Missed the important digital marketing news and updates from last week? We’ve got you covered with the WDA Digital Marketing Round-Up.

Google

Google Getting Closer To Delivering Personalisation and Privacy: Last week in a significant step closer to ads that can deliver personalisation and privacy, Google released findings of a prelim study. If you want to read the study, you can do so here (it does get very technical though). The study does show that it’s possible however to deliver both personalisation and privacy without cookies.

Google Blocks Push Notifications: In a new Chrome 86 feature, Google can subscribe to browser push notifications to evaluate them for abusive content. If the issues are unresolved then Chrome can block the notifications.

Google Shares More Details on Passage Based Indexing: We first spoke about passage-based indexing in last week’s round-up and details on it were fairly scarce. However, Google has now expanded upon this and we can confirm that the update won’t mean Google will start indexing passages independently of pages but will become an additional consideration when determining the Search Results Page for a given query. More details can be found here: https://blog.google/products/search/search-on/

Facebook/Instagram

Facebook Expands Shopping Features: Facebook is rolling out a handful of new shopping features designed to help e-commerce brands to drive more business. The updates include:

• The ability to create Instagram Ads with product tags directly from Ads Manager.
• A new type of audience targeting “Shopping engagement custom audiences”.
• Shopping lookalike audiences.
• Promote sales and discounts via Promotions in Commerce Manager (testing only in the US for now).

Instagram Fan Badges: Instagram fan badges have been expanded to an additional 50,000 Instagram creators, enabling more influencers to monetize their live streams. Contributions of either $0.99, $1.00 or $4.99 can be made by fans.

Facebook Watch Updates: Facebook is adding two new discovery features to Watch, including topics and highlight sections. Topics enable users to personalise the videos that show up within their feed while highlight sections showcase the most popular videos.

WhatsApp Shopping Tools: WhatsApp will soon start offering more tools for businesses to sell products within the app, including a way to browse products, select and pay for them, whilst communicating. The dedicated shopping tap for Facebook and Instagram that has also been previously announced will be expanded to WhatsApp.

Twitter

Shareable Topics: Twitter has now made Topic listings shareable in tweets, DMs and outside of the platform as a way of further boosting tweet discovery and letting users share their interests and hobbies. Discovery, in particular, is something Twitter has focussed heavily on recently and Shareable Topics extends that further.

Tweet Composer Updated: In a small update, Twitter’s Tweet Composer has been updated so that users can get a better sight of what the tweet will look like on desktop and mobile devices.

WDA’s Highlight of the Week

Our highlight for this week is the expansion of Facebook’s Shopping Features.

Whilst this is only relevant to e-commerce businesses, Facebook is clearly committed to improving features and functionality for both advertisers and shoppers on the platform and across its suite of apps. If your business sells products online then this is definitely something you should be capitalising on to boost product awareness and drive more sales.