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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 “September 2020: Week 4” edition brings us:   

  • Facebook Launches FB and IG Management Tool “Facebook Business Suite” 
  • The US TikTok Ban Delayed For a Week
  • Keywords in Domains or URLs Aren’t Helping Your Ranking  
  • GoogleBot to Start Crawling Websites via HTTP/2 
  • Google Merged ‘Custom Affinity’ and ‘Custom Intent’ Into ‘Custom Audiences’

Alrighty then, let’s dive right in! 

 

Facebook Launches FB and IG Management Tool “Facebook Business Suite” 

In an attempt to make Facebook and Instagram management tasks easier for small businesses, the social media giant has launched a brand new management platform – Facebook Business Suite

The idea is to have a single tool the users can utilize to manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts and boost their social media presence more easily. 

Facebook Business Suite will be available for both desktop and mobile devices and will enable FB and IG users to:

  • Save time by posting to both platforms simultaneously and being able to manage their posts and stay connected to both communities via a single tool. 
  • Receive more consistent updates and stay in the loop as they will get all the alerts, messages, and notifications in one place.  
  • Achieve better business results by gaining insight into which posts are performing well and which require tweaking. 

You can find out more about this tool in Facebook’s official post

 

The US TikTok Ban Delayed For a Week

US-based TikTok users will be able to use this social media platform for at least another week. Namely, after the conditional approval of an acquisition deal with Oracle and Microsoft took place, the TikTok’s US ban has been halted due to the recent progress in a deal with Oracle and Walmart. 

Though President Trump has recently signed an executive order for TikTok to be banned in the US on September the 20th, this date has been postponed as there has been a new concept-based breakthrough with this deal concerning the two US companies taking control of the platform. 

According to SEJ, ByteDance Ltd. wants a $60 billion validation, while Oracle eyes a 12.5% share. Walmart has already agreed to buy a 7.5% share, which means that Oracle and Walmart are about to pay a combined sum of $12 billion.

A new company will be formed for these purposes – TikTok Global.

 

Keywords in Domain Names Aren’t Helping Your Ranking  

In a recent Ask Google Webmasters video, Google’s John Mueller talked about whether or not putting keywords in a domain name can help a website rank for that keyword, and the answer is no. 

Mueller addressed the matter as one user posted a specific question regarding keywords in top-level domains:

“Does a .jobs domain improve ranking in Google for jobs?”

Google’s expert responded by addressing both putting keywords in TLDs and placing them in domains in general: 

“This is a really common question that comes up for the new top-level domains. In short, no. You don’t get a special bonus like that from having a keyword in your top-level domain. Anecdotally you can see that by searching naturally for anything that interests you.

I’d venture a guess that the top results don’t have those keywords as a domain ending. Often it’s not even in the URL at all. That’s by design.”

Mueller also said that SEOs don’t have to put their keywords in a domain name as it simply won’t affect their ranking for that particular keyword.

“Just because a website has a keyword in its domain name”, says Mueller, “doesn’t mean that it’s more relevant than others for that keyword. In short, you don’t need to put keywords in the domain name.”

If you have been in the SEO industry for a while, you are probably surprised by this claim as it contradicts certain studies regarding Google ranking factors.  

What is your experience with keywords in domain names and rankings? More info on this available in this SEJ article.  

 

GoogleBot to Start Crawling Websites via HTTP/2 

As of November 2020, GoogleBot will start crawling certain websites over HTTP/2 – the next major revision of HTTP with improved architecture. The company has recently announced and confirmed this major update. 

The upgraded architecture of HTTP/2 is:

  • faster
  • more efficient
  • more robust

It will also improve features and add new ones for clients and servers.

The company claims that the main idea behind the update is to make the crawling process more efficient in terms of resource and server usage:

“With h2, Googlebot is able to open a single TCP connection to the server and efficiently transfer multiple files over it in parallel, instead of requiring multiple connections. The fewer connections open, the fewer resources the server and Googlebot have to spend on crawling.”

Visit this SEJ article to read more about how HTTP/2 crawls websites. 

 

Google Ads Merged ‘Custom Affinity’ and ‘Custom Intent’ Into ‘Custom Audiences’

Google decided to update its audience options for YouTube, Gmail, Display, and Discovery campaigns by combining two previous options “custom intent” and “custom affinity” into one called “custom audiences”.

Google Merged ‘Custom Affinity’ and ‘Custom Intent’ Into ‘Custom Audiences’ | Four Dots

(Image Source: Google)

The option can be set up in the Audiences section at the Campaign/Ad Group level, as well as via the Audience Manager section in your Google Ads account. 

Google chooses the right audience based on how you set up your campaign goals, along with your bidding strategy. The campaign priorities can be reach, performance, or consideration, based on which Google then optimizes audience choices. 

Go to this informative SEJ article to gain more insight into how these audience targeting settings work and how to optimize them. 

 

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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