going to show you some specific tips and also show you how you edit from start to finish using InShot. So excited about that one.

Last but not least, on the 25th, we have a brand new blog post coming out all about trending recipe ideas in the summertime. So we’re talking about different ingredients that are trendy, different recipe ideas, and more. It’s going to be a good one. So that is going to be our May, and we hope to see you on Food Blogger Pro. Again, you can learn more and join today at foodbloggerpro.com/join. All right. That does it for us this week. We will see you next time, and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com. And I’m going to give you a really specific example of how you can use Clariti if you sign up today and that is poster page specific tracking of changes that you’re making. And you can use the notes area within Clariti to make a note anytime that you make a change. An example of when you’d want to do this, let’s say that you’re switching over some of your YouTube videos to be AdThrive or Mediavine video players. You want to make sure that you’re tracking to see when you look back three months later, the change or the impact that that had.

And personally, what we’ve noticed as we’ve worked on content is you forget. If you don’t have a system, if you’re not making a note of that somewhere, you’ll forget. And so within Clariti, there’s the ability to leave a note anytime that you’re making a change or improvement on a piece of content to allow you to go back and see how that change impacted things. There’s lots of other ways that you can use Clariti, but I thought it’d be helpful just to give a really specific example. If you want to see what those other ways are, you can go to clarity.com/food to get 50% off your first month. Again, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food to get 50% off of your first month. You can start taking notes on the changes you’re making and explore all the other features. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Hey there, this is Bjork. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We’ve done this for years and years, and the hope for this podcast is that we are putting out information that’s helpful for you as a creator in the world to go out and create better. To build a stronger business, to have a bigger impact, to connect with more people, to find more joy and satisfaction in what you do. And usually we do that by interviewing experts or other creators or people in a certain field who have a deep area of expertise and knowledge around a certain thing. Occasionally, we’ll do what we call a solo episode, which is just me turning the mic on and talking in an empty room.

And today we’re going to do one of those solo episodes. It’s going to be a little bit shorter, but the reason I want to do it is because I thought it might be helpful because I’m going to be talking about our Facebook account getting hacked. Specifically, it was Lindsay’s personal Facebook account. And for those who aren’t familiar with our story, so my wife Lindsay has a blog called Pinch of Yum. Pinch of Yum is a food and recipe site, and that’s kind of the… When we talk about things on Food Blogger Pro, it’s all through the lens of actually doing it day-to-day. So we have experience doing it, we also talk about what it’s like to do it behind the scenes.

And in a situation like this where it’s really practical and actionable information because it’s something that happened to us, it might happen to you, and so we wanted to have a conversation around some things you can be thinking about and what we learned throughout the process of Lindsay’s Facebook account getting hacked. Now, it was more than just Facebook. What happened was we woke up one morning, Lindsay mentioned getting an email in the middle of the night or a notification around an attempt to log in so we decided to look into it. We didn’t recognize the location. A lot of times it says where the location was. I think it said somewhere in Georgia or something like that and we didn’t recognize it.

And so we’re like… Shoot, it was Georgia and then it was a different country. So there’s two different instances of where people were trying to log in. And so we decided to look into it. We logged into Lindsay’s Facebook and it was like, “Hey, sorry you’ve been suspended.” These aren’t official notifications of what it actually said, but we were like, “Shoot, that’s not good.” And it said something around violating guidelines, like violating the publishing guidelines. What we later came to find out was the account had been hacked and these people had posted content that violated guidelines, it was illicit in some way. And so Facebook said, “You know what? We got to take this down.”

Now, here’s the kicker, the Facebook account and the Pinch of Yum Instagram account were connected. And so what happened was Meta as you know, all of those kind of roll up into Meta, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, they all roll up into Meta. And because it saw those accounts were connected, it also took down Pinch of Yum’s Instagram. So it was like, “Shoot, this isn’t good.” We went through the process of trying to restore it by uploading an ID which validates information and who you are, and we had an email back from Facebook that said, this was maybe a few hours after we submitted it, “Hey, we reviewed your information, we can’t accept it. Your account has been closed, this decision is final.” It was like, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”

Days and days and days of us trying to figure this out and sort through it, and my guess is for some people this might be just interesting to hear about, but my hope is that what will happen is inevitably this will happen to somebody else down the line or hopefully it doesn’t happen to you because of some of the things that we’ll talk about, but inevitably it will happen to somebody else and hopefully some of the things that we learned throughout the process will help you. So, I think when we look at it, we think what happened was there was a really old email address connected to the Facebook account, Lindsay’s Facebook account, and I think what they did was they were able to get access to that really old outdated email like 12 years ago email address because we had two-factor authentication turned on.

So for those of you who don’t have two factor on, make sure that you turn on two-factor authentication. Essentially what that means is two factor is anytime that somebody tries to log in to your account, even if they have the username and password, they also need to have the two-factor information, which would be like a text message sent to your phone, maybe it’s using an app like Authy or Google Authenticator where it refreshes a new code every 30 seconds or 60 seconds and then you use that code, but it’s an additional layer of security.

And in this case, I don’t know how they were able to get in with two-factor turned on, it’s a mystery still. But if you don’t have it turned on, make sure that you do turn it on because that’s a really important layer of security that you can add to your account. So, we think that’s what happened. We don’t know for sure, but what we do know is we weren’t able to access Facebook, we weren’t able to access Instagram and the accounts were just down. Now, for a personal Facebook account, that wasn’t a huge deal, but for a business Instagram account, that was a big deal. I think Lindsay on Pinch of Yam it’s 1.1 million followers.

There was an upcoming sponsor content thing that was happening so it was, as you can imagine, kind of stressful to navigate it. And we tried a few different avenues and the one that ended up working, and it sounds crazy, but it’s to find somebody at Meta, so at Facebook, at Instagram. And what we learned is there’s this process that Meta employees can go through. It sounds like there’s maybe somebody from Meta who’s listening to this and is like, “Yeah, I know what it is and that’s not the right way to say it,” but this is my interpretation of it.

It’s like an internal report or an internal submission that somebody can make on your behalf that says, “Hey, I know this person and I can vouch for them and I can say that they are who they say they are, and their account should be unlocked. It wasn’t them hacking, it wasn’t them posting content that violates guidelines. So you can put their account back in good standing and go through the process of setting a new password and things like that.” And that comes from an email. And what we learned is when you’re going through this internal report, use a new email address.

So, they’ll set up a new email address with your account, they’ll send you information to that new email address to go through the process of resetting your account, getting it back in good standing. And after that, it’ll go through kind of their Facebook’s security check and they’ll say, “Hey, within the last three days,” I don’t know what the actual timeline is, “Within the last three days we saw you posted these things. Was that you?” “No.” “Okay. And we saw that you made these comments or messages, was that you?” “No.” “Yes.” And you can go through the process of removing any of the content that had been added.

So, the key takeaway here is if this does happen to you, so this would be kind of reactive response not proactive, which we’re going to talk about or listen a little bit, but reactive response, this happens to you, what do you do? The best thing that we found was finding somebody at Meta to help you through the process. Now, how do you do that? One of the things that we did was Lindsay has a personal Instagram account. She doesn’t post to it a lot, but she just posted a little update there and said, “Hey, this is what’s happening. Is there anybody here who’s from Meta that could help?” So that would be one potential avenue.

If you have another social platform, personal or business related to post there and see if anybody who does follow you works at Meta could help, could reach out and could walk you through this process of submitting an internal report. You could send an email update, you could post a blog update on your blog, whatever it is. If you don’t know somebody who works there personally, I think you go to the next ring out, which would be your followers or maybe friends of friends doing whatever you can to connect with somebody who can hopefully help you through the process of doing this.

Now, we’ve had a few people reach out who have actually been going through the same thing and they’re like, “Can we connect with a person that you connected with?” And that was our friend Brad. I reached out to Brad and I was like, “Can you do this?” And he’s like, “No. It really has to be somebody that you have a connection with, that you know.” And from my understanding, if somebody follows you, that would be enough for them to reach out and say like, “Hey, I have an understanding of who you are, I follow you online.” Potentially could go through that process, but it’s not the kind of thing where somebody could email me and be like, “Hey, can you connect me with the person that helped you and then go through this process?”

Because it sounds like that’s kind of like a step too far out. It has to be something a little bit more personal or somebody a little bit more connected. So if that happens to you, that would be my recommendation. Essentially, just do whatever you can to get ahold of somebody at Meta who could potentially walk you through the process of doing one of these internal reports to say, “This person was locked out, probably programmatically.” Meaning there might not have been this person sitting down and actually reviewing to see if an account should be logged out or not. It was probably an algorithm or a program that runs and says, “Hey, let’s close this account down.”

And so what then they have to do is go through this internal report process, which my guess is somebody then actually does look at it. A person does sit down and say, “Should this account have been closed out?” Yes, no. If not, it will be reinstated, restored, reinstated and restored or combined reinstored. So a couple other actionable takeaways. This would be more preventative, so things that you can be thinking about to keep you safe moving forward. First, two-factor authentication. So think about setting up two-factor authentication or go through the process of setting up two-factor authentication for every account that lets you do it.

And you can do that either through text message or even better is using an app like Authy or Google Authenticator. You can also do this within 1Password where you set it up and connect it to say, “Hey, every 30 seconds, every 60 seconds, there’s a new code that’s generated and we’re going to use that code as your authentication.” And there’s only one place that you can see it and it would be within the app and so then you copy and paste that in. So make sure that where possible that you set up two-factor authentication. The other thing that’s really important that not a lot of us do, and I went through the process of reviewing all my passwords and all of our logins years and years and years ago to get to the point where they’re all unique.

So, every password should be unique that you use to log in. Now that sounds crazy when you have hundreds and hundreds, or in our case it’s thousands of passwords and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, that would take forever.” But once you get into the routine of doing it, it becomes easier to manage. And it’s only really manageable if you’re using a password management solution. The one that we use, all our teams use, we personally use is called 1Password. And the idea with 1Password is you have one really unique password that unlocks your vault that then has all of the individually unique passwords. So you could have, I think in our case, I’ll open this up in real time here on the podcast.

For all of the different businesses and personal and whatnot, I have 1,356 different logins and they all have a unique password. And it sounds crazy, but when you’re using a password management solution, that is the thing that manages it. And the reason that’s important is because if something does get hacked and your information gets leaked, let’s say it’s not encrypted, so people are able to see what it is. So let’s say you have a random website where you get diaper delivery. Speaking from experience here. This didn’t actually happen where I got hacked, but we do have a diaper delivery service.

And so we have this service, let’s say that they get hacked, it’s not encrypted, and you have your email and your password. What could then potentially happen is they could use that password or look at using that password in other places like banks or email or all of these different places where you’d commonly have logins, if you’re not using a unique password, somebody could potentially then use that password in other places based on a hack from an account or a service that you don’t think is really that important, and so maybe don’t have a bunch of security with that specific application.

And that becomes an issue when you’re using the same password. So you secure yourself by using really unique passwords that are unique in terms of their length and using symbols and numbers and letters, but also unique in that they’re not repeated. And I know it’s hard to do on your own, but if you’re using a solution like 1Password, it becomes a lot easier. The other thing that’s important is just making sure that you’re reviewing any of your contact information in your account and making sure that’s up-to-date, specifically email. So in our case, that was the biggest issue. So going through and seeing if there’s other emails listed on your accounts and specifically with your social accounts. Like, is the contact information correct?

If you have a backup email, that would happen in the case of Gmail, that that information is correct and set up well. A lot of these services like social media accounts or Gmail or Google, they’ll have a security checkup service. And what this service does is it walks you through the process of making sure that your account is secure. So for example, with Facebook, you can just Google security checkup Facebook, and it would bring you to a page that walks you through their like security checkup to make sure that your account is tight and that it’s as secure as it can be.

Another, this is a small thing, not really related to what happened to us but just a reminder, there’s this thing called phishing. What phishing is somebody will send you an email that is not from the actual company like your bank account let’s say, and say, “Hey, we need some updated information. Click here to log in and give us that new information.” And when you click there, it goes to a site that looks like what the site would be, but in actuality it’s this phishing site and you enter in your username and your password, and then what happens is then they have that information and then they can log into your account.

Now, they won’t be able to do that if you have two-factor set up, so that would be another case for setting up two-factor. But just a reminder, as you’re getting emails, one of the things that you can do is instead of clicking on the link to enter your information in if you get something like that, just go to the actual site, type in the URL on your own, navigate to the URL on your own versus clicking on that link just to be extra secure. And the last thing, this is standard de facto advice, but make sure that all of your account stuff is updated.

I actually just went through the process with my brother-in-law this weekend. His credit card information had gotten stolen, and I was looking at his computer and noticed that he had these, it was a couple malware barriers type things that we removed, but his software was out of date, so we made sure to update that as well. And that’s just general best practice too. So my hope and the end of the story here is that we were able to get the account back, we were able to get everything back up and running. All the information was still there. It was a huge relief. Thank you to everybody who reached out to offer to help, and those who did actually help.

There’s a few other kind of kinks we’re working out in terms of getting… There was an ad account that was set up, which I think is kind of the main driver for it that we’re looking to shut down and get that cleared out. But for the most part, we’re all in the clear and we’re able to figure that out due to some generous help from people at Facebook and Meta and our friend Brad and somebody named Jessica’s been helping us as well, who’s been really generous with her time. So thank you to everybody who reached out to help.

My hope in doing this short podcast is number one, maybe it’ll just make you feel good that you didn’t have to go through the process of having all of your accounts locked out, so there’s that. So if you haven’t run into that, you’re in a really good place, take a step back and have a little bit of gratitude that you haven’t had to deal with a situation like this. The second part would be if you have gone through this process or you’re in the middle of it, hopefully this will give you some information to think about and some steps to take.

If you need to, feel free to reach out bjork@tinybit.com. I would love to see if there’s anything I can do to help. And third, I guess would be just a reminder to do some of those proactive things to make sure that you don’t end up in a place like this. And it’s never fun to do, it’s kind of like insurance where it’s like, “This is not the most fun thing to do,” but it will save you a lot of time later on, and if nothing else, provides some peace of mind. So, hopefully that helps and really appreciate everybody and this community and I’ll that you do. We’ll be back here same time, same place next week. See you.

Leslie Jeon: Hello, hello. Leslie here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We really hope that you enjoyed this episode of the podcast. Before we sign off, I wanted to quickly mention our Food Blogger Pro podcast Facebook group, in case you haven’t joined yet. So, our Facebook group for the podcast is one of our favorite places, and it’s a great place to go to just continue the conversation outside of the podcast. So members of our group are the first to know about new episodes. We do open calls for interview ideas, and when we plan our upcoming episodes, we actually ask for questions so you can help shape the future of the podcast and maybe even get your questions answered in upcoming interviews.

So we would love to have you join the group, it’s free to join. If you want to check it out, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/facebook and then request to join and we’ll go ahead and get that processed for you. But we would just love to see you there, and we so appreciate your support of the podcast. That’s all we’ve got for you today though. Thank you again for tuning in, and until next time, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by our sister site Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I is how you spell Clariti, all different iterations of how people say it, but it’s Clariti because it helps you to be clear on what it is that you need to be working on, and really gives you direction around how you can go around improving and updating and tracking the content on your blog. We built it because we had been managing everything in a spreadsheet. So my guess is there’s two people listening to this podcast. One would be, you are people who track stuff, then you probably track it in a spreadsheet, maybe Airtable, maybe Notion. And my guess is it’s a lot of manual work.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s another group of people who just aren’t tracking anything, and that’s okay, you’ll get there eventually. But Clariti’s going to be the tool that’s going to allow you to do that more easily. It’s going to allow you to not spend as much manual time doing the tracking, updating, improving, and just generally understanding the lay of the land with your content. And one of the things that I think is most important, a lot of times we talk about hiring on this podcast, but one of the things we don’t talk about enough, and I probably should talk about it more is some of the first positions you should hire for are software.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not an actual person, you’re hiring software to come in and do a lot of the work that you are doing, and that’s what Clariti is for us as the Pinch of Yum team, Food Blogger Pro team. We use Clariti to take manual work away from our day-to-day tasks. And we automate that. It’s one of the easiest ways to have your first hire. So if you’re thinking, oh, I hear people talk about hiring a lot, who should my next hire be? My encouragement for you would let your next hire be a tool like Clariti, where you’re going to spend 25 a month and you’re going to save an incredible amount of time. That’s what it’s all about. So if you want to check it out, if you want to learn a little bit more about what it is and how it works, you can go to clariti.com/food, and you can deep dive into the ins and outs of Clariti just by signing up for that list.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s not going to sign you up for the app. It’s not going to sign you up and process any payments or anything like that. It’s just going to allow you to understand the tool better through some onboarding emails, that give you a little bit of context around what Clariti does and why we built it. So again, that’s clariti.com/food, if you want to check that out. And as a last note here, we’re halfway through this $25 forever deal. So when I say you can think of hiring Clariti at $25 a month as a little team member, who’s in the background, working for you, that deal’s not going to last forever.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re just wanting to get to our first 500 users as we’re in the early stages with this. You’ll still get a lot of value out of it, but the great thing is as the value within Clariti increases, as we build out more features, as we build out more functionality, you will be locked in at that $25 price as a thank you for signing up early for being somebody who’s using the tool early on, giving us feedback, but also finding a lot of value out of it.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ve actually had two people this week. It was last week, actually that followed up and one person said, “I LOVE…” it was all L-O-V-E capital “…this service,” and somebody else said the same thing in the Slack channel, which you can join and be a part of that after you sign up for Clariti, to see how other people using it and the questions that come up and offer any insight or feedback along the way. So thank you to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello, welcome to the Food Blocker Pro podcast. We’re excited that you are here, and I’m looking forward to sharing this interview with Alison Bechdol, she has an agency called Digital-ade, and we’ve worked with Alison, she’s a Food Blogger Pro expert, so you might see her on the forum. And she’s the expert in all things analytics in Google Analytics and number crunching and data, and all of those important things. And she’s going to be talking today about a really big change that’s coming down the line. And it’s not happening until next year, but it’s something that you should be aware of right now, a change that you should make, and that is a switch or adding.

Bjork Ostrom: I shouldn’t say it’s just a switch. It’s adding Google Analytics 4, as a tracking mechanism, as analytics for your site. And she’s going to be talking about the idea behind that, why it’s not at this point, just a switch over to it, but it’s actually kind of layering that in. So you can start collecting data using Google Analytics 4, because there’s going to be a switch. And when there’s a switch, the old version of Google Analytics, Universal Analytics is going away and you won’t be able to track your information with that. So she’s going to be talking about why that change is happening, what that will entail, and some of the strategies around. It’s an important interview and one that has some action items for you as a publisher with it. So let’s go ahead and jump in. Alison, welcome to the podcast.

