Digital Technology News – 22 Nov 2021

Google ads 4 new features for Local Shopping

Google has taken a new initiative to support the livelihoods of local businesses by diving into their lives a little bit more. In the past holiday season, it has added 4 new features:

•       Area Busyness: As some customers prefer to lose a big crowd, customers can now see how busy an area is with the help of Google’s new feature. Tap on an area on Google maps to see how busy it is at different times of day to receive Area Busyness data.Google Maps will show you how crowded the location is right now, as well as how crowded it is expected to be throughout the day. This also aided with the current world scenario as less crowding lead to less spread of the virus.
•   Directory Tab: The directory tab has been a new feature that has been added to display all the stores open in a building, which helps with locating shopping malls, car rentals, etc. It will show you the local business that is open right then and what star it is on.
•   Grocery Shopping: There has been a feature that helps the customers order groceries for pickup. Google Maps tracks the order’s status once it is placed and subsequently gives the order’s estimated arrival time. As a result, the customer waits less frequently statistically.
•   More Information about Restaurants: This new feature helps customers to look up restaurants easily, as it is aided by reviews of the other customers. The different reviews sent by them help in the requirements of the new customer in whether to eat from the restaurant or not.

Google ads Indian Searches with Translated Results

New documentation was added by Google called Translated Results which helps to auto-translate the web pages that are in a different language into the language that the user understands. Although this feature has been confined to India in Indonesian, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu; Google aims to target other countries and increase its reach.

The system is set up in such a manner that if there aren’t any online pages in the user’s native language, Google will choose the best web page and display it. It produces results linking to the users’ native language, thus the title tag and meta description will be translated. This goes without saying that all the web pages have opted into this new feature. Publishers wanting to not give in should use the no translate directive. 

Google describes the Search Central as something that will be an asset to the world as it will increase the reach of the people, for the people. Although there is a long way to go, this is a small step to something great!

Not known Google Analytics Reports

Google Analytics is a website of marketing measurement for many. There have been many tools and technologies that have been incorporated into it. This could mean connecting with other Google products, finding audience interests, find sites that drive the most traffic. Some not-so-well-known will be:

• Custom Dashboards: This is a big-time saver. You can schedule deliveries of reports to key stakeholders from time to time. You can create Custom Dashboards from any data you view in Google Analytics. This is a great start before turning into Google Studio.

•     Lifetime value: If you have a site that users engage and that they have to return to make their purchases, then you can track those users and then use this with their other factors in their buyer’s journey. But it still has the ‘beta’ tag in Google Analytics, so beware as the information must be rewritten.

•  User Explorer: We may use User Explorer to look at the journeys of certain website users. While we can’t see how individual people consumed material and acted on the website over time in Google Analytics we can see their activities. It does give some data about the users’ experience and conversion rate optimization.
• Interests/Affinity categories: This is a really interesting feature of Google Analytics. The data that we incur from this gives an insight on who your current audience is, How they convert, Where you should prioritize your efforts across the digital marketing spectrum etc.
• Benchmarking Channels: This is a pretty great feature if you want to know the status of your company compared to some other pretty detailed industries. This is good if you want to baseline your foundation and establish your goals.
• User flow: Observing how your users browse across the site, can lead to additional research if there are any surprises. Patterns and tendencies can also be seen in the user journey, which can be used to assist you to design your content to shape changes in the routes over time.
• Site content- Landing Pages: You can examine the source for each page and easily see what is driving the most traffic to it by using the dimension tools. For SEOs, you want to make sure that your optimization strategy is producing a diverse variety of landing pages over time.
• Site Search-Search terms: You can view the same phrases that your web platform most likely shows you in the Google Analytics search terms report.

This is to be said that there are many overlooked reports in Google Analytics. So, use this to know more about your customer and their journeys!

Google Cloud outage darkens websites

Google Cloud has experienced an outage that led to users showing an Error 404 on their screens. This happened to many major apps like Spotify, Discord and Snapchat. The problem was isolated to Google Cloud Networking, and according to the most recent Google Cloud incident report, it was partially resolved about 20 minutes later. Later Google updated saying that the issues were partially fixed.

Outbound Links Strategy: When, How, why to use them?

There has always been confusion in two types of links that marketers worry about: Inbound links and Outbound links.

 Inbound Links are those that point at your site from another. Example: If you run an online wood carving store, then you will be receiving links to the finest wood for your store.

An outbound link is something that points to someone else’s site. Example: If you run an online wood carving store then you may as well as attach a link to the finest wood that should be able to make the strongest bats.

Seeing this, we conclude: All inbound links are outbound links. When we are the ones receiving the link, then the link is inbound. If we are providing it, then the link is outbound.

People and search engines both use outbound links to find helpful material. They’re significant since they can boost organic traffic, establish trust, and even promote business interactions. Although Outbound links do not affect the site rankings, we need to remember that Outbound links are also Inbound links and they are a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

Your presence on Outbound links will be fruitful if you want to be potent to your customers and if your business asks for it. If you feel like attaching a link from another website will benefit your customers, then there is no short time to do so.

Outbound links, on the other hand, can assist your website gain authority if done correctly. One strategy to establish authority is to provide valuable resources to your content’s users. Some webmasters are hesitant as it might lead to the customers leaving.

But how fragile is your business if your customers aren’t even visiting you back? Rethink it!

Outbound links are very potent for the Digital Marketing Community as they provide valuable information to the customers. This will lead to trust, which in turn is one of the most important things in business.