I love to cook. Especially when I'm not sure what I'll be making. For me there is a great sense of freedom in just seeing ingredients and deciding then and there what the dish will become. Not knowing which ingredients I have in the fridge or pantry is a minor nuisance, but I like to pretend I'm on a mission throughout the house trying to discover tastes and textures for the dish. (The lack of insight into my own pantry will be fixed soon enough though. Stay tuned for an update on that.)
The chaos that accompanies cooking this way wasn't always something I longed for. But after years of following recipes and making godawful mistakes I feel confident enough to "throw something together" and make it taste good. And yes, sometimes it doesn't work. But seeing my better half trying to give me polite feedback is all part of the fun, I think.
I don't really remember the exact moment I stopped following recipes. But I like to think it was when recipes stopped listing instructions, and began with a paragraph about the writer's childhood. Try finding a recipe right now for a traditional Italian lasagne. Chances are, it's buried beneath paragraphs of musings on "my Nonna's life" and the difference between lasagna and lasagne.
"While I'm upstairs, folding the sheets I wonder whether Nonna, may she rest in peace, ever had the time to really enjoy cooking lasagne for a family of 16..."
– Ok, cool, but what did you say the flour to butter ratio for the roux was again?
And it's not just the long intros that annoy me and the rest of the Internet. It's the ads, the auto-play videos, the pop-ups and the speed of the page that reminds me of WAP mobile internet. And if it were only contained to recipes, I think I could've lived with it, but it's everywhere. Almost every page you visit, is an overload of distractions that feel designed to block you from achieving your goal.
And let me be perfectly clear. I'm not trying to shame anyone here for writing to their heart's content. Some just love to write. And some food bloggers are very open about why they format their recipes the way they do. Some even add a nifty little deeplink to the actual recipe for those looking for the cheatsheet. No, what I would like to discuss is two things specifically.
The impact of search engines and ads on the design of a webpage containing a recipe.
The search engines
It's 1997 and we just got "Het Net" in The Netherlands. Het Net was the Dutch prelude to the internet as we know it now. It was a national intranet, which meant that we couldn't even send an email to an address outside of The Netherlands. I was 16 at the time and I still remember the first thing I tried looking up – 2Pac lyrics. Of course I couldn't find any.
It wasn't until 1999 that Het Net became a "real" ISP and opened up the doors to the rest of the world. Suddenly it was clear as rain what 2Pac was saying. But I also found a lot more information on him. They say to never meet your heroes. Well, never look them up on the internet either.
Back then I only used Lycos to get my information. I don't really remember the interface or the interactions. I just remember that Lycos was used for everyday browsing but if you ever wanted to "temporarily try" some software... And needed a cracked serial code or something... Then Alta Vista was the go-to engine. Or so I've been told. And with the rise of these search engines in the 90's and many more, the game had started. These engines did their best to provide relevant results, and companies tried everything they could to be deemed relevant. Because even back then, the best place to hide a dead body was on the second page of the results.
We've come a long way since then. Black hat SEO strategies such as keyword stuffing and hidden text are (almost) a thing of the past now. But since search engines are wonderfully ambiguous about their ever-changing algorithm, SEO experts are working overtime to keep the content relevant. Rewriting content of the past to make it more marketable or deleting it to optimise the "crawl budget" are some tactics that are used to play the search engine's game.
Now it's easy to blame SEO for recipes bloated with personal stories and background information about ingredients, but that's not how search engines work. Anymore. Food bloggers, are bloggers for a reason. They love to write. And sure, there are some SEO tactics that they use to play Google's game. But that game isn't as bad as a couple of decades ago. Google's Helpful Content update already puts focus on rewarding websites that produce high-quality content written for people. And with the continuous core updates, they keep building more and more towards the quality of the content.
An old colleague of mine always said: "SEO is simple. If it's relevant for the customer, it'll work for SEO." And I think herein lies the problem with online recipes written by food bloggers.
They're serving the same content to two different types of customers with different needs. So that content is not always relevant. Some people are there to read the story and take a look at the recipe, and others are just interested in the recipe. Some websites already offer a deeplink for those who just want to start cooking. But there are some who believe that the time someone spends on a page is important for their ranking as well. I tried finding an answer to this, but of course there is no simple answer to be found.
So the fact that no one really knows how search engines rank their results keeps us from standardising interaction patterns for these online recipes. Knowing that these websites need to serve two different types of needs, from a design perspective it would be a relatively simple fix. If only ads didn't exist...