Alison Bechdol: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s fun to have a conversation anytime that I talk to people that I’ve emailed a lot, we’ve emailed back and forth. You’ve worked some members of our team, but it’s always really nice to be able to say, great, we’re going to actually have a call, and also nice because a lot of times these calls are focused. We’re focused on something that oftentimes we’re both interested in, I’m interested in it, you’re an expert in this. And we’re going to be talking about that today with Google Analytics. Fun news, you’re actually the Google Analytics expert for Food Blogger Pro for anybody in the forums who has Google Analytics questions.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ll be seeing you around there a little bit more, which is really awesome. And we’re really excited about that. So thanks for your work there, but tell us a little bit about your story. Everybody here is a business owner in some way, whether in their startup stage or they’ve been doing it for 10 years. So it’s always interesting to hear about people who are doing business and business in different ways. And your focus is analytics, data, focusing on Google Analytics, a lot of that work. So how did that start for you?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, definitely. So this was not what I thought I was going to be doing when I got into the business world. It was honestly something that fell into my lap, in a way that I joined a small agency. I’m located here in Milwaukee. So I was part of a very small website development agency. And when you work for small agencies, you get to learn how to do a lot of different things. So it was a lot of self learning, but luckily we have a lot of great resources, specifically surrounding Google Support and all that kind of their different platforms and user interfaces. So I was able to go ahead and do a lot of self-learning, and got to really hone down into the things that I enjoyed, so Google Analytics being one of those, then Google Tag Manager shortly followed.

Alison Bechdol: From there, I just really got into it. And so, we’re able to find different insights and the more you’re in this kind of space and understanding the data, you get to see those trends over different industries and different time periods and seasonality. So with that, I hopped around between a handful of other small web development agencies and then come COVID. I was, I guess, I decided to split off on my own and be this little, I guess birth of my digital strategy business here, which has been really great. So being able to focus on more one-on-one clients, working with other agencies or partnering with other agencies in order to have these kinds of digital conversations.

Alison Bechdol: I also do training with a handful of agencies as well, for people who don’t have an analytics wing or analytics arm of their business. So it’s been a really interesting ride and yeah, I couldn’t think about doing honestly… I’m one of those people that now that I’m my own boss, I don’t think I could ever imagine going back to having somebody else be my boss, but it’s been great. I’m really enjoying it. And obviously now with Google Analytics 4, there’s just even more stuff to keep diving into.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And that’s one of the things that we find to be so true. Sometimes I think it might seem like, Hey, if you focus on one thing, you’re going to learn everything you can about it. And then that’ll be it. If you become an expert in Photoshop, well, you’ll learn it all and then it’s done, or you become an expert in Google Analytics or Google Ads or WordPress. But it just keeps evolving. Those are not stagnant platforms. And so you’re constantly having to learn, even way back when I remember doing a Google Analytics course early on for Food Blogger Pro. And while I was doing the course, they updated the interface. It was three days that I spent recording it, and then like halfway through like stuff switched around. It’s like, oh this is always changing and evolving.

Bjork Ostrom: Google Analytics 4, a really important evolution and a really significant one. It’s not like changing where things are located in the interface, and we’re going to talk about that. But I want to go back actually, you had mentioned something that I think a lot of people would be like, oh, I don’t know what that is. People would know Google Analytics, it’s that core foundational thing. But then you also mentioned Google Tag Manager, and that’s an important thing, but I think it’s less known. What is that? And should every publisher, blogger be using Google Tag Manager, or what is it?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, that’s a great question. So Google Tag Manager is really a… I like to explain it as a portal between your website and third-party tools, Google Analytics being one of those third-party tools. So other third parties can be social media platforms, your paid advertising platforms. So Google Tag Manager really acts as this nice little middleware almost between the back end of your website and those third parties. So we can utilize Google Tag Manager for a handful of things. First off, what’s really great about it is pixel implementation. Let’s say you have a brand new, a Facebook pixel you need to install. Instead of having to contact a developer or find a plugin on a WordPress, you go ahead utilize Google Tag Manager. That’s a one-time install product. Once that installed, you can go ahead and manually add your own pixels in without having the assistance of a developer, which is really helpful.

Alison Bechdol: You have a lot more manual, being able to decide when things fire. It is a different world when you think about it that way, but it’s very helpful when it comes down to knowing exactly what’s tracking on your website, knowing exactly where things are going. The other portion of Google Tag Manager, which is going to be increasingly important, especially for Google GA4, is going to be this event implementation. So when we speak about events, right now with Universal Analytics, it’s essentially event tracking is going to be tracking any kind of interaction on your site.

Alison Bechdol: So clicks, downloads, video views. So things that Google Analytics, Universal Analytics does not track out of the box, we can utilize Google Tag Manager to implement these events, to just help that overall engagement profile of what’s happening on the site. So the events are really the meat and potatoes of GA4. So utilizing GTM or Google Tag Manager is definitely something I’d recommend, not only for just the ease of being able to add those again, pixels and things as you might need, but also for this event implementation as you’re starting to understand and really get to know what people are doing on your website.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So one of the things I love to do whenever there’s something I’m trying to understand is like, just break it down into components. So for Google Tag Manager, the two pieces that are easy to understand with that for me at least are Google. We can just drop that because they’re just branding it. That’s who owns it. And then the other piece that’s easy to understand is manager. So it’s something that helps you manage this thing. And the thing that is helping you manage are tags. And if you think of tags at the top, underneath tags, if that’s a generic term. There’s different things that could be considered tags, is that right?

Alison Bechdol: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And those things are pixels. So, that’s one thing that you can consider tag that goes into your site. And for those who aren’t familiar, a pixel is literally a one-by-one image that you can’t see, that goes on your site and that allows different sites to track in a certain way. Is that right? So like Facebook, Google obviously has their pixels that they would put on. And that’s why when you hear these people saying like, have you been pixeled? It’s kind of synonymous with have you been tracked. And so it could go in an email too. The pixel is what decides if, or tells you if an email’s been opened or not. And so as a little fun fact for people, if you block images in your email, that also means that you block tracking. So people wouldn’t know if you open an email because images are blocked, so it can’t load. So can’t trigger that pixel.

Bjork Ostrom: So tags could be pixels and a lot of times you want to put those under your site to track. Events, I think that’s kind of an interesting one, a new one for people. And can you explain the idea of an event? Essentially it’s like… I think a lot of people think of page views. Great. They understand that. Time on page, sessions, all of these things that we know in Google Analytics. But it sounds like what you’re saying is an event is kind of like somebody clicked on a button or maybe they pressed play on a video player. What are some other types of events and, or should publishers be tracking, every event possible or only certain events? What should you be doing with that?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. So events are a different… It’s a tag type is exactly what you’re referencing. So the events themselves right now within Google Analytics, everything is being tracked through what we consider hits. So a page view is a hit type, an event is a hit type. So when we’re looking at your regular Universal Analytics, page views, those are things that you’re accustomed to. So within Universal Analytics, there are really three things that we know out of the box. So Universal Analytics help us understand user information. So, that’s going to be all of your audience reporting. Acquisition information, so where do the users come from prior to coming to the website, and lastly behavior information. And that behavior is only going to be that page view based behavior. So average time on page, entrances, bounce rate, that kind of information.

Alison Bechdol: What Universal Analytics does not track out of the box is going to be more of those engagement or interaction points. So downloads, video views, click a play, click a button, download a item. Those types of actual interaction is not currently tracked within Universal Analytics. So, that’s where we can supplement with events to help us understand that fuller picture, hey, once someone comes to the website, what are they doing outside of viewing that page? Are they spending… yeah, we know they’re spending three minutes on that page, but what are they doing within that three minutes? So it just helps us understand a little bit more the actual engagement points that people are really interacting with.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And that’s done through Google Tag Manager, you can manage events. Were you saying that in Google Analytics 4, that’ll be built in a little bit more? Or what were you referencing with GA4?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. So GA4, it’s a totally different data model. So how I mentioned hits and those page view hits, that is currently how Universal Analytics is tracking. It’s rather linear with a page view and then another page view and another page, just based on that path through a website. GA4’s data model is going to be specifically focusing on events. So now a page view hit is going to be an event that’s established as a page view event. So everything is just transitioning over from these all different types of hit types, really just to events. The reason that this is helpful is that we do get that full picture in one area versus having to kind of differentiate, oh yeah, during this page view, this must have happened. We get that full picture as everything is going to be then tracked as an event versus different hit types. So that’s something just to consider as this whole data model, and really Universal Analytics, really should be thought of as a totally different platform and really different analytics tracking than GA4, just based on that data model itself.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. So I’m going to attempt an on the fly analogy and you can let me know if it’s accurate or not, when you look at the transition from Universal Analytics to GA4. And I’m going to set the stage at… So I just got a text from my friend last night who’s out in New York, he is shooting a documentary on… this isn’t actually what it’s about, it’s just kind of interesting. He’s shooting a documentary on this group of guys that did like… It was like crypto fraud. And they copied, it was at the peak of crypto, 2017. They just exactly copied a page of some crypto project that was launching. And they were like, here’s our crypto project. And they just changed the name. And they’re like, here’s our Coinbase account or something and send us your money.

Bjork Ostrom: And within weeks they had 20 million or something. Anyways, that doesn’t have anything to do with any of this. It’s just kind of interesting, and I excited to see the documentary. But he just sent me a text yesterday and he’s like, jokingly, he was like, “Hey, we’d love to hang out with you, but too bad I have to be hanging out in this 20 million mansion in New York.” And it was, they had this like private show and it was this mansion. So I’m going to set the scene in a mansion. First it’s going to be Universal Analytics mansion. And what I would imagine happens is let’s say you’re tracking the behavior of somebody who comes into the mansion. They open the door and you say door was opened and you say, where did you come from? I came from Minnesota. Great.

Bjork Ostrom: And then they go in a room and you say, great. They go in the room, they close the door and then they come back out and you’re like, okay, great. You were in that room and you were in there for one minute. And then you went to this room. You went into the kitchen, you were in the kitchen for three minutes, closed the door, and then you came back out. Universal Analytics. So by the time they leave, you know that they went to the guest room. They went to the kitchen for three minutes, and went to the bathroom for a minute, and then they left after that. Whereas GA4 would be like, somebody comes in and then you’re following behind them. And this door opens, you go into the room, and you go in the room with them, and you’re like, oh, I see that you went and you opened the window.

Bjork Ostrom: And then after you opened the window, you went and turned on the light. And then after you turned on the light, you adjusted the rug and then you left. It’s a more granular approach to tracking behavior. Where it’s not just going in and out of a room or in and out of a poster page. But it’s saying actually what we want to know is, what does the experience look like? What are the different events along the way? And we’re going to consider opening the window and turning on the light, just as important as opening the door and going in. Here’s my mansion analogy. Sounds accurate.

Alison Bechdol: That’s a great analogy. Very much so. So G4, is going to help us with that event integration within that user journey altogether. So when you implement a GA4 property, there is already an enhanced measurements, enhanced event measurement that you can implement. It’s just an enable, you just go ahead and click enable. And there are these events that it’s already going to be tracking for us out of the box without actually needing us to do anything. So those events are going to be like scrolling, outbound link clicks, site search. So things that right now, we actually would need to potentially utilize an additional event for, GA4 is going to do for us automatically. So it’s nice that we already are getting some of those very basic user engagement points that we already know people are going to be doing. It’s already going to be included with this enhanced measurement model once you enable GA4.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. I know that one of the things, a lot of people, and we have some questions actually from the Facebook group. So foodbloggerpro.com/facebookgroup. We have a dedicated podcast group there and when we are interviewing somebody we can say, hey, do you have any questions? A lot of times we’ll get questions that we’ll make sure that we ask live on the podcast. Tiffany’s asking, “At what point do we need to make the switch?” So she said, “I know the date is July 1st, 2023. So should we make the switch now to adjust to the transition, or is it okay to wait until we absolutely have to move over?” I think that’s one of the scary things with Universal Analytics to GA4, Google Analytics 4, is it seems like, it’s not like, hey, with your computer. You can make this update, you’ll get some cool stuff but you could stay on the current version for two years and you won’t get the cool stuff. There’s kind of a hard cutoff where everybody has to move over. Is that right?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. There is. So Google initially announced GA4 and it’s prior name was the Web and App Property. So essentially the point of this was be able, if you had an app and a website, you could track them seamlessly. So when that came out, people who don’t have an app, which is the majority of website owners are like great. I don’t need that because I don’t have an app. So I don’t necessarily need to worry about that, so nobody made that switch, but then Google kind of rebranded this as GA4. It’s a new thing. We all need to be kind of thinking about. And once again, everyone’s like, no, I’m good with Universal. There’s nothing wrong here. I’m all set.

Bjork Ostrom: Don’t want to change. Don’t want to mess stuff up. I see pages, and that’s what I want.

Alison Bechdol: Yes. So when Google came out earlier that you saying, “Hey, July, 2023 is the date that Universal Analytics is no longer going to be collecting data,” that obviously put everyone in this freak. So one thing that’s good to know about analytics and Google Analytics in general is that it is not retroactive, meaning that anything we implement today is not going to be… we’re not going to see what happened yesterday based on our today’s implementation, same thing happens with GA4. So kind of best practice for everybody right now is, hey, you can still maintain and utilize your Universal Analytics, totally fine. However, best practice, go ahead, create that GA4 property and install it on your website. So we have at least one full year of data that we can go back to when it comes to historical information. So that’s really what we’re telling everybody right now. Have them be launched together synonymously. So we can at least have a little bit of background knowledge that we can start utilizing when that switch does need to happen next year.

Bjork Ostrom: So in that way, when you look at Google Analytics, you’ll have your site or I’m going to forget what all the different levels of it are. What is the first top level of Google Analytics?

Alison Bechdol: Yes. So how this kind of goes, and if you actually go into your admin, which is that nice little icon on bottom left. So left-hand corner or left-hand side, that column is going to be your account. You’re going to maintain your account. So your account is essentially your parent organization or the overall account. That center column is your property, so right now properties are differentiated by domain is what we like to essentially have those separated out as. So right now, Universal Analytics is on the property level. The next one on the right-hand side are views. So views are related to the Universal Analytics and that’s just going to be different reporting views of that property. So when you go ahead to create a new analytics or GA4 property, that’s going to be in your center column. So when you see it there, honestly, I think it’s just the buttons. The top call to action right underneath there is upgrade a GA4 or add a GA4.

Alison Bechdol: So, that’s what you’ll want to do. It’ll talk you through exactly how to go through and create that property, how it’s differentiating things. Again, there’s a lot of different terminology that we’re seeing here. Instead of having this property installed, we’re calling it a web stream or different data streams is how we’re getting the information from one place to analytics. Reason we call it that way is again, if you have a website and an app, you might have two data streams going into that one property. But again, if you just have a website, totally fine. Just want to make sure you have that GA4 property with your data stream to the website implemented there. So you can start getting that data populating.

Bjork Ostrom: So I see when I look at Food Blogger Pro. We have a few different properties, but the two that are worth mentioning are foodbloggerpro.com. And that’s where, and you can see underneath it’s a little bit weird to hear this on a podcast, but if people are following along. Underneath foodbloggerpro.com, the tag is UA dash and then a number, so Universal Analytics. And then underneath that, there’s one foodbloggerpro.com.com-ga4. When I click into that, then we have GA4. And this is really important to point out where you can have… What I hear you saying is you can have both Universal Analytics and GA4 active at the same time, and there’s no harm. There’s probably only benefit in getting Google Analytics 4 up and running sooner because you can’t merge those. So there’ll be a start date. And that start date will be the date that you get Google Analytics 4 up and running. And you won’t have any historical data for that in GA4. You’ll only be able to go back and look at your Universal Analytics. Is that right?

Alison Bechdol: Yes, exactly. So you should still be able to see some of that historical data in Universal Analytics, or if you’re utilizing a Google Data Studio, a kind of visualization tool. You’ll still be able to see that data, but just nothing forward is going to populate come July 2023.

Bjork Ostrom: So you’ll see, and I bet there’ll be a lot of people who use Google Analytics, who aren’t listening to podcasts or reading search engine land or whatever. Come July, they’re going to be like, what? All my traffic’s gone. But that’s because Google has said that they’re going to essentially shut that off at that point. And you’ll need GA4 and you won’t be able to install new Universal Analytics. It’ll be GA4 moving forward. And so I think one of the things that people would think about is, shoot, one of the things that I do is I compare traffic in July or August to make it easier. How do I compare August 2023 to August 2022 if I didn’t have GA4 in August of 2022? Is that when you’d use something like Data Studio?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, potentially. So Data Studio is a really nice, another free Google platform. I should also mention Tag Manager also a free Google platform. So these are all free to use. Google Data Studio is really a visualization tool. So it’s very similar to, I mean, you might have heard of Tableau or Power BI, some of these higher-tech visualization tools. Essentially what it is you pump in your data and you’re able to create your own little charts and your own data models. So you can visualize them the best way or to whoever stakeholders might need them. This is beneficial if, hey, yeah I’ve got a stakeholder who does not need to go into Google Analytics. They don’t need to touch anything, just get them the data that they need.

Alison Bechdol: What we can do is do blended data. That is a little bit more advanced, but we can blend data from two data sources, something I’m not actually quite sure on is what we’re going to do as far as blending GA4 and Universal. I need to dig a deeper dive into that data studio model. One thing to notice, analytics and Google Analytics is really coming out with one to two small updates per month right now. So they’re rolling out smaller things that I think right now… And I’m going to tell you, in the analytics space and people who do what I do, people are not thrilled. You know what I mean? And I know that sounds terrible, but aren’t.

Bjork Ostrom: No, totally.

Alison Bechdol: It’s one of those where like, Hey, Universal, no one thought it was broken. So why fix something that’s not broken? However, as I mentioned, the data model’s going to be much more scalable. It’s going to be a lot more flexible and customizable to the actual business that you’re running versus, hey, these are the three types of reports we have. So there are definitely… there are positives, but there are a lot of people who are just not quite convinced that this is ready yet. But Google is still rolling out with some of these updates slowly, which I think is the right thing to do, just to help people also understand this new user interface, trying to connect the dots between Universal and GA4. So I really do hope that Data Studio is part of that as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And one thing I thought I’d mention, we’ve seen this before, and I know there might be somebody who’s thinking this, where I’ve seen implementations of Google Analytics where they double install it. And then it looks like your site’s doing a lot better than it should be because you have the same code installed twice, so it’s loading twice. So it looks… Anyways, but just for anybody who’s thinking that or kind of nervous about it, that isn’t an issue with having Universal Analytics and GA4 installed.

Alison Bechdol: Correct. Those are two separate platforms. So again, just think about them as completely different. They’re not aggregating the same. They’re not going to aggregate into one platform. They’re in completely separate interfaces. So no, those will not. You won’t have any tracking duplication issues there.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Here’s a question coming in from Ally in the Facebook group, she’s asking how hard is it to figure out how to switch over ourselves? Are there people who can do it for me? The answer to that is yes.

Alison Bechdol: Yes it is.

