This curated list includes important digital marketing updates and insights from the month of June. To stay updated on the latest updates from the digital landscape, read our Digital Marketing Apple Page.

Digital Advertisement 

1. Google rolls out features for advertisers to promote deals, drive in-store purchases. The announcement read

We have new features coming for Local campaigns to make it available to more advertisers and improve how you manage your locations and creatives. In the next few weeks, you’ll be able to set up your Local campaigns to drive calls to your business locations—even if you don’t have store visits measurement. By expanding Local campaigns to optimize for calls, more advertisers will now be able to access it and highlight what makes their stores unique across Google Search, Maps, YouTube and more.

Starting today, you can also create location groups to make it easier to promote a subset of business locations. For instance, if you’re selling special back-to-school product bundles at certain locations, use location groups to tailor your budget and messaging to this offer. Finally, asset reporting has started rolling out to give you better insight into creative performance. See what kinds of messaging and assets work best and use these learnings to improve your current and future creatives

    2. Instagram to begin showing ads in Explore tab. The announcement read

We're introducing ads in Explore slowly and thoughtfully in the coming months. After tapping on a photo or video in Explore, people may begin to see ads as part of their browsing experience just like in the main feed. As always, people have control over the ads they see.

3. Spotify expands its ads capabilities with podcast listener targeting. Read more here

4. Instagram rolls out branded content ads. The announcement read

There are two main steps for creating branded content ads. First, branded content creators need to enable their business partners to promote their post as an ad, which they can do in advanced settings. Once they do this, the business partner will see the post on Ads Manager under existing posts and can choose to run it as an ad in feed or stories format.

5. TikTok tests interest-based ad targeting. Read more here

6. LinkedIn rolls out a new Ads tab on LinkedIn Pages. The announcement read

In this tab, members will be able to view all the Sponsored Content (native ads running in the LinkedIn feed) that advertisers have run on LinkedIn in the past six months. 

7. LinkedIn announces integration with Moat Analytics to help advertisers measure the impact of video ads. Read more here

8. Final URL suffix, Parallel tracking + more custom parameters rolled out by Microsoft Advertising. Read more here

9. Google tests carousel of text ads on mobile: Report. Read more here

Social Media 

   1. LinkedIn Pages get new CTA button and analytics, mobile editing capabilities, more. The announcement read

Five new options make it easy to turn your Page visitors into potential leads, and new analytics dashboards provide deeper insight into how many visitors are clicking through.

Custom CTA button options include:

Contact us
Learn more
Register
Sign up
Visit website

We’re also introducing Communities Hashtags, a feature that allows you to associate your Page with relevant hashtags and join important conversations that members and organizations are having on those topics. 

2. Facebook to remove ‘Company Overview’ and ‘Biography’ fields from Pages. Read more here

3. Pinterest launches Complete the Look tool. The announcement read

We’ve built Complete the Look, which leverages rich scene context to recommend visually compatible results in Fashion and Home Decor Pins. Complete the Look takes context like an outfit, body type, season, indoors vs. outdoors, various pieces of furniture, and the overall aesthetics of a room, to power taste-based recommendations across visual search technology.

4. More than 50% of all tweets, for example, now include images + more insights for digital marketers - Mary Meeker's 2019 Internet Trends. Read more here

5. Facebook rolls out Study From Facebook app; it will pay users for market research. Read more here

6: Facebook Video Creation Kit Updates: save drafts of videos; automatically create multiple versions of a video with different aspect ratios + more. The announcement read

We've added more templates in the Video Creation Kit to help all businesses find a format that suits your brand and advertising objective. For example, we've added new, single-image templates that take a static image and add visually engaging motion to capture your audience's attention.

You can now add holiday and event-specific stickers to your videos to make your ads feel current and fresh throughout the year. We've released stickers for Easter and Mother's Day, and stickers for summer vacation and back-to-school are coming soon. You can find the stickers in the Effects tab within the Video Creation Kit.

7. There are more than 720 million people monthly and 140 million people daily who spend at least one minute in Watch. Here's the Facebook announcement 

8. LinkedIn adds new features such as: sharing a photo and tag people + sharing a moment with a video message + more to help users start conversations and build community. Read more here

9. Instagram makes it easy to add song lyrics to your Stories. Read more here

10. Twitter tests desktop redesign with trends on the right, navigation on the left. Read more here

11. Facebook Introduces New Cryptocurrency: Libra. Here's the Facebook announcement

Today we’re sharing plans for Calibra, a newly formed Facebook subsidiary whose goal is to provide financial services that will let people access and participate in the Libra network. The first product Calibra will introduce is a digital wallet for Libra, a new global currency powered by blockchain technology. The wallet will be available in Messenger, WhatsApp and as a standalone app — and we expect to launch in 2020.

12. Facebook shares updates on how comments will be ranked for public posts. Here's the Facebook announcement

13. LinkedIn Ad Review: a new regular feature on the LinkedIn Marketing Blog. The announcement read

Every month in the LinkedIn Ad Review will shine a spotlight on a top-performing piece of LinkedIn Sponsored Content. In the Review, we’ll analyze why the Sponsored Content’s headline, visual, and copy work together to get across the brand’s message.

14. Pinterest tests Story Pins. The announcement read

You may notice Story Pins showing up on your Pinterest home feed—you’ll recognize them by the Story icon below the image. A Story Pin can be made up of multiple pages, so you can tap into it from home feed to get the full experience. 

You can add comments or photos to a Story Pin just like you would any other Pin. You can also save Story Pins to your boards like any other Pin, though you can’t save an individual page from within a Story Pin.

Search

1. Google makes a “few tweaks” to Google Search Console to help webmasters and SEOs understand how Google is indexing their sites. Specifically, they can see if and when Google switched a site to mobile-first indexing or not.

As part of our continued commitment to mobile-first indexing (read more at https://t.co/7FXf67A84f), today we are announcing a few tweaks to Search Console reports that will help you understand how Google is crawling your website — Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 26, 2019

2. Google deprecates support for social profile markup. 

Social profile markup for Knowledge Panels is now deprecated. We now automatically discover profiles to include. Those who have claimed Knowledge Panels can also suggest any profiles not included. Learn more here: https://t.co/OgXAs8zsxy — Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 25, 2019

3. 49% of all Google searches are no-click: Study. Read more here

4. Google My Business rolls out more features to help businesses make their Profiles unique and descriptive. The announcement read

Find businesses quicker with short names and URLs: Business owners can now claim a short name and URL for their business. With this URL, businesses can easily refer customers back to their Profile - to catch up on latest updates, to make a booking or to write a review after a visit. In the coming months, people will also be able to search short names in Maps.  

Show personality with cover photos: Businesses can easily set their preferred profile cover photo, putting their best foot forward.

Identify companies with more prominent logos: Businesses have an additional branding opportunity with the logo feature. Those that have completed their core information (phone number, hours, etc) will have their logo displayed at the top right-hand side of their profile.

5. Google rolls out new search menu with icons. Read more here

6. Google no longer supporting the preferred domain setting in Google Search Console. Read more here

7. Google search update aims to show more diverse results.

Have you ever done a search and gotten many listings all from the same site in the top results? We've heard your feedback about this and wanting more variety. A new change now launching in Google Search is designed to provide more site diversity in our results….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 6, 2019

8. Google Search Console adds 2 new features 

New feature landing in the Search Console URL testing tools (like the AMP Test, Rich Results & URL inspection tool):

1️⃣ Search within the markup
2️⃣ Copy the code & tweak it!

This makes checking the rendered markup and experimenting with it quicker & easier! pic.twitter.com/AVe90L5zF2

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 24, 2019