PPC. Changes to statistics and video uploads in Google My Business. Google My Business is updating its performance reports with search results data.
Claudia Blišťanová
Idea & Social Media Consultant
23. October 2020
6 min
BeginnerGoogle My Business is updating its performance reports with search results data. Another recent update in GMB is a reduction in the maximum size of uploaded videos.
It now gives business owners more data to work with in a series of performance report updates. The most important of these is the ability to find out how many times a business profile appeared in search results. Business profile performance reports are growing more detailed and more accessible. New metrics are being added too, and it will be simpler for business owners to view the data straight from their profile. Specifically, Google is adding information about interactions. That data tells business owners how often people contacted them after visiting their Google My Business profile.
From October, when building a new campaign you can save it as a draft and come back to it later. The largest advantage, in our view, is being able to return to a half-built campaign later without having to create it again.
With video campaigns, impression frequency is one of the important metrics a marketer tracks and reports to their client. We now have 3 new metrics available for frequency reporting.
With Christmas round the corner, Facebook has announced several new advertising tools meant to help retailers make the most of the season.
One improvement is the option of adding your products and tagging them in your ads. We know, tagging has worked since 2016, but in ads it is new. This upgrade is a way of putting more commercial creative to work as advertising. The platform will let organic posts be used more, making sellers' work simpler. The formats available on Facebook and Instagram are photos, video and carousel.
Facebook is also adding several new custom audience options. That will help retarget people who showed interest in a product or brand. Research into the success of retargeting display ads suggests it raises the likelihood of a conversion by as much as 70%.
Besides that, Facebook is introducing a new "Season of Support" initiative meant to help small and medium businesses prepare for the holidays. The season of support will include free marketing training and various resources. Rather good, don't you think?
Facebook has published a 23-page report on how our interactive behaviour changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meetings began taking place from kitchen tables, checking in on grandparents by phone and celebrating birthdays over video. This became the new normal.
The outside world became unpredictable, so we began spending more time in the virtual one. In total 82% of people played video games while following what was happening in the world. Even concerts moved online — and by that we do not mean only a stream on Facebook, but the visual experience of rapper Travis Scott's concert in Fortnite.
For brands it means digital experiences ought to be taken into account. They support fan engagement and build a relationship with the brand. In future that may be precisely what triggers buying decisions.
The pandemic has accelerated many planned changes. The use of cash keeps falling. Fear of the virus being carried on notes and coins, together with the wider use of e-commerce, has driven the current shift to cashless payment. In this situation brands should therefore make sure their payment processes are optimised.
The full report is HERE.
2020 brought a new era of gaming. Which is precisely why Facebook decided to make use of it and extend its offering for users. The Social Network has introduced a new set of cloud-streamed games that Android and web users can play without having to download them.
The improvement is partly a concept at present, owing to ongoing negotiations with Apple over the availability of games within the Facebook Gaming app.
The gaming feature is new to the USA only, and roughly 380 million people can be seen playing on the platform each month. Interestingly, to promote it Facebook has devised a new playable ad type for developers.
Incidentally, Facebook has released a new COVID-19 update saying that during this period free gaming is a great support in finding new ways to interact.
What are the advantages of using GIFs?
GIF images can be an advantage for SEO when they are well made — they can draw clicks and keep people engaged on the page. Google's image optimisation techniques are the way to ensure your GIF files are crawled, analysed and indexed by Google. GIFs can be shared, and a well-branded, shareable GIF can live a long life. People like GIFs, and using them in an article can break up long pieces and add a sense of connection to the content. Used effectively, GIF content has the potential to raise engagement with a particular post or piece of content.
What are the disadvantages of using GIFs?
Watch their file size above all, so they do not slow your site down. For more complex animation, use other programs instead. They can also be bad for accessibility — you have to make sure your GIFs meet accessibility guidelines.
How to improve your GIFs
Customise your GIF file names, use unique GIFs and, crucially, write good alt text — for people and for SEO alike. You can add GIFs to your image sitemap so Google knows exactly where they are. Use descriptive file names and make sure the GIFs work with the surrounding text.
There are several dozen online tools to help you compress images. You can also turn your GIF into an APNG file to keep more colours at a better file size. Using better settings when saving GIFs in Photoshop can also win savings for page speed. You can also convert your GIF into an HTML5 video.
Google is highlighting the best shopping offers in search results, in an effort to raise visibility for sellers while ensuring customers get the best prices available. In a series of related updates, Google is making it easier and faster to apply product promotions and attract new customers. All these updates relate to the free shopping listings Google began offering earlier this year.
Promotions are now available to every retailer in the USA. Google says using them during the holiday shopping season will be considerably simpler. Retailers can edit promotions directly in Merchant Center and the average approval time has fallen from days to hours. These updates offer the ability to respond better to shopper demand.
Useful shopping statistics
Google's announcement came with a set of shopping statistics that retailers may find useful.
58% of US shoppers put off buying gift items until they are on sale.
40% of global shoppers say they turn to Google to find the best deal.
58% of US shoppers bought at least one brand they had not bought before during last year's holiday season.
65% of US shoppers start shopping earlier to avoid items selling out.
If you care about your site's speed (which we would certainly recommend), the new CSS property content-visibility will please you. We can expect wider browser support in time; at present Safari and Firefox are lagging behind above all. content-visibility lets the browser skip rendering content that is not visible until it genuinely needs it. That way a large part of the content not currently visible can be skipped and the page loads far faster. The user can work with the content they can actually see sooner.
Every e-shop owner using WooCommerce will certainly be pleased by our new plugin for GLS ParcelShops. In a few clicks you can add this attractive delivery method to your e-shop. What is more, the plugin is entirely free.
Claudia Blišťanová
Idea & Social Media Consultant
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