Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: April 2020, Week 1

Greetings, reader. We hope this installment of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots finds you well and that your social distancing game is on point during the current COVID-19 outbreak. For those of you who don’t know, this is a column wherein we gather and digest some of the most relevant industry-related pieces of news that took place over the last 7 days or so.

The “April 2020: Week 1” edition brings you the following topics:  

• SMBs are Offered $340 Million Advertising Credits by Google
• Labeling Your Business ‘Temporarily Closed’ Isn’t Affecting Your Rankings According to GMB
• LinkedIn Recommends What Type of Content to Share During the Lockdown
• Safari to fully Block 3rd Party Cookies 
• Latest “Search for Beginners” Covers Updating Your Google My Business Info
• Facebook Provides More Insight Into How It Uses Your Information From ‘Download Your Data’ Tool

Let’s dive right in! 

SMBs are Offered $340 Million Advertising Credits by Google

Digital giant, Google, recently announced that the company was preparing an incentive type of free credit boost to advertisers in the coming months. The ad credit, that will reach the $340 million mark, is meant to treat SMBs – Small and Medium-Sized Businesses – all over the globe and is planned to appear in the Google Ads accounts. 

Here’s the official announcement from Google’s support page:

“SMBs who have been active advertisers since January 1, 2019 will see a credit notification appear in their Google Ads account in the coming months.”

This basically means that these generous ad credits will find their way to a somewhat narrowed-down list of advertisers and that SMBs that have a relatively new Google Ads account, unfortunately, won’t be eligible for this hefty incentive. 

Labeling Your Business ‘Temporarily Closed’ Isn’t Affecting Your Rankings According to GMB

The word comes from Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, who recently stated that listing your business as “temporarily closed” in Google My Business isn’t doing any damage to your page in terms of visibility and ranking. 

The information comes in the wake of the recent pandemic in which many businesses were forced to shut their doors, both physical and figurative. This is why the folks over at Google decided to introduce a “temporarily closed” label in GMB, which at first caused concerns among business owners regarding a potentially negative impact on their search rankings.

The issue was addressed when one GMB user reached out to Sullivan on Twitter with a suggestion that Google should come up with a solution that is not negatively impacting the visibility in search.

Sullivan’s response was simply: “Temporarily closed doesn’t impact ranking or visibility.”

The concern was first born when, prior to Sullivan’s response, Google’s announced that the businesses that are listed as closed would appear in SERPs with reduced visibility.

More on this available here. 

LinkedIn Recommends What Type of Content to Share During the Lockdown

The current pandemic has caused a significant surge in social media activity and LinkedIn is among those platforms that are using this situation to help in the time of crisis. The company has recently published several tips on how to pivot the content creation so the posts are aiding the mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are the 4 main topics and approaches they suggest:

1. Post about your experiences – Personal stories are welcome, especially if they can be of assistance and inspire other LinkedIn users who may find themselves in similar predicaments. They suggest composing content with the “what really helped me” mantra.

2. Discover and comment on conversations that are most relevant to you – Searching through hashtags can be useful to those who are looking for useful content and threads created by others so they can share it across their own LinkedIn friend base. 

3. Be yourself and offer your unique perspective – Some of the guidelines include: sharing lessons learned in your personal lives, displaying appreciation for your team, sharing words of encouragement and kindness across the community, etc. 

4. Stay informed with trusted news and share your thoughts – Making sure you stay properly informed is crucial. Try sharing the latest news that could help others, but ensure they are coming from valid and legitimate sources. 

Safari to Fully Block 3rd Party Cookies 

Apple’s official browser, Safari, will start completely blocking third-party cookies. The feature is called “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” and it blocks all 3rd party cookies but it does allow cross-site cookie access for features and services you as a user opted into, which includes:

• payment preferences
• subscriptions 
• commenting widgets

The new feature will obviate third-party tracking cookies from advertising websites that the user doesn’t want while allowing the usage of payment methods like PayPal. 

Safari deploys the Storage Access API technology it introduced back in 2017. 

Safari thus managed to beat Chrome to the punch as Google’s browser is expected to make this move in 2022. 

More information available here. 

Latest “Search for Beginners” Covers Updating Your Google My Business Info 

Google‘s SEO-focused vlog called “Search for Beginners” has a new episode in which their team tackles an entry-level lesson on how to properly use the Google My Business platform.

The video answers the following questions and guidelines: 

• Who is Google My Business for?
• How is Google My Business Useful?
• How to edit information in Google My Business

You can watch the episode in its entirety here:

It appears that this is the final episode of the “Search for Beginners” series, however, the YouTube channel Google Webmasters will continue to new content in the future.  

Facebook Provides More Insight Into How It Uses Your Information From ‘Download Your Data’ Tool 

As Facebook has been facing enormous backlash about how it uses the user data, the social media giant is now providing more transparency by adding some new sections to its ‘Download Your Data’ for Instagram and ‘Download Your Information’ for its Facebook tools.  

This should shed more light on the process of accessing, collecting, storing and using the data about user activity across this platform in order to better shape the relevance of content and ads. 

Here’s an excerpt from Facebook’s official post:

“Over the last decade we’ve been working to extend the functionality of our self-service data access tools to help people access data in meaningful ways. Today’s step is part of these efforts. There have also been growing efforts by many policymakers and regulators to enhance people’s rights around access to their data. These laws include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, which was implemented in 2018 and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which took effect earlier this year.”

The entire “Updating Our Data Access Tools” blog post is available here. 

That’s it for this edition of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots. See you next week, until then – feel free to check out our previous edition!

And remember – stay home and stay safe. 

Radomir Basta

CEO and lead SEO strategist at Four Dots and lecturer at Digital Marketing Institute Also an angry driver and huge tattoo fan. In love with growth hacking.

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