1. Instagram Enables Likes On Stories - Instagram has added a new, simple way for users to engage with Stories content with Stories likes, which enables you to ‘like’ any Story in your feed, and let the creator know, without having to start up a DM conversation.

Stories likes are not public, and only the creator will be able to see them. Creators will be able to view their Story likes in their Story insights, with a small heart icon added next to the viewers’ name in the view listing.

Stories likes will not come through as a DM, so you’re not suddenly going to get an influx of DMs as people use the function to react to your Stories. To be clear, Instagram hasn’t indicated that this is or will be a ranking factor at this stage. But you would assume that with another means of direct insight, Instagram will look at how it could utilize such to improve each users’ experience, by showing them more of what they literally like.

2. Snapchat Will Enable Top Creators to Insert Mid-Roll Ads into Their Stories - Snapchat's adding another new monetization opportunity for Snap creators, with mid-roll ads for Snap Star Stories, providing a directly attributable revenue pathway for the app’s biggest stars. 

As explained by Snap, soon, Snap creators will be able to switch on ads within their Stories, with a cut of any revenue generated by those ads then allocated back to the creator. Though the specific revenue cut here is not entirely transparent – according to Snap, the revenue share from these ads will be based on its proprietary payment formula, “which may include a number of factors such as posting frequency and audience engagement”.

3. Microsoft Advertising Expands to 29 New Countries - Microsoft announced the expansion of Microsoft Advertising in 29 new countries. This expansion goes across Europe and Africa, with a reach to 19 new languages. Microsoft estimates this brings the reach of the ad network to 41 million consumers, making 400 million searches each month on Microsoft and partner sites.

The following markets are live and ready for you to upload your Microsoft Advertising ads: Albania, Andorra, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Turkey, and the Vatican City.

You can learn more about the expansion on the Microsoft blog.

4. Smart Pages, Microsoft’s Free Site Builder, is Now Available to US-based SMBs - Microsoft first launched Smart Pages,  Microsoft’s free website building service, in February 2021. Until now, businesses that were interested in the service had to sign up for the closed beta. In October 2021, Microsoft announced the website builder’s first round of feature updates, which included an analytics dashboard and the ability to create a Smart Page from directly within a Bing Places account.  

Starting Feb 16, 22, Smart Pages, is available to all US-based small and medium-sized businesses. Microsoft has also added new features to the service, including video embeds, text suggestions, integration with Bing Maps, and an updated Social Posts section.

Far too many SMBs operate with just a social media profile or a local listing as their only online presence. Having your own website opens up more opportunities to connect with potential customers and drive both online and in-store traffic. Now that this service is more widely available, more business owners can use it to establish a basic website for free. And, the new features, particularly the video embeds and Bing Maps integration, can be used to improve the user experience while providing relevant business information.

5. Meta Provides New Recommendations to Help Advertisers Lessen the Impacts of Apple's ATT Update - Meta has published some new recommendations to help advertisers maintain their data flows, and improve the performance of their campaigns.

First off, Meta says that advertisers should integrate with the Conversions API, which will provide more insight into consumer pathways.

Meta also recommends that advertisers verify all of their domains, especially for brands looking to track performance across multiple websites, while it also says that businesses should ensure that their conversion events are aligned with their campaign priorities.

Meta also recommends that brands allow some time before analyzing campaign performance, due to delayed data and modeled reporting (Meta recommends giving conversion-optimized campaigns at least 72 hours), while for App Conversion campaigns, it also recommends that brands use a 24-hour conversion window to help its ad systems optimize “for the fastest and most predictable feedback cycles”. Meta also says that its machine learning ad recommendation and audience tools are improving, which can help to limit the impacts.

Meta also suggests showing your ads across 6 or more Placements – “like on Facebook Marketplace or in Instagram Stories”, which can give its system more flexibility to control costs and generate better results.

6. YouTube Adds New Shorts Shelf in Channel Listings - YouTube continues to make Shorts a bigger focus, with a new addition on the desktop version of YouTube channel pages that will display each channel’s Shorts clips (where available) in a separate element.

Now, when a channel has uploaded Shorts, they’ll be displayed in a separate section, giving Shorts content a more specific focus, and likely driving more viewers, which could also make Shorts a more critical promotional element.

This is in line with usage trends, and engagement around short video clips. Indeed, YouTube recently reported that Shorts clips have cumulatively amassed over 5 trillion views thus far, and with Shorts catching on in India in particular, it makes sense for YouTube to lean into the format where it can, and help its creators boost their channel performance via the format.

7. YouTube Rolls Out New Metadata For Educational Videos - YouTube is bringing additional metadata to English language videos that are educational in nature. Videos can be marked as educational during the upload flow via a drop-down menu where you can select a category. Selecting Education as a video category will grant access to a new set of metadata you can use to describe the content. The new metadata fields include:

Each of these fields is optional. You can utilize some, all, or none of them during the upload process. This is an important update for YouTube channels because, in the future, this metadata will be added to YouTube’s search results to help viewers decide whether the content meets their needs.

8. Google: Good Core Web Vitals Scores Won’t Improve Indexing - Having good Core Web Vitals scores won’t necessarily lead to improved indexing of your webpages in Google’s search results. This is stated by Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller during a recent Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout.

