February Invelity news

Our regular round-up tells you what February brought to the online world. Besides items of interest in social, there is no leaving out the changes at Google Ads, the news from the world of SEO and, now, subjects covering WordPress and development too.

Social

GIFs in stories!

A small change, but it will certainly be a hit. We no longer have to reply to stories with emoji or a message alone — reactions can now be expressed with a GIF. In marketing we can imagine using it either by inviting replies in GIF form, or by using the most original GIF, which we can then share.

PSA: You can now reply to your friends' stories using @GIPHY GIFs! Update your app to try it.

— Instagram (@instagram) February 4, 2020

What's up, WhatsApp?

Facebook's most widespread communication platform, WhatsApp, has underlined its dominance. It reached two billion people, comfortably overtaking Messenger, which does not have even 1.5 billion users.

Countries by their dominant messaging app:

Instagram will show us who we should not be following

Instagram is starting an interesting new feature. It will show us which followed accounts we interact with least and which appear in our feed most often. So we will be able to manage who we want to follow and who we would rather unfollow. It is likeable of Instagram not to push a like-for-like strategy but to go after quality. Influencers will be able to assess their profile's success better and work with it.

Want to see which Instagram accounts show up in your feed the most and who you interact with the least? Now you can! Just tap "Following" and manage your list from there. pic.twitter.com/eKFOBCdutr

— Instagram (@instagram) February 6, 2020

Pinterest arrives with an excellent feature

Pinterest is bringing an AR feature that will let users try on (for now only) lipstick before buying. Well-known, quality brands are part of the launch — Sephora, L'Oréal, NYX Professional Makeup, YSL Beauté, Urban Decay, Estée Lauder and Lancôme.

Every shade carries a "Shop the look" option, through which the product can be added to the basket immediately, or saved among your pins. Pinterest is among the popular social networks in the beauty field, and this new feature could be an excellent success, above all for retailers looking to connect with customers online more interactively.

Google Ads

Sitelink extensions launched for video

The option of adding sitelink extensions to TrueView For Action videos is finally available in every account — it is no longer just a beta. Through these extensions you make it simpler for your customers to take action, and you raise user interaction too.

A new feature for comparing data over time – BETA

Have you noticed the Explanations feature anywhere in your accounts yet? Through it you can get an overview of large performance changes in your account when comparing periods. Where a campaign's or an ad group's performance in the search network fluctuates markedly, the feature can help you find out why. It may come down to factors such as budget changes, bid changes or targeting changes.

SEO

Another study confirms the importance of a well-written meta description

The meta description is the text you see in the search results. It tells us what we will find on the page. A well-written meta description is like a shop window. Its first job is to motivate the customer to "come inside" — in the online world, to click the search result and enter your site.

The meta description has to be enticing and, above all, should reflect the content of the page. If Google judges that the description does not correspond to the content on the page, it will write a description it considers relevant itself.

A study carried out in December 2019 showed that as many as 62.9% of respondents decide to click a search result on the strength of the meta description. 24.2% choose by brand and the remaining 13% by the title. The meta description has no effect on your position in the SERP, but it can decide whether a prospective customer clicks on your site or e-shop. Worth giving them some attention :-).

Appearing twice on the first page thanks to featured snippets is a thing of the past

Featured snippets had at least 2 large advantages. The first is that they can get you to the so-called zero position in search without ranking first. The second was that thanks to featured snippets you could have the same link twice on the first page. To prevent duplicate links, from January the second link is moved to the second page of the search results.

An example of a featured snippet:

Search Console has extended its content editing tools

In three ways, no less:

Temporary URL removal: Hides the URL from the search results for 6 months. It does not remove it from the index. Blocking it permanently is up to you.

Outdated content: The section gives you information about requests to remove outdated content submitted through the public tool over the last 6 months.

SafeSearch filtering: Here you are told which of your content was reported as adult content.

WordPress and development

The new WooCommerce dashboard

Since roughly the summer, work has been under way on a new JavaScript WooCommerce dashboard for online shops. The new dashboard brings clearer statistics for the whole shop. It provides many reports that were missing before — reports on revenue, orders, products, categories, coupon usage, taxes, downloads, stock and customers are all available. Although it is still only beta version 0.25.1, we have to say it looks very good so far.

Laracon 2020 is on the horizon

The largest online conference devoted to the popular PHP framework Laravel is approaching, on 26 February to be exact. Join the more than 15,000 developers attending. Among the speakers is Laravel's founder Taylor Otwell himself.