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Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots: December 2019, Week 3
December 18th, 2019
posted by Radomir Basta to content marketing, digital marketing, Google, Google Search, SEO
Hello and welcome to another installment of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots, a column where we discuss the most important and exciting topics and events that took place during the last week in the world of digital marketing.
For our “December 2019: Week 3” edition we have prepared some of the most interesting and relevant stories from the digital marketing industry.
Here’s what we have prepared for you this week:
- Facebook Addresses Ad Buyer Frustration via Ads-Status Tool
- YouTube Introduces Another Policy Change, Creators Upset
- Instagram Users to Be Warned Posting ‘Potentially Offensive’ Captions
- Bing is Updating BingBot’s User-Agent
- WordPress Announces Gutenberg 7.1 and New Exciting Improvements…
…and more.
Read on.
Facebook Addresses Ad Buyer Frustration via Ads-Status Tool
Frustrated ad buyers can now stop wondering if they did something wrong or if Facebook is actually down. The users now have more insight into what is going on with Facebook Ads Manager. The social media behemoth introduced a new ads status page that will update the ad buyers on platform related issues.
This newly provided transparency comes after the users complained about the unsteady back end, triggering the buyers and direct-to-consumer companies to start looking for alternatives. The buyers have been addressing various Facebook Ads Manager issues, especially during the holiday shopping season, particularly as the platform experienced an extended outage right before Black Friday last year.
(Image Source: Facebook)
Read more on this Facebook Ads Manager Status here.
YouTube Introduces Another Policy Change, Creators Upset
The biggest video sharing platform has yet again caused a stir among video content creators by making a new policy change that can result in the content published by popular channels being impacted on the content-type level. More precisely, YouTube has updated its harassment policy forbidding content that is not politically correct.
The YouTube statement is as follows:
“We will no longer allow content that maliciously insults someone based on protected attributes such as their race, gender expression, or sexual orientation. This applies to everyone, from private individuals to YouTube creators, to public officials.”
In other words, PC babies win yet again. Actually, there are simply no winners in this scenario.
More on the topic here: YouTube Upsets Creators With Another Policy Change.
Instagram Users to Be Warned Posting ‘Potentially Offensive’ Captions
The social media platform will now warn its users before they are about to post, as they stated “potentially offensive” captions for their video or photo content.
From now on, whenever the platform’s AI-based tools recognize hurtful captions, the app will notify the user via message saying that the caption “looks similar to others that have been reported,” and will then encourage the Instagram user to change the written content. However, the platform will also provide the user the option to post the caption unchanged.
Back in July, Instagram introduced a similar AI-powered feature that prompts the users to reconsider leaving potentially hurtful comments.
These features build on the company’s ongoing fight against online bullying.
Bing is Updating BingBot’s User-Agent
Microsoft’s search engine Bing revealed it will begin the transition to a new BingBot user-agent with the rollout of the evergreen BingBot continuing to take place. Bing’s new user-agents will be regularly updated, resulting in the changes in the user agent strings as well.
The brand new bot will be streamlining this SEO aspect as it is based on Google’s Chrome browser. In other words, if your page works with Chrome, it should do the same for both search engines – the new BingBot and GoogleBot.
As indexing a web page is the very fulcrum of SEO, this is definitely something you should keep track of, especially as Google is about to follow suit.
Read more here: Bing to update BingBot’s user agent.
Google Introduces New Features to ‘App + Web’ Properties in Google Analytics
Google is officially upgrading the new App + Web property in Google Analytics. This is great news because these new features will allow users to measure multiple websites and apps.
App + Web properties provide people with the opportunity to easily measure data across their app and website all in one place. The main purpose is to help site owners to better understand the user journey.
Besides the option of measuring multiple websites, new features include more custom analysis options and faster access to data.
Multiple Web Streams
After these changes, App + Web properties are now supporting up to 50 data streams across apps, websites, and web apps in a single property.
This means site owners are now able to see metrics aggregated across all data streams and apply filters to view a single set of data.
More Custom Analysis Options
Originally, App + Web properties had only five options for cross-platform analysis. To help the users, Google has added two more options.
- Cohort analysis – Compare engagement between similar users by providing more metric and dimension breakdowns
- User lifetime – Gives insight into the lifetime activity of a certain group of users, based on custom dimensions user chooses
Automated & Custom Insights
Automated insights use machine learning to identify key trends and anomalies in data. On the other hand, custom insights allow users to tell Google Analytics which metrics they prefer being notified about.
Faster Access to Data
App + Web properties users can now acquire the information they need faster by simply asking a question in the Google Analytics search bar.
WordPress Announces Gutenberg 7.1 and New Exciting Improvements
WordPress Gutenberg 7.1 has been updated with many new improvements. Here are the most interesting ones:
New Welcome User Interface
An improved feature is in the welcome UI screen. This new feature helps new users to better understand the Gutenberg block editing.
Table Captions
This feature allows users to add captions to the bottom of the tables. There is also a new and handy toggle you can use to select between editing and selection modes.
These improvements make Gutenberg’s table more useful and the best thing is that you can use it without having to download a plugin.
Mobile Editing Improvements
One of the most interesting new features is definitely a fixed-mobile toolbar for selecting editing elements like paragraphs, and links.
WordPress also trimmed PHP 5.2 compatibility code from the RSS block. This means WordPress users should always using the most up to date version of PHP, which is now the 7.x version.
Google Is Now Using BERT to Generate Top Stories Carousels in Search
Google started using BERT models and various machine learning techniques in order to group related news articles together in carousels.
These new carousels will appear in the top stories section of Google Search. Their purpose is to help searchers to easily find the best articles related to a specific news story.
Google’s Duncan Osborn, product manager of Search, states:
“When you’re searching for information on a timely topic–a recent sports upset or the latest scientific breakthrough–you see a carousel of articles at the top of your Search results highlighting relevant news. Now, when there are multiple stories related to your search, we’ll also organize the results by story so it’s easier to understand what’s most relevant and you can make a more informed decision on which specific articles to explore.”
Besides displaying the newest stories, Google will now show other content that will provide users with more context and information.
That would be all for this week’s edition of Digital Marketing Week in Review by Four Dots. See you next week for more impactful stories from the digital marketing landscape. In the meantime, be sure to check out the previous edition!
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