Breaking Digital Marketing News (Updated Every Friday)

Digital Marketing News 5/9/2022 – 5/13/2022

This week: Musk plans to triple Twitter’s audience, Google contradicts itself, and LinkedIn has some great advice for marketers.

Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.

LinkedIn Changes How It Ranks Content

This past week, LinkedIn announced that it’s updating the platform’s ranking algo to create a better user experience.

“We’re testing new ways for how you can receive status updates on each individual report that you submit,” said Linda Leung, LinkedIn’s Director of Product Management. “We’re always seeking to improve, so there’s more to come in feed controls. In the future, the more you use this, the more we learn your preferences and can tailor your experience.”

For starters, you can now opt-out of content you’re not interested in. Just click the “I don’t want to see this” option next to individual posts.

The feed will also display less irrelevant news. Look for more content that sparks engagement and videos relevant to your interests.

You’ll also see fewer clickbait articles.

Google Blocked 3.4 Billion Ads in 2021

Google recently published its annual “Ads Safety Report.” In it, the company disclosed that it blocked more than 3.4 billion ads in 2021.

The blocked ads violated Google Ads policies.

Specifically, Google stopped 652 million ads for abusing the network. Another 286 million got blocked for including adult content.

The Big G blacklisted other ads for referencing gambling, medicine, financial services, and alcohol.

Additionally, Google restricted 5.7 billion ads and suspended more than 5.6 million user accounts.

Finally, Google says it removed ads from more than 1.7 billion pages last year.

Musk Plans to Almost Triple Twitter’s DAU by 2025

You’ve probably heard the news: Tesla CEO Elon Musk is buying Twitter.

But what does he plan to do with it?

Well, thanks to a recent report in The New York Times, we now know. He wants to almost triple the company’s daily active users in three years.

Twitter currently sees about 230 million DAU. He plans to increase that to 600 million by 2025.

Then he wants to take it to 900 million by 2028.

Musk also plans to increase Twitter’s revenue five-fold, from the current $5 billion in sales to $26.5 billion.

But he also plans to restructure how the company makes money. 

Advertising revenue currently contributes to about 90% of the company’s overall sales. Musk would like to cut that percentage in half.

Finally, he wants to lay off around 1,000 employees before hiring an additional 2,700 employees in three years.

Study Highlights Best Practices for Advertising on Snapchat

The folks at VidMob recently released a study that offers insights you can use to ramp up your advertising on Snapchat.

Researchers analyzed more than 14,000 Snap ad campaigns over the past three years. Here are the top takeaways about the best-performing ads:

• They got their marketing message out early and emphatically.
• They didn’t start with a curiosity gap question and answer it later. Instead, they stated their brand name immediately.
• They make the brand name stand out with high levels of contrast.
• They don’t hide the call to action (CTA) until the end of the ad.

Additionally, VidMob says that the engagement rate was a whopping 175% higher in the financial services sector when text took up less than 5% of the screen. The difference was 85% for consumer packaged goods ads.

Finally, VidMob confirmed that using celebrity endorsements on Snapchat is an effective way to promote your brand.

Google: Ignore Our Own Advice in That New Training Course

If you’re a regular reader of this space, then you might remember that last week I mentioned that Google is releasing a new digital marketing certification course.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it includes some info that isn’t accurate.

How do I know it’s not accurate? Because Google says so.

That’s right. Google’s Danny Sullivan disavowed Google’s own training course.

Specifically, the training course recommends publishing content that includes at least 300 words and tells marketers to target a keyword density of about 2%.

But that’s not publicly available information. So did Google release some details about the secret sauce it uses to rank web pages?

Nope. 

On Twitter, search marketer Gianluca Fiorelli tagged Danny Sullivan and asked about the content advice.

Here’s how Sullivan responded: “I’m not on the team that produced that, nor are they part of the Search team. As someone from the Search team, we don’t recommend any limiits or ‘density’ or anything like that. This can be ignored; I’ll pass it on.”

That doesn’t inspire confidence in the quality of the course.

So… On Connect GT (the biggest and oldest Italian SEO forum founded by @giorgiotave), Emanuele Ricci subscribed to the Digital Marketing & E-commerce Certificate by Google on Coursera.
Seriously… “write more than 300 words”? and “keyword density”?
cc: @dannysullivan pic.twitter.com/7qdWKlJ1vs

— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) May 9, 2022

Pinterest Launches TV Studio App

The “Build Your Own Home Shopping Network” craze continues.

This time it’s brought to you by Pinterest. The company is launching its own TV Studio app.

As of now, though, it’s only available to select users.

If the pilot test works out as expected, you can expect to see a general release soon.

And it’s for good reason. In China, live shopping sales will hit $400 billion this year. That’s about half of all ecommerce spending in the U.S.

