Digital Marketing News and Views April 2018

It is an exciting time to be a marketer — the digital world is evolving every second and it is much like spending every day in a digital amusement park with new updates, enhancements and a few debacles. Let’s dive in with the top stories from the world of digital marketing in April 2018.

Search News Updates:

1. Know the reach of YouTube Ads with the new Google AdWords tool

Google AdWords has introduced a new tool called Reach Planner. This allows marketers and advertisers to forecast unique reach and frequency of ad units on YouTube and performance across Google’s video partners, for all audiences and video formats, across all devices.

Additionally, it will also suggest the right mix of YouTube ad products based on your budget, marketing objective, and also your ad preferences.

2. Google AdWords introduced outstream video ads

Aiming to extend the reach of video campaigns beyond YouTube, Google AdWords has introduced a new video format called outstream, built exclusively for mobile. The outsream videos will be displayed in mobile browsers and apps, in auto play mode but without a voice. Of course, the viewer can tap to unmute and toggle to play video from the beginning

Marketers advertising can add outstream video ads starting April 17, and will only pay for impressions when the ad has been on screen and viewable.

3. Google and Voice

Google is definitely committed to making all its searches a bit more human and seamless. The biggest champion towards this commitment is Google Assistant. With superior NLP search capabilities, ability to recognize your pet’s breed (limited to Cat & Dog for now), and the recent show of “ booking a haircut appointment” at the Google I/O by Sundar Pichai says it all.

Google also wants to make audio content searchable — this means there is a growing potential of audio or voice SEO to come into play, which means podcasts, sound clips, audio books or even audio version of an article will be indexed for better ranking.

In another update to show off Natural language Search capabilities, Google released a new search experience called “Talk to Books,” in which it invites users to ask questions which Google will respond to with passages from books.

4. After Stack Overflow, Google is testing Carousel of Quora ‘Top Answers’ to Search Results

Social Bookmarking is one of the best ways to amplify your content as well as build your brand. Google recognizes this and recently added inline answers from Stack Overflow in the Search results of certain queries. The search engine now appears to be testing a similar carousel for results from Quora.

5. “More Results” Button for Mobile

One of the top complaints by publishers has been about the reducing web traffic from Google search on mobile. Addressing this, Google introduced the “More Results” button for Mobile searches.

If the default search results do not answer the user adequately, they can click on “More results” button that will show links to more pages. All except mobile Chrome browser for iOS will see this implemented.

Social Media News Update

Pinterest: Display of total monthly viewers for Business Profile Pages

Keeping up with the month on month advancements, Pinterest will show all page visitor including the page account administrators, the total number of people who saw the business’s pins within the last 30 days.

While one can buy follower, views are harder to achieve. As a marketer one can make this work in their favour by increasing the ad spends and gain more views.

LinkedIn: Bring in some humour with GIF

LinkedIn is the largest professional networking social media channel. But, don’t we all have fun even at our workplace once a while? Tapping into this sentiment, LinkedIn has teamed up with Google-acquired, Tenor, to integrate GIFs into direct messaging.

Twitter: Will display more news links in your feed

In the attempt to differentiate itself from the other social media channels and progressing towards an app in the News category, Twitter spokesperson has confirmed to Buzzfeed that it has rolled out to all users including those on Android, iOS, and web browsers — advancements by which it will push more news links to your home timeline.

Snapchat: Released two set of new lenses this month — One for iPhoneX and other for its users to play AR Games

iPhoneX is the top selling mobile phone in the market. Being the flagship product with top features like the front-facing “TrueDepth” camera, there are many ways Apple promoted to the developer community to use the feature at launch. One was augmented reality (AR) Snapchat lenses. They can reflect the surrounding light as well as render 3D objects.

The new lenses include a Mardi Gras mask, a Day of the Dead skull, and pro wrestler face paint.

The other pair is a new set of lenses, called “Snappables,” which lets users play augmented reality (AR) games with their contacts. The lenses can be controlled with touch, motion, or with facial expressions — each “Snappable” lens behaves differently.

Check this video for details:

Instagram: Upload Multiple Photos and Videos to Stories

Instagram has rolled out an update that will allow upload of multiple photos and videos to the user stories.

Users can preview each piece of media, and apply edits to individual pieces as desired before uploading

”Whether you want to preview your entire story to make sure it’s just right or you’re waiting for a strong connection to upload all of your photos and videos from the day, it’s now faster and easier than ever to share to your story after the moment has passed.” read its press release.

Facebook

After the major security breach in March with Facebook and Cambridge Analytics causing an upheaval worldwide, Facebook was, of course, active in damage control mode whole of April — from changes to user access tokens permissions (User needs to log in every 90 days) to be transparent about the internal enforcement guidelines & appeals process, Facebook is doing everything to re-establish the trust with its audience.

May will have GDPR as it biggest news, coming into effect on May 25, 2018. While we watch the landscape shape to bring you the latest of the digital marketing world, hope you enjoyed this read, until next time. Yours truly!