Daily Minute Master Series – July 4, 2019

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Social Media

Facebook brings back reach estimates for Custom Audiences

Facebook is reinstalling reach estimates for Custom Audiences, a tool that allows advertisers to estimate audience size for their Custom Audience campaigns. The company removed the tool in March, 2018 when researchers at Northwestern University discovered a vulnerability that made it possible to infer attributes of Facebook users via the tool. Facebook reports it worked on three key changes to improve security around its Custom Audiences reach estimate tool: privacy, detection and new restrictions. Reach estimates were a handy tool for advertisers, making it possible to determine approximate campaign sizes and manage budgets and bidding activity accordingly — without taking up a lot of time and effort on their part.

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Study Claims Instagram Engagement Has Been in Decline Since May

A study claims overall engagement across Instagram is down and has been sharply declining since early May 2019. The study defines engagement rate as the total number of interactions on a post divided by the size of the account’s following at the time of posting. As of mid-April, the maximum average engagement rate for the accounts included in the study was 1.54%. Engagement rate now hovers around 0.9%, which is down 1.1% from earlier this year. In addition, the average number of interactions is down 18% since the beginning of the year. According to the study, brands are suffering from this decline in engagement as well as individual influencers. The study doesn’t offer any insight into what is causing the decline, noting that there haven’t been any substantive API changes. If you market your business on Instagram, know that you aren’t alone if your engagement has been down over the past month. The study only measured engagement with feed posts. It did not take into account engagement with stories.

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Facebook Makes Job, Housing, Credit Ads Searchable, Eliminates Other Targeting Triggers

Facebook plans to make ads for jobs, loans and credit card ads searchable for all its U.S. users, based on an agreement made in March following a legal settlement. The searchable database that makes U.S. housing ads searchable by location and advertiser, along with the other databases, expands on an agreement to eliminate discrimination. The company’s also addressed discrimination in Facebook Ads by removing thousands of categories that target people related to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. This searchable database for housing, employment and credit-card ads will no longer target by age, gender or ZIP code. It will have a much smaller set of targeting categories overall — but all will become searchable on the platform. While it’s not yet clear the type of technology Facebook will use to target these ads, the new structure aims to ensure advertisers follow these rules, with plans for full enforcement by the end of the year.

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Marketing

Google extends Chrome ad blocking to global markets on July 9

On February 2018, Google implemented ad filtering for “annoying” and intrusive ads in Chrome in North America and Europe. This had been pre-announced in 2017 and was intended to compel publishers to adopt advertising standards established by the Coalition for Better Ads. The industry group was created in response to the rise of consumer ad-blocking. Now Chrome’s bad-ads filtering is going global, with a rollout to markets beyond North America and Europe on July 8. In brief, sites that feature any of the four desktop or eight mobile ad categories banned under the Better Ads Standards, could see those units, or potentially all ads on their sites, blocked. Annoying formats include pop-ups, auto-play video ads with sound, prestitial ads, flashing/animated ads, large sticky ads and full-screen scrollover ads, among others. The global rollout of Chrome “ad blocking” comes at a time when Google engineers are contemplating controversial changes to browser extension APIs, which could disable most third-party ad blockers and privacy extensions. Google appeared to reverse course, although the status of the changes remains uncertain.

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Daily Minute Master Series – July 3, 2019

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Social Media

Instagram Launches ‘Join Chat’ Sticker to Promote Private Group Discussion

Instagram has this week officially launched its new ‘Join Chat’ sticker for Stories, which, when tapped, will connect Stories viewers into a private discussion. Given the overall rise in messaging use across various social apps, it makes sense for Instagram to look to facilitate the same, porting more engagement and interaction into Direct, as opposed to seeing users switch to other networks – like, say, Snapchat – to hold more intimate discussion. Facilitating connection with your closest friends is a clear way to make your app an essential interactive tool, a connective utility which users can rely on to stay informed of the key happenings and events in their world. For brands, it could provide another way to build stronger community connection, and bring your biggest advocates closer, by sharing exclusive content and/or seeking consultation.