The ads
When I started writing this, I had some assumptions about online ads, but I had never thought it would feel like taking "the red pill". I always wondered: "Is anyone clicking these ads? If so, who are they?", and I always settled for the answer: "Oh, they're clicking alright! Just look at these numbers!".
I guess it all depends on the type of ad and how relevant it is. Personally, when I used instagram, almost every ad was relevant for me. I absolutely loved its algorithm. For me Instagram was the place to get inspired by new products. Truly. But visiting a recipe website and being bombarded by "personalised" ads about those pair of shoes I looked at last week while a random video about the new Renault starts playing is a completely different story.
And I use the phrase "bombarded" here because it not only feels that way, but I'm also quoting P&G’s Marc Pritchard during a talk where he demanded better advertising through more transparency.
"Let’s face it, all of us in this room bombard consumers with thousands of ads a day, subject them to endless ad load times, interrupt them with pop-ups, and overpopulate their screens and feeds with just plain bad work."
And to put things in perspective, P&G is the largest advertiser in the world by ad spending. This push for transparency led Facebook and Google to update their algorithm and this in turn provided companies much needed insights into viewership metrics and how the ad money was spent. P&G cut their digital advertising budget by $200 million in 2017 because of these new insights.
This all makes sense to me. We all know that banner blindness is a huge challenge for advertisers, and has been researched since 1997. And I do understand that some ads might work, in a certain context so cutting this budget seems very logical. So imagine my surprise when I read that P&G's overall media spending remained the same by reinvesting it in TV, radio and e-commerce media [1]. Wait what? You can track digital ads from impressions, to CTR to conversion to retention. What are we tracking with TV and radio though? Aren't those used for completely different purposes? Well guess what, by 2019 P&G's organic sales growth had an increase of 7.5%. So yeah, what the hell do I know?
This reinvesting of marketing budget seems to be a trend as well. Banner blindness seems to turn into frustration and negative brand experience when "ad clutter" keeps users from reading an article [3]. On top of that, people are questioning the effectivity of digital advertising [3] [4] or at least the quality of the data [2], referring to the "selection effect".
The selection effect is about people who see your ad, but were already going to buy the product anyway. Not to be confused with the advertising effect – people buying the product because they saw the ad. It has been argued that there is currently no reliable way to distinguish between these two effects. And even with all this information about the lack of added value of certain types of ads, I still have to scroll past countless banners, with annoying parallax effects, hidden close buttons and videos that seem to stick to my thumb.
Conclusion
So why are online recipes so awful? Let's do a quick recap.
Writing content for the search engines
Based on most of the information I found online, "keyword stuffing" and irrelevant prose is not considered good SEO practice. Remember what my colleague said, "as long as it's relevant for the reader, it'll work for SEO". And even though opinions differ on the impact of "time spent on a page", I'm inclined to listen to what Google's John Mueller has to say about it – i.e., it has no impact. Back in 2019 Google even stated that they don't use any type of user behaviour as a ranking factor. In this same article they did mention the negative impact that bounce rate has on ranking. So making the content unnecessarily long without a shortcut to the actual recipe will probably have a negative impact on that bounce rate.
Writing content for the advertisers
It is definitely true that the more content a user has to scroll through, the more ad space you can sell. But with all this data on the negative effects of "ad-clutter" on your brand and the lack of transparency about the effectivity of digital ads, I believe it's time to move on. Especially considering Google phasing out third-party cookies by late 2023. A CMO survey already found that almost 20% of companies have started investing in traditional advertising next to their online focus because of the disappearance of third-party cookies.
Writing for your audience
I think that most food bloggers write for their audience. They believe that there are people who want recipes and that there are others who also enjoy some background information about those recipes. These two needs are vastly different and should be treated as such. But whether you address this issue with separate flows, or moving the recipe up on the page, it will probably affect the money you make on selling ad space. But it's worth it to test this out.
Not just to understand the effect it has on your bottom line now, but to prepare for a world that is slowly but surely waking up to the truth about digital advertising. A world that is making it harder to track your behaviour online, and personalise ads. Which in turn will cause more "ad-clutter" on the user's screen and probably correlate with a higher bounce rate and more frustration towards your brand.
And again, it's not just recipes. The internet is full of digital environments filled with banners shouting at you. I think we owe it to ourselves to start rethinking the way we're begging customers for their attention.
[1] P&G says cut digital ad spend by $200 million in 2017
[2] What Digital Advertising Gets Wrong
[3] Why Marketers Are Returning to Traditional Advertising
[4] The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising
[5] Google Again: Time Spent On Page Is Not A Ranking Factor