Bjork Ostrom: And we are talking to one of those people, and if I do it myself, is there any way I can massively mess something up by mistake? So for anybody who is kind of earlier on, they know they want to do this, but… They’re recipe creators, they’re recipe developers, or they’re home DIY people. They’re not people who want to dig into Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics. Are we going to be able to do that on our own or is it best to work with somebody who can do it for us?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. So if this is something that you are interested in. If you have any interest in data and how things are, what people are doing and that behavior, then yeah, you definitely can teach yourself. So there are really great resources out there. Google, honestly, being one of them. Support.google.com has a whole GA4, I guess really instance of anything you could really ask. That’s really good place to start. They also have their skill center where that has just some modules you can go through to help understand how this is a little bit different. So those are furry again. You can go ahead and self-teach, if that’s something you’d like to do. There are also a couple resources that I like to look for.

Alison Bechdol: So there’s two people that I really recommend to keep an eye out for. Julius who’s with analyticsmania.com. So he’s really great. He’s got videos on YouTube. He’s got content on the website, really awesome. The other is Simo Ahava. And Simo is… He has a company called 8-Bit Sheep, and he and his wife started Simmer. So it’s another kind of integration with how people can be utilizing these tools. So those are two people I recommend taking a look at that have some really great resources out there if you are interested in self learning. So yeah, it is possible for you to do so. One other thing, as far as in GA4. There is this nice new functionality that Universal Analytics doesn’t have, and this is the explorer tab. So you’ll see within there, once you get in there. Explore is really a way to create your own reports, right within analytics and GA4, without needing a data visualization tool like Data Studio, as we just mentioned.

Alison Bechdol: So you’re able to go in there and they have a bunch of different report types. They have cohort reports, they’ve got funnel reports, segment overlapping, user exploration. So they got a handful of different report types that you can be able to actually go in, play around, put some of these together to see what kind of data you’re looking to really see and understand. So you can’t break that. I mean, yeah you might have some difficulty at first trying to think, hey, what metric and dimension? How do these really talk to each other? Do they talk to each other? But again, because it’s an explorer and it is actually asking you to be touching and messing around with your data, it’s a really great place to start.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Can you talk a little bit, usually we have folks talk at the end, but what would it look like if you were like, I know I don’t want to do that. I have a little bit of a budget. Do you have like a GA4 package? Do you work with clients on an ongoing basis? We have some additional questions I want to walk through, but I know some people will be thinking that.

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. So there’s a lot of things to think about. I mean, obviously this is totally new platform. There’s so much happening really when it comes down to like packages and what’s best is I like to have a one on one, really conversation. And really, we start really with any kind of analytics implementation. And a goal in KPI planning session. So really, hey, let’s figure out where your goals are. Is it going to be added clicks? Is it going to be video views? Is it going to be downloads, prints? What are your goals? Once we can establish those goals, we’re able to then find the KPIs that are set, really speak to those goals. Is it going to be page views? Is it going to be time on page clicks, download.

Alison Bechdol: Whatever those actual KPIs are, that’s going to help us speak to, what do we maybe additionally need to be tracking? What else do we need to be doing in order to make sure we’re getting the full picture for you? So once we kind of have that conversation, we’re able to really understand, hey yeah, we have a lot we need to do here, or hey, let’s just start at one place we can have at a pretty small package. Hey, let’s start with that conversation, see what that means. We can be pretty flexible. So it really does… I hate to be like, oh it depends, but it does mean-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it really does.

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, it does on an individual basis because you want it to be speaking to your organization as best as you can, just what worked for Joe might not work for Jane. So, it just definitely comes down to that.

Bjork Ostrom: Even our own businesses, you think of Pinch of Yum versus Food Blogger Pro as an example. KPI, key performance indicator, for those who aren’t familiar. For a Food Blogger Pro, one of the key performance indicators is how many people are signing up for an email for example, to the email list, or the obvious one is how many people are converting to paid customers. Whereas Pinch of Yum, email isn’t as important. It’s not important, and there’s not a conversion to customer. So then those KPIs look different. So obviously every business is really different. And so it makes sense when you say you have to have one of those one-on-one conversations to learn what is it that you’re really after.

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: So another question here coming in from the group, this will be the last one from the Facebook group. “When we set up GA4 so that we are not tracking our internal traffic. Is it normal? We still see ourselves when we visit our website in real time. For example, I’ve excluded the tracking of myself, but when I view GA4 in real time, I see one user on my site, which I know is me as I don’t have any real traffic right now.” So can you talk about that idea of why you want to block yourself, either your IP address or one of the things I’ve done is I just install block Google Analytics, just so it doesn’t register any of them. There’s a little Chrome add-on, where it never registers Google Analytics information, which I think is more of a privacy thing for Google, but it’s nice for me that I know I’m not having to switch IP addresses if I’m working from a coffee shop or whatever. So why would you want to do that? And what are some ways that you could do that?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. So very good question. So GA4 does have filter ability. It’s much different than Universal Analytics. So right now in Universal, you go cool I filter out my IP address and we’re set. With GA4 filters are going to be a little bit different and there is actually a learning phase that’s also associated with implementing these filters. So there is this bot fact… The bot traffic is going to be taken out automatically, which is great. So that is also kind of part of that filtering when it comes to Universal, but within the internal IP addresses, you can actually go in and set up a rule, it’s kind of in the data settings. Set up a rule for internal traffic. So it’s also then going to be tracked as an event when any user comes to the site, the actual, whether the user type is going to be internal or if it’s not internal for example.

Alison Bechdol: So you go ahead, set up an internal filter, say hey, these are the IP addresses. The IP addresses start with this, if it’s an organization or whatever it might be. And there is going to be a little bit of a learning phase so that it’s going to… You can enable it, but it might not be active right away. As soon as that phase is over, you’ll be able to go back in, into that data settings and see if it is active or not. So I would just recommend keep an eye on that. If you need to go in and then update those settings within that data, settings portion, go ahead and take a look. But that’s really at this point, what I’ve seen within GA4.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So in to explain that for those who are new to the idea of IP addresses or Google Analytics. Your computer, anytime you’re using it has a unique IP address, but that can change. You can even change if you’re at your house, where maybe you sign out or your computer, and you sign back on, you might have a different IP address, but you can get relatively specific with it. And you can say in Google Analytics, hey, anytime that you recognize this type of IP address or this specific IP address, don’t count that as traffic. Right now that’s what it says. What I hear you saying is in GA4, you can set it up as an event where you can consider that internal traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: So the obvious example would be, huge company like Facebook, where maybe they have thousands or tens of thousands of their own team members coming to facebook.com. They could filter those out based on the Facebook IP address. But for us, especially in the early stages, if we go to our site 10 times a day and we just launched yesterday, we don’t want that to show as like, hey, we have 10 people because that was actually you. And so you can filter out your own IP address. And I think you could just do a simple Google search, like what’s my IP address? To see-

Alison Bechdol: Literally what you do. So yeah, what’s my IP, it’ll pop up right there for you, which is helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: If I find my specific IP address, would you recommend doing a range?

Alison Bechdol: Potentially. So there is like a starts with, or begins with, the limiters. So if you can do that if you have a couple of them or you know that they’re all going to be related that way. One thing to know, which is also a big part of GA4 and I haven’t really touched on this is going to be the actual data collection and integration as far as cross channel tracking. So that’s also been a challenge with Universal Analytics is yeah, hey, if I am visiting a website on my phone, and then later I go onto my desktop to convert or do something along those lines, that’s going to be registered as potentially two users. And how are we going to know what that whole user journey is if we don’t understand, hey, that cross device tracking.

Alison Bechdol: So we actually have a lot better and a lot more, there’s actually three different levels that GA4 is going to be actually going through to help dedupe those sessions. So it’s going to be utilizing Google Signals, the device ID, which is currently what Universal uses. And I believe there’s one more, and it’s escaping at the moment, but there are three different actual levels that it’s going to be helping us with that dedupe. So, that’s going to be helpful as well. If we have internal traffic and your cell phone is going to be potentially a different IP address, then your desktop, it’s going to help us also identify that internal traffic too.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. So I deal with that is it’s shifting from thinking about devices, to thinking about people. And so, if I’m on my iPhone and I look up a recipe and then I’m like, actually I want to do some more research around this or probably it’s the other way around, I’m on my computer, I look up a recipe. I’m like, hey, I actually want to make this I’d copy it, send it to myself, pull it up on my phone. It’s still me but in Universal Analytics that would show as hey, there’s two different people who came here or that’s what it would appear to be. Whereas what you’re saying is those will be deduped in the sense that it’s not two different people, it’s one person, just using different devices. So you can see that more accurately all the way through.

Alison Bechdol: Exactly. So that’s, again, one of the reasons that GA4 is just scalable. It’s obviously based on real life, what real people are doing versus what we’re limited by the technology.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. As you think about the transition, Universal Analytics to GA4, I think we hit some of the most important things. One of them is make the transition as soon as you can because there’s not going to be any downside. You’re going to have a longer history of data and you’re going to be able to then see that, earlier is better to be able to collect that. Number two would be the cutoff being… Is it July 1st, 2023?

Alison Bechdol: I believe so. I just keep saying July 2023, because then if it’s the 30th then awesome. Then I had a couple extra days, but yeah, sure the first will, I think that’s actually it.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that sounds right. Your Universal Analytics, the account that you’re using will at this point, as far as we know, drop to zero, and you’ll have to start using GA4 moving forward. It’s going to be more accurate in terms of seeing user behavior all the way through, it’s going to be event tracking. So it’s going to be more granular, that mansion example of walking through, being able to see it a little bit more. I think the next question is when I think of analytics, I think of the…

Bjork Ostrom: It seems like one of those things where we feel like we should collect everything, but then what we actually look at is how many people are coming to my site? How many pages am I getting? For people who want to take the next step in actually using analytics as a tool to inform decisions that they’re going to make to improve their site, to grow their site, to be more successful. What are some of those early steps that we can take to start using it as a tool? Not just to look back, but to say looking forward, how can I make better decisions?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. I mean, great question. I mean the goal in KPIs, those KPIs, those key performance indicators are really going to be what is going to help us. Because analytics has a plethora of all the different types of data that you can potentially think of at this point, can be overwhelming and it can be, what does that mean? Is it important? I mean, we talk about all the time in the analytics space of, there’s a handful of metrics, for example, average time on page. Is that a positive metric or is that a negative metric? If someone spends five minutes on a page, is that a good thing? Because they were enjoying the content or is that they spent five minutes on a page because they couldn’t find what they were looking for?

Alison Bechdol: We don’t have that context. So it’s really trying to understand the trends overall and trying to just perform better than you’ve been performing. I hear questions about benchmarks, and what are other people doing, what are other people in my industry? And that’s really easy to say I just want to compete with everybody else. However, we don’t know so many things about that. We don’t know organization size, we don’t know what their budgets are, we don’t know so many things. So it’s always just to think about, okay, how can I be improving upon what I am doing based on the data that I am currently seeing.

Alison Bechdol: So it’s really understanding those KPIs based on what your organization is really trying to focus on, what is working, what isn’t working based on some of these reports and these funnels and cohorts that we’re able to now see with GA4. I’d recommend leveraging those, just because right now we don’t actually visualize the data in that way, utilizing Universal Analytics. So looking at the data in different ways, trying to understand cohorts over periods of time, really understanding that is going to be, I think the most beneficial way for us to really start just gradually improving.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say co cohorts over time, what do you mean by that?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. So cohort report, we’re able to kind of… Bunch, a bunch of users together and saying, hey, based on average time delay is something, for example. Hey, if a user visits my site or converts in January, when is the next time most likely they’re going to convert again? So we’re able to see these time delays reporting based on user attributes. There’s I mean, just as an example. We are able to start seeing those trends based on how we kind of chunk this data together.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How about in the case of… For a lot of people listening to podcast, page use would be important.

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: Search performance would be important. What are some of the ways that you could… Is page use too generic of a KPI?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, no, that’s a great question.

Bjork Ostrom: And if it is what would be the KPI underneath that? And then for people who are trying to optimize around that, essentially optimize around traffic, if you don’t have a conversion point. Any thoughts around how to use Google Analytics proactively with that mindset?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah, absolutely. So if you’re just focusing on traffic, acquisition is going to be your best friend. Where are people coming from? How are you getting people to your website? Is it through search engines? So that’s going to be SEO, trying to make sure that from an organic standpoint, we’re doing well, we’re ranking for the keywords we want. Great, if it’s social media, wonderful. Let’s make sure we’re posting on social more regularly, how often are we posting? What days and time is there people coming to the site?

Alison Bechdol: What content is performing best? So if you’re really focusing from a traffic specific organization only, that’s where I would really focus is what is the channel that is going to be the most successful for me? What are the channels that reach the user in order to actually get them to come back? So that’s going to be, what I would recommend, most likely is try to focus on those channels. Those acquisition sources are really going to be your best friend.

Bjork Ostrom: And I would imagine at that point, what you start to do is, Google Analytics, naturally you could push back on this if this isn’t correct. But it feels like it’s a historical tool. So it tells you what has happened in the past even if the past is just five seconds ago. But looking at that data, then you can take that and start to make some decisions looking forward, potentially using other tools like Google Search Console or any of the Semrush or Ahrefs or however you pronounce it. And start to pair those together. You go into Google Analytics and maybe you see search traffic going down, let’s say.

Bjork Ostrom: You could dig a little bit deeper and say why is it going down? Is there a certain page that had a lot of traffic that now doesn’t? Okay. And then you can use one of those tools, like Google Search Console and say, maybe this keyword changed in terms of performance. And it was in a certain position and then it dropped great. So now we know that, not great that it happened, but what do we do to go back and make those updates? So it almost feels like, as I think about it, it maybe becomes kind of a multi tool type analysis. Are there other tools that you recommend that complement Google Analytics well?

Alison Bechdol: Yeah. Great question. So what’s really nice. Again, from a visualization tool, Data Studio is really helpful, because we can blend data from other sources also in one place. So there are, as we mentioned, Analytics, Semrush, there’s a handful of other tools that are going to be helpful. But if you’re really trying to… One of the biggest challenges is social media, it tends to be a really difficult. Hey, what is performing well? What posts are actually being clicked on? How many likes am I getting on those? Those things we just can’t see because it’s reported in other platforms. With tools such as… These are kind of like API tools is what we call these, Supermetrics is a really great one. So Supermetrics has these nice plugins that you can say, hey, I want to get my data from Facebook to Google Data Studio and we can use it all in one place, all part of one report.

Alison Bechdol: So I’d recommend that if you’re really looking for a full picture based on all channels and trying to understand all of those, take a look at the Supermetrics or something along those lines to help you fill in those gaps. But to other tools that I utilize all the time, Semrush, Google Search Console, Moz, I still use a handful. Moz is a really great tool for just beginner SEO trying to understand what is good, and what’s not. Google Ads and Keyword Planner. I mean, even if you’re not doing any paid advertising through Google or Bing, they both have keyword planner tools, which are going to help you understand search volume and how competitive those keywords are. So yeah, a kind of a blend of all of those in the space, I think are definitely tools to check out.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. For those who say, you know what? That all sounds awesome, and I don’t want to do that. You have your agency. So as we close out here, can you talk a little bit about what it is that you do? You shared a little bit in the beginning, but if people are interested in working with you, what’s the best way to connect? How do people know if they’re a good candidate to potentially work with you? Because we’d love to shine a light on that and let you share a little bit about what you do.

Alison Bechdol: Awesome. Yeah, thanks. So my agency’s called Digital-ade. So lemonade and helping people, all blended in one if you will. So digital-ade.com is my website, feel free to search my name or that business online or Google. So essentially what I do is… Because as I mentioned earlier, have touched a lot of different spaces and a lot of different silos as kind of we call it in the world of SEO and paid in analytics and all of these things, as we’ve kind of even just touched on. They all are related. They all touch each other in one way or another. So that’s something that I like to say is beneficial about utilizing somebody that has, or an agency that has experience in all those fields.

Alison Bechdol: So we do all of those things. We build custom dashboards. We look at your analytics, we’ll clean it up if we need to. We can do those goal and KPI planning sessions. I haven’t really met a client that’s too small. I’ve seen a couple that, hey, I’m on Wix and I’m not really sure what I can do or what I can’t do or square space is a little limited, what are the possibilities for me? So there are those questions and if I can’t help you, I definitely have people that I work with or have worked with or have their own little agency or their own little gig that they’ve got going.

Alison Bechdol: The network of people that we find is really interesting. And we tend to try to help each other out. So if you reach out to me and I can’t help you for whatever reason, I’m sure I can connect you with somebody else. I mean, analytics is just… What I like to think of it just skims the surface of what all really lies underneath to really get your website going. So, yeah I’d love to help out. If you’ve got some questions, feel free to find me on my website.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So digital-ade.com. We’ll link to that in the show notes as well.

Alison Bechdol: Perfect.

Bjork Ostrom: Great conversation, Alison. I learned a lot great, which is one of the great benefits of this podcast. And I know that people who listened will as well. So thanks for coming.

Alison Bechdol: Of course, thanks so much for having me.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there, Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a quick second to make sure you are aware of the Food Blogger Pro membership. So the Food Blogger Pro membership, Food Blogger Pro in general, was started when Bjork and Lindsay, Ostrom Lindsay is the content creator over at Pinch of Yum. When they started getting a ton of questions about starting and growing and monetizing food blogs. So people would come to them and say, hey, I see what you’re doing. I love what you’re doing. How can I do the same thing? So they decided Food Blogger Pro to be the place where food bloggers, food content creators can go to learn how to start, grow and monetize their own food blogs.

Alexa Peduzzi: So we have different courses. We have different events. We have different tools and deals for our community. We have a community forum where members can connect, collaborate and troubleshoot with industry experts and their fellow Food Blogger Pro members. And it’s just a really active place. I always like to say that your Food Blogger Pro membership won’t look the same the next week after you join, because we’re constantly adding new content, new value to your membership.

Alexa Peduzzi: I wanted to read this testimonial from Food Blogger Pro member, Alistair from The Pesky Vegan. And he says, “Starting a food blog can feel pretty daunting more often than not, it’s probably something you’re trying to do on your own without much prior experience. Signing up to Food Blogger Pro was one of the single best things I could have done as it removed a lot of the worries I had and provided me with a supportive community and a wealth of invaluable information. When I think about the journey I’ve been on, I simply can’t imagine getting to where I am without this membership. Thank you.”

Alexa Peduzzi: It’s so cool to see so many different experiences with Food Blogger Pro, we have tons of testimonials on our site if you’re interested in learning more. And if you’re interested in learning more about the membership, what that looks like, what you get when you sign up as a member. You can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join. You get access to everything we have the moment you sign up. So no content is dripped. You can just create your own journey through our content and access what is most meaningful and beneficial for you. So again, that URL is foodbloggerpro.com/join if you’re interested in learning more. Otherwise, we’ll see you here on the podcast next week, and until then make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by our sister site WP Tasty. As I’ve shared before, the WP Tasty team, they make incredible plugins for WordPress for people like you, people who are running a WordPress site, my guess is that’s 90% of you, maybe 95% of you. Some of you might be using other sites, Wix, Squarespace. Those are great sites or site builders, but we really believe that WordPress is the place that you should be if you want to have good search traffic and flexibility with how your site is created. We love WordPress, which is why we created a business around it, called WP Tasty.

