WDA Digital Marketing Round-Up: 11th – 17th Jan

Main Image of WDA Digital Marketing Round-Up: 11th – 17th Jan

Missed the important digital marketing news and updates from last week? We’ve got you covered with the WDA Digital Marketing Round-Up. This week, news includes Google News Performance Report now available, YouTube’s dedicated hashtag search results page, Instagram testing unhiding likes and more.

Let’s delve into it…

Google

New HTTP/2 Crawling: Google has started crawling sites with the new HTTP/2 protocol and has been sending out notifications to webmasters to let them know that their sites have been upgraded to the new protocol. It’s a more efficient protocol than HTTP/1.1 and can transfer data faster, resulting in decreased server load for sites.

Google News Performance Report: Google has launched a dedicated performance report for Google News. The report shows clicks, impressions and CTR from news.google.com and the News app on both Android and iOS devices. It’s available within the “Performance” section in Google Search Console. The report doesn’t include content from the “News” tab on Google as this is covered in the existing report for Search.

Index Coverage Report Updated: Google has updated its Index Coverage Report within Search Console with 4 key changes. These include – the removal of the generic “crawl anomaly” issue type, indexed pages blocked by robots.txt are now reported as “indexed but blocked”, soft 404 reporting has been made more accurate and finally, they’ve added a new warning – “indexed without content”.

YouTube

First 24 Hours Metric Now Available: YouTube has added a new First 24 hours metric to its Analytics section, allowing creators to measure the performance of a new video in its first 24 hours after publishing. This is great news for content creators on the platform as this data has never been previously available.

Hashtag Search Results Page: YouTube is improving the discoverability of hashtagged videos with the launch of a dedicated hashtag search results page. The new results page will only display videos that contain relevant hashtags and is available on both desktop or mobile devices.

Post-Roll Ads Turned On: Post-Roll ads have now be switched on by YouTube as default for any monetised videos on the platform. Here’s what someone from YouTube had to say…

“For monetizing creators, any video over 10 minutes in length will automatically have post-roll ads turned on by default.”

If you don’t want to serve these ads then you can turn them off.

YouTube Tagging: Last year, it was reported that YouTube was exploring ways that would allow products to be tagged in videos to provide clickable shopping functionality. This is now in its next phase of testing and here’s what YouTube said…

“We’re testing a new way for people to easily discover and purchase products featured in YouTube videos. Creators in this pilot can add certain products to their videos. Viewers can then see a list of featured products by clicking the shopping bag icon on the bottom left corner of the video. From there, viewers can explore each product’s page to see more information, related videos, and purchase options for that product.”

Facebook/Instagram

Increased Data Transparency: Facebook has updated its “Access Your Information” tool in an attempt to provide increased data transparency. This has likely been updated ahead of the upcoming Apple IDFA update which you can find out more about here. With the update, personal data is broken into several categories instead of two and they’re also adding information about how data might be used to deliver more personalised experiences

“Our Story” Section Being Removed: The “Our Story” section on Facebook Pages is going to be removed at the end of next month and Facebook have started to warn Page owners of the change. In the notification, they’re encouraging admins to add the existing “Our Story” information to the Additional information section on the page instead.

Instagram Testing “Unhide Likes”: Instagram like counts were removed for most users back in 2019 but according to a recent discovery by Alessando Paluzzi, a well-known app researcher, they look to be in the process of testing a new “unhide likes” feature. If rolled out, it would give users the ability to toggle the like count on their posts on or off. If we get any confirmed details on the test from Instagram we’ll be sure to include it here so stay tuned.

Other Social News

LinkedIn Stories Swipe Up: LinkedIn is rolling out a new swipe-up feature which lets users add links to Stories. The feature works in a similar way to what you may be accustomed to on Instagram Stories. It will be available to LinkedIn Pages and members that meet the criteria and creates another opportunity for driving traffic. At this time, LinkedIn Stories can only be created from the mobile app. You can use the app to capture photo and video or upload media from your camera roll.

Snapchat Spotlight Feed Made More Like TikTok: Snapchat has updated its Spotlight feed to bring it even closer in similarity to TikTok with the addition of a public view count on video clips, showcasing a video’s popularity. However, with Spotlight, the view count is on the playback overlay whereas, on TikTok, it’s displayed on the thumbnail. Time will tell whether Snap’s Spotlight feed will be a success for the app or not.

WDA’s Highlight of the Week

Our highlight from this week’s WDA Marketing Round-Up is the addition of the LinkedIn Stories swipe up feature. This provides another way for businesses or professionals to link back to their website or relevant resources from their Stories and will be great for driving additional traffic and referrals from the platform. It also adds to the overall user experience with your audience being able to find out more if they’d like to directly from your Story.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the WDA Digital Marketing Round-Up podcast to get this in audio form. It’s available on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts and more. Also, be sure to follow us on Social Media to stay on trend and stay ahead of the competition.

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