Well, 2019 has officially come and gone! Is it just us, or did that year go faster than normal?! If you feel the same, then check out the year in review posts from Google: they’re a great reminder of everything that’s happened in the last twelve months.

To get your year-end update, and the rest of December’s top headlines, keep reading this month’s digital marketing round-up.

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2019 in review: Stories from Google this year

Emily Wood, Editor-in-Chief of Google’s blog The Keyword, summarizes 2019 for Google in this year’s review post.

Google releases top trending searches in 2019

See what searches were trending in 2019 across Searches, News, People, Actors, Athletes, Diets, Fashion Style, Home Style, Movies, Musicians & Bands, Professional Sports, Recipes, Songs and more.

Google’s BERT rolls-out worldwide

Advances in machine learning led Google to make this update, which will improve how the search engine understands queries. The BERT update was the largest change Google has made to its search functionality in the past five years, and is said to impact 1 in 10 queries, and the corresponding results that rank for those queries. Currently only rolled out to English queries at the moment, BERT also impacts snippets in all countries where snippets are available.

Google launches a hub for top trending product searches

Google has launched a home on the web for marketers to discover the top trending product searches across different categories.

Google Shopping 100 highlights the products that have recently seen an increase in US searches. It’s important to note that these are not necessarily the top product searches overall, they’re products that are rising in popularity.

Understand performance changes with Google Ads explanations

Understanding why your performance changes is critical when optimizing a campaign. However, it can be time-consuming to diagnose why your metrics can fluctuate. To help you understand some performance changes in your campaigns and ad groups faster, you can now request explanations.

With explanations, you can view the most likely reasons for impression, click, and cost changes with the click of a button. This makes it easy for you to spend more time focusing on optimization, and less time investigating performance issues. For example, let’s say you notice a big week-over-week drop in impressions for one of your campaigns. Rather than diving into multiple reports to find out what happened, you can just click on the “See Explanations” button on your campaign and ad group tables while in time comparison mode.

YouTube upsets Creators with another policy change

YouTube has again upset creators after implementing another policy change that may impact the content published by popular channels. After recently infuriating creators with changes to its monetization policies, YouTube has updated its harassment policy to no longer allow certain types of content.

Facebook introduces 3 new ad reporting tools

In time for the holiday shopping season, Facebook is rolling out new tools to assist advertisers with analyzing campaign performance.

Facebook is making it easier for advertisers to measure ad performance across accounts, channels, and publishers.

With this data, advertisers can better understand how ads are performing, which demographics they’re reaching, and where the most conversions are coming from. Here’s more about the new ad reporting tools.

Instagram announces new and updated tools for businesses

Instagram has recently launched new features to help businesses better-understand their community and better-control their presence on Instagram.
With Growth Insights, see which posts and stories are generating the most followers. This feature will also give you an aggregated view into follower changes by day or week. Also, Stories that mention your account from the past 24-hours are now aggregated for you to view as a story at the top of the Activity tab.

Instagram introduces new rules for publishing branded content

Branded content that promotes goods such as vaping, tobacco products and weapons will not be allowed. Instagram’s advertising policies have long prohibited the advertisement of these products, and they will begin enforcement on this in the coming weeks.

Branded content that promotes goods such as alcohol or diet supplements will require special restrictions. These policies will go into effect next year as Instagram continue to improve our tools and detections. For example, they are currently building specific tools to help creators comply with these new policies, including the ability to restrict who can see their content, based on age.

Instagram Stories can now include more than one photo

Instagram is introducing a new feature that allows users to upload multiple photos in one story.

The new Layout mode lets users create Instagram stories with anywhere from 2 to 6 photos. Previously, Instagram only allowed for one photo or video per story.

Portal from Facebook adds new content and features

Now you can login to Portal with your WhatsApp account to make video calls and access features like Story Time even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

Story Time lets you bring children’s stories to life with augmented reality effects that change your appearance to match the characters. We’re adding new renditions of classic stories, Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears, plus new tales from Llama Llama, Pete the Cat and Otto.

Portal can help you connect with your co-workers when you’re working from home. Workplace provides a simple and secure way for people to communicate, collaborate and connect at work using familiar Facebook features like chat, video calling and groups. With Workplace on Portal, you can collaborate more effectively, building strong relationships with your co-workers, regardless of distance.

This holiday season from Bing: expanded visual search

Bing already has features that allow you to get visually-similar images from within Bing image results. Now, they’ve expanded and streamlined this capability so you can also use Bing visual search capabilities wherever you are, such as on third-party retailer site or in your own existing photos.

For example, imagine you’re holiday shopping on a retailer’s website or a home decor blog and see a couch you really like. Simply use the search bar in Windows, click the ‘Search with a screenshot’ icon in the lower right corner, and take a capture of the furniture that caught your eye. Bing will provide visually-similar products from various retailers at diverse price points.

New Bingbot user agents will streamline SEO

Bing announced brand new user agents for crawling web pages. The new user agents will be continually updated and as a consequence, the user agent strings will also change to reflect the latest rendering engine used.

The most fundamental aspect of SEO is if the search engine can index a web page. The new Bingbot streamlines this aspect of SEO because it is based on Google’s Chrome browser.

So in general if your site works with Chrome then it should work for both Google and the new Bingbot.

Twitter lets iOS users post live photos as GIFs

Twitter is rolling out a new feature to its iOS app, which lets users easily upload their live photos as GIFs.

This feature is exclusive to iOS because live photos are an Apple innovation. A “live” photo captures 1.5 seconds before and after the user taps the shutter button. That means it would turn into a 3-second GIF on Twitter.

WordPress releases Gutenberg 7.1

Gutenberg 7.1 is a big release. The release contains many refactors to the code base to make future changes possible, e.g., refactors to functional components so it is possible to use new hooks that are available.

This release tries to make block development using standard features like color picking UI easier. To do that the release expands the useColors hook to have new functionalities like color contrast checking and default color detection. There was huge progress on the full site editing work, with the merge of the template part block. Documentation efforts for the FSE (full site editing) work are now in progress.

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Thanks for checking out December’s Digital Marketing Round-up.

We’ll see you next month!

Photo Source: Szabo Viktor on Unsplash