[Ep131] - Google/YouTube Audio Ads Now Available

#TWIMshow - This Week in Marketing

1. Highlights From Snapchat Q3’22 Earnings - Here are the highlights from the Snapchat’s Q3’22 Earnings report. Analysis is in the podcast.:

• Revenue increased 6% YoY to $1.13 billion in Q3’ 22.
• Average revenue per user (ARPU) was $3.11 in Q3’22, compared to $3.49 in Q3’21.
  • ARPU in US was $8.13
  • ARPU in ROW $.89
• Daily Active Users (DAUs) were 363 million in Q3’22, an increase of 57 million, or 19% year-over-year
  • Snap is still seeing the majority of its growth in the ’Rest of World’ category, where it’s added 45 million users year-over-year.
• Snapchat+ reached over 1.5 million paying subscribers in Q3’22 and is now offered in over 170 countries.

2. Uber Testing “Journey Ads” - Marketers Can Target Riders By Destination - Uber, the ride-hailing company is expanding its advertising business and is testing out ‘Journey Ads’ to its riders based on their travel history and their geographic locations. The journey ads will be shown in the Uber app at least three times during the riders’ journey. Uber will allow brands to place ads using data drawn from riders’ travel history and their precise geographic destinations. For example, if a user books an Uber to a specific retailer, cinema or airport, an advertiser could buy ads centered on that location.

An Uber spokeswoman said, "Uber does not share user data with advertisers. The information that Uber shares is limited to aggregated information or other non-personal data, such as the percentage of users who clicked on an ad, or the number of users who visit the retail locations of advertisers using our platform. Users can opt-out of targeted ads on the Uber app at any time"

3. New Features for Facebook Groups Announced In Communities Summit 2022 - Facebook has announced a range of new groups features during the Communities Summit 2022, including new Stories sharing tools, view-only chats, custom member profile displays, and more.

• Reels in Groups- With Reels now in Groups, community members can share information, tell stories and connect on a deeper level. Group admins and members can also add creative elements such as audio, text overlay and filters on top of their videos before sharing to bring their stories to life.
• The ability to share a public Facebook event for your community to your Instagram story. Whether you’re a group admin hosting a meet-up to celebrate a community milestone, or a group member sharing your passion with friends, this feature can help you showcase your community more broadly.
• Facebook’s also testing new customization options for people’s ’About Me’ section specific to each community, in order to better highlight relevant information for that audience, along with a new indicator that highlights whether you’re open to private messaging.
• Facebook’s also testing the ability for group admins and moderators to create view-only chats to send one-way communications to all of their members (without having to maintain or respond to messages in the chat), and a new process to highlight top contributing members, who’ll be able to earn points by taking on group engagement responsibilities.
• Facebook’s also trying out a new element within Admin Assist that’ll enable group admins to implement automatic removal of posts containing information, as determined by Meta’s third-party fact-checkers.

4. Instagram Announces ‘Creator Portfolio’ Option - Instagram has officially announced its ‘Creator Portfolio’ option, which will enable creators to build what’s essentially a media kit type package, in order to showcase their audience reach, as well as previous brand work. It’s similar to Instagram’s Creator Marketplace listings where influencers are presented in a collective showcase – though a Creator Portfolio enables individual users to share their profile direct with potential partners in the app.

5. Google: The Importance Of Image Filenames And One Big Mistake To Avoid - Google’s documentation doesn’t say if image filenames are ranking factors. But they do say that Google takes note of them in order to help figure out what the image is about. For that reason it’s recommended by Google that images be given meaningful filenames. It’s also a good practice to give meaningful filenames to images because it makes it easier for organization purposes to be able to see the image filename and know what it’s about.

In Episode 48 of Search Off the Record podcast, Google’s Lizzi Sassman and John Mueller discussed the importance of image filenames and here is the gist of their conversation:

• Image filenames that are descriptive are helpful from an Image Search standpoint because they help Google understand what an image is about.
• Alt text and the text surrounding the image provide a stronger and more important signal about the image than the filename.
• Changing the image filename of an already indexed image has a “minimal effect” and likely won’t make it better.

• Changing the filename of an indexed image may result in the renamed image going uncrawled and not indexed for months.

6. Google : The One Thing To Do Before Implementing Geo IP Redirects - Geo IP based redirection is the process of automatically redirecting a website visitor by their geolocation (country, state or city). It works by detecting the visitor's location from their IP address by matching it against a database of IPs and locations.

In the latest #AskGooglebot video series, Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, shares that “this is a pretty complex topic and it can cause headaches depending on how it’s implemented. So I’d recommend getting help from experts or reaching out to the Search Central help forum for advice.

The most important aspect here is that Googlebot usually crawls and indexes a website just from a single location. If you’re showing different content by location only one version will be indexed for search. Because of that, if there’s something you consider important on your website, make sure it’s on the default content that’s shown to all users. And finally, if there’s any page you want to have findable in search, make sure that you’re not blocking users in other locations from reaching that page.”

7. Google: To Have An Unique URL You Need A Character The /? - Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter "Using just "/?" at the end of a URL is equivalent to not having anything after the slash. You need at least 1 character after the "?"."

8. Google: There Is No Need To Use English URLs For Pages Not In English - Google’s John Mueller wrote on Twitter "There's no need to use English URLs of the content isn't in English. That said, keywords in URLs are a bit overrated, so I wouldn't worry too much about it." The same information was conveyed back in 2018 in a video.

9. Google: Spam Update Rolling Out - It has been 11 months since the last time Google released a spam upda...