Martin: Happy new year everyone and welcome back to our weekly digital marketing news update. We hope you have had an excellent Christmas and new year. To help calm some of the back-to-work chaos we have created a handy video to keep you on top of the digital marketing updates that have happened over the festive period.
Emily: New Rules on Instagram for Publishing and Promoting Certain Content. A new policy is being introduced that will stop influencers from publishing certain content, such as vaping and tobacco. This change is more of a strict enforcement of existing policies rather than new rules altogether. Furthermore, changes which have not yet been specified will also affect branded content that promotes alcohol and diet supplements. Knowing what can be published and how it can be published is vital to a comprehensive and audience-sensitive brand strategy which navigates the intricacies of promoting restricted content.
Lucy: Google Ads Customer Support No Longer Available on Social. Since the 1st of January it is no longer possible to contact Google Ads’ customer support via social. In place of this advertisers will be directed to an online form, on Twitter this is a pinned post with a link to the form. This change is supposed to help with the ‘streamlining’ of the customer service channels. Hopefully these changes will result in faster responses for advertisers.
Katy: Google Ads is Killing Message Extensions. Google have announced that come 27th January, message extensions will sunset in Google Ads. In a recent Developers blog they said that all existing message extensions will no longer serve and you won’t be able to create new ones. Message extensions were released in 2016 and allow advertisers to create a messaging option in ads, such as text or instant messages. The reason for Google removing this is not clear, however there are some things you can do to prepare for this. Firstly, be sure to collect all data from your existing message extensions. You may want to consider moving to another form of extension such as lead form extensions, which are very similar.
Emily: Microsoft Ads Standard Text Ads to Continue to Serve for Time Being. Standard text ads in Microsoft Ads which were due to stop serving at the end of 2019 are still serving and likely to until the end of March. This is due to many advertisers still running standard text ads in their accounts despite advertisers not being able to create or edit standard text ads for 2 years. Regardless of this extension on serving time, it is important for advertisers to have expanded text ads in their account for when the standard ads stop serving.
Katy: YouTube COPPA Changes have Started. The changes on YouTube relating to child protection have begun. These changes could possibly impact creator revenue. These changes are surrounding issues of collecting data from children under the age of 13. Targeted ads will not be presented on videos aimed at children, as targeted ads require data collection. If creators which create videos for children rely on ad revenue from videos they will still be able to serve ads however as they will not be targeted they may see a reduction in ad revenue which could impact their channel.
Martin: That’s all for this week folks, if you want to be informed daily of the latest digital marketing news follow us on our social channels’.