With everything going on in the world right now it’s easy to forget what’s going on in marketing. That’s why, starting this week, we’re going to be bringing you a weekly round-up of the most important marketing news and updates from the previous week.

Google Ads agency partners to lose dedicated ad rep support

Google reviews its agency rep program every quarter. The most recent change they’ve made is that small and mid-sized agency partners will lose dedicated support. This comes following the coronavirus crisis and is being implemented to support limitations. Advertisers have also started receiving notifications making them aware that support options could be delayed or completely unavailable.

‘Public health emergency’ added to Google’s inappropriate content

Google has updated its inappropriate content policy, effective immediately on March 31st. The update is to help prevent advertisers from capitalising on the current pandemic. This is the language used in the update: “public health emergency”: “Content that potentially capitalizes on or lacks reasonable sensitivity towards a natural disaster, conflict, death, public health emergency, or other tragic event.”

Facebook Messenger desktop apps launched

After almost 9 years, Facebook has finally released a desktop app for Messenger on both Mac and Windows. The apps are now available and were released on April 2nd. We downloaded the apps on both our Windows and Mac machines and they contain the same features and functionality as the browser version.

New controls added to Google Search Console

In a welcome change for SEO’s, Google has added some new features to Google Search Console. The features include a different way of selecting whether or not you want performance data to show in search results and more options on email notifications that you receive from the platform.

SpecialAnnouncement schema support on its way to search

On the 31st, Google announced that it will adopt the SpecialAnnouncement schema. Guidelines for using it have been published and it’s useful for announcements relating to COVID-19 such as travel restrictions and closures. However, support is still currently undergoing development.

YouTube working on “Shorts”

It has been reported that YouTube is working on a possible competitor to the global social craze, TikTok. It’s supposedly going to be called “Shorts” and will allow users to upload brief videos, similar to TikTok. Whether YouTube is too late to the game or not remains to be seen but they do have a couple of significant advantages over TikTok including 2 billion users and extensive music licensing arrangements. Time will tell.

So that wraps up the most important marketing news and updates from last week. Subscribe and stay tuned for new editions coming each Monday.

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