We may have had an extra day in February with 2020 being a leap year, but it seems to have passed in a flash. Here’s a review of the social media and digital marketing top stories for February.
What Happened?
- Disruptive Video Ads Join Chrome’s Block Party
- Shopping Ads are Coming to Your Inbox
- Facebook Messenger Launches Notification API
- Google Search Console New Feature
- WhatsApp Hits 2 Billion Active Users
1. Disruptive Video Ads Join Chrome’s Block Party
Fed up of those annoying and intrusive ads that run before and during videos? Now Chrome will block ads from any site that does not comply with its new video ad guidelines. Beginning August 5, 2020, the Google Chrome browser will expand its built-in ad blocking to stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these ads.
Google also said that this will apply to YouTube ads. The type of ads that are considered to be disruptive on video content which are less than 8 minutes long were:-
Pre-roll ads: Long, non-skippable ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video.
Mid-roll ads: Ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video.
Image or text ads: Any ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle third of the video player window (or cover more than 20% of the video content).
Although does that mean videos longer than 8 minutes can get away with any type of pre-roll or mid-roll ads?
2. Shopping Ads are Coming to Your Inbox
Google Ads have let their advertisers know that from the beginning of March, Shopping ads, will be eligible to appear in Gmail to reach users. This includes both Product Shopping ads and Showcase Shopping ads.
All you need to do is opt your campaign into “YouTube, Gmail, and Discover” optic and they will be automatically enabled to run on Gmail.
3. Facebook Messenger Launches Notification API
Facebook users will now be able to opt-in to one-time notifications from businesses on Messenger.
Facebook has released a new beta API that will provide businesses with a method for offering its customers with straight-forward follow-up information.
The purpose of this is to notify customers about simple updates. For an example, if a customer wants an item that is out of stock, the customer can choose to be notified over messenger when the item is back in stock. Once a customer has asked to be notified, the business receives a token which they can then use to send out the notification with the information the user requested at a later time.
To enhance the customer experience, Facebook is limiting the number of one-time interactions that businesses can issue to users. Additionally, the API documentation notes that tokens can only be used once and expire within 1 year of creation.
Google have been spotted testing some new options to give advertisers more ways to track website actions through the customer journey. These are more granular and should make it easier for advertisers to track micro-conversions and optimise campaigns.
While the current options for tracking website conversions has five options: purchase, lead, page view, sign-up and other, the new options are divided into two sections; sales categories and lead categories.
5. Google Search Console New Features
Google is trialling new features on Search Console to help users when changing domains.
This new feature will allow site owners to notify Google when a website has moved from one domain to another, which also includes subdomains. But Google haven’t stopped there, they have also added a re-direct validation feature.
Setting up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs is a vital part of any domain change, the change of address tool will now validate the redirects in place for the site’s top 5 URLs.
Furthermore, Google Search Console will send you a handy an on-screen reminder when you have requested a change of address on your dashboard.
6. WhatsApp Hits 2 Billion Active Users
Owned by Facebook, the messaging platform WhatsApp reached 2 billion users this month. Whilst the app is more commonly used in Western markets, it is continuing to grow in developing markets.
Looking at the bigger picture, there are now 2.26 billion people interacting with Facebook apps every single day. To put that into perspective, that’s 30% of the total world population!