Another month, another glut of digital marketing stories to dive into. The usual suspects are covered, from Facebook and its internal content policing rules; to Google adding a number of new features to various offerings. There's also a great voice-search study from Dr Pete Meyers and the best from the folks here at Distilled.
Industry news
Snap misses Q1 earnings and shares nosedive
Snapchat has seen its shares plunge by 20% after missing targets for its first quarterly earnings as a public company, as well as seeing its growth in new users fall to its lowest level in years. This weak growth comes as Facebook pushes Instagram closer and closer to Snapchat’s territory. Snap Inc. made a $2billion dollar loss in the quarter, but CEO Evan Spiegel attributed this to stock-based compensation
Read the full story (Business Insider)
An eye-opening look at Facebook’s internal rules on violence, sex and terrorism
In the world of fake news and extremist content, it’s no surprise that Facebook has created extensive internal guidelines for moderators on how to deal with these kinds of issues. The Guardian lifts the lid on the secretive rules and exposes the major challenges and intense pressure that employees face when trying to police and make decisions on all manner of content.
Read the full story (The Guardian)
The lessons from 1,000 voice searches
In an amazingly meticulous piece of research, Moz’s Dr Pete Meyers carried out and analysed 1,000 voice searches on Google Home to try and get a sense of how the intelligent personal assistant was handling your queries. Among the many pieces of information uncovered is the strong correlation between snippets and voice answers, with 71% of queries with snippets also having a voice answer.
Read the full story (Moz)
Chrome will add ‘not secure’ warnings for HTTP sites later this year
It’s the final nail in the HTTP coffin, as Google signals its intent to give ‘not secure’ warnings to any HTTP sites later this year, meaning moving to HTTPS is more important than ever. The warnings will start to appear in October 2017 and will display when users enter data or visit on Incognito mode.
Read the full story (Marketing Land)
Wannacry ransomware largely fails to blackmail users
The recent ‘Wannacry’ ransomware attack in Europe, which affected 200,000 machines and was called unprecedented by Interpol, has largely failed to generate revenue for the attackers from its ransom demands. So far, only an estimated $92,000 has been collected, which is a meagre amount considering the $300 starting demand.
Read the full story (Bloomberg)
Google launches ads hub beta for cross-device tracking
Initially created to analyse YouTube campaigns, the ads measurement system created by Google now includes data from Google Display Network and DoubleClick. The expanded data available shows a shift from being reliant on cookies to user and device IDs. The system, called Data Hub is designed to help give impression-level insights for campaigns served across multiple devices.
Read the full story (Marketing Land)
A year of Google Maps changes
Taking a detailed look at the finer details of Google Maps, Justin O’Beirne drills down to the cartography and design choices used the by the search engine giant. From park walkways to displaying different business listings in multi-storey premises, Justin charts the recent changes and compares it to main competitor, Apple Maps.
Read the full story (Justin O'Beirne)
Biz Stone returns to Twitter
Twitter, evidently not afraid to turn to old founders (Jack Dorsey returned to become CEO in 2016), have re-recruited Biz Stone to help with company culture. Biz has made it clear that he’s not returning to replace anyone, with Dorsey’s mixed tenure as CEO coming under inevitable scrutiny.
Read the full story (Marketing Land)
Distilled news
SearchLove Boston 2017 has just drawn to a close. We were joined by 200 smart marketers and 16 amazing speakers. The videos for the conference will be available in about four weeks. Meanwhile, tickets are selling fast for searchLove London 2017, which takes place on the 16-17 October.
On the Distilled blog, CEO Will Critchlow has put pen to paper numerous times this month, writing about the end of the 1-Click Amazon patent, the NYT fluffing the Google monopoly argument, and most interestingly, the results of a JavaScript SEO split test.
Over at the Moz Blog, Will continued his JavaScript exploration, digging further into the state of JS indexing. Principal Consultant Ben Estes showed us his smarter methods for measuring and improving site speed, while Sam Nemzer walked through the method of implementing SEO changes using Google Tag Manager.