Here’s what you missed last week in digital marketing. Week 49 — 2022
Marketing is stressful, and if you are like me, you will often find yourself short on time — I try to put together updates from the most prominent platforms hoping to save you some time so you can focus on other more critical aspects of your life. Don’t get me wrong, knowledge is power, and we should all be up to date with the platforms we use in our marketing mix (or those we are looking to integrate in the future). However, I believe we should also focus on more important things: mental health and family are just two things that are top of mind for me as the year ends. I also recently wrote an article about how I keep my productivity up and remain sane while working from home; check it out if you feel stuck or overwhelmed.
Let’s get down to business:
December 2022 Google Webmaster Report is out. If you own a website or are interested in SEO — it’s a must-read. If you missed my last piece, you should know that link-building is slowly but surely going to die down Duy Nguyen, from Google’s search quality team, said in the Google Office hours video that “backlinks as a signal has a lot less significant impact compared to when Google Search first started out many years ago.” Duy said this at the 6:08 mark in that video.
Google shuts down Duplex on the Web. Sunsetting the DuplexWeb-Google web crawler is a big hit for any business that generated revenue from it. Google called this feature “Duplex on the web,” and it allowed users to use Google Assistant for new reservations and other purchase categories. It would call a restaurant, for example, to book a table reservation for dinner when you asked Google to secure a reservation.
It worked for movie tickets, assisting with checking out for online retail stores, food ordering, flight check-ins, password changes, and discount finders.
Meta
A New EU Digital Acts law can affect Targeted & Personalised Meta Ads. Privacy regulators in the European Union have ruled that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, can’t make giving up data for targeted ads a condition of joining the social networks. Signing up for Facebook or Instagram means clicking past a privacy policy and consenting to the social networks’ digital surveillance for advertising purposes. If you disagree, you can’t have an account. But the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) made up of all of Europe’s privacy regulators, issued a series of new decisions Monday, reportedly declaring that this kind of coerced consent violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s sweeping privacy law. This affects all platforms that want to operate in Europe — but it may take some time before we see any effects, however, it’s something to keep in mind moving forward, First Party data aggregators and providers will be solid gold in the coming years.
Meta adds Instagram Audience Targeting for IG & FB Ads. As noted by Meta ads expert Jon Loomer, up till now, you’ve been able to create a custom audience of your Facebook followers but not your Instagram audience. That’s made it virtually impossible to focus on your IG followers specifically — which is generally, for most brands, much different from their Facebook following.
So, you can now use this as an ad targeting option to reach people who’ve shown interest in your products on IG with your offers and promotions, while you can also use it as your source for a Lookalike Audience.
Twitter to delete 1.5 Billion accounts to free usernames. Brands keep an eye on your favorite handle. Twitter is preparing to delete 1.5 billion inactive accounts to free up dormant handles, or user names, on the platform, owner Elon Musk said Thursday. Some Twitter users have complained that inactive accounts have unusual and desirable handles that were snared in Twitter’s early days.
In the second quarter of 2022, Twitter counted 237.8 million users as “monetizable daily active users,” a measure that suggests they’re active on the platform and are being shown advertisements.
LinkedIn launched new B2B Ad Targeting Updates. Since 87% of B2B marketing leaders across the globe shared that first-party data is important to their marketing strategies, we are working on ways to integrate your first-party data with our platform of more than 875 million professionals.* We will soon begin to test a new Conversions API, which connects your first-party conversion data to our platform to help you better understand full-funnel performance while having control and flexibility over your data. We are also continuing to invest in privacy-enhancing technologies, such as clean rooms, to enable you to gain actionable insights and advanced measurements in a secure environment. First-party data is going to be the buzzword of 2023 in marketing, you are going to see it everywhere.
Snapchat
Snapchat will allow creators to make money from AR filters Some creators will be able to make money off in-app lenses. It’s the start of a business Snap hopes will make its platform the center of an AR universe. Another step toward a better Creator-centered economy.
Reddit launches “Reddit Recap 2022” — it’s probably the best this year.
Various
Giphy to add alt text feature to make GIFs more accessible & better for SEO. Giphy is looking to improve accessibility and help more people understand what the platform’s GIFs are depicting with the help of alt-text descriptions. It has teamed up with a content accessibility solutions provider called Scribely to add descriptive text to the platform’s content. Screen readers will be able to read the alt text aloud, which will help visually impaired folks to know what’s happening in a GIF.
Amazon launches a Tiktok-like Photos & Videos feed feature called “Inspire” for products. Amazon is bringing a TikTok-like shopping experience to its app. The company announced the launch of Inspire, a new short-form video and photo feed that allows consumers to explore products and ideas and shop from content created by influencers, brands, and other customers. The feature is designed to draw consumers’ attention away from apps like TikTok, where brands can directly market to consumers to drive sales on Amazon.com instead.
The retailer said the shopping feature will initially roll out to select customers in the U.S. in early December and will become broadly available to U.S. customers in the following months.
That’s it folks — thanks for reading
Cheers,
Sabin
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