August Invelity news

A great deal happens in a month. Even though everyone is enjoying the last warm summer days, we are grafting away to bring you news from home and abroad. It is not for nothing that marketing is said to be a constantly changing field. To stay in the picture you have to keep your eyes and your browser tabs open, read a lot and keep learning. We are glad to help with that, so off you go — read on!

PPC

Google is testing larger type in ad headlines

In a new test Google has enlarged the type in search ad headlines. The first headline appears considerably larger than the second, which sits on the line below it. The new ad format appears only in the first, top position in search.

Google makes it easier to control Shopping ads by country

A new attribute allows products to be excluded at country level. If a product feed is set up to show products in several countries, the shopping_ads_excluded_country attribute lets you stop certain products appearing in particular countries you target. The attribute overrides the country targeting set at feed level.

New Performance Planner features

The Performance Planner needs no introduction by now. :) Let us go through 3 new features that will improve working with this useful tool. From now on the Performance Planner supports shared budgets in search campaigns, so we can download and work with those forecasts too. Another addition is the option of sharing plans with others, with a simple click on the "Share" button in the top right corner.

The last addition is that where we have a conversion path longer than 7 days, the Performance Planner will now be able to account for it.

Social media

Short entertaining videos now on Instagram too

In August Instagram launched a new feature called Reels. It is an alternative to TikTok's entertaining videos. For now the feature is available in 50 countries; Slovakia is not among them, though our Czech neighbours can already start filming.

You can film and share the video directly. They run to 15 seconds and can include audio, effects and the various creative tools the feature offers. The finished video can then be shared in the feed or in stories. The advantage is that if you have a public profile, a large number of followers can reach your videos through Explore. Your uploaded clips are also found in a separate tab on your profile.

Reels is found in the Instagram stories camera. Opening it shows the options for creating or editing a recording on the left of the screen. There are tools such as: add audio, AR effects, timer, align and adjust speed. Reels is an extension of stories, IGTV, live broadcasts and video posts.

WhatsApp is preparing to please its users with new features

The app did not support using one account on several devices. As soon as a user signed into their account on another device, it automatically signed them out on the original one and the old messages vanished — unless they had set up backups manually. That will soon be a thing of the past. WhatsApp is preparing the option of using one account on up to four devices. Another advantage will be that the accounts synchronise with each other, which means all messages sent and received do too.

Facebook is pruning ad targeting options

The network has begun removing more than a thousand ad targeting options. Mainly ones that are not used often or that are similar to each other. Through this move Facebook should make targeting simpler and more effective. It chose the options to remove according to how companies of every size and field commonly advertise.

The changes also cover multicultural content. Facebook recommends targeting by language or culture. Targeting focused on military subjects such as military bases and the like will change to the Military category.

The change will not affect most ordinary advertisers. It will touch you if you target ads at very specific audiences.

Facebook has begun supporting #hashtags

You can now use hashtags on Facebook too. The network itself recommends that users and companies use them in posts, since it plans to use them to raise the organic reach of published content. Facebook has now begun sending out prompts to use them.

They matter above all for greater fan engagement according to their preferred content. The optimal number of hashtags per post is 3–5. Facebook recommends testing their success and relevance.

SEO

A glitch in indexing

At the start of August the Google algorithm suffered a glitch that noticeably affected search results worldwide. The glitch meant search results stopped showing relevant results, sometimes downright absurd ones. Before Google's statement, the webmaster community largely believed it was an algorithm update.

While the algorithm error lasted, sites such as Amazon, eBay, AliExpress and news sites dominated the first positions.

The explanation came when Google Webmasters tweeted that there had been an error and that it had now been fixed. John Mueller then commented on the subject in a tweet, clarifying that it was an error on their side which they had already fixed. He also had a joke at 2020's expense, remarking that it would be good if somebody fixed the rest of the year's problems too.

Google now lets online sellers adjust product information

Sellers can already adjust their product results through schema.org markup or Google Merchant Center, yet it still sometimes happens that Google decides to show other information from the page in the search results. So Google has added new options letting e-shops control what information appears with products in the search results.

Among these options is No Snippet, which stops a page from showing a snippet in the search results. Then there is the option of setting the maximum snippet length through the "max-snippet:[number]" robots meta tag, and the maximum size of the image shown from the page in the snippet through the "max-image-preview:[setting]" robots meta tag.

They can now even stop Google pulling a particular part of the page into the snippet, through the "data-nosnippet" HTML attribute.

Google has also committed that these snippet adjustments will not affect a page's ranking in the results in any way. Even so, the changes may mean a product does not appear in rich results or in other product displays on Google.

WordPress and development

A faster VUE 3.0 is coming

The planned release of VUE 3.0 is slowly approaching. It promises several interesting things, such as a marked improvement in speed. The RC stage is already out and can be downloaded through NPM. We are waiting for the production version, which should be available in the coming days.

Changes to templating in WordPress 5.5

Passing arguments was a long-awaited piece of functionality in WordPress. The ticket for it was created 8 years ago. :) Until now there was no way to pass any data, so the part of the code called by the function had to load that data itself, which often meant needless extra queries. Now you can have one template part instead of four different ones, passing a style parameter and handling the output accordingly within the template part. The style need not be loaded from the post again.