In the latest WDA Marketing Pit Stop, we take a look at the most important automotive digital marketing news and updates from the last week, 11th – 17th Jan. News includes – LinkedIn Stories getting a Swipe-Up feature, Google launching a dedicated performance report for News, YouTube Post-Roll Ads now turned on by default, Snapchat Spotlight being made even more like TikTok and much more.

Let’s take a pit stop and get into it.

LinkedIn Stories Gets Swipe-Up Feature

Swipe-Up links can now be added to your Stories on LinkedIn, similarly to how the feature works on Instagram. This is great news for both automotive businesses and professionals as it will provide another opportunity to drive traffic to your website or a relevant external resource. The update also delivers a better user experience for those wanting to find out more. At this time, LinkedIn Stories can only be created on mobile devices. If Stories on LinkedIn aren’t something you’ve explored yet for your automotive B2B marketing then now is the time!

Monitor Performance on Google News!

It’s now possible to directly monitor your automotive brand’s performance on news.google.com and within the Google News app. This is thanks to a brand new performance report available in Google Search Console. The metrics included within the News report are what you’d expect – impressions, clicks and click-through rate.

4 Changes to the Index Coverage Report

In addition to the News section in Search Console, Google has made several changes to its Index Coverage Report. The report gives a detailed look at the index status of your web pages that Google has attempted to crawl. The new updates to the report include soft 404 reporting improved, generic crawl anomalies removed, indexed pages blocked by robots.txt are now reported as “indexed but blocked” and finally, “indexed without content” has been introduced as a new warning.

Dedicated Hashtag Search Results Page Launched on YouTube

The option to search for videos by hashtag was first introduced by YouTube back in 2018 but there has always been plenty of room for improvement. Content creators now regularly use hashtags in video descriptions and YouTube has finally improved the discoverability of these videos by launching a dedicated search results page that only displays videos using relevant hashtags.

Spotlight Gets View Count

Snapchat’s Spotlight feed has now been given a view count that shows a video’s popularity and is overlaid on the clip. This makes it more similar to the TikTok experience, however, on TikTok, a video clip’s view count is shown on the thumbnail. As we’ve stated before and in our recent automotive marketing trends article, short-form video content is on the rise and we’ll likely see many more continue to try and replicate the TikTok look and feel to take advantage of its popularity. It’s not for all automotive brands but for those that do want to capitalise on the trends and show off a less professional side to their business, the reach is there and the audience continues to grow.

Facebook Improves “Access Your Information” Tool

Facebook has made a number of improvements to its “Access Your Information” tool that help provide better data transparency to users on the platform. Personal data on this section is now broken into several categories rather than two which makes it easier to find the information you’re looking for. As well as this, information has been added in regards to how personal data is used.

YouTube Now Showing First 24hr Performance

For the first time, YouTube is granting access to video performance from the first 24hrs since publishing. This is available within YouTube Analytics and is surely welcome news to any automotive content creators on the platform.

Instagram Likes Count Test

In 2019, total likes were removed for the majority of Instagram users. However, they now appear to be testing a new option that would enable you to choose whether you want to display likes on posts or not. There’s nothing official on this yet from Instagram but we’ll keep you updated. Is this something you’d like to see happen and would you turn them on for your automotive business account? For us, it helps to judge potential influencer performance but there are other tools etc. out there that help with that.

“Our Story” Section Getting Removed from Facebook Pages

The “Our Story” about section will be removed from all Facebook Pages as of Feb 28th. If your automotive business has populated this section with content then we’d recommend transferring that content to somewhere else on your Business Page. In fact, Facebook is sending notifications of the update to Page Admins and are suggesting that this content is added to “Additional Information” going forward.

Google HTTP/2 Crawling

Google is now starting to crawl websites using the latest HTTP/2 protocol. This replaces the HTTP/1.1 protocol used previously and notifications will be sent to you if your site has been transferred to the new version. With the latest protocol comes a host of benefits including a reduced website server load.

YouTube Turns on Post-Roll Ads by Default

Just a warning to any automotive businesses that use YouTube and monetise their videos, Post-Roll Ads are now turned on by default for videos over 10 minutes long. If this is something you don’t want showing on your videos then they can be switched off.

YouTube Product Tagging

YouTube is continuing to explore ways for creators to tag products directly in their videos to provide seamless eCommerce experiences. Here’s what they said…

“We’re testing a new way for people to easily discover and purchase products featured in YouTube videos. Creators in this pilot can add certain products to their videos. Viewers can then see a list of featured products by clicking the shopping bag icon on the bottom left corner of the video. From there, viewers can explore each product’s page to see more information, related videos, and purchase options for that product.”

If this does get rolled out eventually and we’re pretty sure it will then it will provide an excellent opportunity for automotive retail brands to take advantage of – whether through your own videos or those of influencers.

That wraps up the latest Marketing Pit Stop. Subscribe to our blog and follow us on social media so you don’t miss the next one!

Sharing is caring!