Welcome to our fourth episode of our “Fortnightly Digital Marketing News Roundups”.
We know it can be difficult to keep up with all the changes in the Digital Marketing industry. Many of us work in busy offices, sometimes barely having time to grab a sandwich or a coffee. So, we wanted to make it easier for all of you to know what’s going on.
Learn about the new Facebook digital wallet, Google’s views on noindex, fake Google Maps listings and so much more…
On the move? You can also listen as a podcast on our Spotify and Apple Music channels…
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Transcript
Martin: Hi and welcome to the fourth digital marketing news roundup. Wow hasn’t time flown when you’ve had fun. We’ve got another great set of stories for this week’s episode, we hope you enjoy.
Martin: Facebook is Removing a Number of Fields from Pages
Lucy: Facebook’s digital wallet Calibra
Martin: Microsoft Advertising Editor Now Supports Price Extensions
Emily: Create and Edit Responsive Search Ads in the Google Ads Mobile App
Katy: Google to stop supporting noindex directive in robots.txt files
Lucy: Fake Google Maps listings are hurting real businesses
Katy: Bing Never Supported Noindex In Robots.txt
Emily: Facebook is downgrading posts that use exaggerated health claims
Martin: Facebook is Removing a Number of Fields from Pages
The fields which are going to be removed include: Company Overview, Biography, Affiliation, Personal Interests and possibly even some others.
These will be removed starting from around the 1st of August.
To combat the loss of this information, Page owners can edit their page description to include the soon to be deleted field information.
By doing this it allows Pages to have the necessary information available to page visitors.
Although it is likely that this removal will not impact a Page’s performance.
Lucy: Facebook’s digital wallet Calibra
In 2020, Facebook are launching their own digital wallet. It will be a standalone app that is also built into Messenger and WhatsApp.
It will enable global users to make financial transactions using Libra, their newly formed currency.
Calibra data will not be used for ad targeting, but Facebook expect their move into cryptocurrency to have a positive impact on ad revenue.
Calibra is predicted to drive more ad business for Facebook. It could create global e-commerce opportunities with its cross-border payment capabilities.
Martin: Microsoft Advertising Editor Now Supports Price Extensions
Price extensions with Google were rolled out a few years ago and they were launched last year with Microsoft Advertising.
But now they can be managed within Microsoft Advertising Editor, which is the offline editing program.
So if you going into the shared library in Editor you can add headers, descriptions and prices.
To associate price extensions with ad groups in campaigns, select an ad group and use the “choose price extension” dialogue box.
So it means you can now manage price extensions in bulk, potentially saving a lot of time.
Emily: Create and Edit Responsive Search Ads in the Google Ads Mobile App
You can now directly create and edit responsive search ads in the app.
In the past you could only pause or enable ads.
Google is also rolling out new app capabilities such as creating and editing negative keywords.
Go into the app and select the campaign, then ad group, you want to add or edit ads in. You can create and edit ads as you would on a desktop computer.
This can be helpful for launching last minute promotions, anywhere you are.
Katy: Google to stop supporting noindex directive in robots.txt
Google have said: “In the interest of maintaining a healthy ecosystem and preparing for potential future open source releases, we’re retiring all code that handles unsupported and unpublished rules, such as noindex, on September 1, 2019.
For those of you who relied on the noindex indexing directive in the robots.txt file, which controls crawling, there are a number of alternative options,”
There are some alternatives. Which include, 404 and 410 status codes, which will drop URLs from Google’s index.
Password protection, will also remove a page from Google’s index. You can also use the Search Console remove URL tool.
On the 1st July, Google announced the company is working on making the robots exclusion protocol a standard and this is probably the first change coming.
Google has been looking to change this for years and Google will standardize the protocol, which it can now move forward.
Lucy: Fake Google Maps listings are hurting real businesses
Google carries approximately 11 million illegitimate local listings.
These are pushing real businesses further down in local search results.
Google say they are aware of the problem and are trying to combat spam listings.
Some people say that Google didn’t take the problem of listing authenticity seriously enough from the beginning.
Priority was placed on the user experience over everything else.
Katy: Bing Never Supported Noindex In Robots.txt
Frédéric Dubut from Bing has said that its search engine has never supported the noindex in a robots.txt file.
So nothing is going to be changing on Bing for this front. However, Google have said that they will officially stop supporting this towards the end of the year.
Frédéric Dubut also wrote on Twitter “The undocumented noindex directive never worked for Bing so this will align behavior across the two engines.
Noindex meta tag or http header, return codes are all fine ways to remove your content from Bing.
Emily: Facebook is downgrading posts that use exaggerated health claims
The company said it made changes to its algorithm last month to reduce the amount of misleading health information on the platform.
Facebook Product Manager, Travis Yeh, has said “We know that people don’t like posts that are sensational or spammy, and misleading health content is particularly bad for our community.”
Facebook said it is identifying phases commonly used in these types of posts to predict which may include sensational health-related claims, and then demoting such posts lower in the News Feed.
Marketers managing Facebook Pages for healthcare products or services should be mindful of the messaging they are using on the platform.
To determine if a post should be downgraded, Facebook gave the following clarification:
“We consider if a post promotes a product or service based on health-related claims — for example, promoting a medication or pill claiming to help you lose weight.”
Martin: So thank you for watching this week’s episode. Don’t forget to follow us on our social channels if you want to see the stories as they drop.
You can also subscribe to this to get our video next week straight into your email box. Thanks again for listening and speak to you in a couple of weeks.