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

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 “November 2020: Week 1” edition brings us: 

• Microsoft Clarity – Free Website Analytics
  
• Length Limit for Instagram Live Broadcasts, Adds Live-Stream Archive Extended 
• What Went Wrong With the Latest WordPress Update?
• TikTok to Partner Up With Shopify
• LinkedIn Sees Record Engagement Levels, User-base Reaches 722 Million

Alrighty then, let’s dive right in! 

 

Microsoft Clarity – Free Website Analytics

Microsoft Clarity is a free analytics tool that allows website managers deeper insight into the website’s visitors’ behavior and what exactly they are looking for, without violating their privacy. 

The analytics tools help publishers know how web users use a site and find opportunities for improvement, including reporting on something they call the “rage click” metric. As the people from Microsoft claim:

“Clarity is designed to have a very low impact on page load times, so you can make sure users navigating to your site won’t have to wait for pages to load. Additionally, we don’t place any caps on your traffic so whether you get 10 visitors per day or 1,000,000, Clarity will be able to handle your traffic with no additional cost for you.”

The tool is divided into three features:

• Session playbacks
• Heatmaps
• Insights dashboard

(Image credit: Search Engine Journal)

With Session playback, you can replay the user’s visit to see their scrolling through the pages, where they clicked and where they made a pause. 

The heat map feature shows hot spots or places where the visitors clicked the most, which will give you an idea of how far down your page visitors usually go. For instance, if your hot spots are near the beginning of the article you published, it indicates that people didn’t quite read it. However, if the hot spots are near the end, then you have yourself an engaging piece of content. 

(Image credit: Search Engine Journal)

The Insights dashboard feature gives insight into performance and user behavior metrics. Microsoft describes it in the following way:

“We provide a dashboard of aggregate metrics to help you get an overall understanding of the traffic on your site. At a glance you will be able to see how many users were clicking on non-existent links or how many people scrolled up and down a page in search of something they couldn’t readily find. You can also see things like how many concurrent JavaScript errors are occurring across your clients or how much time the average user spends navigating your site.”

(Image source: Search Engine Journal)

Microsoft continues to provide us with new SEO tools that are warmly welcomed by the SEO community due to both their user-friendliness and practical deployability. Read more in this SEJ article.

 

Length Limit for Instagram Live Broadcasts, Adds Live-Stream Archive Extended

Following the discord that COVID-19 created concerning IRL human interaction, options like live streaming are experiencing a big comeback as people are trying to re-establish their social connections. No wonder Instagram announced they are adding two more options to enrich their live streaming portfolio. 

(Image Source: Social Media Today)

Firstly, they are going to prolong the live streaming time limit from the present 60 minutes to 4 hours. As they claim:

“This could help people such as instructors (yoga, fitness, schoolteachers etc.) who had to pivot to virtual classes, budding musicians, artists, or activists hosting discussions with fellow peers engage with their audience with no interruption from a 60 min time limit.”

(Image Source: Social Media Today)

Also, they are launching a new option that will allow you to keep your live stream videos archived for up to 30 days. In addition, if you wish to download your live stream video, it will include likes, comments and other details that were unavailable up until now. 

 

What Went Wrong With the Latest WordPress Update?

WordPress team will remember the 29th of October 2020 for a long, long time because it marks the beginning of one of their greatest debacles to this day. 

It all began with a very routine update, which should have resolved security issues. The latest WP version 5.5.2 was meant to resolve issues like XSS (Cross Site Scripting) attacks, Cross Site Request Forgeries, and others. This is where it all went sideways for people from WordPress. Along with the intended code, 5.5.2 introduced a bug that has been preventing new WP installations. 

WordPress team was very quick to stop the further roll-out of 5.5.2 and immediately started working on 5.5.3 when WordPress auto-updates started pushing an Alpha version all on its own. What a Halloween story, ha?

(Image source: Search Engine Journal)

Anyway, the WordPress team promised…

“…that won’t be done again. Now seems like a good time to document a correct and proper way of “stopping” a release in progress, which honestly had not been attempted before. Stopping a release is actually pretty simple if they had made the correct change, so while their attempt was a reasonable assumption to make, it turned out to be wrong.

The release system is complicated, and trying to do things with it that haven’t been anticipated and documented led to unexpected results. This will be improved through documentation and better code and management of the release system itself.”

Luckily, the 5.5.3 version is up and running and is bug-free. So, check your WP installation and make sure you have the latest version installed. 

 

TikTok to Partner Up With Shopify

Just when we thought that time had run out for TikTok (pun intended), it slipped out of the US government’s rear-naked choke and sprung back into the match. The newest addition to the social network family seems to be more resilient than we gave them credit. 

In its short time online, TikTok has managed to attract and create their own celebrities and influencers, which in turn attracts more people to the platform. In their search for ways to help their content creators make money, the TikTok team struck a deal with Shopify to integrate their e-commerce solution into the platform. 

(Image source: Social Media Today)

The TikTok crew were happy to go public with this new development:

“Today, we’re announcing a global partnership with Shopify that will help more than a million merchants create and run campaigns directly geared toward TikTok’s highly engaged community.”  

Needless to say, this feature won’t enable direct, on platform eCommerce, but will allow Shopify merchants to use TikTok for their promotion campaigns created within their Shopify dashboards.

This accounts for TikTok’s another effective effort to facilitate its channels for online sales, and therefore grow as an app. 

 

LinkedIn Sees Record Engagement Levels, User-base Reaches 722 Million 

Ever since the current pandemic started creating more room for job seeking, LinkedIn has been on the rise in terms of post engagement and user-base growth. The official report coming from the platform’s parent company Microsoft states that LinkedIn saw a 31% increase in engagement over the last quarter, which is described as “record levels of engagement.” 

The revenue generated by this business-focused social media network has gone up by 16% as well. Most of this increased revenue was due to the increased ad spend over the last quarter. 

The Microsoft report also revealed that LinkedIn’s user-base has now reached the 722 million mark, which is a significant boost from 675 million, a number reported in January 2020. 

Read more about the LinkedIn numbers and updates here.  

 

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!