PING — Top Digital Marketing Stories — June 2018

June saw some new developments in the field of digital marketing: advertisement formats and measurement methods to assess user engagement. Google clarified some of the confusion around its mobile-first indexing and tools which might come in handy for SEO experts and Marketers. Here are some snippets which we thought were the things to watch out for in upcoming times.

Search News Updates:

As mobile communication is changing the way we communicate, Google had come up with mobile-first indexing wherein the Googlebot crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent. June saw a number of tweets from Google aimed at clearing the air about a few things. We have compiled the key takeaways from the tweets –

1. URLs in Search –Google recognizes separate mobile and desktop URLs and accordingly shows it to the users. The indexed content will be a mobile version for both mobile and desktop users
2. Cached Page – Currently there is no showing up the cached pages for mobile-first indexed sites, however, this will get resolved over time. It doesn’t affect the crawling, ranking or indexing
3. Ranking – Mobile-first index doesn’t change anything on the ranking except that mobile content is used. Though mobile friendliness is a ranking factor, a mobile-first index is not.

After the introduction of the new Search Console by Google, it released some updates in June which might come handy to marketers. It began rolling out the new ‘URL inspection’ tool which will provide detailed crawl, index and serve information about pages directly from Google index.

1. This update will help you learn the last crawl date and status, any crawling or indexing errors, and the canonical URL for that page
2. If the page isn’t indexed, you can learn why. A single click will help you know all affected pages with the same issue to fix common bugs

Since the new Search Console is still a beta version, we expect additional exciting features soon!

Google’s advice on how duplicate content is ranked, as Juan Felipe Rincon from Google, offered that syndicated content used by multiple websites will not be featured in the search results. Ideally, the site that originally published content will be shown in the search results. However, if you want to rank in Google then there needs to be a value-add to the syndicated content which differentiates from the original content.

Social Media News Update:

Facebook brings transparency to Ads and Pages that run them

Users will be able to see all the advertisements a page is running irrespective of its targeted audience. All users will be able to view all the ads being paid for in the “Info and Ads” section of the Facebook Page. This move will mean more accountability for advertisers thus helping prevent abuse on Facebook.

Google announces “Creative Suite” for measuring the impact of YouTube Videos

A new set of tools from Google will help content marketers to measure the impact of the YouTube Videos. This feature uses the power of AdWords capabilities to uncover insights

LinkedIn introduces Carousel Ads

Carousel Ads on LinkedIn have introduced this June to engage the audience with the brand as the ads are interactive and often have eye-catching visuals which will stand out on a newsfeed. Metrics can be retrieved on each carousel card to give a reporting of Card Clicks, Viral Card Clicks, Card Impressions and Viral Card Impressions.

Poor Customer Feedback might result in your Facebook Ads being Banned

Facebook announced that it will ban the Ads which have poor customer feedback. This came after Facebook spoke with people who have purchased things on Facebook. The biggest frustrations were inaccurate shipping times and misrepresented products. This does not mean any problems for marketers as long as the ads are not misleading

Video Ads in Facebook Messenger

Keeping up with the changing formats of ads Facebook has now introduced auto-play video ads in Messenger. These ads will be rolled out slowly and gradually. It will be important for marketers to see how users react to this decision given the amount of instant messaging apps available.

New Video Content on Facebook

Facebook’s efforts to make content more engaging took the game of videos were the experience is not passive. Gamification and Polls are being rolled out with select publishers which will enable them to ask questions to users and engage directly with the users for better marketing results.

June was more about bringing in transparency and facilitating marketers with measurements which might come in handy for the digital marketing efforts. It will be interesting to see how these updates unfold in the coming months.