February 2022 – SEO and Marketing News

Feb 25, 2022 by
February 2022 – SEO and Marketing News

February is always a month that seems to be over before it really begins. But while it might be the shortest month of the year that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s short on news. Ignoring the numerous global catastrophes, this month we put the spotlight on the full breadth of players as far as online marketing is concerned.

Google Ads Announces Top 3 Priorities for 2022

Google Ads recently announced its top three priorities for 2022: automation, measurement, and privacy. Now, these aren’t exactly brand new priorities but Google has made it clear it’s shifting how it’s focusing on each one.

Under the automation pillar, Google is emphasising the use of Performance Max and Discovery campaign types. Both campaign types focus on reaching users at scale from a single campaign. For management, meanwhile, Google is rolling out new solutions that will rely on your first-party data and privacy-safe APIs. These efforts put the user first by respecting their privacy, but also listening to the needs of advertisers to track campaign efforts.

Finally, Google understands the increasing need for user privacy and controls. It has updated its privacy playbook to capture these needs both from the advertiser and user perspective. The three main highlights of this playbook include building direct relationships with customers, ensuring measurement remains accurate and actionable and keeping ads relevant.

TikTok Consolidates Transparency Updates

TikTok has launched a brand safety centre as a hub for articles, partnerships and other resources related to brand safety and transparency. The brand safety centre includes TikTok’s mission statement, the latest brand safety announcements, information about its partnerships and certifications, the platform’s transparency updates and case studies.

Social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have a range of monetisation options for creators – TikTok will need to build out more opportunities for creators to make money if it wants to keep them on its platform. As it builds out these advertising capabilities, the brand safety centre may be a convenient reference for brands to understand how TikTok is tackling these issues.

YouTube Gives Creators More Ways To Make Money

YouTube will soon be giving creators more ways to monetise content and make money across all video formats. This information was announced earlier this month as part of an inside look at YouTube’s roadmap for 2022, which also includes details about new features and changes to the viewing experience.

Currently, creators can make money from YouTube Shorts via the Shorts Fund. The Shorts Fund is available to all creators, even those who aren’t eligible to monetise regular videos. YouTube plans to continue running the Shorts Fund and introduce additional ways for creators to earn revenue from short-form videos.

Creators will also soon be able to make more money while streaming live on YouTube. YouTube plans to give users the ability to purchase gifted channel memberships for other Livestream viewers. This will be similar to how users on Twitch can gift paid subscriptions to other users during a stream.

Web3 also opens new monetisation opportunities for YouTube creators through technologies like blockchain and NFTs. For example, creators can give fans verifiable ways to own unique videos, photos, art, and more. There’s a lot to consider in this area, however, so it may be some time before we see these new technologies added to YouTube.

Google adds Journeys to Chrome

Google Chrome has added a new feature called Journeys that makes it easier for users to revisit topics they searched for days or weeks ago. Journeys is a Google Chrome desktop feature. It groups pages from your search history by topic or intent, providing a more helpful user experience than just showing a chronological list of pages.

The Journeys feature is optional – you can turn it off if you don’t want to use it. The history is limited by device, though Google said it may later make it possible to access Journeys on multiple devices.

Bing’s New PubHub Offers Millions of New Site Visitors

Microsoft recently announced the launch of PubHub, a new part of Bing Webmaster Tools that helps news publishers significantly extend their reach and attract more readers. PubHub is a new way for all news publishers, regardless of size, to dramatically increase their readership. The only prerequisite is for the publisher to already be signed up with Bing Webmaster Tools.

The goal of PubHub is to help high-quality news sites to be discovered by millions of new readers by exposing their content at different points where an audience may be interested in consuming news content. Best of all, getting added to PubHub is easy. Just log into Bing Webmaster Tools, verify your news site and then sign up for Bing News PubHub.

Facebook Shifts Focus to Short-Form Video After Stock Plunge

Following the greatest single-day stock drop in recorded history, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg intends to shift the company’s focus to growing short-form video. Zuckerberg communicated this plan to Facebook employees during a company-wide virtual meeting.

The stock price of Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc, dropped by over 200 billion dollars this past week after reporting major losses in a quarterly earnings report. Not only did Facebook’s expenses exceed its revenue, but it experienced its first-ever decline in daily active users.

From the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2021, almost half a million people stopped logging into Facebook every day. Investors panicked after learning the details of Facebook’s quarterly report, which triggered the stock to crash. The reason for the loss of daily active users is apparently due to the rise of TikTok so it makes sense that Zuckerberg would want to pivot towards short-form video content.