Daily Minute Master Series – July 29, 2019
Social Media
Facebook is Letting More Advertisers Place Ads in Search Results
More advertisers can now place ads in Facebook’s search results, a placement that has been in testing since last year. Facebook’s search ads were first rolled out to a select number of businesses in the US in December. Now, it appears a greater number of advertisers are seeing ‘Facebook search’ show up as a placement option when setting up ad campaigns. ‘Facebook search’ is an additional placement option when creating newsfeed campaigns. Facebook search ads, like newsfeed ads, are clearly labeled with a “Sponsored” tag. They can appear either as a static image or in a carousel format. Unlike Google ads, there is no option to target specific keywords or phrases with Facebook search ads. So the best way to show up for various keywords is to make sure they appear somewhere on your business’s Facebook page.
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As Instagram Hides Likes, Young Users are Switching to Business Accounts, Exposing Personal Data
New research suggests that a growing number of young users are now converting their personal profiles into business accounts in order to access more in-depth audience data on their post performance. That’s particularly concerning, given that in order to list yourself as a ‘business’ on the platform, you need to provide additional contact info, like a phone number or email address, which is then displayed in your publicly accessible bio. With Instagram lessening its public focus on Likes, maybe, through the advanced metrics available through business profile, young users are looking to maintain their Insta ‘cred’ by sharing these more in-depth figures.
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Marketing
Google is Replacing Voice Search With Google Assistant on Android Devices
Google is reportedly in the process of replacing voice search on Android devices with Google Assistant. According to a report from 9to5Google, the old voice search icon has been replaced with an Assistant icon in the Google app and search bar widget. Google shifting the focus from regular voice search to Assistant is an indication of where Google wants to guide the future of its services. This change could potentially impact a small percentage of organic search traffic to publishers, given the Assistant’s penchant for providing direct answers. When users are given the answers they need from Google Assistant, they don’t have to search and click through to publishers’ sites. Although it’s important to keep in mind that Assistant can’t provide a direct answer for every query.
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Google notifying webmasters to remove noindex from robots.txt files
As part of Google fully removing support for the noindex directive in robots.txt files, Google is now sending notifications to those that have such directives. This morning, many within the SEO community started getting notifications from Google Search Console with the subject line “Remove “noindex” statements from the robots.txt of…” If you get this notice, make sure to ensure whatever you mentioned in this noindex directive is supported a different way. The most important thing is to make sure that you are not using the noindex directive in the robots.txt file. If you are, you will want to make the suggested changes above before September 1. 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.
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