With the New Year comes new changes in digital marketing driven by Google, YouTube, and Instagram. These giants have all announced big changes that digital marketers and brands need to consider as we roll out our 2021 marketing plans.
YouTube Product Tagging in Live Testing
eCommerce was a huge story in 2020 marketing and is here to stay as YouTube introduces this to its platform. While many platforms expanded their product sales opportunities, YouTube marketing was still reliant on clickable ads and links in posts.
That’s all getting ready to change as phase 2 of testing begins for product tagging in video clips. The test is live with select content creators and is visible on desktop and mobile devices.
From YouTube: “We’re testing a new way for people to easily discover and purchase products featured in YouTube videos. Creators in this pilot can add certain products to their videos. Viewers can then see a list of featured products by clicking the shopping bag icon on the bottom left corner of the video. “
This new feature is likely to have applications in search as well. Buckle up, digital marketers. Before you know it, the entire web will be shoppable.
Dive Deeper in Google Search Console Coverage Reporting
Savvy digital marketers know the value of the Google Search Console coverage report. It contains essential information about how the search-behemoth scores your website in several areas and includes details about Google successfully crawling your web pages, as well as pages they couldn’t crawl due to problems. These problems hurt your ranking in search results.
Changes to the coverage report now include more detailed results. Pages that are submitted but blocked received “submitted but blocked” errors in the past. Now it is shown as an “indexed but blocked” warning. Soft 404 error reporting is now more accurate. There’s even the addition of a new warning, “indexed without content.” Also, Google’s generic “crawl anomaly” errors are now mapped to specific resolutions.
All these new labels and responses in the report help digital marketers better understand Google’s issues crawling and indexing your site. That’s a change for good. We will be leveraging this new report for all of our SEO clients.
GSC shows a new “Google Search Update” for Jan 16 2021 in Crawl stats report.
— Alexander Außermayr (@Aussermayr) January 19, 2021
The update links to “Data anomalies in Search Console” page https://t.co/sau1SvaYNh.
cc @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/bYR1bTBCIQ
Instagram Tests Unhiding Like Counts
Most Instagram users had their post-like-counts turned off around 2019. The theory was that it would help the general audience’s well-being. Instead of post-like-counts being a vanity measurement status symbol to impressionable users, the content would be allowed to stand on its own.
A recent discovery shows that Instagram is testing the ability to turn like-counts back on manually, post by post, for those who still want that visible. While there hasn’t been any data published by Instagram on the results of hiding them, there is still chatter that a visual measurement tool is desired and needed. Especially in light of competitors TikTok and others still showing the reactions that posts receive.
#Instagram is working on an option to hide the like count in a post 👀 pic.twitter.com/0Bd6Mhc6YB
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) January 14, 2021
