There were some significant updates announced by the major players in January, including updates to Facebook’s news feed, big changes to YouTube’s Partner Program, and some interesting news about how page speed will soon affect your mobile rankings.
Keep reading to find out all the updates in this month’s digital marketing round-up.
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Instagram Stories can now include GIFs
Instagram is making its stories feature even more animated with a new GIF option. GIF stickers can now be added to any story via an integration with GIPHY.
Users can select from hundreds of thousands of GIFs from GIPHY’s database to add as stickers. After tapping on the “GIF” button when adding a sticker, Instagram will show what’s currently trending on GIPHY. In addition, users can find something more specific by using the search bar.
Facebook has created a new policy which effectively bans ads for cryptocurrency, as well as other financial products.
The reason for this policy change, Facebook says, is to honor one of its core advertising principles that ads should be safe. Ads for cryptocurrency are frequently tied to misleading and deceptive practices, the company believes.
Why Google AdWords’ keyword volume numbers are wildly unreliable
Many of us rely on the search volume numbers Google AdWords provides, but those numbers ought to be consumed with a hearty helping of skepticism. Broad and unusable volume ranges, misalignment with other Google tools, and conflating similar yet intrinsically distinct keywords — these are just a few of the serious issues that make relying on AdWords search volume data alone so dangerous. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Moz will discuss those issues in depth and offer a few alternatives for more accurate volume data.
Facebook has announced that it will be overhauling its News Feed that will once again shift the type of content users see first, and most often.
According to the official statement, Facebook will “be making updates to [its News Feed] ranking so people have more opportunities to interact with the people they care about” — as in, their friends and family, instead of Pages.
New Google Search Console reports have more filtering options
Google’s new Search Console experience has some advanced filtering options that weren’t previously available when the public beta launched.
One of the most notable changes to the new Search Console is that reports now contain 16 months of data. Along with access to all this new data there are now new ways to filter it. Those who have access to the new Google Search Console can find the filters within the Search Performance report.
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