Facebook Has No Idea What “Improved” Means Any More
Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:
Facebook’s Confusing Reporting Change
Pages with Good ‘Core Web Vitals’ May Get Ranking Boost, After All.
Google Tests Estimated Local Service Prices
People Can Leave Photos On Your GMB Profile Now
Eventbrite Embeds Going Away
Below is the transcription from this weeks topics
Facebook’s Confusing Reporting Change
Heads up if you run Facebook ads and prefer your reporting to be, you know, accurate…
Facebook has made a change it hilariously calls “Improved Result Summaries.”
Hilarious, because they’ve actually managed to make result summaries much less valuable now.
(As usual, Facebook advised us advertisers about this by putting a pop-up in the ads manager of maybe like 10 people, then calling it a day.)
The pop-up reads:
As usual, it’s not clear whether this is active for everyone now, or if it’s rolling out, or if it’s a test, or if the moon is in Virgo…
Do the people at Facebook even look at their own product?
Who asked for this?
Please.
For the love of God, Facebook. Stop.
Pages with Good ‘Core Web Vitals’ May Get Ranking Boost, After All.
An update on the forthcoming Core Web Vitals change to Google’s ranking algorithm.
To briefly recap, Google is close to adding a new ranking factor — the Core Web Vitals are actually three metrics:
How fast the first element appears on your page
How soon a user can interact with it
How much the layout jumps around
Until now, Google has said this is a pass-or-fail score:
If you pass, your ranking stays the same.
If you fail, you might lose a bit of position.
But now, Martin Splitt, a key engineer at Google says:
"All things being equal… a page with CWV field data may have a tiny advantage over one without."
This is the first time we’ve heard that passing could give you a ranking boost.
Some people are speculating that in the case of a ranking tie, it could make the difference of putting your site up higher.
Google Tests Estimated Local Service Prices
If you rely on Google Local for your company’s revenue — like plumbers or handymen — their latest test might interest you.
They’re testing a box that comes up when people search for a business in Google Maps that shows the estimated prices near the user.
One person who reported seeing this test had done a search for roofing companies in his area, and it shoed estimated prices for a roofing job in that community.
It looks like this data is being sourced from Homewyse. Google does have a data connection with that site for other stuff, but this is certainly an interesting change.
People Can Leave Photos On Your GMB Profile Now
Heads up social media community managers….
Google says it will soon let users share photos about a business without leaving a review.
(By “share photos,” Google means “post photos on your company’s Google My Business profile.”)
They’ll also be able to leave a short text description.
This will be the first time users can drop photos on your profile without writing out a review to go with the photo.
It’s not clear whether the photos will drop into the Comments API so your third-party tool of choice can access them and let you act on them — my guess is it won’t be in the API, at least not right away. So best to install the Google My Business app on your phone to get those notifications.
Android install link
iOS install link
Eventbrite Embeds Going Away
Starting on March 24th, Eventbrite will stop supporting the following widgets:
Calendar
Countdown
Button
Text Link
If you are currently displaying any of these widgets on your website, you will need to remove the associated HTML code ahead of that date as the widgets will no longer render they we remove support for them.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.