As per Mueller, “the Core Web Vitals kind of plays into the Page Experience ranking factor — and that’s more of a ranking factor. That’s not a quality factor. And in particular, it doesn’t play in with how much we actually crawl and index from the website. In some cases, there is a little bit of a relationship between how fast the page is and how fast we can crawl it, but it doesn’t have to be that way. So that’s something where usually these sides are less connected and not completely tied together.”

9. Google: More Content Does Not Mean More Traffic - Google's John Mueller said on Twitter "more content definitely does not mean more traffic." Meaning, writing more content does not always translate to more traffic, especially from Google Search.

I can relate, creating more content, does not always translate to more traffic. Sometimes sites push out bad or spammy content and that won't always lead to more traffic. But in general, if you write quality and useful content often, it is more likely that you can produce more traffic from more content. Not always but often. John Mueller has said this before, saying Just putting out more content doesn't necessarily make a site better. He also said content frequency is not a ranking factor.

10. 15% Of Search Queries On Google Are Still New - Here is a not-new piece of data, 15% of the searches Google sees each day are new. Google shared this stat, again, on Twitter the other day saying "Fun fact: 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before."

Just some history on this stat, in 2007, 25% of all queries that searchers entered into the Google search box was never seen by Google before. That figure changed to 15% in 2013 and has remained at that figure according to Google even through today. Last I covered it was about two years ago in 2020, Google reconfirmed the 15% figure in 2017 and 2018 and now again in 2022.

11. Google Ads Announces 3 Changes to Automated Extensions - Google Ads rolled out three updates to automated ad extensions. Here's what's new.

12. New Google Ads Destination Not Accessible Policy - Google Ads announced it is adding a new "destination not accessible" policy under the Google destination requirements policy. Google is also making changes and clarifications to the document overall. Google said the changes go into enforcement on March 21, 2022. 

The new independent destination not accessible policy is part of the overall Destination Requirements category for ads related to a destination's access limitation. Google said that this policy will also "provide self-service appeals management for advertisers." These include pages that lead to error messages such as "This site is not accessible in your location" or "down for maintenance" that were previously enforced under the "Destination not working" policy. The new policy language will say "Not allowed Destinations that are not accessible in the targeted location."

13. Like Apple, Google Will Limit Sharing of User Data with Third Parties - Google announced that it will be bringing Privacy Sandbox to Android with the goal of introducing new, more private advertising solutions. Privacy Sandbox is an existing initiative by Google to better protect users’ private data. These solutions will limit sharing of user data with third parties and operate without cross-app identifiers, including advertising ID.

14. Google Confirms Standard Shopping Campaigns Will Remain Available - Google confirms Standard Shopping campaigns will remain available. This will come as a relief to advertisers that still rely on Standard Shopping’s manual controls and capabilities — especially as Google Ads continues to release more automated products.
 
Standard Shopping campaigns offer a set of capabilities, controls, and data that many advertisers rely on, and knowing that they’ll continue to be available will come as a relief, especially since Google has been taking away manual controls in so many areas.

15. Performance Max Will Absorb Smart Shopping and Local Campaigns -  Performance Max is set to absorb Smart Shopping campaigns this summer. Local campaigns will also be rolled into Performance Max sometime between August and September. Once that occurs, advertisers will no longer be able to create new Smart Shopping or Local campaigns. 

To facilitate the transition, Google Ads will offer a self-service tool for advertisers that want to move their campaigns over to Performance Max ahead of the transition window, which could give them more time for testing. The tool will be available for Smart Shopping campaigns starting in April, with support for Local campaigns starting in June.


16. Google Ads Needs At Least 15 Conversion In 30 Days For Machine Learning To Work Better - Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed some time ago that for the Google Ads machine learning models to work faster (and probably better) Google would need a minimum of 15 conversions in the last 30 days. She added that you really need 50 to 100 conversions if you want machine learning to outperform manual strategies.


17. Google Ads Shares Top 3 Priorities for 2022 - Jerry Dischler Vice President / General Manager, Google Ads shared his top three priorities for 2022: automation, measurement, and privacy.

1. New Opportunities With Automation - Under the Automation pillar, Google is emphasizing the use of Performance Max and Discovery campaign types. Both campaign types focus on reaching users at scale from a single campaign. Google touts the benefits of these campaigns to include: 

2. The Future Of Measurement - It’s no secret that measurement has been a challenging topic for most advertisers. With the iOS 14 update, the future removal of third-party cookies, and more – new approaches to measurement will be critical for success. Without meaningful results and data to back up your marketing efforts, it’s going to be harder to prove the value of marketing. Google is rolling out new solutions to privacy and measurement including:

3. Delivering Expectations For Digital Privacy - It’s difficult these days to go without hearing of some sort of privacy breach. Google understands the increasing need for user privacy and controls. While you need to build and cultivate relationships with your customers, they need to know that their data is safe and maintain some level of anonymity. Google has updated its privacy playbook to capture these needs both from the advertiser and user perspective. The three main highlights of this playbook include:

In building direct relationships with customers, you’re able to capture first-party data for more 1:1 direct communication, such as email marketing or in-app messaging.

While we are all used to relying on paid media to drive the final sale and showing direct ROI, the role of paid media may need to change. For example, the goal of some of your non-branded or awareness efforts should shift to capturing first-party data, instead of the final sale.

If you’re able to capture that first-party data on the first touch, you would be able to attribute a final sale back to that original touchpoint. Just remember to shift your attribution modeling to reflect changes in strategy.