Hello and welcome to our monthly news recap, a column where we provide our readers with an overview of the most relevant news and events that happened within the digital marketing landscape over the last month or so.

Let’s see what October 2020 brought us:

• Google Made Shopping Ads Free Worldwide
• Instagram Rolls Out New Features as Part of its 10th Birthday Celebration 
• The Updated Google Analytics Version has Been Launched 
• ‘Digital Marketer’ Listed As A Top In-Demand Job By LinkedIn
• WhatsApp to Launch Shopping/Payment Tools for Businesses

Now, onto the news!

 

Google Made Shopping Ads Free Across The Globe 

Starting mid-October, Google has expanded free shopping ads worldwide. Back in April this year, the company rolled out free shopping ads across the US, and now marketers and retailers from Asia, Europe and Latin America are capable of running free listings in the Shopping tab. 

Google stated that the idea behind this move is the fact that numerous businesses had to cut their marketing budgets due to the pandemic-induced financial crisis, so they decided to make it easier for companies to reach out and connect with their clients. 

As per Google: 

“And as consumers increasingly shop online, they’re searching not just for essentials but also things like toys, apparel, and home goods. While this presents an opportunity for struggling businesses to reconnect with consumers, many cannot afford to do so at scale.”

Another incentive for these free listings, aside from the obvious benefits for retailers, is the fact that the sudden global change has shifted the entire shopping landscape toward online activities.

More on this feature and how to run it successfully here. 

 

Instagram Rolls Out New Features as Part of its 10th Birthday Celebration 

For its tenth birthday, Instagram is adding several cool new updates and features – from new visual-based additions and story maps to eCommerce tool expansions.

Perhaps the most hyped of the new features is Stories Map. Namely, users will now be able to provide their followers with a private look at the exact locations from where they’ve been posting IG stories – provided they used a location sticker – and be able to access these stories map locations from the past three years.

(Image Source: Social Media Today)

Naturally, this movement tracking featured started raising certain privacy issues, as now we know that IG stories are not actually disappearing.

Amongst the newly added features are: 

• A set of variable IG icons that are designed to align with the iOS-14-inspired trend of customized home-screens
• Shopping tab for Reels (yet to be rolled out)
• In-stream shopping for IGTV  

Read about these new features in this Social Media Today article here.

 

The Updated Google Analytics Version Has Been Launched 

Google has recently presented us with an updated machine-learning-based version of Google Analytics. The idea is to provide digital analysts and SEOs with new ways to:

• monitor pertinent data
• track crucial trends
• gain insight into new opportunities via alerts

The fulcrum of this upgraded GA version is “machine learning at its core” that should significantly enhance the quality of trend monitoring. 

“Like products seeing rising demand because of new customer needs,” say over at Google. “It even helps you anticipate future actions your customers may take. For example, it calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers at a time when marketing budgets are under pressure.” 

GA users can now utilize the data to create more focused audiences for Google Ads aligning them with desired trends. The measuring of app and web interactions has also been made possible, resulting in an ability to monitor more conversion types (like from YouTube campaigns, for instance).  

Reporting has also been simplified and re-organized in order to provide the users with an easier way of tracking down marketing insights focusing on specific stages of the customer journey. 

(Image Source: SMT)

The value of these new features and updates seems substantial, even at first glance, but the real utilization potential is yet to be shown. 

 

‘Digital Marketer’ Listed As A Top In-Demand Job By LinkedIn

LinkedIn has recently released a top 10 list of most in-demand jobs and one of them is “Digital Marketing Specialist” with a set of skills including SEO, content marketing and social media skills.

The list was created using data from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph that maps more than 706M professionals, 55M businesses, 11M job listings, 36K skills, and 90k schools. The LinkedIn team than focused on the positions that currently have the highest numbers of open job positions available, with the equation also including the following 3 criteria:

• Job growth over the past 4 years
• Whether the jobs pay a livable
• Whether the required skills can be learned online

“We used our Economic Graph to identify 10 jobs that are in-demand in today’s economy and well-positioned to continue to grow in the future,” said LinkedIn. “We were able to filter for jobs that can be obtained without a 4-year degree, those that pay a livable wage, and those that can be successfully reskilled for online.”

Go to this SEJ article to find out what other jobs are currently among the most wanted ones according to this business-focused social media network. 

 

WhatsApp Rolling Out Shopping/Payment Tools for Businesses

Facebook announced new WhatsApp tools that should help businesses sell more products online using this app. The announced shopping and payment tools will make it easier for sellers to communicate and close sales via WhatsApp by enabling users to browse, select, and pay for desired products directly through the app. 

Facebook recognized that there is a certain communication gap between the business and the consumer that could be bridged through WhatsApp’s new business shopping tools, thus benefiting both sides of the deal. 

“Many of the old ways in which people and businesses communicate are not working,” says Facebook. “While businesses spend billions of dollars annually managing phone calls, e-mails, and SMS, people do not want to wait on hold, get passed from person to person, or wonder if their messages were received.”

The tools focus on three key aspects: 

• Shopping
• Facebook Hosting Services
• Business Sales

Learn more here. 

 

Summing Up

That’s it for this edition of the monthly news recap. See you next time, and in the meantime, feel free to check out our blog for more informative and useful articles from the industry we call digital marketing.