If you plan on going that route, keep in mind that Pinterest will undoubtedly vet you thoroughly. The company needs to know who it’s allowing to do live shows on its platform.

Meta Scraps Various Location Tracking Tools

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is eliminating location tracking tools from its app.

The company plans to remove Nearby Friends, weather alerts, and location history.

In a recent announcement, Meta says that those services won’t be available after May 31. And all your previously tracked info will disappear as of August 1.

Why the change? According to Facebook, it’s because of a lack of interest.

That makes sense. Who checks Facebook for the weather?

But some people think that there’s another method to Meta’s madness: fewer data tracking points that appear on the iOS prompt.

Folks who see only 2 or 3 data points instead of 6 or 7 might be more inclined to say “Yes” to the “Allow tracking?” question.

Or maybe Meta is just jumping on the privacy bandwagon.

TikTok Announces Partnership With Foursquare

TikTok recently joined forces with Foursquare to help local advertisers gauge the effectiveness of their online campaigns.

Specifically, you’ll have the option to include Foursquare attribution in your TikTok ads. That will give you more insight about which ads are driving traffic to your store.

In case you’re unfamiliar with it, Foursquare attribution connects a customer’s activity to a location by tracking mobile devices as they move around. The end result: you’ll get details about how many people who’ve seen your ad end up paying you a visit.

“With Foursquare, this integration will focus on the metrics that are critical to advertisers with physical business locations,” TikTok said in a statement. “Advertisers will be able to understand how effective their media plan on TikTok has been and discover new insights to optimize campaigns, ultimately tying their TikTok investment back to real-world visits at their business locations.”

Keep in mind, though: iOS limits tracking (see previous story). So it might be more challenging to attribute ad success to many iPhone users.

LinkedIn Publishes New Guide on Branding

If you’re in the B2B space, pay attention.

LinkedIn just released a guide to boosting your brand on its platform. Here are some of the high-level points:

• Harness emotion
• Humanize your brand
• Use creativity to build awareness and memories
• Find the right story for each audience: employees, investors, customers, and suppliers

The guide is packed with examples of great marketing. Be sure to read the whole thing.

Homework

While you’re waiting patiently for the French Open and Memorial Day weekend, take care of these action items:

• If you’re running a B2B business, take a look at that LinkedIn guide to marketing. You’ll likely find some great ideas.
• If you’re running a local business, think about how you can use that TikTok/Foursquare partnership to get more people into your store.
• If you’re in the ecommerce space, think about how you can sell more products by “going live” on Pinterest.
• Be wary about taking that Google digital marketing certification course since we all know it includes at least some inaccurate info.
• Think about how you can reach millennials on Snapchat by following the findings of that study cited above.

Digital Marketing News 5/2/2022 – 5/6/2022

This week: Google now offers a digital marketing course that includes SEO certification, Twitter miscounted users for years, and wait until you hear about how many views YouTube Shorts videos are getting each day.

Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.

Cloudflare Says OVH and Hetzner Hosted Massive DDOS Attack

This past week, Cloudflare identified cloud-based data centers OVH and Hetzner as the origins of a massive DDOS attack.

If you’re unfamiliar with a DDOS attack, it’s a Distributed Denial of Service (hence, DDOS) that uses thousands of connected devices to make web page requests simultaneously and in rapid succession.

The result: the web pages receiving all those requests can’t process them. The site effectively goes down.

In this case, botnets sent 15.3 million requests per second. That’s a lot for even the world’s busiest websites.

Although the attack originated from more than 1,300 networks, Cloudflare named Hetzner Online GmbH, Azteca Comunicaciones Colombia, and OVH as the top offenders.

OVH and Hetzner are known hosts of spam attacks as well.

YouTube Shorts Hits 30 Billion Views per Day

Whoa.

In Q1 2022, YouTube Shorts reached 30 billion views per day. That’s a four-fold increase from Q1 2021.

Additionally, YouTube confirmed that it will start running ads on Shorts videos.

But who wants to watch a long ad on a short video?

As it stands now, if you want to earn revenue from YouTube Shorts, you’ll have to do that via the Shorts Fund. You don’t have to join the YouTube Partner Program to earn some of that cash.

Bing Updates Its User-Agent

This past week, Bing confirmed that it’s updating the agent it uses to crawl your website.

Going forward, Bingbot will use two agents: one for desktop and one for mobile.

The old user agent looks like this: “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)”/

The new user agent for desktop looks like this: “Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36”.

And the new user agent for mobile looks like this: “Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)”.

Microsoft says it will use the existing agent until this fall.

You won’t need to make any changes to your robots.txt file to accommodate the change.

Google Offers SEO Certification

This past week, Google announced Google Career Certificate scholarships for U.S.-based businesses.

