Digital Marketing News 03/01/2022 – 03/07/2022

Social

Twitter Moderation Approach Impacts Member Accounts

Twitter's Transparency Report shows that the proactive moderation approach is responsible for most account suspensions.

The platform issued its six-month Transparency Report reveals the volume of country-level requests, facts about policing members for rule violations, and a trend in accounts that violates rules. 

Twitter shares a 4% decrease in government requests for account information and preservation. Preservation Requests are requests from law enforcement to preserve account information that may be used in legal proceedings. The United States accounts for 57% of all government preservation requests. In addition, government entities from the US also issued the most information request than any other country at 24% of the volume.

Information requests from non-government entities are also received by the platform for purposes such as civil or criminal legal cases. Japan issued the most requests for information from Twitter, followed by Brazil and United States. These three countries represent 89% of all information requests from non-government entities.

The Transparency Report also reported that Twitter received 43,387 government legal demands of content removal within the six months that the report covers. 95% of total content removal requests come from only five countries: Japan, Russia, Turkey, India, and South Korea.

Twitter's moderation action is swift. 68% of tweets were taken down before the violating posts achieved 100 impressions, with only 24% of the posts achieving 1,000 impressions. The report also showed that Twitter permanently shut down 453,754 accounts for violating their Child Exploitation (CSE) policies and suspended 44,974 accounts that were promoting terrorism and violent organizations. 

Search

Trending Search Data from Google Shows How Consumer Expectations are Changing

Google Search trend reveals how customer expectations have changed from 2021 to 2022.

Based on a comparison volume from 2021 to 2022, trends indicate that customers want things both sooner and later. For example, shopping in person late at night, and shopping online and getting their orders as soon as the day after. Consumers also expect new experiences from businesses.

This Global Insights Briefing report by Google Ads Research and Insights team from an analysis of billions of search queries. 

Consumer expectations for new experiences, services, and ways to shop are on the rise, with growing searches for:

• "Late night shopping": Up 100% year over year.

• "24/7 customer service": Up 500% year over year.

• "Dog friendly restaurants": Up 100% year over year.

• "Next day flower delivery": Up 800% year over year.

Activities related to in-person searches have also increased, with searches associated with attending events indicating a level of consumer comfort in physical engagements.

• "Cinema near me": Up 300% year over year.

• "Seating chart": Up 600% year over year.

• "Spring break": Up 100% year over year.

• "Unique things to do in": Up 100% year over year.

Several "pandemic-related trends" also continue to stick: 

• "Makeup game": up 700% year over year.

• "Best movies to stream right now": Up 300% year over year.

• "Nursery plants near me": Up 100% year over year.

• "Hair trends female": Up 800% year over year.

These changes in consumer behavior would mean that their expectations from businesses will also evolve. 

Search

Google Ads Updates Destination Requirements Policy

Changes to Google Ads Destination Policies are officially going into effect on March 21, 2022.

The main objective behind Google updating the Destination Requirements Policy is to improve clarity to advertisers by providing clear examples and updating the language of disapprovals. Changes to the policy include:

• Clarifying guidelines for Insufficient Original Content policy

• Introducing new Destination Not Accessible policy

• Updating examples in the Destination Not Working policy

The changes for the Insufficient Original Content policy are for websites that had error messages, including "site under construction" will be categorized into the policy. Previously, these error messages corresponded with the Destination Not Working policy. With this update, destinations that will receive this error message include parked domains, a website that is intended to reserve a web address, and websites displaying "coming soon" or "under construction" messages. 

An example of the updated language Google Ads will be using is below: 

Destination Not Accessible policy is an independent policy from Google. It falls underneath the requirements of access limitations. For example, if your site showed a "down for maintenance" message, the error message below will appear on Google Ads.

Lastly, Google is updating the examples showing the Destination Not Working policy to improve transparency and increase clarity for advertisers. The updated policy below will show for instances such as a server error code or a website not working on common browsers and devices.

With this new update, troubleshooting can be faster. And the quicker you identify issues, the quicker ads will be back up and running. 

These policy updates will be available starting March 21, 2022.

PPC

Google Introduces New Short Titles for Product Ads

Google Merchant Center rolls out new attribute called Short Title to optimize product titles even further.

Google Merchant Center helps advertisers create concise and to-the-point descriptions using the

. The short Title attribute is optional, acting as a brief and concise identification of your product. This is different from the already existing Title tag that more accurately matches the product's landing page and a search query.

Currently, the Short Title attribute will be shown in places where users typically do a lot of browsing, including Discovery campaigns and Shopping Ads in Gmail. Since this is an optional feature, it won't always show on all networks.

Some best practices to keep in mind with using the Short Title are: 

• Staying under 65 characters to avoid your title getting truncated

• Listing the most important details first as users don't always read entire titles

• Add a brand name if it's a differentiating factor

Web

Nine WordPress Plugins Vulnerabilities Affects Over 1.3 Million Sites

Nine WordPress Plugins, including popular ad management, malware firewall, and database managers, exposes over 1.3 million sites to exploits.

The United States Government Vulnerability Database and WordPress security researchers published alerts of WordPress plugin vulnerabilities. 

While many plugins were found to be vulnerable, the nine most popular plugins affect 1.3 million websites. 

The following are on the list of nine vulnerable plugins:

1. Header Footer Code Manager 300,000+ installations

2. Ad Inserter – Ad Manager & AdSense Ads 200,000+ installations

3. Popup Builder WordPress plugin 200,000+ installations

4. Anti-Malware Security and Brute-Force Firewall 200,000+ installations

5. WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click 100,000+ installations

6. Database Backup for WordPress 100,000+ installations

7. GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform 100,000+ installations

8. Download Manager 100,000+ installations

9. Advanced Database Cleaner WordPress plugin 80,000+ installations

Vulnerabilities discovered include Reflected Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability and SQL injection vulnerability, among others. Reflected Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability may trick an administrator into clicking a link or other actions to make it vulnerable for full site takeover. In contrast, SQL injection vulnerability was reported that a specific plugin does not sanitize and escape fragment parameters before using it in a SQL statement in the admin dashboard, leading to an SQL injection issue.

What you can do next

• Emphasize key phrases that your target market uses to meet customers where they are in Google.

• Review trends in search and highlight relevant keywords such as unique and new experiences in your website, so you get found in Google.

• When launching Shopping Ads or Discovery campaigns, use Short Titles to capture a user quicker.

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