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

Digital Advertisement 

1) Google adds several new features to keyword planner.The upgrade includes:

• Up to 10 seed keywords when searching for new keyword ideas.
• Keyword trends can be viewed or downloaded for individual keyword ideas.
• Grouped ideas can be viewed by keywords by theme or added to sets as a group.
• Saved ideas can be added to an existing campaign.
• Get suggested daily budgets based on the max CPC bid and forecasted costing.
• Get a detailed competition value column that shows ranking across keyword ideas.

Read more about the updates here

2) LinkedIn adds Lookalike Audiences, Interest Targeting with Microsoft Bing Data, and Audience Templates. The announcement read 

Recently, we announced interest targeting in Campaign Manager, which allows you to reach members with relevant ads that match their professional interests. Now, we’ve expanded interest targeting by allowing you to target based on a combination of your audience’s professional interests on LinkedIn and the professional topics and content your audience engages with through Microsoft’s Bing search engine, in a way that respects member privacy.

Audience templates make it easy to find the right audience. If you’re new to advertising on LinkedIn or are an existing advertiser looking to reach new audiences, audience templates can help.  This gives you a selection of more than 20 predefined B2B audiences (and growing) that help you get started faster.

 3) Facebook advertisers planning to run housing, employment or credit ads will no longer be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code. The announcement read 

Advertisers offering housing, employment and credit opportunities will have a much smaller set of targeting categories to use in their campaigns overall. Multicultural affinity targeting will continue to be unavailable for these ads. Additionally, any detailed targeting option describing or appearing to relate to protected classes will also be unavailable.
We’re building a tool so you can search for and view all current housing ads in the US targeted to different places across the country, regardless of whether the ads are shown to you.

4) Facebook to replace relevance score with 3 new metrics in April. The announcement read

Similar to relevance score, these ad relevance diagnostics are not factored into an ad's performance in the auction. We think that this level of granularity will offer reporting that's more actionable for businesses.

Ad relevance diagnostics will measure relevance across these three dimensions:

1. Quality ranking: How your ad's perceived quality compared with ads competing for the same audience.
2. Engagement rate ranking: How your ad's expected engagement rate compared with ads competing for the same audience.
3. Conversion rate ranking: How your ad's expected conversion rate compared with ads that had the same optimisation goal and competed for the same audience.

5) Shopping Ads on Pinterest are available to all businesses through the self-serve tool Ads Manager. Once products are on Pinterest, brands can easily promote items from their existing product feed with Shopping Ads. Read more here

6) Google Ads to include cross-device conversion data to all attribution reports. Read more here

7) Google rolls out policy manager in Google Ads. Read more here

8) Amazon to launch video ads in mobile-app search results — report. Read more here

9) Facebook users can see when a Custom Audience list is uploaded and if the advertiser worked with marketing partners to run the ad. Read more here

10) Google's ad manager will move to first-price auction. The announcement read

With this change, every offer from programmatic buyers will compete in the same unified auction, alongside inventory which is directly negotiated with advertisers. An advertising buyer’s bid will not be shared with another buyer before the auction or be able to set the price for another buyer. The buyer that wins the auction pays the price they bid. By simplifying our auction in Ad Manager, we can help make it easier for publishers and app developers to manage and get fair value for their inventory.

11) Bing Ads rolls out a new 3D ad format to promote the new Galaxy S10 phone. Read more here

12) Google Ads rolls out Budget Planner forecasting tool. Read more here

13) Google rolls out Shoppable Ads on Google Images. The announcement read

This new format enables you to highlight multiple products available for sale within your sponsored ad among Google Images results. We’re currently testing this on a small percentage of traffic with select retailers, surfacing on broad queries like “home office ideas”, “shower tile designs”, and “abstract art”.

Social Media 

1) Checkout introduced in Instagram. The announcement read 

When you tap to view a product from a brand’s shopping post, you’ll see a “Checkout on Instagram” button on the product page. Tap it to select from various options such as size or color, then you’ll proceed to payment without leaving Instagram. You’ll only need to enter your name, email, billing information and shipping address the first time you check out.

2) Facebook tests new ways for Pages to archive and share Stories.

“We’re always looking to bring more Stories features to Pages on Facebook, like Stories Archive and the ability for people to share a Page’s story. We will continue to learn and iterate as we test more features like these,” said a Facebook spokesperson in an email to Marketing Land.

Read more here

3) Pinterest launches catalogs. The announcement read

Brands can now upload their full catalog to Pinterest and easily turn their products into dynamic Product Pins, which means more shoppable Pins across Pinterest. A new dashboard allows businesses to organize their feed so their products can be discovered and purchased by Pinners.

The other updates include 

Shop a brand (pictured above): A new dedicated section from retailers is starting to roll out beneath Product Pins. You’ll soon be able to dive into a brand’s catalog by clicking “more from [brand]”.

Personalized shopping recommendations: Alongside style, home, beauty and DIY boards, you’ll see in-stock ideas related to what you’ve been saving, to match your style. Just click “more ideas” then the shopping tag to start shopping ideas picked for you. Tap + to quickly add the Pin to your board, or click the Pin to go straight to checkout on the retailer’s site.

Shopping search: With more in-stock Product Pins, there are more products to search. Just search for a product like “midi skirt”, “men’s watches” or “outdoor furniture” and shopping results appear on the top of home feed. To start shopping, click “see more”.

4) Internet Archive to preserve public Google+ posts. Read more here

Search 

1) Google is retiring the info command as it was an alternative way of discovering canonicals. It was relatively underused, and URL Inspection tool provides a more comprehensive solution to help publishers with URLs. Read more here

2) Bing delivers text-to-speech and greater coverage of intelligent answers and visual search. The announcement read 

The updated Bing app can now change text to speech, meaning Bing can speak answers to your queries back to you with a voice that’s nearly indistinguishable from a human’s. The Bing app also supports speech as an input, meaning you can speak to your mobile device and Bing will change your spoken word to text and search that query for you.

Bing intelligent answers allow you to get comprehensive, summarized information aggregated across several sources in response to certain queries.

Visual search is another area in which recent developments have enabled huge strides in efficiency and coverage.

Visual search allows you to search using an image. For example, if you see an image of an accent light you like, Bing can show visually-similar decor and even show purchase options at different price points if the item is available online. To save you time, visual search also automatically detects and places clickable hotspots over important objects you may want to search for next.