The company will offer companies up to 500 scholarships each.

“Businesses can use Google Career Certificates to train their employees for jobs in data analytics, digital marketing & e-commerce, IT support, project management or user experience (UX) design,” Google said in a statement.

Google also said that all course instructors are Google employees and subject matter experts.

As part of the digital marketing course, students will learn to become a “Search Engine Optimization Specialist.”

So, yeah. You can get certified in SEO.

And it’s free of charge for scholarship recipients.

Twitter Miscounted Users for Years

“Miscounted.”

This past week, when Twitter announced its quarterly results, the company said that it had inflated the number of users since 2019.

Specifically, the company reported that it miscounted the number of monetized daily active users (mDAU). According to Twitter, the miscount is the result of a feature that allowed people to link accounts and switch between them.

As a result, Twitter reported somewhere between 1.4 million and 1.9 million “extra” users.

And I think it’s more than a coincidence that this news comes on the heels of Elon Musk buying Twitter for a cool $44 billion.

YouTube Launches Live-Stream Cross Promotions

YouTube recently announced that it’s rolling out cross-channel live redirects.

The company previewed the feature back in March. Now, it’s open to all eligible publishers.

“Today, creators with at least a thousand subscribers can use a feature called live redirect to direct their viewers from a live stream or premier to another live stream or premier on their own channel,” YouTube said in a statement. “But they can’t send their viewers to a live stream or premier hosted on another channel. With this launch, creators with at least a thousand subscribers and no active community guidelines strikes will be able to direct their viewers to a live stream or premier hosted on a different channel.”

Additionally, YouTube will also add Key Moments analytics to the mobile YouTube Studio app. Soon, you can use that app to learn about when viewers click away and when you hit your highest levels of engagement.

TikTok Offers Collaboration Guide

How would you like to collaborate with a popular TikTok creator for an ad campaign?

If so, you’re in luck. TikTok just published a 25-page guide to working with popular publishers.

The guide includes:

• An overview of why you should work with TikTok personalities
• An explanation of how they can help you improve campaign performance
• Creative tips
• Info about the Creator Marketplace, TikTok’s place for highlighting the best talent on the platform
• Case studies

TikTok is on track to pass 1.5 billion users this year.

Vulnerability Found in HubSpot WordPress Plugin

This past week, WPScan and the United States Government Vulnerability Database announced a vulnerability in the HubSpot WordPress plugin.

The vulnerability enables hackers to perform a Server Side Request Forgery attack.

If you’re unfamiliar with SSRF, it enables a malicious user to read or even update server-side resources. In some cases, the attacker can even post data to resources that aren’t exposed.

The plugin is currently used by more than 200,000 site owners.

However, HubSpot has already released a series of fixes to take care of vulnerabilities. Be sure to get the latest version if you’re using the plugin.

Google Lets Users Limit Ads About Weight Loss and Dating

Google recently announced that it’s expanding its “sensitive ads” category to include ads about weight loss and dating.

What that means for you as a consumer: you can opt to see fewer ads on those subjects.

What that means for you as a marketer: if you’re in either of those niches, you might have more trouble reaching people in your target market.

The “sensitive ads” category applies to both YouTube and display ads, by the way.

Other sensitive subjects include gambling, alcohol, pregnancy, and parenting.

Homework

Keep enjoying the nice weather, but don’t forget about these action items:

• If you’re marketing for dating or weight loss businesses, find new ways to reach people in your target market that don’t include Google Ads.
• If you’re using that HubSpot WordPress plugin, make sure you update to the latest version immediately.
• Take a look at that TikTok guide on working with creators. You might find new ways to reach potential customers.
• Think about whether you or anybody on your team needs that Google SEO certification.
• If you’re not using YouTube Shorts, consider using that platform to promote your brand.

Digital Marketing News 4/24/2022 – 4/29/2022

This week: Instagram tweaks its ranking algorithm, Google decommissions a couple of tools, and Snapchat continues to grow.

Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.

Instagram Updates Ranking Algo

This past week, Instagram announced that it’s changing its ranking algorithm. The updated news feed will prioritize original content.

“People expressing themselves is the heartbeat of Instagram,” Instagram Head Adam Mosseri said in a statement. “It’s what makes Instagram work. I’ve talked a lot this year about how creators are incredibly important to Instagram’s future. And one of the things I’ve learned from speaking with creators is how important getting credit for their work is to them. So today, a few hidden gems, a few ways we’re going to make sure that credit is going to those who deserve it.”

One of those “hidden gems” is the software update that pushes original content to the top of the newsfeed.

But Mosseri never said if the content has to be unique to Instagram or unique within cyberspace.

Additionally, Instagram is also updating People Tags. The new feature will enable you to create categories for your profile that show up when you’re tagged in a photo or video.

