He paid an SEO firm $20k but only got 4 pageviews

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Welcome to the newsletter that is here to keep you updated with interesting things - and some sad things - that happened in the marketing industry over the last few days.

Jason Rainsforth runs an electrical company in Melbourne, Australia. All he needed was a new SEO-ready website ranking for his most valuable keywords.

The agency he used, Supple Digital, locked him into a contract for $1150 per month over 24 months.

But the results have been dismal if any. This is after spending $20k in total for the contract.

“This month was four views, the highest we’ve had was 14,” he said. “We’re paying over $1000 a month. It seems ridiculous for something that’s just not working.”

After realizing this was not working for him, he tried to get out of the contract. Supple Digital insisted he has to pay the remaining fee first.

Woocommerce is now just Woo. The company finally realized how long its name was, and just cut the “commerce” out.

I’m kidding. According to their team, it’s not just a logo rebrand. Woo has become a platform. How did it get here?

Many years ago, Wordpress developers who wanted to add ecommerce functionalities onto their websites had to download Woocommerce, which was a plugin.

It would allow you to upload your products, and create a shop, then enable payments through PayPal and Stripe.

Even though Woocommerce did that particular flow quite well, there were several things developers were not able to do with the plugin.

This necessitated installation of other plugins from other companies to support the Woocommerce plugin.

Over the last few years, Woocommerce has tried to catch up on that by providing more features with their plugin to cover for all the missing aspects that made 3rd party Woocommerce plugins a thing.

As more features have come to life on Woocommerce, it has evolved from being a plugin to becoming a platform.

To represent themselves better as a platform for ecommerce, it will now be known as Woo.

Your Google My Business Profile reviews are back. According to Google.

What happened: An outage occurred that removed local business profiles reviews or made them show less than they should be.

Who got hurt: Businesses that rely on their good reputation to get more business. Think of restaurants, stores or services. Basically every business got hurt.

What if your business' profile reviews are still not showing: Google says you wait. They will be back in a few days.

Who will compensate businesses that lost business as a result of this: No one. Sorry, that’s all we can say. At least you get a sorry from us. Google didn’t say sorry by the way, but your patience was appreciated.

More people are watching YouTube on TV than on mobile for the first time ever in the US according to the latest report from YouTube.

Marketers can take advantage of this new stat. Here is what you can do:

• QR codes - add QR codes in your ads. Viewers can scan the QR codes, and get a link to wherever you want them to go via their phones. After all they are probably watching TV while busy on their phones.

• Pause Ads - When viewers pause a video, you can show targeted messages on the screen to capture their attention without interrupting whatever they were watching. Can they skip that while the video is paused? I don’t think so.

Until next time, have a good one!
Growth Grind team