1. Quick Updates –
- Meta Provides New Insights Into How its Video Distribution Algorithms Work
- Meta Invites Applications for the Third Phase of its ‘Community Accelerator’ Program
- Instagram Best Practices For Recommended Content
- Twitter Shares New Insight into the Value of Utilizing Ad Format Combinations in Your Tweet Marketing
- Google Updates Privacy Threshold For Analytics Search Queries Report
- Danny Sullivan at Google Tweets That “Helpful Content” Is WIP
2. Twitter ‘Circles’ Option Is Available To All Users – Because sometimes your Tweets aren’t for everyone add up to 150 people to yours and use it. “Before you post on Twitter, you’ll now see an option to share your Tweet with either your circle or your full followers list. Circles can contain up to 150 people, and you can adjust who’s in and who’s out at any time. Don’t worry, no one will be notified of any changes you make to your circle.” Members of Circle will be alerted that their tweets are only viewable by those in the group via a green indicator attached to each Circle tweet.
3. Microsoft Ads Re-extends RSA Migration To Feb. 2023 – In April,2022 Microsoft extended the original June 30 deadline to August 29. Now Microsoft has announced that they are extending that deadline to February 1, 2023. Microsoft says the extension is in response to advertisers need for more time. Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) will continue to serve with RSAs but advertisers will no longer be able to create new or edit existing ETAs.
You can read the announcement here.
4. Google Wants You To Add Product Information To Your Business Profiles! – Google has added a new section for products to the Google Business Profile guidelines. The section says “If you run a retail business, you can show nearby shoppers what you sell by adding your in-store products to your Business Profile at no charge.” You can either add products to your Business Profile manually through the Product Editor or with Pointy – a hardware device that is free from Google and sits in the middle of your barcode scanner and point of sale system so that it can add your products to Google.
Products submitted via Product Editor or Pointy must adhere to the Shopping Ads Policy. Google does not allow content related to regulated products and services, including alcohol, tobacco products, gambling, financial services, pharmaceuticals and unapproved supplements, or health/medical devices. Submitting products that violate Google’s policy may result in removal of the entire product catalog, including products that aren’t in violation.
You can read the guidelines over here.
5. 4 New Features In Google Shopping Campaign – Google just announced four new features for advertisers to implement in their ad campaigns and merchant feeds.
- Conversion value rules for store sales and store visits – Advertisers can now set store visits or sales default values at the campaign level. Before this update, Google Ads applied conversion value rules equally to all conversion actions. In addition to setting specific conversion values for store visits and sales, you can select the values at the campaign level. If you’re running multiple campaigns promoting store visits, you can assign a higher value to one than the other. Additionally, you can set rules for store visits or sales on the conditions of geographic location, audiences, or devices. The ability to adjust values by location or device means you can increase the value of store visits for customers in New York versus customers in other areas, for example. You can set conversion value rules by logging in to your Google Ads account and navigating to Measurement > Conversions > Value rules. Then, click create conversion value rule and fill in the required information.
- Product-specific insights – Product-specific insights are available at the account level and help advertisers spot underperforming offers, identify products with missing feed attributes, and compare bidding with your top competitors. Product insights work on shopping and Performance Max campaigns and are intended to leverage ads performance data to optimize products and provide visibility on what actions to take to fix issues.
- Deals Content API – The Deals Content API is intended to make uploading and managing deals easier at scale. Merchants and advertisers can now add their sales and promotions to their listings via the Content API, which makes it even easier for merchants to upload and manage their deals at scale.
- Shipping & Returns Annotations – Merchants will now be able to list the expected delivery date (dynamic) (“Delivery by XX/YY”) and free returns right on their ads. Advertisers can also easily add their return policies.
6. Google Publishes 6 SEO Tips For E-commerce Websites – Alan Kent, a Developer Advocate at Google, shared six SEO tips that combine structured data and Merchant Center to get the most out of your website’s presence in search results.
- Ensure Products Are Indexed – Googlebot can miss pages when crawling a site if they’re not linked to other pages. On ecommerce sites, for example, some product pages are only reachable from on-site search results. You can ensure Google crawls all your product pages by utilizing tools such as an XML sitemap and Google Merchant Center. Creating a Merchant Center product feed will help Google discover all the products on your website. The product page URLs are shared with the Googlebot crawler to use as starting points for crawls of additional pages potentially.
- Check Accuracy Of Product Prices Search Results – If Google incorrectly extracts pricing data from your product pages, it may list your original price in search results, not the discounted price. To accurately provide product information such as list price, discounts, and net price, it’s recommended to add structured data to your product pages and provide Google Merchant Center with structured feeds of your product data. This will help Google extract the correct price from product pages.
- Minimize Price & Availability Lag – Google crawls webpages on your site according to its own schedule. That means Googlebot may not notice changes on your site until the next crawl. These delays can lead to search results lagging behind site changes, such as a product going out of stock. It would be best if you aimed to minimize inconsistencies in pricing and availability data between your website and Google’s understanding of your site due to timing lags. Google recommends utilizing Merchant Center product feeds to keep pages updated on a more consistent schedule.
- Ensure Products Are Eligible For Rich Product Results – Eligibility for rich product results requires the use of product structured data. To get the special rich product presentation format, Google recommends providing structured data on your product pages and a product feed in Merchant Center. This will help ensure that Google understands how to extract product data to display rich results. However, even with the correct structured data in place, rich results are displayed at Google’s discretion.
- Share Local Product Inventory Data – Ensure your in-store products are found by people entering queries with the phrase “near me.” First, register your physical store location in your Google Business Profile, then provide a local inventory feed to Merchant Center. The local inventory feed includes product identifiers and store codes, so Google knows where your inventory is physically located. As an additional step, Google recommends using a tool called Pointy. Pointy is a device from Google that connects to your in-store point-of-sale system and automatically informs Google of inventory data from your physical store. The data is used to keep search results updated.
- Sign Up For Google Shopping Tab – You may find your products are available in search results but do not appear in the Shopping tab. If you’re unsure whether your products are surfacing in the Shopping tab, the easiest way to find out is to search for them. Structured data and product feeds alone aren’t sufficient to be included in the Shopping tab. To be eligible for the Shopping tab, provide product data feeds via Merchant Center and opt-in to ‘surfaces across Google.’
For more on any of the above tips, see the full video from Google.
7. Google Shares Insights On Factors That Determine Which Content Is Indexed – Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt from Google recently published a podcast discussing what’s known as a crawl budget and what influences Google to index content.
Gary Illyes said that the concept of a crawl budget was something created outside of Google by the search community and most sites don’t need to worry about the crawl budget. According to Gary, part of the calculation for a crawl budget is based on practical considerations like how many URLs does the server allow Googlebot to crawl without overloading the server. Another interesting point that was made was how, in relation to crawling, there are different considerations involved. There are limits to what can be stored so, according to Google, that means utilizing Google’s resources “where it matters.” It all boils down to the issue of “spending our resources where it matters.”
Because Google can’t index everything, it tries to index only the content that matters and how frequently it is updated. “Google can infer from a site overall which areas they might need to crawl more frequently. E.g. if there’s a blog subdirectory & there are signals that it’s popular/important, then Google might want to crawl there more.” ” And it’s not just update frequency, it’s also about quality. E.g. if G sees a certain pattern is popular (folder), & people are talking about it & linking to it, then it’s a signal that ppl like that directory,”
Listen to the podcast here.