Along those lines, Mosseri said that Instagram is committed to ensuring that users get appropriate credit for their original work.

📣 New Features 📣

We’ve added new ways to tag and improved ranking:

– Product Tags
– Enhanced Tags
– Ranking for originality

Creators are so important to the future of Instagram, and we want to make sure that they are successful and get all the credit they deserve. pic.twitter.com/PP7Qa10oJr

— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) April 20, 2022

New Link Scheme Involves DMCA Requests

Keep your eyes open for a (kind of) new link scheme out there. It involves fake DMCA requests.

You might get an email that complains about a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation on your website. The email will appear to come from a lawyer associated with a law firm.

The email will tell you that you can rectify the problem by simply providing a link to the client website.

The problem: the email is totally fake. It was generated with artificial intelligence.

And get this: the email might even include a photo of the “lawyer” that sent it. But that’s fake, too.

Apparently, some black-hatters are out there using software to auto-generate a person’s image so you won’t be able to find it with a reverse image search.

So keep your eyes open for that trick.

Snapchat Adds 13 Million Users in Q1

Snapchat continues to grow.

The social media company reported 13 million more daily active users (DAU) in Q1. That brings the total up to 332 million.

Much of that growth came from India, where TikTok is banned.

However, the majority of Snapchat’s revenue comes from North America.

Snap also says that more than 250 million users engage with artificial reality (AR) elements every day. And more than a quarter-million users have built over 2.5 million Lenses in Lens Studio.

Finally, Snap says its audience is getting older. That points to young users sticking with the platform as they age.

Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s Buyout Offer

It’s official: the CEO of Tesla is about to own Twitter. He plans to take the company private.

This past week, Twitter’s board accepted a $44 billion offer from Elon Musk. That amounts to $54.20 per share.

The stock closed at $51.20 on Monday shortly after the deal was announced.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

The agreement still requires shareholder and regulatory approval.

A few weeks back, Musk announced that he’d purchased a 9% stake in the company. That made him the single largest shareholder.

Then he promised to join the board. Musk backed away from that promise later.

Afterwards, he offered to buy the company outright once he secured the necessary financing.

Initially, Twitter’s board wanted to reject the offer. Apparently, though, lawyers informed board members that turning down the offer would be a breach of their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

Instagram Working on Simplifying Reels Monetization

Instagram is testing a new feature that makes it easier to monetize Reels.

If it goes into production, you’ll have the option to add overlay ads on top of your Reels clips.

And it’s as simple as flipping a switch. You won’t need to do anything else.

However, you might still face challenges when it comes to monetizing short-form videos. It’s a lesson TikTok creators have learned the hard way.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

YouTube Surfaces Shorts in More Places

YouTube is really pushing Shorts.

If you’re unfamiliar with Shorts, they’re short-form videos. YouTube’s answer to TikTok.

And now you’ll see them in more places.

For starters, YouTube will display a trending page with a dedicated Shorts carousel. It’s called Shorts Shelf.

Additionally, you’ll see Shorts more on desktop and mobile browsers. Look for a new tab and homepage carousel on the YouTube website.

Google Removes Search Console URL Parameter Tool

Say goodbye.

The Search Console URL Parameter tool is now extinct.

It’s no surprise. Google announced that it would take the tool down a while back.

If you’ve got the tool bookmarked, you’ll see a big “This report is no longer available here” box when you try to access the URL.

You can expect that link to return a 404 (Not Found) error eventually.

Google Shuts Down AdWords API

It’s not a good week for legacy Google tools.

Google also shut down its AdWords API this past week.

Again: this was no surprise. Google issued the warning more than a year ago.

Hopefully, you used that time to get your house in order.

It’s now time to use the Google Ads API instead. That went live a little less than two years ago.

LinkedIn Reports ‘Record Levels of Engagement’

This past week, Microsoft shared the latest performance update for LinkedIn.

Things are going really well.

The company reported a 34% year-over-year increase in revenue to almost $3.5 billion.

Additionally, Microsoft said it’s seeing “record levels” of user engagement.

Active LinkedIn sessions grew 22% during the quarter.

The number of LinkedIn members currently stands at 810 million.

Homework

Before you enjoy those well-deserved May flowers after all those April showers, make sure you take care of these action items:

• If you’re in the B2B space, think about how you can use LinkedIn to boost market share.
• If you’re using either the Google AdWords API or the Google Search Console URL Parameter tool, make sure you make adjustments now. Better late than never.
• Think about how you can build brand name awareness with YouTube Shorts.
• If you use Instagram Reels, take a look at that new simplified monetization option once it’s released. You might generate some additional revenue.

Digital Marketing News 4/18/2022 – 4/22/2022