Daily Minute Master Series – October 7, 2019

Social Media

Instagram Launches a New Messaging App for Close Friends Called ‘Threads’

Instagram’s ‘Threads’ is rolling out to all users on iOS and Android. Threads is another messaging app, with all the regular messaging features users have come to expect. Threads opens to the camera – like Snapchat – and provides quick, easy options for sending text, photo and video updates to a selected group of friends. Your contacts in Threads are defined by your Instagram ‘close friends’ list, meaning that the people you’re connected with in Threads are only those within your inner circle. But where Threads looks to differentiate from other messaging apps is in its Status and Auto Status tools. Status enables users to manually set an emoji as an away message, giving their friends a visual representation of what they’re up to at any given time. Auto Status, meanwhile, will allocate an emoji status without manual input, making an assumption based on your location, your movement, your phone’s battery level, etc. Facebook-owned app will now automatically track your everyday movements, and report them, in order to keep people updated on your activity. 

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Google’s new take on Shopping goes live in U.S.

Google’s new personalized shopping “destination” is now live in the U.S., the company announced Thursday. One thing you’ll notice immediately is the prominence of the colorful shopping cart icons and calls to “Buy on Google”. This is Google’s cost cost-per-action program for retailers, currently called Google Shopping Actions. It enables users to buy via Google’s checkout with the payment information stored in their Google accounts. This is a significant piece of Google’s strategy to push back on Amazon is to establish partnerships with retailers and provide universal checkout. Google described the new Google Shopping as the “merger of the best of Google Express with Google Shopping.” A price-tracking feature lets users tag products they’re looking for to receive notifications when the prices on those items drop. Users will also be able to buy online or locally with buy online/pick up in-store, if that’s supported by the retailer. Google says it has mapped more than 2 billion products to local retailers. This is a significant initiative by Google to remain relevant in the retail sector. Now that this new experience is live, it’s even more clear that merchants will need to adopt Shopping Actions if they want to get prominent visibility in Google Shopping. That will be the key going forward to retail advertising on Google and its various properties. As it does with Amazon, revenue share for Shopping Actions varies by category.

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Marketing

WordPress 5.3 Adopts Rel UGC Nofollow Link Attribute

WordPress announced that WordPress 5.3, coming next month will support Google’s UGC Nofollow attribute by default. Starting November 12, 2019, all links in the comments section will automatically use the UGC nofollow link attribute. The UGC nofollow link attribute is a code announced by Google on September 10, 2019 that tells Google that a link is in the context of user generated content and should not be trusted. The WordPress announcement did not specify if plugins using the old code would break the site or simply gracefully degrade. There is no ranking benefit to the publisher for using the UGC nofollow attribute. The UGC nofollow attribute benefits Google because it helps Google understand that a link was created by someone outside of the publisher’s control and that the link should not be trusted.

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Advertising

Microsoft Advertising will also deprecate accelerated delivery

Starting November 1, all Microsoft Advertising Search, Dynamic Search Ads and Shopping campaigns will automatically start serving with standard delivery. Accelerated delivery was designed to serve ads as early and often as possible throughout the day. It was never a good idea to use it if your campaign budget was restrained, but both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising point out how inefficient it is for budget-constrained campaigns, so perhaps advertisers weren’t using it correctly. Ad delivery will be determined by machine learning in both platforms. Parity between the two platforms with this setting makes sense for Microsoft Advertising and the advertisers who import campaigns from Google.

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