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Google’s time!
This is the Q4 2019 Reports’ week, and today it’s the turn of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company Let’s dive straight into some stats.
Revenue: Up to $46B, a 17% year-over-year increase.
Operating margin: 20%.
Advertising revenue: $37B, $5B more compared to 2018.
Delving deeper into their ad business, this is the first time that Google broke out YouTube ad revenue, which brought in $15B in 2019.
Another strong voice is represented by Google Cloud business, which brought in $10B over 2019. A business of itself, uh?
Despite the staggering numbers, these results left the market somewhat disappointed. Shares went down by 3% as Google missed its revenue target, and the CEO reacted like this:
“Our investments in deep computer science, including artificial intelligence, ambient computing and cloud computing, provide a strong base for continued growth and new growth chances across the Alphabet”.
SEO
Vulnerabilities, bugs and other updates for webmasters and SEOs
Say hello to Sajio George, the man who shared a bunch of updates for SEOs and webmasters in the SEO Signals Lab Group.
But before you do that, let’s extract some juice from the post, shall we?
+ The first update comes from Google’s webmaster central hangout from January, 31st. In this hour-long video, John Mueller talks about how DMCA complaints are taken into account algorithmically for ranking purposes.
+ Moving on, Google Analytics has now extended data retention for up to 14 months for user-level and event-level data. This means your event-level data will not expire after the previous two months period, allowing you to conduct longer term analysis of your data.
What can you do with this data?
- Run analyses over a full quarter or year.
- Compare current key months metrics with the same month from last year to identify trends net of seasonality.
- Look for user behaviour in Funnels and Pathing over a longer period of time.
+ If you are using the newly launched web-conversion export from App + Web properties, be informed that all conversions exported to Google Ads (except for remarketing) will now be enabled for bidding by default.
If you have previously exported conversions, they will be editable in Google Ads so you can manually enable them for bidding.
+ Meanwhile, Google’s webmaster team also confirmed a bug in GTM verification method in Search Console yesterday. Though the bug has been fixed, you might want to check your properties and re-verify them if necessary.
+ And finally, if you are using WordPress and its popular Strong Testimonials plugin, beware of these recently discovered XSS vulnerabilities and make sure to update the plugin immediately.
All WordPress websites using Strong Testimonials version 2.40.0 and below have been affected.
That sounds like a lot of work to do for the next few days, good luck!
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They will show you exactly how to become a native ads ninja and avoid rookie mistakes when running ads on their platform.
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- Optimizing and scaling a DSP campaign – the power of super-granular reporting.
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- How to use Voluum reporting to make the right decisions.
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Trying to fight the Facebook ban-hammer
If you advertise on Facebook, chances are that you’ve had at least one nightmare about Facebook banning your Business Manager.
Now, trying to keep those bad dreams away from you, Lourenço Maciel shared what are, according to his experience, the practices that cause bans for circumvention.
Let’s go into them.
High certainty of getting hammered:
- Using the same domain associated with a disabled Page or ad account.
- Using the same images or videos previously used in ads from disabled pages.
- Editing the creatives of a disabled Page and using them on a new Page.
- Using the same account that was running a disabled Page to run the same business using a new Page.
Medium certainty of getting hammered:
- Using the same ad text, page/landing page images, and page/landing page text that caused your account to be banned.
- Using similar (barely modified) videos, images, and text you used in banned accounts.
Low certainty of getting hammered:
- Using the same ad account of a disabled Page to run something else entirely.
- Trying to run the same business before fixing the underlying issue of the disabled page/ad account.
Despite the fact that there’s nothing absolute when it comes to Facebook restrictions… These look like some useful suggestions to keep in mind!
ROUNING UP THE STACK
- E-COMMERCE: Dim Niko shared how to calculate the Customer Lifetime Value of your business and why this matters when running FB Ads.
- CHATBOTS: In a video, Rutger Thole showed what metrics you should look at to check the feedback in Messenger.
- E-COMMERCE: Augmented Reality is becoming a serious option in the e-comm space as well. This infographic shows 12 AR Trends in ecom for 2020.
- FACEBOOK: Ad rotation anyone? In this post Andrei Lunev shows you how to catch ad fatigue, that thing that causes your CPM to go up.
BRAIN TEASER
What weighs more? A pound of feathers or a pound of stones?
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Algorithms will never beat humans’ creativity
Can tech ever be foolproof? What if it’s Google’s tech? Well, the common answer to both these questions is, quite obviously, NO…
What happened? An artist named Simon Weckert was able to trick Google Maps to create virtual traffic jams on the streets of Berlin.
How did he manage? Weckert loaded 99 smartphones running Google Maps into a cart. He then had someone wheel that cart around various streets in Berlin, just outside Google’s office.
This was enough to fool Google’s tech into thinking that there was a huge traffic jam on those streets. Also, because the phones were placed in a cart, it tricked Google Maps into believing that the traffic was slow-moving.
The result? The navigation app started showing virtual traffic jams by turning green streets to red.
Google’s response? “Whether via car or cart or camel, we love seeing creative uses of Google Maps as it helps us make maps work better over time.”
While some users found it funny, there were some who raised their concerns and thought this could turn dangerous or problematic.
What do you guys think?