[Ep104] - YouTube's 'Search Insights' Feature Is Now Available To All Creators

In 12 minutes, get up to speed on the must-know Digital Marketing updates from the week of 11th April 2022.
1. TikTok Launches ‘Effect House’ AR Creation Platform - Creative effects are part of what makes it, so fun to create on TikTok. Whether you’re teleporting into new worlds with Green Screen or freeze-framing with Time Warp Scan, creative effects empower creators to express themselves, entertain, and share stories through a wide array of engaging and immersive formats.

Thanks to the ‘Effect House’ AR Creation Platform, now anyone can create vibrant effects on TikTok. Effect House has been in closed beta since last fall. This week, they have opened the beta to all creators, designers, and developers from around the world, inviting them to imagine new frontiers for TikTok's effects universe.

To date, more than 450 effect creators have published effects on TikTok, inspiring the creation of more than 1.5 billion videos and garnering over 600 billion views globally. 

You can access TikTok’s new Effect House effects workshop here.


2. Snapchat Introduces 'Dynamic Stories' - Snapchat Introduces 'Dynamic Stories,' a new feature that allows news publishers to present up-to-date content on the app. 

With the launch of a new Dynamic Stories feature, Snapchat hopes to keep 319 million daily active users up to date on the latest news and information in the app. The feature essentially allows partner publishers to link their content feed into the platform, ensuring that the latest updates or big stories are reflected via the app.

Rather than requiring the publisher to manually curate and update their Discover feed, Dynamic Stories will adapt to updates as they come in, ensuring that the app is always up to date.

Source: https://newsroom.snap.com/discover-dynamic-stories


3. Pinterest Launches an Extension for WooCommerce eCommerce Platform - Selling your products on Pinterest just got easier. If you are one of the three million WooCommerce merchants, there’s now a Pinterest extension that turns your entire product catalog into shoppable Product Pins. 

It’s one more way that Pinterest is becoming easier for merchants to use to build their audience and drive more sales.

Announcement here. Download the extension here.


4. Meta Introduces New Creator Funding Programs To Grow The Metaverse - Meta’s launched two new creator funding options designed to better incentivize user contributions to its digital worlds - Metaverse.

The first is a $10 million expansion of its Horizon Worlds Creator Funding program, which began in October of last year. Horizon Worlds is Meta's virtual reality sandbox, where users can create their immersive worlds. They'll be able to monetize their efforts in new ways now.

According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the goal is to "thank the people who are doing fantastic work in Horizon," though the bonuses will target specific aspects of the VR experience that Meta wants to improve. So, if Meta notices that users are interested in a certain aspect of its virtual experience, it may make it an incentive objective for others, or it can get creative with 'the most interactive' worlds or 'the most innovative uses.'

The second piece is probably the most interesting: Meta is starting a test program that will allow some creators to sell virtual products and effects within their virtual worlds. "For instance, someone may create and sell attachable fashion accessories or provide paid access to a new region of the world."

It's a reasonable move from Meta to develop from the ground up with collaboration in mind, which will considerably increase its creative potential and allow new trends to emerge organically, generating interest and attracting new users.


5. Google: Updating Images Can Backfire - John Mueller mentioned in a recent Google Office Hours that Google indexes images slowly, which might be a problem if you make large modifications to thousands of images. Two workarounds to this problem are:
  1. Redirect old image URLs to the URLs of the new images.
  2. A fast server response.

6. Google: No Shortcut To Rank In The Featured Snippets Section Of The Google Search Results - John Mueller of Google was asked for guidance on 'how to rank' in the highlighted snippets section of Google Search results. 

In response, John stated that "no technical means for achieving that" exists.

"Given that there's no technical manner of doing that, this seems fairly pointless as a major objective," he stated on Twitter. "I'd propose concentrating on other things that are more linked to what's genuinely valuable for the site/business," he continued.

In other words, John is claiming that there is no specific meta tag or technique to tell Google that you want this particular piece of information to be a featured snippet.


7. Register for Google Marketing Live: May 24, 2022 - It's almost time for Google Marketing Live, Google’s annual event where they showcase the most cutting-edge product developments to help your company grow. 

The virtual event will take place on Tuesday, May 24th, beginning with a keynote from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PT, live-streamed across the world.

Following the keynote, you'll have the option to participate in a selection of on-demand breakout sessions aimed at helping you achieve your business objectives.

Click here to register.


8. YouTube's 'Search Insights' Feature Is Now Available To All Creators - In November of last year, YouTube released an overview of Search Insights, which will feature data on what people are searching for in the app, both in regards to your channel and content and for more broad search queries.

YouTube announced this week that all creators would get access to its new Search Insights feature, which will provide a slew of new data points to help you fine-tune your YouTube approach.

On desktop, Search Insights will be available in the 'Analytics'>'Research' section of YouTube Studio and will provide information on the most popular topics among your viewers, as well as the overall search volume for each and the amount of traffic your channel has received as a result of each query.

For 'Content Gap' searches, which are search phrases that don't generate a lot of results, YouTube will show a marker. The idea is that by displaying these queries, content creators will be able to focus on developing content that corresponds with searches that aren't currently being provided by the videos in the app, perhaps opening up new opportunities for your efforts.

There's also a feature called 'Searches Across YouTube,' which will show you the most popular search queries for any keyword.

You may use 'how to' as a search phrase to see the most prevalent 'how to' queries on the platform.

YouTube added that the data used to power its search trends information would initially only include search activity from users in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India. YouTube is trying to add more countries in the near future, but even if you don't live in one of these markets, the data could indicate greater interest in the app.

Search Insights is available in the desktop version of the YouTube Studio software, which is now available to all users (YouTube says that the full rollout will be complete by the end of April).