October Invelity news

Improving the user experience dominated the online world in October too. Our brief look back tells you more...

Google Ads

A new lead form extension

Google Ads has gained an extension to help clients collect leads and make advertising and gathering contacts easier. The extension is available on mobile devices only. A fast, mobile-optimised environment should make submitting a form easier without the customer having to go through to a form on the site. The extension can also be used with e-commerce clients who want further information from the company before making a purchase.

Conversion actions in video campaigns

As with search campaigns, from October it is possible at the level of YouTube video campaigns to choose specific conversion actions (one or several) to optimise the whole video campaign's performance towards.

New ways of assessing responsive search ads

That every ad group in search should have at least one responsive ad hardly needs saying any more. Google has offered advertisers further tools to help make full use of responsive search ads:

The performance column — helps identify which of your creative assets contribute to results in a given ad group.

The ad variations tab — makes it easy to create and test ad variations across different campaigns or the whole account. You could test, for instance, how your ads would perform if you changed the call to action from "Buy now" to "Buy today".

Social

Responsive ads on FB too

Following Google's lead on responsive ads, Facebook has arrived with an entirely identical ad format. From now on ads can carry several descriptions, headlines and pieces of ad copy. The ad system then dynamically shows the combination it decides will bring the best results (leads, purchases and so on).

The end of following activity

Instagram continues its "policy" of user safety. One step is removing the feature for following other friends' — users' — activity. The feature mapped out all friends' activity over time and was originally meant to help discover new content.

Talking to a brand through stories

Imagine you are watching a story on Facebook or Instagram and it catches your interest, or raises questions. With one tap or swipe you activate the "send message" feature and the app automatically "throws" you into Messenger and a conversation with the company. Practical, fast and, in conversion terms, effective too. Or so it ought to be.

No time to prepare eye-catching stories? You can already use creative templates right in the app.

Not using Creator Studio yet?

Facebook launched this post-management tool only recently and, besides the standard scheduling of Facebook posts, made it possible to schedule Instagram posts too. (We wrote about it in the September post.) Another practical part of the "studio" will be scheduling IGTV videos and live broadcasts, plus more precise statistics for assessing posts.

Quora ads – 3 new targeting options:

October also brought 3 new targeting options for advertisers in the Quora ad system:

• Keyword history targeting, to reach people again who took an interest in the past in questions related to your company or services within a chosen period, 20 days for instance.
• Targeting a specific gender.
• Targeting a specific browser — Chrome, Firefox, Safari.

SEO

FLASH is ending

This matters above all to owners of older sites that used Flash (SWF files) to liven up their graphics. At the end of this year Google will begin ignoring content in this format, so we recommend using HTML5 and, in some cases, JavaScript.

BERT arrives

Google has made another update, named BERT. Its aim is to understand a search term better in terms of context. It is a large step towards getting closer to the user. In testing, Google found that BERT helped its algorithms grasp the nuances of questions and understand connections between words that it previously could not. For now it is being tested mainly in the USA. If your site is aimed at that part of the world, we recommend writing as naturally as possible.

The new Site Kit 1.0 plugin

This plugin will please sites running on the WordPress CMS. It lets users reach data from Google tools directly from their site's admin. The plugin aggregates data from Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights and AdSense, and installing it needs no developer involvement.