TechShu Marketing Digest: October 2020

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

Digital Advertisement 

  • Businesses can create ads with product tags on Instagram. The announcement read 

 Today, we’re launching a new way to create ads with product tags from scratch in Ads Manager. This gives businesses the option to use more commercial creative and copy compared to traditional organic posts. The available formats for ads with product tags include photos, videos and carousels.

  • Facebook adds new audience tools to help businesses reach new and existing customers who are interested in shopping across Facebook and Instagram. Read more here
  • Facebook is testing discount features for shops in the US. The announcement read

You’ll be able to put individual products on sale, create offers that can be automatically applied — like “Spend $50 and get 10% off each eligible item” — or offer a discount on an item by letting customers apply a promo code. To make sure customers know of the discount options available to them and pique their interest, you can get creative by adding a banner to your shop.

  •  Snapchat releases First Commercial to advertisers in Ads Manager. The announcement read

With its move into general availability in Ads Manager, we’re unlocking the ability to run Extended Play Commercials up to 3 minutes in length, transact via self service, and enable conversion tracking. This gives advertisers the ability to access First Commercial seamlessly alongside their existing, always-on video campaigns in Snap Select.

  • Google tests local ads in Maps auto-suggest results. Read more here
  • Adobe forecasts $189 billion U.S. online sales this holiday season. Read more
  • Amazon announces a new customization feature for Sponsored Display. The announcement read

You can now personalize your Sponsored Display product targeting ad creatives with custom headlines and brand logos, which will help you create more engaging ad creatives to convey your brand message. Sponsored Display ads with a custom headline and logo may appear alongside product description pages, customer reviews, shopping results pages, or under the Featured Offer.

  • Google announces improvements to Attribution in Google Ads including coverage for YouTube ads and a significant expansion in the availability of data-driven attribution. Read more here
  • Google Ads rolls out a new look for Report Editor. Read more
  • Is there an optimal number of times that someone should see an ad? Does it change based on the quality of the creative? See what Facebook's research found:

More impressions drive greater results—up to a point

Creative quality impacts when performance plateaus

Testing and optimization are key to optimal frequency 

  • Google introduces Performance Max campaigns. The announcement read

To bring the full value of automation to more businesses, we’re introducing Performance Max campaigns, a new way to buy Google ads across all our inventory.

Google Ads currently offers fully-automated campaigns for app marketers, retailers, and businesses with physical locations to drive results across Google’s surfaces. Performance Max campaigns will build on learnings from those campaigns to deliver a comprehensive solution that works for all advertisers across a wider range of marketing objectives. 

Search 

  • BERT is now used in almost every query in English, helping you get higher quality results for your questions.The announcement also said:

Today, we’re introducing a new spelling algorithm that uses a deep neural net to significantly improve our ability to decipher misspellings. 

We’ve recently made a breakthrough in ranking and are now able to not just index web pages, but individual passages from the pages. By better understanding the relevancy of specific passages, not just the overall page, we can find that needle-in-a-haystack information you’re looking for. 

We’ve applied neural nets to understand subtopics around an interest, which helps deliver a greater diversity of content when you search for something broad. 

We’re making several new improvements to help you navigate your world and get things done more safely and efficiently. Live busyness updates show you how busy a place is right now so you can more easily social distance, and we’ve added a new feature to Live View to help you get essential information about a business before you even step inside.

Using a new AI-driven approach, we’re now able to understand the deep semantics of a video and automatically identify key moments. This lets us tag those moments in the video, so you can navigate them like chapters in a book. Whether you’re looking for that one step in a recipe tutorial, or the game-winning home run in a highlights reel, you can easily find those moments.

Plus more ! 

  • Google testing new ‘call history’ feature for Google My Business. Read more
  • The state of local SEO: experts weigh in on industry-specific tactics. Read more
  • Google brings visual and immersive Web Stories to Discover, part of the Google app on Android and iOS. Read more

​​​​Social Media 

  • Instagram expands shopping on IGTV, plans test of shopping on Reels. Read more
  • The creative behaviors of 2020’s breakthrough brands: Facebook's Creative Shop. Read more here
  • WhatsApp rolls out new business features. The announcement read 

Shopping - We will expand ways for people to check out available products and make purchases right from a chat. We also want to make it easier for businesses to integrate these features into their existing commerce and customer solutions. This will help many small businesses who have been most impacted in this time.

Facebook Hosting Services - Businesses have varying technology needs and want choice in the companies they work with to host and manage customer communications, particularly with remote work increasing. Which is why over the coming months, we plan to expand our partnerships with business solution providers we've worked with over the last two years. We will also provide a new option for businesses to manage their WhatsApp messages via hosting services that Facebook plans to offer. Providing this option will make it easier for small and medium size businesses to get started, sell products, keep their inventory up to date, and quickly respond to messages they receive - wherever their employees are.

Business Sales - We will charge business customers for some of the services we offer, which will help WhatsApp continue building a business of our own while we provide and expand free end-to-end encrypted text, video and voice calling for more than two billion people.

  • Instagram launches several new features, including a private “Stories Map” to mark its 10th birthday. Read more here
  • LinkedIn makes it easy for users to transfer the conversation from messaging to a face-to-face interaction. Read more here
  • Instagram rolls out new Reels features
  • Instagram is extending the time limit for its live streams from the current 60 minutes to four hours. Instagram is also launching a new option which will enable users to archive their IG Live broadcasts for up to 30 days, similar to the same for Stories. Read more here
  • Instagram lets brands and creators to set age gates for each content post. Read more 
  • Twitter's gives users the option to share Topic listings in tweets, DMs, and even off Twitter.
Category
Digital Marketing