Bjork Ostrom: We had some opinions on how we wanted to go about building the plugins that we’re using and how we wanted to use those to increase earnings, to maximize the search potential and the social reach of our food and recipe site called Pinch of Yum.

Bjork Ostrom: So we kind of built these for our own, we wanted to scratch our own niche, but then we also knew that there was an opportunity to package these up, the things that we were creating for ourselves, and then offer those to other bloggers and publishers. So right now we have three of these plugins that we’re using and then also offering through WP Tasty. You’ve heard me talk about them before, it’s Tasty Recipes, Tasty Pins, and Tasty Links.

Bjork Ostrom: And one of the things that’s been great about sharing these plugins with other people, is we get great testimonials from people like this one from Christine, from Bite your Cravings. When she was talking about Tasty Pins, she says, “Tasty Pins has helped me seamlessly connect my blog and my Pinterest account before setting it up, pinning from my website was confusing, lacked information, like pin descriptions,” which is a part of what we do with Tasty Pins, and being able to set keyword-rich descriptions, the correct title and disable pinning on certain images has really clarified my approach to getting my recipes to Pinterest, which is a great little testimonial about how Tasty Pins works for people who want to do a good job of maximizing their exposure on Pinterest and the traction that they’re getting there.

Bjork Ostrom: So if you’re interested in learning more about any of the WP Tasty plugin offerings, Tasty Pins, or Tasty Recipes or Tasty Links, and how they help you optimize your site for Pinterest, Google search and affiliate earnings, you can head over to WPtasty.com. That’s the letter W, the letter P, and then tasty.com. Thanks to the WP Tasty team for partnering up in sponsoring the Food Blogger Pro Podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello, hello, welcome to the podcast. This is the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Really, what I’m starting to learn is, a lot of you are food bloggers. A lot of you are food publishers, right? So Instagram, YouTube, whatever your platform might be, TikTok. There’s also a lot of you who don’t do food and you follow along with this podcast, which is awesome. It’s really great to have you following along wherever you are, whoever you are. What we want to do, what our goal is with this podcast, and really with all of our businesses, is figuring out ways that we can help people, that would be you, or companies, which is probably something that you run, get a tiny bit better every day forever. That’s why we exist. That’s what we think about when we think about the work that we’re doing.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re building businesses. Those businesses need to have revenue, they need to be successful, but that revenue is really fuel for the journey. And the journey that we are on is helping creators and business owners and people get a tiny bit better every day forever. And this conversation is going to be one of those conversations, Bet Hannon, from Bet Hannon Business Websites is going to be talking all about her experience with kind of the accessibility world. And a lot of us know accessibility, are familiar with accessibility, but not really the intricacies of what goes into it and how we can make accessible websites, why it’s important, why we should be thinking about doing that, why it should be a priority. And Bet’s going to share ways that we can do that, and also the why behind, the reason really for wanting to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a great conversation. Bet’s an incredible individual, not only in her skills and knowledge, but also the heart behind what she does. So it’s going to be a great interview, really excited to share it. Before we jump in, want to do one more quick shout-out to the Food Blogger Pro survey. We want to know you, we want to know about you. And the only way we can do that… Well, not the only way. One of the ways that we can do that is by asking you questions and hearing from you. And we want to do that through this survey, it’s foodbloggerpro.com/survey. If you go through the survey, you’ll get a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card.

Bjork Ostrom: And your information will also be included in the recap episode that we do on the podcast, where we share the results from that survey, and that’ll help this community, that’ll help this podcast get a tiny bit better every day forever, which is what we’re all about. So we’d appreciate if you do that. It’s foodbloggerpro.com/survey, and you can head over there to go through the survey and let us know a little bit more about you, what you’re about and your business. All right, let’s jump into this interview. Bet, welcome to the podcast.

Bet Hannon: Great, good to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We’re going to talk about all things accessibility, and that word I’m guessing is going to be familiar for some publishers, some bloggers, because maybe they’ve heard it in groups, heard conversations around it. Maybe a little bit fear-based, which we’re going to talk about that in regards to lawsuits and kind of legal issues, but where I want to start is hearing about how you got into this, because your focus is really on accessibility and helping businesses, whether it be publishers, online businesses and I know it’s beyond that as well, really make sure that they’re doing this right. So what did your journey into this world look like? How did you get started with it?

Bet Hannon: Yeah, so this is actually a second career for me. I did about 15 years in nonprofit management, and then right before the financial crisis in 2008, my position downsized and I kind of stumbled into freelancing. I had been building some websites for the organizations I served and other groups around them, and just kind of stumbled into freelancing and then growing an agency over time. And we’ve always been 100% remote. So the pandemic was nothing new for us. I told my mom, the only thing that really changed for us is I don’t have to explain what Zoom is anymore.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. You don’t have to troubleshoot as long when you do a Zoom call.

Bet Hannon: Yeah. People know… When you say to somebody you’re muted, they know where to look right away. And then we got into accessibility… So we’ve been doing WordPress development and helping people with other kinds of marketing things, setting up emails and email newsletters, and that kind of stuff. And then in about early 2017, we had a client that we were helping them with their WordPress website, a big water district in California. They’re part of the state of California, so they’re required to be accessible. And they were just learning about some of those new accessibility requirements.

Bet Hannon: And we said to them, oh, let us help you find somebody to do that. And they said, “No, no, no, well, that’s fine, bring in an expert, but we want you to be the day to day people to help us, so we want to bring you along,” which was great, because they invested in us as an agency too. And when we dived in and really started learning more about accessibility, and really I think for me, when I first saw somebody who was blind, they happened to be blind, using a website that was accessible and how that really just enabled them to be independent and have this human dignity, oh, I was hooked. So-

Bjork Ostrom: That’s cool. Can you talk about what that’s like? Because I think people, in theory, understand it, but even just when somebody who’s visually impaired is using a screen reader, would that be the right term for it, screen reader?

Bet Hannon: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: What does that look like? And I think that picture will help people understand why it’s important.

Bet Hannon: Yeah. When I’ve done live workshops and stuff, I actually sometimes bring in a little YouTube clip of a person using a screen reader and there are dozens of them out there. You can just Google person demoing a screen reader. And it can… So pretty much know you can, when you turn it on, when you’re testing it, it’s kind of annoying because it reads out every single thing, so when you’re testing. And so sometimes if I accidentally turn it on, I’m like, ah, I got to turn that off. So it just kind of works its way through the page.

Bet Hannon: And so I would encourage people to go to YouTube and see somebody who depends on it, doing that. And that’s especially important if you’re going to start testing or you’re going to try and use a screen reader to kind of get a sense for what it’s like on your website, just to understand that people who depend on them every day and use them all the time, use them differently than you or I might, if we’re just testing and stumbling through it. And so, well, one of the big things is they usually have the speed turned up super high, just-

Bjork Ostrom: In terms of somebody reading back to them.

Bet Hannon: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Or the machine reading back, yeah.

Bet Hannon: Yeah. And so it’s a machine reading through the language that’s there and it reads out things like, when you hit an image, it’ll say image of, and then it reads the alt text. So you never have to put “image of” in your alt text because the screen reader already puts that in there, those kinds of things. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. And then watching people who have mobility issues, they are using… There’s hundreds, maybe thousands of different devices for that, but it all comes back down to keyboard navigation. So people, like Steven Hawking had a little sensor on his cheek or people have eye movement trackers or other kinds of things. There really it all just comes down to navigating through your site with the keyboard, typically with the tab key and the enter key, you can see how much you can get through your site doing that. But people who use screen readers also use a lot of keyboard navigation.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So an example being, if somebody’s vision impaired, they might come to the site, they would use tab to navigate, if everything’s accessible, would be able to understand what a link is, the text would be read back, which that is maybe just kind of a default behavior, and images would be read back, the alt text being a really important piece for that. And oftentimes, in our world we’re thinking about, hey alt text, SEO optimization, but alt text really, the SEO is secondary. It’s like Google writing off of an accessibility feature. First and foremost, it’s not meant for Google, it’s meant for accessibility. And so when you’re crafting those, think about… My understanding is, I think about how you would read it to somebody who might not be able to see that, to describe what the image is. Yeah.

Bet Hannon: And actually Google starts the algorithm… My understanding is that the Google algorithms really are starting to discriminate there too, that when you’re obviously keywords stuffing or you’re obviously trying to manipulate it, that really what they’re looking for is just a plain sense description of what’s going on in the image. And ideally, that should be supporting or connected to the other text that’s on the page. So they’re using that description to kind of get a sense for what’s happening on this site and how good of an experience is that.

Bjork Ostrom: So you’re in this world of accessibility, you go through this kind of trial by fire of learning the ins and outs of it. And suddenly you’re like, wow, I love this, and it’s impactful work, it’s needed work. My guess is that you could go to just about any website and see an opportunity for them to improve the accessibility on it?

Bet Hannon: Well, yeah, and that’s something to be aware of, is that in some sense, no website is 100% accessible, because it’s always a journey, you’re always working at it. Every time somebody adds new content to the site, there’s a potential for it to not be accessible again. And so you’re always kind of working at that, but then when you start thinking about, well, it’s not just people who are blind or people who have mobility issues, but you can begin to include things in accessibility, like, well, things like color blindness, things like ADHD and reading disabilities, things like anxiety and depression, people with anxiety and depression give up.

Bet Hannon: So if you have a checkout process on your site that’s complicated, or a registration thing somehow that’s complicated, people just give up. And so just kind of beginning to look at all of those things, and then you have to look at, well, there are compound disabilities, or the medical term would be comorbid… Two things, right? So maybe they’re blind and they have anxiety, or there’s a reading disability and they’re color blind. And so how are you going to begin to do that? So it’s a journey always to… But yes, I often will check, it’s kind of a compulsive thing, I think, probably it’s some something I should seek therapy before, but anytime I visit sites, I start looking at, oh yeah, that’s probably not accessible.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting, for Pinch of Yum we had an email from somebody, this was maybe two weeks ago. And to your point about being color blind, they mentioned, “Hey, this button is kind of hard for me to see,” and talked specifically about why. And it was super helpful feedback. And so we went and made an update on that so the contrasting colors was strong enough to be easy to see. And so you can start to see how a lot of those factors play into it. When somebody hears that, my guess is 99% of people are going to say, “I want to be that person that is aware of this and moving towards improving that.”

Bjork Ostrom: And there are also probably people who feel overwhelmed with just learning WordPress and installing a plugin and getting their content out the door. How do you see people being successful with both of those things without getting overwhelmed by maybe feeling like it’s beyond their expertise or the resources they have available. How do people do this well? Especially if they’re just starting out or at an intermediate level, as opposed to a brand like Pinch of Yum, where we’d have a budget to put towards that and pay a developer to push the fix out the next day, what does that look like and how do people do that well in the early stages?

Bet Hannon: Yeah. So it’s important to recognize that in, especially when we talk about WordPress, but even in other content management systems, there are accessibility-related things that are content-related, and some that are theme-related. So things like your theme, does it have skip links? So when you go to the site, can you skip directly to the content without having to tab all the way through the menu? So things that are content-related are easier for non-technical people to deal with. And coincidentally, if you fix all of the headings issues, if you get alt texts on all your images, and you properly nest those headings, that’s pretty much… They do these studies that say that’s like 70 to 80% of all the accessibility issues on your site.

Bet Hannon: And so if you’re beginning to educate yourself about how to put content in, I would say that’s the place to start, educate yourself. Keep creating accessible content, right? You may have a ton of old content that you’ve got to still deal with, but at least learn how to put it in an accessible way so you can go forward. Then you could begin to deal with, address over time some of those folder posts, I would start with your more popular posts and then kind of gradually work… And there’s some tools for that. There’s some plugins that will help you identify images that don’t have alt texts, for example, and begin to kind of work through things. And then you can begin to think about, is your theme accessible? And when we work with folks, part of that is the lifespan of a theme design, probably somewhere in three to five-year range, five if you’re lucky, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Meaning, towards the end of that it starts to become outdated.

Bet Hannon: Well, and I would say… Yeah, that you’re going to want to redo the design anyway. You’re going to redo the design anyway. So if you’re more than halfway into that, it’s probably more cost-effective… If you have a lot of theme issues related to accessibility, then it’s probably more cost-effective that rather than trying to fix all of those, to just go ahead and bump up your redesign project.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Bet Hannon: And so kind of helping people begin to think about that so that when you educate yourself, so that when you get ready to do that next redesign process, you’re already thinking about what are the things you’re going to be looking for to make sure that that’s accessible. And so some of the things, just make sure… There are themes in the WordPress repository that are labeled accessibility-ready, and of course any developer can put accessibility-ready on any theme that they’re going to sell you, so do your homework and make sure you’re checking on those, just because they say it is, just do some diligence on that. And then being ready to do that next time around, I think is just a really… Those couple of things will get you a long way. And then just realizing, again, that it’s going to be a journey and you’re going to keep working at it. It’s going to be a long process.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We talk about that a lot on the podcast, we have this… So the name of our parent company’s Tiny Bit, we talk about getting a tiny bit better every day, forever. This concept of 1% infinity, like great, you don’t have to fix all the problems, and every day it doesn’t have to be 100%, but to your point, have it on the table as something you want to continually improve and get better at. I want to pull out a few of the different things that you talked about. Alt text, I think that one’s really easy to understand for people and it’s something they can be doing, and there’s no downside with it. There’s only upside in doing accurate alt text that describes what the image is. That’s simply what it is. The other thing you talked about was nesting headers. Can you talk about what that means and why that is accessible?

Bet Hannon: Sure. So I have recently discovered that they don’t teach high school essay writing like they used to, but I used to have to write an outline. And so there was a Roman numeral one, and then there was a capital letter A, and you went down and you kind of nested those levels in, and the H tags on your website are supposed to be nested like that, and you’ll often see when you’re editing things, you can make something an H1 or an H2 or an H4. And a lot of times people just think, well, those are just design, that just gives me the size and style of the font differently.

Bet Hannon: And they’re only thinking about it as a design piece, but it actually needs to be there for the accessibility, but also for the SEO. Google is looking for this stuff too, right? So the H1 is always the page title, so in WordPress you never make anything else an H1. H1 is always the title of the page or post. So then everything, other main level items are H2, but you should never then skip from an H2 to an H4, you need to have a three in between. And you can go down to six, but we don’t see that happen very often. Mainly you’re doing twos and threes, and maybe a four to get through-

Bjork Ostrom: If you get super nested, yeah. If you’re going really deep on a subject and have a long article, but usually you’re not going to need that much.

Bet Hannon: No. And you just want to make sure you’re not skipping any levels, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So an example being, if you and I were going to write a why tacos are awesome post, that would be the H1, Why Tacos Are Awesome.

Bet Hannon: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: H2 would maybe be, you could write a little intro paragraph, H2 would be like the, I’m building this on the fly, because of the variety of tacos that you can make, so that would be the H2, like Variety of Tacos. And then the H3 could potentially be like chicken tacos, shrimp tacos, tofu tacos, beef tacos. You could have all of those. And then after that, it would be, the next header would be fun party food or something, it’s another point of why tacos are awesome. But each section rolls up into the next. To your point, it’s visually, when you’re looking at it, it makes sense. But what I hear you saying is that, from an accessibility standpoint, it helps somebody navigate that content, is that how it manifests from an accessibility standpoint?

Bet Hannon: Yeah. Because people who are using screen readers or accessibility devices are often skipping from H tag to H tag. So maybe they’re going to skip through and just read all of the H2s, to see if there’s something there that is of interest to them. Or maybe then they’ll skip in… And they can do this via their keyboard shortcuts. They can skip it at H2s, if that doesn’t sound like what they’re looking for, they’ll skip to the next H2. That does sound like what they’re looking for, then they’ll start reading the H3s. So it helps people really quickly, just like a sighted person would be scanning things, we’re not really reading everything. We’re just scanning for what we’re looking for. So it’s a way of scanning. So if you don’t offer that scaffold of those headings for people to be able to scan quickly, they just give up, they move on to a different site.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That makes sense. And a couple points that you mentioned, like only have one H1, that’s one of the things that we… This was on a SEO audit, and I think a lot of these things compliment each other, where SEO is accessibility and accessibility is SEO, but you have one H1, and that being important because an article should be about one thing. And the H1 says what it’s about. And in doing this audit, we realize like, oh, there’s a lot of content on Pinch of Yum, and we also were looking at a site we recently acquired called Curbly. And it’s like, oh, there’s articles that have multiple H1s, that’s a really easy fix. And so you tighten that up by nesting things properly within the headings. So for somebody who’s frantically jotting down notes where they’re like, okay, headers. Okay, got that. Alt texts, got that-

Bet Hannon: Another thing with headers is, sometimes people would be tempted to make an entire sentence bold, to just bold the paragraph to-

Bjork Ostrom: Kind of like a header hack.

Bet Hannon: Yeah. But that’s not that… Yeah, if you’re tempted to do that, you probably need to make it a header, somewhere in the header, and italics too, if you’re going to make a… Italicizing a word or two is really great, but when you start to italicize a whole sentence, it makes it really hard for people with learning disabilities to read. So you want to make sure you’re not using bold and italics as kind of hacks in that way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That makes sense. So what does that look like from… I think a lot of people in a situation like this will say, “I just want to make sure that I’m doing it right.”

Bet Hannon: Oh, of course. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I know Google search console has some built-in mechanisms for keeping track of this, even like I think contrasting colors is maybe a part of it with Google search console, but is there any way that somebody could go to accessibilitychecker.com, that’s not an actual URL-

Bet Hannon: No, but there are some-

Bjork Ostrom: And then put in your website and then get feedback on how they could improve this?

Bet Hannon: So there are a number of them online. One of them is wave.webaim.com, and you can put in your URL and you can have it come out and it’ll check, and it’ll check the contrast, and it’ll check your headings. And some other things that are looking for in kind of the theme. Are there labels on things correctly? And the important thing to know… And those are great, that’s a great place to start if you’re not doing anything. The important thing to know is that those checkers use AI, artificial intelligence, and AI only gets about 30% of the issues made on average on a page. So it’s a great place to start to find all the low-hanging fruit, but part of the problem with doing it right is that there’s a lot… In accessibility standards, a lot depends on context, a lot depends on what you’re doing, and so that’s why humans…

Bjork Ostrom: It’s art and science, yeah.