For the full article click here 

Facebook Updates News Feed Algorithm to Demote Misleading Health Claims

Given the focus on vanity in social media, and showcasing a highlight reel of your life via your public posts, it’s no surprise that miracle cures for weight loss, baldness and other physical conditions run rife in ads across the various networks. Such ads are misleading, false, and prey on vulnerable users. And now, Facebook’s taking action against them, with two new News Feed algorithm updates designed to reduce the reach of ads that promote miracle health claims. The update is a good one for Facebook – with more and more people relying on The Social Network for their news distribution and information needs, confusing, false claims like these can only make matters worse, and such claims are detectable by Facebook’s systems. While Facebook would prefer to be more hands-off with content of this type, it simply can’t, and as such, you can expect The Social Network to continue to roll out updates like this which will reduce the reach of concerning, questionable posts and ads.

For the full article click here 

Marketing

Google taking Ads API back to beta over performance issues

Google has decided to send its Ads API back to beta. Feedback from developers about slow response times have caused Google to determine that the API is not ready for production usage. The Google Ads API is the successor to the AdWords API. It was released in March of this year. Until today Google had been actively trying to get developers to migrate to the Ads API. It’s unclear what percentage of AdWords API users had made the switch to date. Google’s Ads APIs are used by agencies, SEMs and brands that want to manage large campaigns or advertiser accounts at scale. Google is telling developers to go back to (or continuing to use) the AdWords API.

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Google expands App campaigns search inventory on iOS browsers

Google has announced that App ads will appear on more iOS mobile web browser searches. Accordingly, campaign reports will also include installs and in-app conversion events from iOS browsers. There’s nothing app advertisers have to do to gain access to this new ad inventory. Active App campaigns will automatically get the modeled conversions in the “Conversions” column of their Google Ads reporting. Advertisers that rely on third-party tools, however, should be aware that these conversions won’t be available on those platforms. And, for early adopters, Google said, “We encourage you to monitor your bids and budgets as there may be fluctuations in performance after these updates go live.” This expanded App campaigns search inventory could put a much larger audience within reach for app advertisers.

For the full article click here

 

Daily Minute Master Series – July 2nd, 2019

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Social Media

Twitter Updates Search Results with Additional Contextual Info

You may have noted that there’s more information there, relating to trends, mutual follows – additional context to help guide you to the results that you’re actually looking for. This week, Twitter has officially announced this update, which is now being rolled out to all mobile platforms. The idea, as noted, is that by showing you more information about your search, it’ll better guide you towards the results you’re after, and help you better understand whether this profile is worth following, in order to get you to tap through for more info. It’s not a major shift, but the additional information markers are helpful, and could better inform your usage – while it’s also worth noting that the activity from your brand account may also now appear in relevant searches, which could influence whether users tap through to see more or not. 

For the full article click here 

Marketing

Google to stop supporting noindex directive in robots.txt

Effective September 1, Google will stop supporting unsupported and unpublished rules in the robots exclusive protocol, the company announced on the Google Webmaster blog. That means Google will no longer support robots.txt files with the noindex directive listed within the file. Yesterday, Google announced the company is working on making the robots exclusion protocol a standard and this is probably the first change coming. In fact, Google released their robots.txt parser as an open source project along with this announcement yesterday. Google has been looking to change this for years and with Google pushing to standardize the protocol, it can now move forward. The most important thing is to make sure that you are not using the noindex directive in the robots.txt file. Also, look to see if you are using the nofollow or crawl-delay commands and if so, look to use the true supported method for those directives going forward.

For the full article click here 

Hootsuite integrates Yext Reviews into its dashboard

Yext and Hootsuite have teamed up to enable businesses with physical locations to monitor and respond to their Yext reviews within Hootsuite’s social media management dashboard. The Yext integration will pull in both online reviews and review data, including review metrics related to average ratings, response count, response time and keyword-based sentiment analysis. Effective brand management is more than simply paying attention to what is being said about your company on social channels. Online reviews play a major role in a brand’s reputation and conversion outcomes. The Yext Reviews integration into Hootsuite is designed to help marketers track and respond to what is being said about their brands beyond social and connect the dots between reviews in search channels and social media engagement, all in one place.

For the full article click here 

Google: Updating a Page’s Publishing Date Won’t Make it Rank Better

Google’s John Mueller recently advised that updating the publishing date of a page won’t have an impact on rankings. Mueller said there’s no harm in displaying the last updated date. However, there’s no benefit to changing the last updated date of a page as far as SEO is concerned. Mueller gave the example of weather forecast pages, which are consistently updated throughout the day. Those pages do not suddenly rank better as a result of the last updated date always changing. From the perspective of users, it may make sense to inform people of when the page was last updated, but it will not play a role when it comes to search.

For the full article click here 

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