One of Instagram's Worst Features Getting is Fixed
+ A GA4 update that, for me, landed with a thud
Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 80 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Buenos días from lovely Barcelona. It’s my second week of six-plus in Spain, and wouldn’t know you know I came down with a fairly nasty cold Tuesday.
I would ask Google for a remedy, but who knows? It might tell me to run with scissors or take a bath with a toaster. I kid, I kid. There is, however, some interesting new info from BrightEdge this week about how Google’s AIO feature is evolving (and becoming more efficient).
Programming Note: Next week I’ll be on vacation in the south of Spain and will not be writing any newsletters or (fingers crossed) doing anything else that resembles work. As always, I have extended paid subscriptions to account for the missed days.
PRNEWS is hosting an SEO seminar June 18. I’ll be talking about the latest changes to Google’s Algorithm. You can find more info here.
(I’m not getting paid to participate and receive no benefit for sign-ups.)
Now, onto this week’s biggest updates.
GA4
+ Realtime Upgrade: Last-5-Minutes View
“The Realtime report in Google Analytics 4 now includes a more granular view of user activity, showing "Users in the last 5 minutes" with an enhanced bar graph so you can more clearly see how many users are on your site or app per minute.”
The two updates are this:
Instead of only being able to see how many users were on your site in the last 30 minutes, you can how see how many were there in the last five, too
You could already to this in a more manual way (see second update below) but now you get a big, easy-to-read number right on your dashboard
This is helpful if you just published something or have breaking news and want to see the total number of users on your site in the last 5 minutes
If real-time analysis is important to your website, GA4 by itself still doesn’t cut it for my tastes
The minute-by-minute bar chart is easier to read
That’s it. You can see more clearly how many users were on your site X minutes ago for the last 30 minutes
You could already see this, and by hovering over each minute’s bar, see users per X minutes ago
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SEO
+ BrightEdge Study: Google went from showing AI on 84% of queries to 15%
Other findings:
AI Overview results are anticipating follow-on searches
If you search for “running shoes,” for example, you’ll get content related to that in the traditional results, but might get info about “how to choose a running shoe size” for the AIO results
“Today, AI Overviews are 30% smaller than SGE results were at the beginning of May.”
“…this is good news because it means AI Overviews are less likely to crowd out organic results.”
“…you have opportunities to reach people in multiple mindsets all in a single session.”
“We can see that Featured Snippets and whether or not the keyword is a question are the most likely conditions to correlate to an AIO.”
Healthcare, B2B tech and Ecommerce are three industries whose related searches are most likely to show an AIO
“Across all keywords, we are observing that 85% of the citations in AI are not ranking in organic results. However, when we look at specific industries, we observe fluctuations in this metric…”
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Social Media
+ Instagram: Testing Carousels with Different-Sized Photos
This way you wouldn’t have to go all vertical or all square with your photos – you can mix them
I do not yet have access to this feature
+ Threads: Swipe To Show Interest
“…we’re rolling out the option to swipe right on a post to like it, or swipe left to show you’re not interested.
“We’ll use those signals to show you more posts like the ones you swipe right on and fewer of those you swipe left on. I hope this helps you find more posts that you’re interested in.”
+ Instagram: After an Hour, We Can Push Down Aggressive Comments
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri gave some advice in a recent AMA response
If you’re getting a lot of “heat” in your comments, “wait an hour or so before getting into your comments.” That gives Instagram a chance to push down ones that are more “aggressive” but don’t violate its policies
+ Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed
“Those same people will be able to see the others’ posts in return, too.”
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Miscellaneous
+ OpenAI Employees – Past and Present – Are Concerned About the Company’s Direction
Here’s the part that most concerned me:
Mr. Kokotajlo, 31, joined OpenAI in 2022 as a governance researcher and was asked to forecast A.I. progress. He was not, to put it mildly, optimistic.
In his previous job at an A.I. safety organization, he predicted that A.G.I. might arrive in 2050. But after seeing how quickly A.I. was improving, he shortened his timelines. Now he believes there is a 50 percent chance that A.G.I. will arrive by 2027 — in just three years.
He also believes that the probability that advanced A.I. will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity — a grim statistic often shortened to “p(doom)” in A.I. circles — is 70 percent.
I made the above link a NY Times gift article if you want to read the full story.
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