Bet Hannon: It’s more art in some ways sometimes than that. So for instance, you always want to have alt text on all your images, except when it’s a purely decorative image. If you have like a fleur-de-lis that’s separated some content sections, no alt texts there. And it gets labeled in a different way as decorative-

Bjork Ostrom: But AI wouldn’t be able to pick that up. It would surface it as an image and your score would be dinged until you put in there, like wavy line. But in regards to adding context around the content, it doesn’t help.

Bet Hannon: But you don’t want to put things in there for the screen reader because that’s not helping the experience of a visually disabled person who’s using the screen reader. They don’t need to know it’s a visual separator or a… And it just wastes their time. So you want to omit the alt text in that particular case, which is very infrequent really. So those checkers can be great, but again, some of it just requires some learning and some working at things. People do do testing. So there are ways to get, what’s called a, like you would get an SEO audit, you can get an accessibility audit. If you had somebody try to do that for every single page of your site it would be astronomically expensive. So typically, what happens is people will do a sampling audit.

Bet Hannon: So we typically do 10 URLs. So somebody will come to us, and we’ll help them identify 10 URLs that have different templates within their site, different layouts, maybe different content creators, we can kind of work with you to get a good representation of the content on your site. Then we’ll do the audit on those. And then we give you a big report at the end that just tells you everything we checked, all the passes and all the fails and where things are. And then for ours, we offer kind of a consultation at the end then. So we’ll sit down with you, we’ll explain it to you. If you want to bring your developer, we can tell them more technically how to fix things, and that kind of stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. So there’s one side of it, which I feel like is the proactive, doing the right thing side. And then there’s the other side, which I think also exists and is important to address, which is a little bit of like, I don’t want to get sued for not having an accessible site. And I think people might know people, or friend of a friend situation, where they’re like, oh, I got this letter about being sued for accessibility, which is a little bit of a bummer because I feel like there’s an opportunity to just create accessible sites, because it’s the good and right thing to do. But at the same time, it’s maybe a motivator for people to do the good and right thing anyways. No matter how you get there, it’s still a good outcome, but can you talk about what’s happening with those and what people should be aware of?

Bet Hannon: So the lawsuits that are coming, are coming under the Americans with Disabilities Act, as you might be familiar with that, that’s where we got ramps and bathroom hand grabs and all those kind of things, that law was passed in 1990. And of course at that point, we didn’t really have websites in the way we think of them today. And they certainly weren’t as ubiquitous everywhere for our daily life in the same way. And so what happened in the nineties with brick and mortar storefronts, was that the US Department of Justice came out with some really clear guidelines of what it takes to pass and not be sued.

Bet Hannon: And we don’t have that with websites. And partly because there’s that issue of context, and there’s so many gray areas around how to implement, there’s this standard and this standard and they kind of overlap but not really. So there’s more ambiguity, I think on websites, than there was-

Bjork Ostrom: As opposed to, with a building where we just made these updates, and it’s like-

Bet Hannon: Your ramp has to be at this rate, this kind of an angle-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, really clearly defined, or you need to change the handles, so they’re like pull handles versus old school circular handles.

Bet Hannon: So what we’re left with is really, because there’s not guidelines like that, we’re left lawsuits that are kind of, we’re stumbling our way into them. Americans tend to be a little more litigious anyway, than our European and other counterparts across the world. But we’re left with lawsuits. Some of those lawsuits are absolutely legitimate. I came to your site and I couldn’t make it work and now I’m going to sue you. Others of them are more of what we call kind of surf by, there’ll be one attorney and one plaintiff, and they’re suing 45 people and all at one time. And so really clearly, some folks, I guess, in a different context, you would say ambulance chasing. Right? We’re just trying to do that. That doesn’t mean that you should take those any less seriously. And some of them can seem really scammy.

Bet Hannon: We had a client get one, when we Googled the attorney that it came from, he’d been disbarred three times. I mean it would’ve been really easy to just sort of say, well, that’s just a scam. I’m not even going to pay attention to it. But as that client’s attorney, and we said to them, you can’t do that. You have to take it seriously. You don’t necessarily have to respond to them and get sucked in to them, but you need to make sure that you’re paying attention because they did raise some issues about your accessibility.

Bet Hannon: And so it does leave you vulnerable. So you want to make sure that even if the letters just seem crazy, that you’re paying attention to it, notice if they specified something, what they did. We also try to, if you’ve been working on accessibility, we encourage folks to put an accessibility policy on their statement, and usually it has three parts, it says-

Bjork Ostrom: On their site, like in their footer?

Bet Hannon: On their site. Yep, right next to the privacy policy, that says, we want everybody to be able to use this site. We specifically have been working to make this site accessible, using… And then the typical standards that people use are the website content accessibility guidelines that comes out of W3, at a AA standard usually. And so we’re trying to do that. This is our goal. And then if you see anything or you have any problems, let us know because, I mean, there’s no way to do it all, but if you’re inviting people to come to you first, that gives you at least a leg to… Now, you got to take it seriously when they do, but at the same time, then that gives you some… You can say to the person who comes, surfed by, sued you, you didn’t pay attention to emailing me first and maybe that’ll buy you a little time to try and make it accessible.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And in a situation like that, if you fix the things that are addressed in the statement, does that then create the ability for you to respond in a way, where it’s like, “Hey, thanks for the heads up on this litigious action that you took against us. We’ve actually fixed these and updated them,” or is it kind of that your historical wrongs can be brought against you?

Bet Hannon: Yeah, no, once you fix… It’s current, that’s my understanding. Although, these court cases are changing all the time. Every new one that comes out adds a new little nuance. And so I don’t think it’s so much retroactive. I think what I would do… And I’m not an attorney and if you get one of these letters, you definitely should contact your own attorney, right? But I do think your attorney might advise you to not necessarily engage with the letter writer, let them be there, but definitely start fixing the pieces of this so that you’ve got a leg to stand on. A lot of times, those sorts of threats of lawsuits, when they do begin to… The demand letter is like the intention, I’m going to sue you. When you get to actually suing it actually costs them a little money to get that far, so fewer of those come, I wouldn’t bet on that.

Bet Hannon: But when they do come, most of those lawsuits end up being settled rather than litigated. But even then, that’s a lot of money to pay your attorney to represent you in all of that. And then you’ve got to pay to, if you need help getting your site accessible, and sometimes on a really short timeframe, sometimes the courts have said, you have 30 days to make those websites accessible, and that’s like, wow, there’s 10,000 posts here. How are we going to do that, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Do you see any correlation to these being bigger sites versus… Because I would imagine on one extreme, let’s say my dad, who’s a potter and he does ceramics. He doesn’t actually have a really active site right now, but let’s say he did, and he got one of these he’d be like, wait, what? Does that happen, and what happens in situations like that?

Bet Hannon: I think the folks that are really trying to troll for these are really just using AI to do a little kind of quick test and say, oh, they’re missing some alt texts, we’ll just… So I don’t know that it’s a correlation so much, as they’re just trying to throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. I do think you’re at a higher risk if you have… If you have a website that really is pretty much just a digital brochure for your plumbing business, call us, there’s not a contact form, your risk is really very low.

Bet Hannon: And then the more interactive or complex the pieces and content of your site are, the more that risk increases. So if you have an e-commerce site where people have got to put stuff in their cart and then check out, or if you’ve got a lawn registration form for your membership site, or a lot of these recipe pieces that have, you’ve got to work your way through the content, or there are videos that then need to have their transcripts and all of those kinds of things.

Bet Hannon: So part of it is just what the site is makes you at a higher risk for having stuff stick when it does.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. Can you talk about videos? So we talked about photos and alt text, and then how about videos? And a lot of videos on recipe sites will be audio-only, so there won’t be the transcript necessarily. What do you do in situations like that?

Bet Hannon: If it truly is audio-only, then you should note that somewhere because if I’m deaf, and I just come to your site and I see the video playing, I don’t know that it’s audio-only. I’m assuming because 99% of other sites that I have visited have a video that’s describing something. And you can just put on it, just like you might turn on captions on your television, it just says soft music playing-

Bjork Ostrom: Cheerful music playing or something, yeah.

Bet Hannon: Yeah, ominous music, right? Whatever it is, depending on the recipe. So that’s one thing. You can put a transcript there. I mean, better yet than a transcript would be to put in captions. And you can upload that to Google. Google can do that for you through voice recognition, and then you can fix the problems because of course AI is never quite perfect, but if you upload it and then you fix those, you win doubly, even more actually, because research shows that on social media and sites like recipe blogs, a huge portion, maybe as close as 50% of people are listening with the sound off.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Bet Hannon: So if you’re posting something on social media, if people are coming to your site, they’re listening with the sound off. I’m looking at that blog. I’m looking at that recipe while my kids are watching TV and I don’t want to distract them, or all kinds of ways that people with no disabilities for hearing are watching things with the sound off. And so you would get way more traction for what’s going on in the video with captions.

Bjork Ostrom: It creates a stickier video regardless. And in a situation where, let’s say you’re not doing a voiceover, your point would be still helpful to have some type of notation around that so people, when they’re watching it, they know that there’s not somebody speaking the directions over it, there’s whatever you said, like cheerful music or ominous music or whatever it is, so people know. So that makes sense.

Bet Hannon: Yep. Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things you had mentioned, when we were chatting before is the availability of tax credits for people who are looking to invest into accessibility, what does that look like? And how do people know if they’re eligible for that? And how do you invest into that?

Bet Hannon: So we talk about Americans with Disabilities Act, and part of that act was to create a way that brick and mortar store owners, business owners, could have some tax credits for working to make things more accessible. In more recent years, that tax credit has also applied to websites and SaaS platforms and other kinds of pieces. So to be eligible, you have to be a for-profit business, you have to be making a profit, and you have to have, either under a million dollars in revenue or under 30 employees. So you can make over a million dollars in revenue, but have less than 30 employees, you still qualify. So one of those two.

Bet Hannon: And then you can get up to 50% of what you spend, so say you spend $5,000 for an audit. You could get a $2,500 tax credit. And the credit is not a refundable thing, it just reduces the amount of tax you owe. And you can repeat that every single year, right? If you get an audit on your site every single year, you can keep taking that tax credit and you can take up to $10,000 in expenses, so get a $5,000 tax credit.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. So for a business owner, you can think about that as an expense. So first there’s a tax credit, 50%. And then additional, above that that you’re spending is an expense, which that will reduce your taxable income. So you can start to see how this looks different from an expense standpoint, because you essentially give it like a 50% cut. And then depending on which tax bracket you’re in, you get a cut after that as well, based on the expense running through your business.

Bet Hannon: Yeah. The key is that you’ve got to pay it out upfront, right? You have to have the cash flow to pay it out upfront, and then wait until next year tax… When you’re preparing your taxes again to get that credit, but it’s a huge thing. And it’s not… You might think, oh, it’s only for super-specific accessibility things, but if you redesign your website and you are doing that to get it to be more accessible, you’re making sure that you’re working with a developer that’s going to help you make that more accessible, you can take the whole project as part of that. And so the key is that you need to make sure that you’re getting good receipts or good invoices or bills from those activities that clearly state that it’s related to accessibility, but-

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And at that point it would be talking with your CPA or tax person to make sure that they understand it.

Bet Hannon: Yeah. And the form is, I think 8826, but it talks about disability improvements.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. 8826, you said?

Bet Hannon: 8826, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s me personally making a note on my end for it. So the other thing you had mentioned was the possibility of doing insurance. And I know a lot of times we think about business insurance, right? If you have a brick and mortar store, you have insurance in case there’s a break-in, or a fire, or we have house insurance. We don’t often think about, and we should, insurance for online businesses. And this being an example of an area that you could get insurance, do you know, what does that end up costing? It’s maybe hard to say, and how do people go about getting that?

Bet Hannon: No, it’s pretty clear actually. So I only know of one company doing this so far. I suspect that it may increase as we are moving forward. They offer up to $50,000 in coverage. So if you think about what you would have to pay for your attorney and then the fees for making your site accessible, if you had damages that you had to pay. So all of that, it starts at… And there’s two ways you can do it, you can do the insurance alone, that’s about $1000 a year. And then you can do, for $2,000 a year, they are partnered with a special agency that really works at helping to get the website accessible.

Bet Hannon: That coverage, it’s a flat fee because it starts out at only, I think it’s $10,000 worth of coverage. And then as you meet some milestones to make your site more accessible, it can get up to 50,000. And so you’ve got to do some pieces of that, but they talk about, you could get almost all of the first… You could get up to 25,000 within just a day or so of work. It’s not a huge thing. And I can get you a link for that, we can put it in the show notes if you want, but-

Bjork Ostrom: Great. What is the company name that does that?

Bet Hannon: Nebula Media is the agency that’s working with the insurance company. But I have to remember… The insurance company is related, I’m not going to say, because I’ll be afraid I’ll quote it wrong, but-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. Right. We can put in the show notes after. So if people want to check that out, that’s great. And then how about on the audit side, I know that you spend a lot of time doing that, and do accessibility audits. You explained a little bit, you’d pull out some pages or look at if you have a certain page that looks one way and then a post that looks another way in your homepage, you’d probably look at the major components of a website. What would that process look like?

Bet Hannon: Yeah. And then you’re looking at also the site-specific things. So are there skip links, things that get people directly to the content, is the menu accessible. Once in a while, we’ll see someone that has a search bar that’s what’s called a keyboard trap. So you can get into the search bar, but you can’t get out of it. Or an inaccessible slide or something like that. So yeah, we would basically spend… Our team would spend time looking at those site-wide pieces as well as every single page. And we compile all of that, we put it together in, we have a report that we send out that gives you an A B C D E F grade, based on the number of criteria that you failed.

Bet Hannon: And then we come back with exactly what we tested, exactly what you passed, where you failed, and then some recommendations for what you need to do. And we divide that into things that a site owner can generally do or a content person could do, and things that you might need a developer’s help with.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. That’s great. So the content side would be things that you could do, historically looking back, but also my guess is, things that you could adopt as best practices moving forward. Is that a part of it is, hey, there’s going to be things that as you’re creating content, it’s going to be a filter that you think about when you are in content creation, like alt text for images.

Bet Hannon: Yeah. And there are a couple plugins out there that you can find in the WordPress repository that will do an automatic check of that content before you publish. But even then, you have to be on board for it and your team, if you have a team of people, has to be on board for it. We’ve had a client that we’ve worked with, where we’ve worked with them, they have a compliance requirement. And so we’ve worked with them, we’ve done training. They’ve gotten there. We’ve worked with the content creators. And then they have us come back every year to do an audit. Well, every single time we come back to do an audit, it’s the same content creators making the same errors again and again, right?

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s maybe processes and standard operating procedures, things like that, that would be able to catch that. It’s one thing-

Bet Hannon: Yeah, or even sticks and carrots, I’m aware of some municipality… No, it’s like all government sites have to be accessible. So I’m aware of one city government, where they have maybe like 75 content creators and they have that kind of an AI check for content-related stuff. And so when they find something that you put in, they identify you put in that content that wasn’t accessible, you have to go back and fix it, I think me knowing that I have to go back and fix it is a big piece of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. And it will be attached to your name-

Bet Hannon: And there’s a certain point at which it starts going in your HR file. And ultimately if you keep doing it, you could get fired, so you got some consequences for your…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s one of the main uses of… The first use that we kind of demo, we created a tool called Clariti, Clariti with an i. And the idea is, we’re kind of shifting away from doing all of our content optimization in a spreadsheet and thinking about how do we build a software tool around this. One of the checks that it does is, it says, okay, surface all of the images without Alt text, you can take all of those posts and then put them into a project to go through an update alt text. But that being an example of kind of the, when you talk about low hanging fruit. To your point before, you have to do the work. It’s one thing to know, it’s another thing to actually do the work with it. So you have to be willing to do the work, but it doesn’t all have to be done at once, like you said before, little by little, over time making improvements. And I think it’s something that people want to do-

Bet Hannon: And some of those things that are low hanging, you could work for instance, with a VA, if you needed to do, a virtual assistant to do some of those kind of pieces, you would want to do some training and do some quality checking, make sure that was happening well. I would be really careful about using things that are artificial intelligence though. Some they can be a great help, so for instance, there is a plugin, a paid plugin that you can get, that will go through all of your images in the media library and your posts and look for the ones without alt text. And then it will suggest alt text to you. But it’s using AI to suggest alt text. And so we had a client where the image was, I presume a man, I presume the dad with the kid on the beach, and it said, “Scary people in masks.” And I’m like, no, no.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. Daniel, who’s on our team and a developer, I know we’ve touched base on Daniel. So we did this acquisition of this content site, called Curbly. One of the things we did is we wanted to add Alt texts to all the images. So we used… It was kind of this in-between. And there was multiple thousands, I forget how many, but it was an insane amount. But he pulled all that information and then used, there’s a service within Amazon where you can hire people at scale for tasky projects, I forget what the name of it is-

Bet Hannon: I’ve heard of it, but I don’t remember the name.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. But anyways, that was our solution. And then we went through and manually adjusted as needed, if there was anything that was a little bit off. So it’s kind of this in-between of human power to get us 90% of the way there on multiple thousands of images, and then us scanning through and being like, is this right, or is it off a little bit, and adjusting as needed. So it was kind of a cool solution that he came up with. My guess is after hearing this, there’ll be a lot of people who are interested in connecting and working with you. Want to make sure that they are accessible for all the right reasons, for doing that, and also just to be, from a legal perspective, to be safe in that regard. Are you working with people, do you do audits? What does that look like? How do people connect with you if they do want to work together?

Bet Hannon: Yeah. So just reach out. I’m on Twitter @BetHannon. Our website is BHMbizsites. So B-H-M-B-I-Z-S-I-T-E-S.com. Just shoot us, through the contact form there, just connect up and we can sort of walk you through some of the options related to accessibility. We typically do, if we’re doing audits, we have done an audit where it was just one page because the person just wanted to get a basic sense of how things were going. More typically we do 10 URLs. We have done some bigger ones that are 25 or 50 URLs. Those are much bigger projects, but people do that. We don’t just do audits and remediations, I mean, we’re a development shop too. So we do new site development. So if people are looking forward to doing a new website design, we certainly are open to have those conversations too.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Bet, thanks so much for coming on.

Bet Hannon: Yeah. Oh, you’re welcome. Good to chat with you.

Bjork Ostrom: Another thank you to Bet for coming on and sharing her story, her insights, her knowledge, and also the heart behind what she does. And again, be sure to check out what she does. If you have a site, they do really good work all around accessibility and how you can really focus on that for your site, not only because it’s smart, but also because it’s right, it’s the thing that you want to be doing to make your site accessible, to make sure that people can access it in a way, regardless of how it is they take in information and operate in the world.

