Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 76 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
GA4
+ Eligible Imported User Data Can Auto-Create Audiences
This can be done by joining stream IDs with web or app IDs OR by using a unique identifier stored internally
“…users imported into Analytics who meet criteria for an existing GA4 audience are immediately added to it.”
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SEO
+ Google Loses Search Share to Bing, Yahoo
Google’s U.S. search share dropped below 88 percent in December
Preliminary data shows it’s now less than 80 percent
This decline coincides with the AI search wars
+ Google Core Updates Did Better Than Google Expected
“The updates led to larger quality improvements than we originally thought – you’ll now see 45% less low quality, unoriginal content in search results, versus the 40% improvement we expected across this work.”
+ Google Search spam policies about reputation abuse take effect after May 4, 2024
Emphasis below mine
“Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate Search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals.
“Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users.”
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Social Media
+ Threads: $5,000 for Users To Post
+ Instagram: We’re Demoting Aggregators’ Posts
“First, when we find reposted content in recommendations, we will replace it with the original. We’ll also add a label to the repost linking back to the original.”
“Second, we’re going to remove aggregators from recommendations if they repeatedly share unoriginal content that they didn’t enhance.”
+ Instagram: We’re Helping Smaller Creators Get Discovered
Many users responded, as they often do, asking Adam Mosseri (below, in screenshot from video) to simply restore their organic reach
Mosseri badly missed the mark earlier in the week by using his personal account to promote another one that already has more than 700,000 follows
+ Snapchat: Unveils Multiple Updates
“Editable chats: …edit your messages for up to 5 minutes after sending them, before your friend replies! This feature is coming soon and will be available first for Snapchat+ subscribers.”
“My AI Reminders: …ask My AI for a reminder in direct chats or in a conversation with one other friend!”
Also: Emoji and map reactions, respectively; custom Bitmoji looks; AI-powered lenses
+ Instagram: Testing ‘Clear Mode’ for Reels
+ Bluesky: Adds GIF Functionality
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Miscellaneous
+ The Financial Times and OpenAI strike content licensing deal
“Under the terms of the deal, the FT will license its material to the ChatGPT maker to help develop generative AI technology that can create text, images and code indistinguishable from human creations.
The agreement also allows ChatGPT to respond to questions with short summaries from FT articles, with links back to FT.com. This means that the chatbot’s 100mn users worldwide can access FT reporting through ChatGPT, while providing a route back to the original source material.”
+ The AI Spotlight Series from Pulitzer
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