Weekly Digital Breakdown – 9.24.20
Weekly Digital Breakdown
Sep 24
Facebook Changes Ad Perspective
Advertisers have long been challenged, and often frustrated, with Facebook’s ad criteria on image and text ratio. Based on preferred customer experience, Facebook has enforced a strict policy that images need to contain less than 20% text for approval. Failing to comply with this policy would result in limited ad reach. The company even provided a Text Overlay tool to help confirm ads align with the policy before going live.
Now, Facebook is updating its policy to remove these limitations. Ads with more than 20% text in the main image will run with full reach potential. The change will give control back to advertisers on ad format without affecting campaign performance.
For many marketers, this is a welcome change, especially as the way users interact with online ads seems to be rapidly evolving. While Facebook is still in the process of updating their official policy, they do still maintain that ad images with less than 20% text perform better. However, they are ultimately leaving the decision, and the results, to the advertiser’s best judgement.
Google Expands Shipping Detail Options
Google has made strides recently to not only help businesses who are finding themselves almost entirely reliant on online sales, but also its ecommerce initiatives by allowing free merchant products listings and free product listings in search results. The extended visibility has resulted in a boost in brand and product discovery and an increase in retail revenue.
With these efforts, they have found that shipping information, including cost and expected delivery times, often play a huge factor in purchase decisions and checkout abandonment. To help alleviate this frustration, listings linked to the Merchant Center show shipping costs, even on free listings. This week, Google announced that they will also support schema.org markup type for retailers that don’t have an active Merchant Center account with product feeds. The addition allows more accessibility to communicate shipping options outside of Google Merchant Center, helping those who find schema easier to manage. For retailers, this could be a tremendous opportunity to drive website traffic and revenue in a new way.
https://searchengineland.com/google-now-supports-shipping-details-schema-for-product-results-340924
Bing Lets AI Guide Search Capabilities
With the help of smart devices and mobile, the way people search online is changing and many are carrying these habits to the keyboard. This week, Bing announced it will be accommodating this shift by using natural language models to improve autosuggestions and People Also Ask (PAA) features. The new technology utilizes Microsoft Turing Language Generation Next Phase Prediction to expand its capabilities and improve the user experience.
Bing is also implementing advanced tech to identify question-answer pairs within a document, allowing those references to appear in the search results.
The updates are more examples of the company’s efforts to incorporate AI to better understand and help users. As the models improve, content relevance will continue to increase, helping both brands and users for an overall better experience.