Bjork Ostrom: So thanks to Bet for coming on. One more big or quick, it won’t be big, it’ll be a small reminder for the survey, foodbloggerpro.com/survey, would really appreciate if you jump in and take that survey, it’ll wrap up at the end of the day on March 11th, and you’ll get a chance to win that $100 Amazon gift card. That’s a wrap for this episode. Again, thanks to Bet for coming on, and thanks to you for listening. Make it a great week. Thanks.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey folks, this episode is sponsored by our sister site, WP Tasty. WP as in WordPress. WP Tasty makes awesome WordPress plugins for bloggers, publishers, people who have WordPress sites, really anybody who’s a creator or business owner, blogger maker, whatever word you want to use. So if you publish food content, which is a lot of you, right? Food Blogger Pro Podcast, or you monetize through affiliate links which also is a lot of you, or share your content on Pinterest for Pinterest is an important strategy for you, you can listen up because WP Tasty plugins are all about helping you with those areas. Optimizing Google search and affiliate opportunities in Pinterest. We have right now three different plugins where I was thinking about what are the areas of opportunity. And these are the three we have identified in the past and we’ll continue to look at not only improving these, but also looking at other opportunities.

Bjork Ostrom: The three are, Tasty Recipes, and this is a recipe plugin for food bloggers. Recipe plugins obvious are very critical. The second is Tasty links. Tasty links is all about linking. And a lot of people, most people use that for affiliate links. So all about auto-linking in a way that makes it really easy to maximize affiliate income and to add internal links. And then Tasty Pins is all about Pinterest. It’s optimizing for Pinterest in numerous different ways.

Bjork Ostrom: The great news is, kicking off the new year here, all of these plugins are on sale. It’s at 20% discount. It’s kind of a start the new year fresh mentality, optimize in ways that you maybe haven’t before. And we want to offer that to all Food Blogger Pro listeners and really anybody who buys a plugin. So check that out. We have all three of these plugins on Pinch of Yum. So we use these each and every day. And with that purchase comes the ability to use that plugin forever and unlimited support for a year. So if you have questions, if you have needs, you can use the support from the WP Tasty team who’s incredible. You continue to use the plugin as long as you want, but the subscription gets you support and continual updates. So that’s what you’re getting with that subscription, that annual subscription.

Bjork Ostrom: And all of those plugins are 20% off here. If you want to take advantage of that discount, when you are checking out, you can use the discount code TASTY2022. Tasty as in something that tastes good and then the year 2022. You can do that all caps and all one word at the checkout in the discount code field. Again, that’s TASTY2022 to get 20% off Tasty Recipes, Tasty Pins, or Tasty Links. And again, this sale wraps up January 13th. So if you want to take advantage of that, make sure to head over to WP Tasty, the letter W, the letter P, and then the word tasty.com to get that 20% discount on any of those plugins. So maybe you’re using one already, but you want to fill out kind of the suite of WP Tasty plugins, you can go and pick those up today and get that discount. And we want to thank WP Tasty for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey, folks, fun interview coming your way. One of my favorite people to talk to on this podcast, Andrew Wilder from NerdPress. Andrew knows many things well. He knows two things really well. He knows WordPress and he knows food and recipe sites. Those are great things to be talking about on this podcast. And that’s why we have Andrew back often as a guest to get kind of a state of tech, where are things at, what are some considerations, what are the things you need to know and need to be aware of. And Andrew and his team day in and day out really eat, sleep and breathe, to use a food analogy, this WordPress world and this food blog world. We’re going to be talking to Andrew about all things tech, all things WordPress and we’re also going to be hitting some important plugins that you need to be using on your site as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we jump in, I want to give another shout-out to our Facebook group. It’s been really fun to start to interact with and have conversations with people who listen to this podcast. Podcasts are really a one-way thing. I record an interview, I talk into a mic sitting in this room, but we can also have a conversation. We can chat. And some of us do that in Food Blogger Pro, on the Food Blogger Pro Community. That’s really where we dive deep into certain topics, live Q&As, we do troubleshooting. But we also have this podcast group on Facebook. You can get there by going to foodbloggerpro.com/facebook. And that will bring you to the login where you can request to join the group. Last I checked, in our first week of the podcast or announcing it in the first week, we had over 100 folks who had joined to be a part of it. I’m pulling it up right now. It’s just been really fun to see the conversations that are happening and the interactions that are happening.

Bjork Ostrom: I said over 100, it’s actually when I look at it now, it’s 99. So it’s not over 100, it’s just under 100, but my guess is by the time that you hear this they’ll be over 100. So really excited about this community and a place to have conversations about the podcast. Ask questions. If we have guests on, they’ll be able to ask questions. And we want to make sure that you are a part of that. So let’s go ahead and jump into this interview with Andrew from NerdPress. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Wilder: Hello. Happy to be back.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We’ve talked in many different places over many years. And so, usually I’d say like, “Hey, this is your second time on the podcast.” For you, I don’t know. You’re in the category of people who have kind of lost track how many times you’ve been on the podcast. You’ve done live Q&As. And it’s always really valuable, so fun to have you back here.

Andrew Wilder: It’s at least less than 10, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s like, still two hands…

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, depending on my fingers, we can’t see it but…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, but it’s still under 10, probably over five in terms of different places you’ve made appearances between live Q&As with the Food Blogger Pro audience and podcasts, so fun to have you back here. I feel like we do… I don’t know if it’s not officially an annual, but it feels like we check in every once in a while and say like, “Hey, give us this state of kind of the technology side of what’s happening in the publishing space,” specifically around food because you work with a lot of food sites. You have a really valuable… It’s a valuable conversation because you have insights in ways that most people don’t because of what you and your team do. Can you explain a little bit about what NerdPress is and how that gives you kind of an inside look at the conversations and the inner workings of sites?

Andrew Wilder: Sure. So NerdPress is a digital agency. I like to say we keep websites running smoothly. So we work exclusively on WordPress websites and we do maintenance and support. It just kind of worked out that like 95% of our clients are food bloggers.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: You know, I got into it because I was a food blogger and I knew the tech stuff and it just kind of took off from there. And so 10 years later, we’re now a team of 13 people and we are doing everything from backup, security, regular updates, site speed optimization, that’s a lot of what we’re doing these days.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: And also just best practices, you know? So like you’re saying, because we work across so many different websites or just the sheer number of sites, we see patterns very quickly and we start to see what’s working and what’s not working and how things are evolving over time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. We’re going to talk about some of those things today. I’m curious to know. We’ve had connections like I’ve said throughout the years. It feels like you went from like you working 23 hours a day, to a team of 13 relatively quickly. Was it like four or five years? Three or four years? What did that look like in terms of growing that team? It seems like it happened pretty quick.

Andrew Wilder: It’s been hard. Yeah, in retrospect it seems fast. At the time, it didn’t, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: So, yeah, it was just me until 2017. And then Sergio was my first hire, and he’s still working with us. He’s now our onboarding team leader. Sergio and I actually met at a WordCamp. Once we’re all meeting in person again, I highly recommend you start going to your local WordCamps by the way. They’re small, semi-independently organized conferences, usually two days. They’re like 40 or 50 bucks for the two days and includes lunch and a t-shirt. The presentations are usually excellent. I’m sorry, I just had to throw in a plug for WordCamp.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. I love that. So there’s certain thing about the in-person event that is significant in terms of connections and interactions and whatnot.

Andrew Wilder: Oh yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: And I was kind of hoping to find somebody to help because I was pretty desperate at that point. I was stretched pretty thin. I happened to sit next to Sergio on a session about the WordPress command-line interface. And afterwards, he was super generous showing me some tricks he had learned. He was local in LA because WordCamps are local. And we went out to lunch the next week and I basically offered him a job. And we’ve been working together since.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Andrew Wilder: So going from one person to two people was really, really, really hard because so much of it was in my head. I was tracking a couple hundred sites and who was doing what and what they needed to know and everything. So we started to document everything. I’d say it took almost a year before Sergio was really up to speed on everything just because there was so much. And then actually I’ll give a shout-out to the Food Blogger Pro community. My next hire was Ben from Ramshackle…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, Ben’s awesome.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. From Ramshackle Pantry. Ben was in the forums, helping people out. He actually was looking for some pickup work and he cold emailed me with a great email and said, “Hey, I’ve seen you in the forums. If you’re looking for more help…” He said it much better than I would’ve.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What was great about it? Just how he framed it up?

Andrew Wilder: Oh, it’s just he covered all the bases and it was enjoyable to read. And then I remember going back and looking at some of his posts in the forums. He was tremendously helpful, but he was also really funny.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Andrew Wilder: I laughed out loud…

Bjork Ostrom: That combination is such a great thing, to be able to have somebody who has a lot of personality and is also really helpful.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. So Ben works for us part-time. He’s always been part-time because he spends the rest of his time working on his food blog. So that works really well too. So having another food blogger in our midst has been great. And we’ve grown since then. Kari also has a food blog. Heather is now basically our head of operations. And then basically last year after the pandemic started, it got really, really busy. As you all know, it was scary in April. And then in May, traffic just went sky high and we really needed more help. And then it took a little while to get there, but we hired Trevor and Chynna in the fall of last year. And then six months later, we hired another six people in May.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, wow. That’s awesome.

Andrew Wilder: Documentation is the key.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about that? That’s something that we’ve been learning as well. I think it’s interesting to have these conversations about the tactical things within blogging which we’ll get to in a minute here, but also I think there’s something about building a team and building a business which you’ve done which people who listen to this podcasts are interested in, and processing and documentation being such a key part of that. Can you talk about how you do that? When should people start to do it? Do you wish that you would’ve done it earlier? Or was it at the right time that you did it? What advice would you have around documentation and processes?

Andrew Wilder: Definitely do it earlier. If it’s only in your head, you should document it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: One of the other things though is if you’re doing the same kind of processes over and over again like writing a blog post, there are certain steps in every blog post that you want to check all these boxes, right? You want to make sure you have all your headers set correctly, your featured image, the SEO settings, like you’ve set the categories, you’ve made sure the slug is correct. All of those little details. And if it’s in your head, some stuff is going to inevitably slip through the cracks. So even if it’s just you doing the work, it’s really helpful to have a checklist.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: But the tool that we use for all of our onboarding and setup is called Process Street. It’s process.st. And I know you guys use it a lot too. It’s basically repeatable checklists. And so even if it’s just you using it, you have this checklist. Every time you do a blog post, you spin up your checklist and you go through all those points.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We use Process Street. We’ve also started to look at doing Google Drive just from a cost perspective. One of the things that we learned is essentially we’re just creating a… Different than probably what you’re doing is we’re creating essentially it’s like a processes of list of maybe five things with like one sentence, “Here’s how you do it.” I would imagine part of what you’re doing is maybe screenshots and a little bit more in-depth of like this step, this step, this step. So we’ve used both, like both.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that I’ve started to do is, if I know that I need a process around something, I’ll just record a video. So this could be something as an alternative for people if you know that you want to document things. You could just record a video. We use Loom. You could have a Loom library of videos. And then if you had somebody who did come on, they could go through the process of creating the processes as long as they have the videos of you doing it, which is one of the things that we’ve done. But point is, you had mentioned this, it was all in your head. And so part of the work wasn’t just explaining it, it was documenting everything that was in your head, which I’m guessing there was a lot of stuff in your head.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. And we effectively support every plugin out there, you know?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: As with questions and everything. So we have like an incredible breadth of information and expertise and also an incredible depth. And so documenting all that is time-consuming. It will be a never-ending project. Because once you have the documentation, you also have to keep it updated, which is also really hard.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: But the nice thing is once you document it for yourself, your first hire, they can jump right in, right? Process Street also is multi-user, so we can assign checklists to people. We can pass tasks off back and forth. We have it integrated with Slack. So we get notifications in there. It’s definitely nice to have that tool in place. The other thing we’re using for documentation now, we just started recently, is called Guru, G-U-R-U. I think it’s getguru.com. We looked at a lot of different documentation and knowledge-based systems.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: Heather looked at dozens of them. And we wanted to find one that was enjoyable to use, not just easy to use, so we’d actually use it. And one thing we like about Guru is, instead of calling them articles or posts, they call them cards. And so they’re designed to be short. So it’s like, here’s the one question and the one answer. And if you have another answer, you make a different card. So it’s not like piles and piles of stuff to sift through. It’s like, “Hey, how do I do this? Oh, wait, there’s the answer.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Oh, interesting. Huh.

Andrew Wilder: So every time we see a question come up more than once, we create a Guru card.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. How do you differentiate between something going through Guru versus going to Process Street?

Andrew Wilder: We’re using Process Street for processes. And primarily, it’s for our on-boarding stuff. So when we have someone sign up with us, we have like a 50 point checklist of all the setup things we do for our support plans. So we’re primarily using Process Street for that. Or if somebody changes web hosting, we have to reconfigure some of our services, we have a checklist that we go through on that.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Cool. I’ll check that out. Fun to see this. We’re always looking to figure out ways to allow people to find answers on their own. So instead of pinging somebody on Slack and saying like, “Hey, how do you do this?”, if you have somewhere that somebody can go first and look to see, “Hey, where is this? Or how do you do this?”, that’s going to be a win automatically. And sometimes I even find it’s myself. Like I’ve done the thing before, but it’s like I kind of have to trigger my brain to work a little bit harder than it should because I’m kind of relearning it every time. It’s like a quarterly or maybe an annual thing. What does end of year look like for payroll? It’s like, “Oh…”

Andrew Wilder: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m kind of learning it again every year. And when we’re recording, this is the end of the year which is why I’m thinking of that. But processes. Cool to see a solution like Guru offering a solution to that. So fun to hear about that. And congratulations to you. Obviously it’s because you do good work. A lot of that has to do with knowing the industry really well, which is my transition into the first thing that we’re going to talk about, which is Core Web Vitals. What is Core Web Vitals? There’s some changes coming down the line in February that will impact that. Can you explain what it is and what those updates are?

Andrew Wilder: Sure. And I think last time I was on, we spent the whole episode talking about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: So we should definitely link to that in the show notes. Core Web Vitals is basically a set of three different metrics that Google has rolled out and said, “Hey, these are for users.” Google just kind of decided this as Google does. But there’s three metrics that are related to speed and performance and basically usability or user experience.

Andrew Wilder: So the three are, Largest Contentful Paint which is how fast the biggest thing on the screen shows up before you start scrolling, so usually that’s like your header or your image. First input delay, which is how interactive the site is when you first try to interact with it. Most food blogs don’t have a problem with this, thankfully. And then the third one, and this is probably the hardest, is called Cumulative Layout Shift. And that’s basically how much stuff moves around on the page as you’re trying to interact with it. So as you scroll, does something load and move the text over and make it hard to read? It’s the worst thing when you’re trying to hit add the cart and you hit something moves right as you click and you instead remove it from your card or whatever, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: So those three metrics together are called the Core Web Vitals. They were actually rolled out on mobile in June of this year. So last time we talked, it was just about to happen. Google had announced it was coming. They’re actually part of the page experience algorithm, which includes also “Is the site mobile friendly? Is it SSL? Does it have any malware security issues?” Like those things. So all of that is called the page experience algorithm. And Google uses that as a ranking factor when deciding which sites to move to the top. I will say it’s not a huge ranking factor. I think people tend to give this more weight than it deserves because they know what it is.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. It’s like the one thing that Google said, “Here’s this thing we’re including in the algorithm.” And so when you do have that information, you focus on what you can control. And in this place, people know what they can control it and so they’re like, “Hey, let’s optimize for this.” Which isn’t bad, but your point is, it’s not like it’s 60% of the ranking algorithm.

Andrew Wilder: Right. At this point, it is slightly more than a tiebreaker.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So all things being equal, if your Core Web Vitals are strong, that’s going to be an advantage?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. And what made it even more confusing was this year, there were so many Core updates with Google where they changed the algorithm significantly where lots of people see a shift. And they did a Core algorithm update at the beginning of June and at the beginning of July. They started rolling out the new page experience Core Web Vitals in the middle of June for two months. So people saw ranking changes because of the Core updates, but they thought it was the Core Web Vitals.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: And so they were panicking. They’re like, “My Core Web Vitals are bad and my traffic is tanking.” And we’re like, “Actually, your Core Web Vitals are not the problem.” Google really changed up a lot in those two months. So there was a lot of confusion there just because of the timing.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Sure. Listen to the podcast that we did, that would be a good step for people. For other ones who are like, “Ah, Core Web Vitals, how do I do that well?” Would there be a good resource that we could link to or somewhere that they could check those out and then a test that they could run to see where they are? And then what’s coming down the line in terms of what you had mentioned in regards to some of the updates that are happening and what do people need to be aware of with that?

Andrew Wilder: I love your leading questions. Thank you. It makes it so easy. So we use the Google PageSpeed Insights testing tool. That’s our primary testing tool. We’ll link that on the show notes. They just changed the address on it. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, we can do that.

Andrew Wilder: But basically, you go to PageSpeed Insights, you type in a URL or you paste in a URL from your site, it’ll run a speed test. And I think in our podcast we talked through the different sections of that. They’ve actually changed the design. There’s a lot more explanation. I think it’s a little bit more clear if you’re trying to figure out how to use it.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: They’ve deemphasized the overall score, which is great because that score is just a simulated test. And they’ve moved the Core Web Vital stuff, which is actually what Google uses to rank towards the top.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: There is one big thing I want to mention on this. Well, two things we’ve kind of… Well, one thing we figured out since we last talked, when Google originally rolled out Core Web Vitals, they said it was going to be pass/fail. They said either you pass or you don’t. Either you get the ranking boost or you don’t. And they’ve very quietly backpedaled on that, buried in and asked me anything with some of the Google spokespeople. I think it was back in May or June, there was a question about this. And they actually said that the closer you get to the good range, the better. So let’s say your Cumulative Layout Shift is 0.4 and you make some improvements and you get it to 0.2, that’s still going to show up as either poor or needs improvement, but it’s actually better.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: So you will get a little bit of a performance boost or a ranking boost from that. Once you get into the good range, which for CLS is 0.1, there’s no additional SEO benefit. So it’s important to improve your Core Web Vitals, but if you’re 0.11 on CLS, what’s crazy is it’s going to say fail right at the top of the PageSpeed Insights test.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: We’ve been talking to Google, I’ve been tweeting at them. I hope they’re going to change the language. They need to get rid of the words pass and fail because it’s not that anymore.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: And it says this in Google Search console as well. So if you’re 0.11, it needs improvement. But it’s so close to 0.10 that I can’t imagine there’s going to be any sort of actual ranking difference, because there’s so many other factors here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: And then-

Bjork Ostrom: But people might perceive it as, if it says fail, they’re like, “This is not working and this is bad.”

Andrew Wilder: Right. And I think it does everybody a disservice because a lot of our clients come to us and say, “I’ve got this problem and traffic is going down” or something and they think it’s Core Web Vitals. And so they’re actually barking up the wrong tree.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: Now, it is important to improve this, not just for Google but for your users. And I do want to clarify that even though once you get into the good range, there’s no additional SEO benefit. Faster or smoother is always better for your users. So the goal for CLS would be to be 0.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Andrew Wilder: But it’s not a make or break…

Bjork Ostrom: And essentially that’s what Google’s after, is creating a metric to track the user experience on your site. Sometimes we lose track of that and we’re like, “Oh, this is just this thing we’re doing to please Google.” But what Google’s trying to do is move content to a place that is a better user experience. Like they’re trying to improve the experience of the web and they say, “You’re going to be able to do this by not having your pages shift all over the place.” And a lot of times people will attribute to Google the quality of a page, and so they say, “Hey, we’re going to show pages that have a better experience because we believe that’s going to serve people better who use Google.” And so they’re kind of giving you clues around, “Hey, this is an important thing and should be prioritized.” It’s not like some random thing that Google’s just said, “Hey, do this.” It’s like, “How do you improve the user experience?”

