This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Twitter Policy Changes
Twitter is changing how conversations happen based on user behavior and conduct. Twitter will use behavioral signals to filter search, replies and recommendations, pushing tweets from offending users farther down the timeline. Behavior signals that could results in content getting demoted include: users who tweet at many accounts they don’t follow, the frequency of a user being blocked by people they interact with, and if a user has created many accounts using a single IP address. There will be a “Show Everything” toggle in search where users can turn this filter on or off. Twitter’s plan is to improve the overall health of the platform. Source: Marketing Land
Bing Ads Editor Update Adds New Time-Saving Tools
The Bing Ads Editor has recently been updated with new productivity and time-saving tools for campaign management. Mac users will now have label management capabilities that were previously only available for Windows users, while Windows users will now also get bulk structured snippet management capabilities in the Editor. In addition to this, a bulk “Undo” option is now available to revert your changes to the original version of what you had. This option will now appear under the “Revert” section for both Windows and Mac users. Source: Search Engine Land
Google Trends Redesign
Google Trends new features include a redesigned interface, a revamped Trending Searches section to show what is trending in search right now, both daily and minute-by-minute, and a new section that finds stories curated by the News Lab team. You can now see how search interest has changed since 2001, and a new color intensity infographic shows you which keywords are more popular in a particular region. This feature allows you to identify where keywords are popular and target those geographic areas with specialized content or outreach for choosing a content topic or link building. Source: Search Engine Land
AdWords to Require Accounts to Use Parallel Tracking
With a deadline of October 30th of this year, Google will be requiring all AdWords accounts to use parallel tracking. Parallel tracking processes click measurement in the background as a page loads, leading to improved mobile speed. This requirement is another part of Google’s commitment to speeding up the web. AdWords users can opt-in to parallel tracking from the “tracking” section on the account-level settings page. Source: Search Engine Journal
YouTube’s Streaming Music
YouTube now has a Premium ad-free version to replace YouTube Red that will cost $12 a month and include YouTube Music Premium and downloads. The version of just YouTube Music is $10 a month and will have TrueView skippable ads as well as non-skippable ads running. It offers official songs, albums, and thousands of playlists and artist radio. This will come with a new mobile app and desktop player designed specifically for a music-listening experience. The home screen will provide recommendations based on a user’s listening history, location and activity. Google’s current goal is to move Google Play Music subscribers over to YouTube Music. Source: Marketing Land
Analysis
The Opportunities Tab: Google vs. Bing
PPC Hero Shannon Glass takes a side-by-side comparison of the opportunities tab in both Google and Bing to determine who does it better. Glass first looks at accessibility, noting that Bing’s opportunities tab is easier to find while AdWords also wins as you are not directed to a separate page. For features, both platforms have nearly identical opportunities outside of AdWords seller ratings and Bing’s campaign re-import feature. Glass considers this a tie as these are platform-specific opportunities. The author’s last category is performance insights where she saw another tie as both gave more or less the same performance projections. Based on this analysis, her ultimate conclusion was a tie due to their overall similarities. Source: Shannon Glass, PPC Hero
GDPR Compliance
Google Analytics has already prohibited the sending of personally identifiable information. If you are found to be in breach of this, you Analytics account could be deleted. PII includes: email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and full names or usernames. The most common way this happens is through URL parameters containing this information. GDPR also classifies IP addresses as an online identifier. You can still use geographical insights, you just have to turn on IP anonymization and the last portion of the IP address will be replaced with a zero. All messages on your site would have to have no pre-checked boxes. For example, on a checkout page, below a “place order” button, if you have a pre-checked box that says, “Please sign me up for updates and special offers,” this would be breaking compliance with GDPR. If you’re not sure where your email subscribers are from or how they opted in, there’s no harm in sending out an email to your contacts again to confirm they would like to continue receiving your messages. Source: Moz Blog
