[Ep130] - Google Ads Will Remove Some Content Targeting In YouTube Conversion Campaigns In 2023

#TWIMshow - This Week in Marketing

1. Facebook Retires ‘Instant Articles’ - Originally launched in 2015, Instant Articles were designed to provide publishers with a more engaging, fast-loading way to present their articles on Facebook, helping to maximize reader engagement within the app. As reported by Axios, Meta’s ending support for Instant Articles as it works to better align with user preferences, which, increasingly, see video being its most engaging content format.

2. TikTok Adds Photo Mode - Now TikTok has copied Instagram (perhaps in retaliation for IG copying all of its stuff) and launched a new ‘Photo Mode’ for still images in the app. Photo Mode looks exactly like Instagram, with users able to post carousels of still images that users can scroll through in the app. Per TikTok:

“Photo Mode allows you to share carousel posts of still images that automatically display one after another. You can add music to soundtrack the images, which viewers can swipe through at their own pace.”

3. YouTube Launches @handles For Channels - YouTube’s moving more into line with other social networks with the addition of @handles for channels, which will make it easier to drive traffic to your profile, and promote your channel in the app.

“Handles are a new unique identifier (example @youtubecreators) & ALL YouTube channels will have one. Your unique @handle will help people find & interact with you & your YouTube channel. And because handles are unique (unlike channel names), it’s easy to confirm if you’re engaging with the right person or not.”

Your @handle, which will be unique to your channel (unlike Channel names), will directly connect people to your content, like it does on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, etc. @handles will also function as a unique channel URL, providing another branding opportunity. Up till now, custom channel URLs have only been available to creators with 100 subscriptions, but now, YouTube’s making the option available to all users in the app. @handles will also make it easier and faster to mention channels in comments, community posts and video descriptions.

“For example, creators can be shouted out in a mention in comments or tagged in the title of a recent collab, helping them increase visibility and reach with new audiences.”

Part of the idea here is to better promote channels, in alignment with habitual trends, with a key consideration likely being Shorts and helping to maximize Shorts channel growth by making it easier to follow creators. Another element that YouTube’s looking to tackle is the rise of copycat channels, where scammers create channels that look similar to popular YouTubers’, often by using the same channel name. By ensuring that each channel has a unique @handle, which they can promote direct, that will make it harder to create replica channels, and trick users with uploads and scams.

4. Google Data Studio Is Now Looker Studio - Google launched Data Studio in March 2016 as part of the enterprise Google Analytics 360 suite, with a free version that lets you turn your data into informative, easy-to-read, easy-to-share, and fully customizable dashboards and reports. There are easy-to-use drag-and-drop features to customize reports from various data sources, including Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and much more.

Now Google has renamed the popular analytics and data platform from Google Data Studio to Looker Studio. Google wrote “starting today, Data Studio is now Looker Studio.” “With this complete enterprise business intelligence suite, we will help you go beyond dashboards and infuse your workflows and applications with the intelligence needed to help make data-driven decisions,” Google added.

Google also announced a Pro, paid, version of Looker Studio named Looker Studio Pro. Google said that the Pro version will get new enterprise management features, team collaboration capabilities, and SLAs. Google said that is just the first release and the company has “developed a roadmap of capabilities, starting with Dataplex integration for data lineage and metadata visibility, that our enterprise customers have been asking for.”

You can learn more about this change on the Google blog.

5. Google Swaps Title Tags With Site Names For Mobile Homepage Results - Google is now only showing the generic site name in mobile search results that are for the entire website, such as for the home page. Google is using site names in order to make it easier for users to identify the specific website in the search results. Here is what Google published in the official announcement:

“Today, Search is introducing site names on mobile search results to make it easier to identify the website that’s associated with each result…”

This new feature is available in the English, French, Japanese, and German languages and will begin showing up in other languages over the next few months.

Google is recommending the use of the WebSite structured data type because Google is using the WebSite structured data type, specifically the “name” property, to understand what the site name of a website is. So it is best that your site has the following:

1. WebSite structured data
2. Title tag
3. Headings (H1, H2, etc.)
4. Open Graph Protocol meta data, specifically the og:site_name

You can read the official announcement here and the Search Central Documentation here.

6. Google Renames Webmaster Guidelines To Search Essentials & Some Changes - Google has renamed the Google Webmaster Guidelines to Google Search Essentials. The name change is Google's ongoing efforts to remove the term "webmaster" so that these tools and documentation do not narrow the focus to just "webmasters," but expands it to publishers, site owners, developers, creators, and so on. Google also changed the overall format, added clearer terms and examples and also tried to simplify them for easier consumption. Google explained they updated the:

• Technical requirements: It is a new section to help people understand how to publish content in a format that Google can index and access.
• Spam policies: Google updated its guidance for its policies against spam, to help site owners avoid creating content that isn't helpful for people using Google Search. Google explained that most of the content in these spam policies has already existed on Google Search Central in the "Quality Guidelines", Google did make a few additions to provide clearer guidance and concrete examples for issues like deceptive behavior, link spam, online harassment, and scam and fraud.