Andrew Wilder: I think that’s an excellent point. I think so many people get bogged down in the score thing and the Google part of it that they lose track of like, this is all supposed to be in service to your users or your visitors.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Great. And so that was previously mobile-focused. Now it’s moving to be also desktop-focused. Is that right?

Andrew Wilder: Yep. So they’ve announced that they’re going to start incorporating Core Web Vitals into of the desktop page experience algorithm starting in February 2022.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: I think it’s probably going to take a month or two to roll out like it did for mobile. What’s interesting is we’re seeing different challenges on desktop than mobile. For mobile, usually it’s Cumulative Layout Shift that’s really tricky to pin down. On desktop, where we’re struggling more and where it’s harder is Largest Contentful Paint. The reason for that is you’ve got more room for more of your blog post on the desktop screen. And usually, there’s a really big picture at the top of the post.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: And so, it depends on your site and your layout and how much text you have at the beginning. So every site’s a little different. But most often, you got a big picture that’s supposed to look beautiful to attract people to read the rest of your post, but that’s the largest element and pictures take a long time to download. And so, you might have a reasonably fast site, but if it comes in at 2.8 seconds, technically you’re not in the good range. And that can be hard. So we’re still working on techniques for that.

Bjork Ostrom: Point being on desktop when it’s Largest Contentful Paint, it’s like how long does it take the most significant thing on the page to load? When you’re looking on a desktop like a monitor, that’s a bigger viewing area which means that there’s more opportunity for that big image to be the largest thing on the page, and big images take a long time to download. So it’s not only the biggest thing in terms of how much space it takes up, it’s also the biggest thing in terms of how long it takes to download. So if that shift to desktop or now included desktop in Core Web Vitals, Largest Contentful Paint’s going to be impacted by that huge image. So ideas around, not that there’s a solution yet, it sounds like you’re kind of working on it and thinking about it, could be to have like a smaller, lighter image or maybe to have more text that takes up more space. Is that kind of in the general category or area of what you’re thinking about in terms of solutions?

Andrew Wilder: Yep. And on mobile, usually adding like a sentence or two at the beginning is enough to get the image, the first photo-

Bjork Ostrom: Down far enough.

Andrew Wilder: … down far enough out of the view.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: On desktop, with most sites you’d need like three paragraphs.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: So that’s not necessarily the best solution.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Andrew Wilder: And then on mobile, you’ve got all that text to scroll through before you get. So I don’t think that’s the best way to go. One of the things we’re looking at now is, well, we use WP Rocket for speed optimization. And that has what’s called lazy loading images where it loads images as they’re needed. Like as you scroll, when they get closer to being in view, it downloads the image as needed. So it’s like just in-time image delivery. And right now, WP Rocket’s JavaScript that does this tries to lazy load the first image. And it should still pop up right away, but there’s a delay with the JavaScript processing. We’re now pushing WP Rocket to try to… This has been a feature request for a while.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: We’re pushing them to be like, “Hey, don’t lazy load that first image.” It’s really complicated to do this though.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Meaning don’t load that right away?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. It’s just to identify what the first image is. And then is it in the viewport, is it visible right away or not, should we apply this? It’s really complicated stuff. I was the one who told WP Rocket support, like, “Hey, is coming in February. We need to prioritize this.” And so hopefully their team is going to be able to crack this. I will say there are some other optimization plugins that do this natively, so I know it’s possible. WP Rocket is still fantastic so I’m hoping that they will get this figured out in the next month or two.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: But it’s not just that. It’s, are images optimized, right? Have you compressed your images properly? I know we’ve talked about that a lot in the past.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: There’s a lot of little pieces that go into all this site speed stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So all important things to check out, for Food Blogger Pro members, we’ve done some live Q&As with you, one recently. We also have a back catalog of those. You could dive deep on those. Check out previous podcast episodes for some of this stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: But one of the things I wanted to do with this podcast is to do kind of an annual check-in on like, “Hey, here are some of the things that I see as valuable tools, plugin services,” things like that. You mentioned WP Rocket as one of them that content creator should be aware of. So would you have a few that off the top of your head? Obviously every site’s going to be different. It’s not all going to be the same. But maybe a few that you could list off that would be important considerations? And then a quick explainer for why those would be important. We can double click on any of them that would be worthy of a double click.

Andrew Wilder: So I’m going to start with a simple one that most readers probably already have, but if they don’t, this is the first place to go, is a good Recipe plugin.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: So there are three good Recipe plugins on the market. Tasty, which is brought to you by the same crew.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Food Blogger Pro disclaimer, we have a close connection to it. Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: I think everybody probably knows that by now.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: But Tasty, WP Recipe Maker, and then Create, which is from Mediavine.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: If you’re not using one of those three, you do need to start. They’re all excellent. And it’s sort of a matter of personal preference of, “Do you like the templates? Do you like the interface? Do you like using it?”

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: They’re all really good choices. And if you are using multiple Recipe plugins, you got to work on consolidating, because they do all add code to the site. So if you’ve got half your recipes in WP Recipe Maker and half in Tasty, and you’re moving over to Tasty, you need to accelerate that process. Get them all moved over as you can remove the plugin you’re not really using anymore and just streamline things a little bit.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s part of best practice with WordPress, is how do you have as few plugins as possible while not having so few that you’re missing out on essential features? Can you talk about why that’s an important piece to not just randomly install plugins?

Andrew Wilder: Absolutely. So plugins, the idea of a plugin is it adds a feature of some kind to WordPress. It could be a really tiny plugin that has like one line of code, or it could be a really huge plugin that’s like a full e-commerce shopping cart system. And plugins can add stuff either on the back end of the site or the front end, or both. A lot of plugin developers aren’t paying attention to the things like site speed. They don’t care. So they’re going to load like 10 different JavaScripts on the front end of your site.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: And if those things are really important to your site, then that’s great. But if you’re like, “Hey, I want to be able to sell one e-book on one page,” you don’t want that shopping cart system adding weight to all 2,000 other pages on your site unnecessarily.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: So being judicious with the plugins is really important.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: When we onboard a new client, we actually do a plugin audit. So we just look through all the plugins and say, “Hey, what things are not being used? What do you have two plugins doing the same thing that we can consolidate? What plugins should you have?” And so, we kind of go through and just try to optimize and clean things up. So I’d say at least once a year, just go to the plugins page and look through and see what you are not using and get rid of it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. So Recipe plugin, obviously if you’re a recipe blogger. Do you work with any how-to sites like a home improvement, DIY? We are starting to focus on a new site. I don’t think we’ve connected with you on this Andrew, but we acquired a site called Curbly which is home improvement, DIY craft kind of content. And one of the things that we’re going to start focusing on with that is how-to, and we’re actually looking at building a plugin around that for WP Tasty. I know that Create maybe does a version of that. Do you know other ones that are in that category? And then can you talk about what’s actually happening from the code side for plugins like How-to or Recipe?

Andrew Wilder: Sure. So the reason you need to use a Recipe plugin, it’s not just to make it look pretty for your visitors. What it does on the back end in the code is it creates what’s called Recipe schema. And so there’s this specific code markup that basically says, “Hey, Google, these are the ingredients. These are the steps. This is the image.” And there’s all this code that makes it crystal clear to Google, “Hey, these are all the features of the recipe.” So Google can scan that or other tools can scan that and basically know all the information. That’s what Google uses for all the rich snippets in the search results. So when it shows the picture or the ratings or the time, stuff like that, it’s actually pulling that from the schema in the code, not on the front end of the page.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: So there’s basically a standardized Recipe schema that all these plugins generate. So HowTo is another type of schema. There’s dozens and dozens of different schema. So HowTo is basically very similar to Recipe, right? Because you’re going through and doing these steps, but it’s slightly different. So you’ll have like step number 1, step number 2. I haven’t dug into the HowTo schema, but it’s going to basically be identical.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: And I know in WP Recipe Maker you can say something as a how-to.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: Like you can just toggle that on your recipe and still use it. If you are generally a recipe blogger but you’re going to craft something with food but it’s not really edible, like you’re making Christmas decorations out of…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, or dog treats. For us, that was one.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, dog treats.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: Yes. You don’t want to call that a recipe. A recipe should just be for food for humans.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: That’s Google’s official policy on that. So that’s where you can flip the switch and make it a how-to. By the way, I think you’re going to have to call it WP Crafty.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Well, it would be Tasty Crafty. That’s what it would be. That’s our naming mechanism. Or it’ll be a new branch. There’ll be as what you were saying, WP Tasty, WP Crafty. Those would be the two differentiators DVD on the naming. Super helpful contexts.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that I learned that was kind of interesting about Web3, a lot of people are talking about Web3 which is like crypto, blockchain, cyber punks or whatever they are, but there was a little bit of momentum around the structured data, schema, being the original Web3. The idea was like, “Hey, this is going to be the new iteration of the internet” is kind of everything schema, structured data to wrap kind of identifiers around content. And I think Web3 for that kind of fizzled. And now there’s like Web3 v2 which is kind of the cryptocurrency world which is kind of interesting. But really important, and important to understand kind of the why behind that. So Recipe plugin, obviously if you’re a recipe blogger. Then there’s also the SEO world and there’s plugins for that. Would Yoast be the recommendation and one that you see the most?

Andrew Wilder: Yep. Absolutely. Yoast is still our number 1 recommendation. They have a free version. If you’re just getting started, that’s perfect. They also have a paid version and that has a few additional features that are really nice such as the orphaned content filter, which can tell you basically, “Hey, there are no other pages on your site linking into this particular page. You should probably add an internal link.”

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: So that’s a really powerful tool. But on all my personal sites, I use the free version and it’s fantastic.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. So that’s Yoast SEO. How about caching? What is caching? And then what should people do when it comes to caching on their site in terms of plugins and services?

Andrew Wilder: Caching is basically storing a copy of your content. It’s C-A-C-H-E. I will say caching is really hard. We actually joke internally at NerdPress that caching is hard. We whine about it so much so that I actually had whiskey glasses made up that are etched on the side that says “Caching is hard.” It’s something that everybody on the team-

Bjork Ostrom: Like take a shot whenever you’re just really struggling through it. Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: So it can be very complicated. But the idea is when somebody goes to a WordPress site, WordPress will generate the page and send it back to them. And generating that page takes time and resources. And so, the idea of a cache is you save a copy of that generated page and then the next person that comes along, your server will send them that copy. So you’re storing a cache of that content. So that’s how high-traffic sites can really get a lot of traffic serve all the content without crashing the server because it can’t keep up with the demand.

Andrew Wilder: Our favorite caching plugin is WP Rocket. WP Rocket doesn’t do just page optimization, but it also does page caching. It actually started primarily with that. So it’s storing all these copies of the page. That alone speeds things up. And then WP Rocket also does these on-page optimizations to help with things like Core Web Vitals where it’ll defer your JavaScript or lazy load your images and all those other kind of bells and whistles features. So WP Rocket is sort of this whole package plugin that adds all of these features to help your site run more smoothly.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And what about, do you use both of those in tandem? Could you do just one of them? What does it look like to do the plugin caching within WordPress and the service like Cloudflare that would be separate from that? How does that interact? And that feels like a point where you’d take out that shot glass and be like, “Caching is hard.”

Andrew Wilder: Yes. So Cloudflare is a separate service that is a content distribution network and a firewall. Technically, it’s a proxy service. What that means is that instead of a visitor going straight to your website, the visitor goes through a Cloudflare server. And then from that, it goes to your website. So if my server is in Chicago, let’s say, and I’m in Los Angeles and if I don’t have Cloudflare, my browser is going to request the page directly from my server in Chicago. Data on the internet travels almost the speed of light. So it’s pretty quick, but that still could add like 50 milliseconds, 100 milliseconds round trip to say for my request to travel all the way to Chicago and then the answer to travel all the way back to me in Los Angeles.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And within that, this is an interesting point that I think a lot of people don’t realize. When you have a server, your server is essentially a computer. And when you type in a URL, it’s essentially your computer calling another computer to get the information that’s on that computer. It’s kind of like me typing an email and sending it. It’s like sending it to your computer, right? That’s not exactly how it works, but it’s similar in terms of you saying pinchofyum.com, if there was no caching, we didn’t have a CDN, it would be going to wherever that location is, getting the information, coming back, putting those images on my computer, putting those words on my computer from a file and folders that were on that server. Is that more or less correct?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, I think it’s easy to forget that your website is actually on a physical computer in a data center somewhere, like in a warehouse building behind locked doors with lots of cable around and fire suppression systems. There’s actually like a room full of servers that’s actually literally serving your website.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And so the Cloudflare portion of it is, you talked about the CDN and kind of the different components of Cloudflare, how much of that do you need to understand intricately versus just know like, “This is generally what’s happening.”?

Andrew Wilder: Well, I think it’s helpful to have the general concept in your head. You don’t need to know the nitty gritty. But to understand kind of conceptually how it works, I think it’s helpful. So if we add Cloudflare to the mix, what happens is Cloudflare has like 200 data centers around the world. The reason they have so many is they want them to be close to users. So they have a Los Angeles data center, right? So if I have Cloudflare on my site but my server’s still in Chicago, when I type in eatingrules.com let’s say, my computer’s actually going to go to the Los Angeles Cloudflare data center, which is very close. So it might take five milliseconds to get the data instead of 50, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: Now, Cloudflare then says, “Hey, Andrew’s requested eatingrules.com. Do we have a copy of that? No? Okay. Well, I’m going to go back to Andrew’s server in Chicago, get a copy of the homepage, bring it back, and then serve it back to Andrew.” After that, Cloudflare’s going to store a copy of that page or the image or whatever it is. And then the next person that comes along is going to get that copy. Where it gets a little tricky is actually the example I just gave is a little more complex because I was talking about the page, not just some of the static assets like images and scripts.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: Caching that stuff is really hard. You can’t do that reliably on a Cloudflare free plan.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: It can be really complex and challenging to keep it all straight. So one of the things we do with our services, we’re actually a Cloudflare enterprise partner, which is their highest level of service. We’ve got a lot of custom code in place that will cache the pages themselves. So often, people who are requesting your site, the request never even makes it back to your home server because Cloudflare’s got it all cached already.

Bjork Ostrom: It has it all.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. The difference between a Cloudflare service and WP Rocket is, WP Rocket is doing all code-based stuff on your site, but it doesn’t have those data centers. It doesn’t have the capability to store things. And that’s why Cloudflare has a paid service. It’s because, to your point, there’s 200 data centers. There’s all these computers, there’s storage costs, there’s upkeep costs. So just good to differentiate between those two. Obviously, we could do an entire podcast series on caching.

Andrew Wilder: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: So just something that’s worth noting and worth mentioning. But I want to hit some other plugins that you think are important. Any others that are on your list that would be worth mentioning?

Andrew Wilder: I want to give a shout-out to the Feast plugin.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Andrew Wilder: I think many of you are probably using one of the Feast themes, Foodie Pro for example, or Brunch Pro. But Skylar has in recent years pushed all of his development efforts into the plugin instead of the theme, because that way… Plugins are very easy to update and themes are hard to update.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: And so he’s been rolling out features regularly. So as things evolve, he’s adding features left and right. And so if you have the Feast plugin, you can just turn on a better menu or you can build a better recipe index or your modern homepage. Skylar is really actively developing it. We work with him. We talk with him all the time about features. One of the things that’s great about Skylar is like he’ll roll something out and if it’s not ideal, he’ll change it and prove it.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: So he’s really on top of best practices. He’s talking to Casey Markee in getting best SEO advice there. And it’s like, “Hey, what’s the best thing to do for food blogs specifically?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: And so, if you’re not using the Feast plugin now, I’d recommend it first of all. But if you’re not, you’re going to have to do a little more homework on what are the best practices and a little more research on your own.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And that’s one of the great things about working Feast plugin being an example, Nerdress being an example. Working with somebody who kind of sleeps, eats, breathes this industry is you can really fulfill the concept that I talk a lot about on the podcast, which is who not how. And I think to a degree as creators, we need to know how, but I think more important is who. So when it comes to technology and plugins and WordPress, there’s one in which is how. How do you do this? How do you do caching? How do you do Core Web Vital optimization, site speed optimization? Or there’s who, which is like NerdPress being a great example and you being a great example of that.

Bjork Ostrom: So for the people who are listening to this podcast, I would encourage you to think about that concept, who not how. I think you have to have a working knowledge to your point, Andrew, like you need to know generally what a CDN is, but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of a creator to know the intricate details of the fine tuning of those things. So, a great opportunity to think about that just in our work in general, who not how. And also a little plug for NerdPress.

Bjork Ostrom: Any other plugins that you would think of or things that would be worth mentioning in terms of the world of recipe and search, knowing that there’s literally an unlimited number of plugins that people could work with? Any other ones that would be worth highlighting?

Andrew Wilder: Nothing’s jumping to the top of my head, but a couple of plugins conceptually are jumping into my head to say, “Don’t use.”

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: I think anything that bogs things down that doesn’t really add value to your visitors can be challenging.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: Google has a plugin, I’m totally spacing on what it’s called. It’s like the Google WordPress plugin. And they try to roll in all their features.

Bjork Ostrom: Huh.

Andrew Wilder: And it pulls in tons of-

Bjork Ostrom: Like Analytics, Google Search Console.

Andrew Wilder: And it’s not a bad plugin.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Andrew Wilder: But food blogs are so competitive that we really need to streamline as much as possible and make sure the only features that we’re using are the ones we need. So maybe the best way to put it is, think about what’s nice to have versus what is need to have.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: And then if it’s something that’s just nice to have, is there another way to get you what you need or want without bogging down your site?

Bjork Ostrom: And nice with that if you can find a way to do that without going into WordPress. Like for the Google example, you have Google Analytics, you have Google Search Console. It just requires you to log into those services and it might not be quite as integrated, but the nice thing is it’s separate. It’s another thing that’s not putting code into your WordPress site. So there’s an emphasis on clean, minimal, but also essential code on your sites so you’re not bogging it down, which I think is important to keep in mind.

Andrew Wilder: You know, one thing we should be talking about is web stories.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Can you talk about that and what they are and then where they are right now as of… This will come out in 2022, but late 2021, early 2022?

