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Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: August 2020, Week 3
August 19th, 2020
posted by Radomir Basta to digital marketing, facebook, Google, Google Search Console, Instagram, WordPress
Hello and welcome to another edition of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots – our weekly column where we comb through some of the most relevant news and events that took place within the digital marketing landscape over the last week or so.
Let’s see what “August 2020: Week 3” edition brings us:
- ‘Search Console Insights’ is a New Way to Understand How Your Content is Performing
- Mobile: Google Chrome to Start Highlighting Fast Pages
- Google Launches ‘People Cards’ – Virtual Business Cards
- Facebook Messenger to Merge With Instagram Direct
- Facebook Announces a New Way for SMEs to Monetize Online Events
- Hidden WordPress 5.5 Feature Blocks Unwanted Plugins
Alrighty then, let’s dive right in!
‘Search Console Insights’ is a New Way to Understand How Your Content is Performing
Google has recently started testing Search Console Insights, a new way for content creators to track how their content is performing and how well it resonates with the audience and then be able to improve upon it.
The tool is currently being tested with selected content creators and publishers who have been granted access to brand new content performance data that has never before been available in the regular version of Search Console.
Google’s new landing page for Search Console Insights states the following:
“Search Console Insights is a new experience tailored for content creators and publishers and can help them understand how audiences discover their site’s content and what resonates with their audiences. This new experience is powered by data from both Search Console and Google Analytics.”
(Image source: SEJ)
Publishers now have access to valuable information they can use to make more data-driven decisions for their content creation process and thus improve their content marketing strategies and better understand their target users.
Search Console Insights should help site owners gain insight into:
- Which pieces of content perform the best
- How new content pieces are performing
- How your visitors are finding your content across the web
- What your website’s top and trending queries are on Google Search
- Which other content pieces link to your content
- Which new links you gained, etc
Pretty handy.
Mobile: Google Chrome to Start Highlighting Fast Pages
In an attempt (presumably) to prompt publishers to better their mobile UX, Google Chrome is about to start assigning a Fast Page label to mobile pages that meet or exceed all metrics thresholds for the Core Web Vitals benchmarks.
If all the Google benchmarks are satisfactory, a user will see the Fast Page label when he/she long-presses on a link within the Chrome mobile browser. The update will first be launch for Android users.
The label will inform the users that the page they’re about to visit is fast-loading, stable, and responsive, and is assigned based on real-world historical data.
(Image source: Blog Chromium)
“To help users identify great experiences as they browse, we are excited to announce that Chrome will begin to highlight high-quality user experiences on the web, starting with the labeling of fast links via the link context menu on Chrome for Android. This change will be rolling out starting in Chrome 85 Beta.”
You can read more about the update here.
Google Launches ‘People Cards’ – Virtual Business Cards
Google’s new People Cards will enable users to link to their website, social profiles, and other relevant web real estate all from a single place.
These virtual business cards are being tested and launched in a limited way as the initial roll-out is happening in India only. These cards will appear in search results when a person’s name is queried in Google, allowing individuals to easily highlight themselves in search results.
“Today, we are solving these challenges with a new feature called people cards. It’s like a virtual visiting card, where you can highlight your existing website or social profiles you want people to visit, plus other information about yourself that you want others to know.”
There will certainly be a couple of challenges like how to solve the scenario where people share the same name with other individuals, especially if a user has the same name as someone more famous or a person that thas a stronger online presence.
We’ll see how this plays out. In the meantime, read more about People Cards in this SEJ article.
Facebook Messenger to Merge With Instagram Direct
Facebook Messenger and Instagram direct messages will merge, giving users an option to access both types of inbox from a single place.
(Image Source: SEJ)
The benefits of merging the two chat platforms are the following:
- New, colorful design for your chats
- Emoji reaction (users can react to messages with any emoji)
- Swipe to reply to messages
- Chat with other users who use Facebook
Fans of Instagram’s current direct messaging app should know that this update changes the entire look and feel of the direct message inbox, so be careful with opting for this update.
Facebook Announces a New Way for SMEs to Monetize Online Events
Facebook is rolling out a new way for small businesses, local businesses, creators, and other entrepreneurs to make money off of Facebook events without any fees going to the Facebook platform.
This is a great opportunity for many to monetize an event without having to tackle any promotion, payments, and hosting tasks as those are being taken care of by Facebook.
For example, if a local business wants to monetize a Facebook event, they can use Facebook to target users with their local advertising or choose to announce the event to all page followers.
(Image Source: SEJ)
According to Facebook:
“Pages can host events on Facebook Live to reach broad audiences, and we’re testing paid events with Messenger Rooms for more personal and interactive gatherings. In testing, we’ve seen businesses use Facebook to host expert talks, trivia events, podcast recordings, boxing matches, cooking classes, intimate meet-and-greets, fitness classes and more.”
Event-goers can pay for the event through the social media platform and attend it online.
Hidden WordPress 5.5 Feature Blocks Unwanted Plugins
Freshly updated WordPress 5.5 has a cool new feature that curbs rogue plugins and keeps your WordPress site(s) clean of any unwanted add-ons that may slow down your pages or jeopardize their security.
The new change enables a WordPress site to check the legitimacy of plugins and accordingly block the updates of the ones that have been flagged.
The feature hasn’t been announced and was hidden in a long list of hundreds of other updates and changes made to WordPress 5.5.
According to WordPress:
“The new auto-update UI is great, but it would benefit from having a way to remotely disable the auto-update for a plugin/theme. It’ll open the possibility for WordPress.org to control the rollout of an auto-update, for example, auto-updating everyone 1-24hrs after release rather than immediately to allow for any major bugs to be discovered.”
This new feature will surely be welcome with many website owners and publishers who have trouble with rogue WordPress plugins.
Wrapping Up
That would be all for this installment of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots. See you next week, until then – feel free to check out our previous edition!
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