With so many updates, it can get hard to keep track all of the most important news. So while you’re daydreaming about the upcoming Labor Day weekend, playing Google’s solitaire and tic-tac-toe or listening to the newly released playlist created by Spotify and a psychologist, Carousel30 has a few digital marketing updates that you may be interested in.
Applications
In recent weeks, companies have been focused on increasing value and improving user experience within applications by adding features that give users dual purposes for their app. Bing recently added new music, video and map features to their application in an effort to give users the opportunity to view video without sound in search results, add movies to watchlists from Netflix and Amazon, and save preferred maps for directions. Apple is developing a video sharing and editing application for the iPhone that will be part of its operating system as a means of capitalizing on the immense user engagement seen on social networks. Google released a new interstitials penalty that dings applications that attempt to get users to download an app after clicking on a search result. Unsurprisingly, Yelp isn’t too fond of this new penalty. WhatsApp, the previously ad-free application, announced that it will begin sharing phone number information with Facebook as it will soon be showing relevant ads to users. As an addition to previous efforts seen last year, Spotify in partnership with Songkick has improved their Concert details tab by displaying tour dates on artist pages along with upcoming concerts based on user locations, all accessible through in-app browsing.
In addition to the interstitials penalty mentioned above, Google continued releasing updates that improve user experience within search results for both advertisers and searchers. Google announced that it will not be ranking expanded text ads any better or worse than standard text ads. The company also removed the Mobile-Friendly label seen within search results due to 85% of websites already being mobile friendly. However, they will continue to keep the mobile usability report and mobile-friendly test to help developers understand their website and landing page effectiveness on mobile devices. In addition, Google’s My Business now allows users to accept or remove certain fields in My Business listings which will allow for further customization. In regards to website maintenance, Google introduced Workspaces, a new feature in Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360, that will allow an unlimited amount of users to work on website tags simultaneously to make tagging easier and more manageable for companies of all sizes.
Social Media
Facebook is now allowing advertisers to create slideshow ads directly on mobile devices by providing a mobile accessible creation tool. Due to anti-conservative accusations, Facebook removed the Trending Topic descriptions as seen on the right-hand side of the screen when logged in. To further keep Facebook as much in real-time as possible, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is working on letting any user activate the Safety Check when necessary. Twitter has introduced a new feature that allows users to direct message brands from websites, and also announced the beginning of an initiative that will help fight abusive Tweets by means of easy flagging and the ability to hide tweets that contain certain keywords and phrases. Last but not least, Snapchat will be giving advertisers the convenience of targeting campaigns to users based on the types of content consumed, and has expanded the use of filters to include even more real-time opportunities like providing scores of high school football games.
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