Google is releasing an update to the Display & Video 360 API v1 which includes the following features:

• Advertiser targeting capabilities that allow you to add or remove channel, digital content label, and sensitive category targeting options for an advertiser. These targeting changes are then applied to all current and future campaigns.
• Targetable entity management that allows you to create and update Inventory Source Groups, Negative Keyword Lists, and Location Lists. Channels can now be updated as well, but not created.
• A new Creative entity field lineItemIds which is output only and lists the line items the creative is currently associated with. The Creatives service list method now supports this field in its filter parameter.

More detailed information about this update can be found on the Display & Video 360 API release notes page.

It seems Google is not showing some fresh content in the search results. Site commands for this site and Wall Street Journal, as well as many other sites show little to zero new content in Google’s search results. Google has officially confirmed this as an issue.

Sample Query: Try searching for site:wsj.com  – filtered for the past hour.

Does not look like the issue has been resolved yet.

Explanations is a BETA feature in Google Ads that give you insights into large changes in your Google Ads account performance. When you see a significant fluctuation in performance for a Search campaign or ad group, explanations help you quickly find out why it happened.

With explanations, you can view the reason for any change in clicks, impressions, cost and conversions in a single click. This makes it easy for you to spend more time focusing on optimization and less time investigating performance issues.

Before you get started with explanations, keep the following in mind:

• Explanations are currently available for manual CPC or eCPC Search campaigns
• Explanations can compare two time periods of equal length within the last 90 days
• Explanations may only show for campaigns with significant performance changes

LinkedIn announced that they are introducing new capabilities to retarget by actions specifically Retargeting by Video and Lead Gen Forms. These features build on their current offering by helping you reach those most interested in your brand based on their actions with your ads, such as video views and Lead Gen Form interactions.

These new features enable you to:

• Tailor your message to your objective. If you are running a video ad showcasing an upcoming event, you can retarget those who watched 75% or more of that video and invite them to register with a Sponsored Content ad.
• Turn interest into conversions. If someone opens or submits a Lead Gen Form, you know there’s likely some interest, but they may not always convert the first time around. Now you can retarget those who opened or submitted a Lead Gen Form giving you another chance to re-engage the professionals who may have shown initial interest but did not ultimately convert.
• Deepen the relationships with your key accounts. Today, many of you use LinkedIn’s account targeting to reach the right contacts for your account-based marketing campaigns. Now, with our expanded retargeting features you can market to the audience of influencers and buyers based on where they may be in their purchase process.

This feature will be available over the next month within Campaign Manager.

Another feature they announced today was the ability to retarget members who watched part or all of your Video Ads on LinkedIn or on the LinkedIn Audience Network to help you deliver messages throughout the buyer’s journey.

They are also integrating with  Integral Ad Science to automatically provides an additional layer of brand protection and contextual brand safety for all ads across LinkedIn Audience Network placements.

By refining keywords, you can group together ideas based on the attributes of your product or service–like color, size, and more.

For example, let’s say that you’re looking for keywords related to “dry skin.” In the past, you would’ve had to sort through thousands of keyword ideas.

Now, you can filter attributes to include or remove keyword ideas related to dry skin, such as ‘face cream for dry skin’, ‘face lotion for dry skin’ and ‘best winter face cream’.

This looks like a great addition to Google Keyword Planner, it can work well as a content ideas generation tool as well. Can’t wait to try this out. Hopefully, it’s not a limited beta.

Facebook’s new Manage Activity feature gives users the ability to archive or trash multiple posts at once.

• The archive feature is for content you no longer want others to see on Facebook, but that you still want to keep for yourself. For example, you could archive a post you made when you were in high school that you still find amusing but that you’d rather not be seen by anyone else on Facebook.
• Manage Activity also allows you to move posts you no longer want to the trash. Posts sent to the trash will stay there for 30 days before being deleted unless you choose to manually delete or restore them before then. This gives you some wiggle room in case you change your mind about deleting old posts.

The bulk mange tool has filters to help you sort and find what you’re looking for, like posts with specific people or from a specific date range. Manage Activity is now available on Facebook Lite and Mobile Apps, it will be available on desktop in the future.

Bing announced it pushed out a new feature for its backlinks tool within Bing Webmaster Tools. The new feature is named “similar sites” and it lets you compare your site’s backlinks to another site. You do not need to have the site verified to see the site’s link profile in Bing Webmaster Tools.

To access this, login to Bing Webmaster Tools, click on Backlinks and then on the “similar sites” tab. You can also go directly to it by clicking here.

Will need to play around with it to see what sort of limitations they have, but FREE backlink data on your competitors is always welcome 🙂

Google has been criticized by some experts for implementing the Scroll To Text Fragment feature in Chrome by default since the feature can have some privacy issues.

Here is a tweet by Peter Snyder Security Researcher @ Brave and another comment from David Baron from Mozilla and now it looks like Google is automatically adding Scroll To Text Fragment to Featured Snippets in SERPs, this basically means that if you are on Chrome and click on the Featured Snippet they can automatically scroll and take you to the section of the page where the snippet was lifted from. If you are not familiar with this new feature in Chrome check out this handy tool we build at Supple that has more info on Scroll To Text Fragment and how it works.

Sample Query: Try searching for Sample Query on Chrome Desktop. I was able to trigger them from Australia.

It was not just me and Glenn, Mordy Oberstein was seeing this at his end as well and not just for AMP pages, all the Featured Snippet I was seeing had this bit #:~:text= added to the end of the URL to trigger the Scroll To Text Fragment feature.

Another interesting thing is that it only happens in Chrome, Edge and Firefox did not show them and in some cases, the Featured Snippet did not appear as well, kinda makes the SERPs on other browsers feel quite inferior IMHO. Sample Query – try clicking on different browsers.

Even when the Featured Snippets are shown in these other browsers they don’t get the Scroll To Text Fragment treatment. Sample Query – try clicking on different browsers.

Obviously these other browsers don’t support Scroll To Text Fragment so it’s pointless to show them right, well in the case of Firefox yeah but Edge runs on Chromium and Scroll To Text Fragment actually works on it. Go ahead try clicking on this link on Edge.

From what I can see all Featured Snippets are getting the Scroll To Text Fragment treatment on Chrome desktop, would love to see examples when it’s not. Also it’s worth noting that even when the server redirects the Scroll to Text Fragment URLs to the canonical version the feature still works on Chrome.

eg; When you click on a Featured Snippet going to Google’s development documentation portal they redirect the page to the canonical version but you will still jump (on Chrome) to the section of the page with the yellow highlighted background.