This week: Facebook penalizes fake videos, Google is keeping a secret, and Quora offers retargeting.
Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.
Facebook Penalizes Fake Videos
You might be one of those savvy digital marketers who posts a link on Facebook with an image that has a YouTube-like “Play” button on it. You do that so you can trick people into clicking the image because they think it’s a YouTube video.
Facebook doesn’t like that trick.
In fact, Facebook hates that trick enough to penalize posts that use it.
“During the coming weeks we will begin demoting stories that feature fake video play buttons and static images disguised as videos in News Feed,” said Facebook engineers Baraa Hamodi, Zahir Bokhari and Yun Zhang in a recent blog post.
It might be time to think about a new way to get people to click on your images.
Quora Now Offers Retargeting
You might already know about Quora’s ads platform. Now, that platform also offers opportunities for retargeting.
This past week, Quora announced that advertisers can create audience segments consisting of previous visitors.
The system works similarly to Facebook retargeting: it uses a pixel.
Google Voice Search Now Available to a Billion People
Google voice search is now available to a billion people worldwide.
In fact, Google’s speech recognition software now supports a total of 119 languages. The company is planning on adding support for more languages, including Swahili and Aramaic, in the near future.
”This process trained our machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and to improve their accuracy when exposed to more examples over time,” Google said in a statement.
Google Won’t Disclose the Number of Search Quality Algorithms
If you’re wondering exactly how many search quality algorithms that Google uses, you’ll have to be satisfied with an educated guess. Google won’t tell you.
This past week, John Mueller said that the Big G has around 200 factors when it comes to crawling, indexing, and ranking.
But he wouldn’t go into more detail than that.
“The number of algorithms is kind of an arbitrary number,” he said.
Facebook Is Testing a Way to Target Ads to People Who’ve Visited Your Store
Retargeting is all the rage these days. That’s why it shouldn’t surprise you that Facebook is working on a new opportunity to reach people who’ve connected with your brand.
If it rolls out, you can create a custom audience of people who’ve visited your store. Then, you can run ads to that audience.
There’s no word yet from Facebook on how many advertisers can use the new audience feature.