Andrew Wilder: Web stories would be the bane of my existence. Web stories are basically Google’s answer to Instagram stories and Facebook stories and all the stories that are out there. They are vertical format, semi-interactive video experience. That’s too generous.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: And so, what’s recently happened is Google’s team created a WordPress plugin called Google Web Stories. And this became very quickly the de facto plugin for building web stories on your site. Web stories can be featured in Google Discover which is like if you’re using the Google app on your mobile phone and used to scroll through it, it presents content for you that it thinks you’ll like. Web stories are very interactive so Google features those. And so it’ll feature one of your web stories. And then you’ll get an insane amount of traffic from that web story. And then a day later, it’s gone.

Andrew Wilder: Web story is also going to be like five to 10 to 15 different pains. Early on, because it would generate traffic, a lot of food bloggers were creating things that were like teaser content. So it’d be like, “Hey, check out… Here’s five pictures of my chocolate babka recipe. Click through to get the recipe,” right? And they try to get people to land on the actual recipe page. Google has said repeatedly they want the web stories to be standalone content that have value on their own, not just as traffic driver content.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. Traffic driver, yeah.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. But there have been a lot of technical challenges with web stories. Because Google is so big, first of all, they can send an insane amount of traffic. And we could be talking about terabytes and terabytes of traffic in a day, so that can easily crash your server if you’re not prepared for it. Or if you have something like Cloudflare where it can handle the traffic, it could run up a really big bill.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and I think technically against the terms of service, if you’re running the video through Cloudflare caching, I think it depends on which plan you’re on, but-

Andrew Wilder: Yes, I try to work around with that and they shut it down in about three minutes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Andrew Wilder: So for some clients, we implemented a separate CDN that just served that. That has gotten better. Now, based on feedback, if somebody clicks through from Google, Google may serve it out of the AMP cache, which is a fancy way of saying Google may serve it for you instead of taking-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, instead of you serving a video file from your server, which is extremely bandwidth-intensive.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. The more recent problem we’ve been seeing with web stories is that as you create your web stories, it saves lots of revisions. Every web story pain is treated as a separate post, and that saves all of its content as a revision as you edit. And so even if you limit a post… Like we limit post revisions to no more than 10 in the database, but let’s say you have a web story that has 10 pains on it or 10 slides, you could have 100 revisions. A lot of the graphics are saved as SVN. So the code for that graphic is actually saved in the post. So we’ve been seeing people’s database sizes balloon.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: We just did a cleanup where it cut the database in half from 500 and something megs to 250 megs just by pruning the old revisions. So the publisher didn’t even know existed.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Andrew Wilder: They’re not using it.

Bjork Ostrom: A revision, for those who aren’t familiar, so you create something in WordPress, it’s kind of like an autosave version of it. And what you’re saying is when you install the Google Web Stories plugin, you’re editing one of those web stories in WordPress. You change something, it says, “Autosave. We’re going to put a revision of this.” So you could potentially have, without you knowing, a bunch of revisions saved of pretty heavy things, which would be images.

Andrew Wilder: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: On top of files, yeah.

Andrew Wilder: And on top of that, it generates a screenshot of each of those and saves that image as an image on your server.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: And then I think your server may generate thumbnail images from that. So frustratingly, the Google developers didn’t have this stuff in mind and they didn’t realize that someone might create 500 web stories and they might be uploading videos that aren’t properly compressed. Now they have a compression tool built in. They didn’t used to. So there’s all this stuff happening behind the scenes with web stories where it sort of looks easy, but then it actually has all these unintended consequences.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: Now that these have been out for a long enough, there’s enough stuff and junk that’s accumulated that we’re starting to see some negative impacts from that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Interesting. Are people getting traction with web stories? We did it for a while and then we haven’t done it. It seems like maybe some of them are starting to pop up in some search results. They’ve seen kind of some conversations around that, but have you noticed anything changing with that?

Andrew Wilder: I haven’t heard anybody really. I mean, I think some people are more successful with it than others.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: It seems to be partly luck of the draw. It’s partly just sheer for you, you know?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: It’s kind of a bummer that you have to create a web story. It goes viral, you’re good for two days. And then literally, nothing ever again.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. Right.

Andrew Wilder: And so people are also then trying to game the system. They’re like, “Oh, well that one’s not going, I’m going to change to URL and republish it.” I don’t think that’s a sustainable practice. I personally don’t like the web stories experience as a user. It’s never been something I’ve liked. So I’m kind of like, “Yeah, why are we even doing this?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: I don’t think most web stories are not compelling content that people are generating. They haven’t been around long enough for people to learn how to make that a really compelling thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: Like with blog posts, we’ve been doing those long enough that you know how to write a blog post that someone’s going to want to read.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: Right? And now we’re getting to the point with video where I think you’re… It takes a lot of skill and practice and expertise in training to create a video that someone’s going to want to watch, right? That’s compelling. And so I think we’re still in the infancy with web stories. I don’t know if the format is going to get to the point. I don’t know if it’s going to mature, I guess.

Bjork Ostrom: Don’t you think part of the reason they’re doing it though is because it is so engaging? Isn’t that why Instagram’s stories copies Snapchat, which then Facebook is lifting that under their platform? I know it’s the same platform. TikTok, like, “Oh, it may be coming from TikTok.” But like this idea of the vertical video being a really engaging thing, it almost seems like what Google hasn’t been able to pull off. It’s not an issue with the medium, but it’s an issue with the interface of what it actually feels like to consume that content on Google versus TikTok or Instagram.

Andrew Wilder: I think engaging, yes. But the vast majority of content I don’t think is necessarily quality.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: I think there’s a difference between engagement and value maybe.

Bjork Ostrom: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: All the social media platforms, they’re all about engagement because they want you to stay on the site because they want to serve you more ads.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: That’s what all these services including Google want to do, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: I mean, as publishers who primarily generate revenue through ads, that’s what you want to do also. So I totally get it. But I guess my takeaway is, technically we’ll solve these problems. The developers are aware of these revision issues. Like there’s a GitHub issue that’s open. There’s a bug report and they’re going to address it. So we’ll get over the technical stuff. So then the question is like, start thinking about how you can make your web stories actually valuable content. Because I think in the long term, that’s the only thing that’s going to have staying power.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And value meaning either informative. It helps somebody learn something or do something better or entertaining. That would be the other category. Ideally, both.

Andrew Wilder: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: But if you could make something that’s informative and entertaining, great. But a huge category of that… In the food space, in the recipe space, it usually leans towards informative. Can you bring somebody from point A to point B and have a more successful outcome with a recipe they’re creating? But there’s also this great a line of like, “It’s also just generally entertainment” like Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives or Top Chef or whenever it might be. It’s like this space of food as entertainment. And I think it runs the gamut in terms of listeners to this podcast would probably be on both sides from purely informative to purely entertainment and everything in between.

Andrew Wilder: Yep. I think all of what you just said is valuable in some way, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Yep.

Andrew Wilder: But a teaser post, which is really an advertisement-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not. Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: … that’s not valuable.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: Now early on, Lindsay had posted one on Pinch of Yum. She embedded the web story in the blog post. I don’t remember what the post was, but the web story was basically step by step guide of how to make the dish. And so each slide was the next step. I found that actually pretty compelling, far more compelling than a video how-to because I could basically like… It was almost like a video with chapters.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Andrew Wilder: So I could step forward to the next one by tapping, or I could tap and hold and look at that longer. So if they’ve done like an interactive video like an interactive how-to, I think that can be really compelling.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: But you know-

Bjork Ostrom: I remember, I don’t know if it was that one, but Google used a Pinch of Yum video that Lindsay did as an example in a help doc where they’re like, “This is what it looks like to create something that’s actually helping people.” It’s kind of like the anti-teaser help doc, like, “Don’t create a teaser.”

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Like, “Here’s what it looks like to do.” And I don’t remember which one it was or which post it was. We can see if we… And it might not even be there anymore. But point being, you might be able to game the system for a period of time, but over a long period of time what you need to be doing is creating content that’s helpful and that’s valuable and always to be thinking about that. Which if you have… I know I said top of the hour and we’re past that, do you have a little bit more time to hit these last few points? Or do you need to bounce and we do need to do another podcast episode?

Andrew Wilder: Both, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Andrew Wilder: I’m always happy to talk and I’m always happy to come back.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Let’s do these last few points that you have, because I think these would be important to hit because these are less tactical. It’s like “Install this plug and do this thing” and more like general guidance of considerations and important pieces for creators to consider. And you see this and it would be interesting for you to surface these as well. One of them that you mentioned was, “Hey, as creators, we need to be thinking about diversifying our income.” What does that mean and how do people actually do that in this world?

Andrew Wilder: So with the rise basically of Mediavine and AdThrive, advertising has become the primary source of revenue for food blogs. It’s been a source of revenue for a long time, but now we see revenue that’s just through the roof especially in the fourth quarter.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: This year I’m hearing numbers that I’ve never heard so high, like $80 per 1,000 page views. I mean, it’s just nuts how much money’s pouring in. So I totally get why it’s blown up. But the problem is, in parallel to that, we’ve got so many ads, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: So if you look at a site now that’s making an $80 RPM or revenue per thousand, you can barely see the content.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Andrew Wilder: There are so many ads being served. I don’t think this is sustainable because I think visitors are going to be sick of it real soon. Everybody’s just going to start installing ad blockers.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: I couldn’t actually do my job without an ad blocker.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: I literally could not load enough pages in my day. And this isn’t a knock on ads. There’s something inherently wrong with display advertising as a way to earn revenue. But I think it’s really scary to be in a position where all your traffic is coming from Google, because Pinterest is no longer good. Pinterest doesn’t know what the ads…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And you see that across the board for the sites you’re working with where there’s a real strong correlation to decline in Pinterest traffic.

Andrew Wilder: I think so. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: I mean-

Bjork Ostrom: And same for Pinch of Yum for sure.

Andrew Wilder: I mean, who likes using Pinterest now? It’s horrible, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: So I think traffic with Pinterest because they’re trying to monetize their own way. So with the shift of traffic source being Google and then your revenue source being correlated 100% to your traffic and nothing else, then you are on this hamster wheel trying to always be worried about SEO and traffic. And man, I am so glad that I’m not in a business where Google pushes out an update tomorrow and half my revenue cuts in half. I mean, if you’re up at that level where it’s that big, then that’s great. Enjoy it while it lasts, right? But there’s so much risk there that it’s just I don’t see how that’s sustainable over years and years and years.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Inevitably, there’ll be a season where that changes or shifts whether that be monetization through ads and the impact of cookie lists, which is a conversation for another period of time. Or to your point, a Google algorithm change that can be really significant. So what do you diversify into then? What are the options?

Andrew Wilder: Right. So you still have to have traffic on your site, obviously, right? Without visitors, you don’t have a website.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Andrew Wilder: But there are a lot of options. And I think you’ve done a few episodes on various options. We don’t need to get too far into it.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: But I’d love everybody to start thinking about what they can do besides ads to monetize their sites, whether that’s building an e-book and selling that to your visitors or a subscription service of some kind, a meal planning service. Some of our clients have launched product lines, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting if one of the things that you can do is any public company that would be in the space that you’re in, you can go and you can read the annual reports from those companies. And it’s eye-opening to see the amount of income that some of these sites are creating from… We think of it as like, “Hey, traffic monetize via ads” but I’m trying to think of some examples of that. Is Food52 public? I’m trying to think. I think it might still be. I don’t remember if it is or not.

Andrew Wilder: I know they were bought and they are huge now. They’re like a sub-brand, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, within another company. But any of these companies that are in the world of content creation, they’ll have annual reports. And a lot of times those annual reports… Like Leaf Group is one of them, they’ll have annual reports. And within those annual reports, they’ll talk about the different successes they’re having and opportunities. And you see, you can kind of get inside the mind of these organizations that are content businesses that are monetizing through different ways. So I would encourage you to do that. And I think it’s a great point. Andrew, you talk about your business. It’s the metrics, the business metrics are so different where it’s referral. It’s word of mouth. It’s marketing, like being on podcast, right? There will be people who listen to this podcast who will inevitably sign up to work with NerdPress. There’s a certain sustainability with it that’s more predictable as well. And that can exist within the food and recipe space. So I love that. I love that you drive that point home.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that I think would be important along with diversification that you mentioned and along with kind of dialing back ads to prioritize user experience is thinking about ways to differentiate yourself from other food sites. What does that mean and how does that look?

Andrew Wilder: So yeah, I mean, Google doesn’t care where they send their visitor as long as the visitors happy you with the answer, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Andrew Wilder: Google’s goal is to get the person the best answer to their query. And so what’s been happening is there’s been this sort of, consolidation isn’t quite the right word, or standardization maybe, where it’s like, “Okay, well this is clearly working for Google. So we’re all going to do this to try to get up in the search results.” In particular, with the Core Web Vitals even, we can’t be visually as distinct anymore because that takes a lot of resources and it’s slow to load. So ironically, food blogs are all starting to kind of look the same because you have to pair everything back. You can’t use web fonts anymore because they’re too slow. So you swap out the logo at the top of the page, and it could be any other food blog.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: Right? I mean, I think having a really strong logo does help. If you don’t have a great logo, that’s a great next step. You can get a logo really cheap at 99designs.com or logotournament.com. Within a week, you’ll have a logo. And if you’re really active and engaged and involve with the process, these logo contests can get you a great result. Where was I going with that?

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, just the idea of differentiation.

Andrew Wilder: Right. Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Like the idea that because of some of these things, standardization of themes, standardization of best practices, standardization of advice and where people are hearing it from, what you get a really standard look.

Andrew Wilder: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: And that is a benefit in some ways because it’s going to be achieving some of the outcomes you want like Core Web Vitals or design aesthetic or user experience or ease of use for menu navigation, a recipe index or whatever it might be. But what I hear you saying is it’s a disadvantage in that suddenly it becomes essentially like all recipes but spread across a bunch of different URLs, which is like your competitive advantage if you fold in some differentiating elements is going to be strategic in that you will be able to separate yourself from other people. But my question is like, how do you separate yourself from other people, other creators?

Andrew Wilder: Well, yeah, and I can’t give you that answer.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Andrew Wilder: You know?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: But I think-

Bjork Ostrom: But your point then is to be aware of that and to think about it?

Andrew Wilder: Yeah, think about it. And what is it that you makes you unique? What is your secret sauce? What is special about you? What is compelling about you?

Bjork Ostrom: It’s personality it sounds like what you’re saying.

Andrew Wilder: Personality, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Totally.

Andrew Wilder: And at the same time, it’s a fine line because there’s always those haters who are like, “Don’t give me your life story. Just give me the recipe,” right?

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Andrew Wilder: I feel like we’ve swung a little too far. Blogs originally were…

Bjork Ostrom: Lifestyle and…

Andrew Wilder: And with Julia’s blog, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: It was all about like your personal life and your family and then, “Oh, here’s a recipe.” And now it’s swung back the other way where there’s almost no personality and it’s like a frequently asked questions at the top of how to make your, whatever it is, perfect.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Andrew Wilder: All of the possible questions, somebody might ask about this recipe, are the content of the post because that’s what Google seems to be looking for. And so I just feel like we need to swing the pendulum back a little bit and breathe some humanity back into all of this.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And that can be a way to say, “Here’s who I am. You’re not following me because of how I’m setting up my post to optimize for Google search, you’re following me because you feel connected to me and you’re interested in who I am and you feel aligned with me in some way or inspired or connected.” And that requires some non-optimization type decisions like sharing a little bit about who you are, your story, insofar as you’re comfortable doing it. I think there are some people who aren’t comfortable for doing it and feel like that is something that has to do as a strategy perspective. But if you’re somebody who’s comfortable sharing about who you are and your story, I think to your point Andrew, that’s a really helpful thing to do insofar as people follow people and want to know other people and be connected with other people, which I think is awesome and a good reminder for us especially as we get potentially super hyper-focused on content to rank.

Andrew Wilder: Yeah. It’s all about your user, it’s not about Google. And so there are these boxes you have to check to make Google happy so that Google technically can figure it out. But at the end of the day, Google’s not reading your site. A human is. And they’re probably on their phone and they’re probably trying to figure out what to make for dinner. And they’re scrolling through, right? One of the things I recommend everybody does at least every couple months is use your actual phone to look at your site.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Andrew Wilder: We all work on our sites on our desktops or our laptops or even our iPads, right? But our readers, 90… Or what? 80% of them now are on their phones.

Bjork Ostrom: Mobile.

Andrew Wilder: They probably don’t have an ad blocker. I can’t tell you how many sites where even if the content’s great, I can’t see it because there are so many ads. Literally, there’s one sentence of the post and there’s three ads and an overlaid video. I can’t get to it.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. Right.

Andrew Wilder: So if you’re doing that, you’re doing all this work to create great content and then your people can’t get around the ads to see it. So I think it’s important to basically put yourself in the mindset of your users and your visitors and actually do a gut check on that every once in a while. And I think you can also do real user testing. Go to a friend, hand them a phone and say, “Hey, can you look up my strawberry shortcake recipe on my site” and watch them do it. You can ask them to talk through what they’re doing and what they’re seeing, and it’ll be eyeopening, you know?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things that we have as a monthly recurring task for every site is it’s… I don’t remember exactly how it’s worded, but it’s something like “Use on phone for 30 minutes.” Every month it’s like… We call it browser testing, but like, “Hey, just go and use it on the different…” And that being a really productive, helpful thing to do. You can take screenshots. You can record a video recording of it, “Hey, this is off. This needs to be improved.” And all of that stuff is super impactful.

Bjork Ostrom: Speaking of impactful, always helpful and impactful to have conversations with you, Andrew. Like I mentioned before, I know that people are going to be interested in connecting with you, potentially working with you and your team, can you talk about the best way to do that and where people can follow along with NerdPress as well?

Andrew Wilder: Well, you can visit us online at www.nerdpress.net. That’s N-E-R-D-P-R-E-S-S.net. And if you have any questions, you can email us at support@nerdpress.net. And if it’s an inquiry about our services, the team’s going to forward it to me so I’ll be the one checking that email. I’ll be happy to talk with you some more. And then you can learn all about our services on our website. And I look forward to any questions you guys have.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, Andrew, always great to connect. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on.

Andrew Wilder: Thank you again.

Bjork Ostrom: As a wrap for this episode, one more shout out to NerdPress, nerdpress.net. Check that out. They do great work there. And really appreciate Andrew sharing his insights and knowledge and expertise with this community. And again, one more shout out to the Facebook group, foodbloggerpro.com/facebook. It is the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook group. One of the things that’s great about this group is not only will you be able to have a chance to have a conversation around the podcast episodes that are happening, but we’re also going to be gathering questions for future interviews. So let’s say we do another interview with Andrew, we’re going to ask the group, “Hey, what are the questions that you want to know? What are the conversations that you want to make sure that we’re having on the podcast?” So it’s not only going to be a spot to respond to the podcast episode, but it’s also going to help us build future episodes, not only for guests but for specific questions that we’ll ask those guests. So you can check that out by going to foodbloggerpro.com/facebook. It’d be great to see you there. Have a great week. Thanks.