ICYMI, here’s what happened at Google This Week.
- New Travel and Tour Booking Features
- Updated Google Product Review Best Practices
- Rebranded Google Data Studio To ‘Looker Studio’
- YouTube Launched YouTube Handles
- New Content Suitability Center in Google Ads
- Goodbye Webmaster Guidelines, Hello Google Search Essentials
- More Site Categories Impacted by Product Reviews Update
- AdSense First-Party Cookies Now Support Personalisation
New Travel and Tour Booking Features
Google has announced three new features for travel and tour booking businesses with ticket booking links for attractions, edit ticket prices on Google Business profiles, and things to do Ads that give businesses the ability to connect with potential customers.
Updated Google Product Review Best Practices
Google’s best practices for writing product reviews were updated. There were three removals and seven additions to the document.
The changes made to the documentation make it clearer what kinds of publishers the best practices are meant for.
Rebranded Google Data Studio To ‘Looker Studio’
Google Cloud has announced that it is unifying all of its business intelligence products under the Looker brand and will rename its Data Studio to “Looker Studio”.
Google’s $2.6 billion acquisition of Looker closed back in 2020, marking the first major acquisition for Google Cloud under the leadership of Thomas Kurian.
YouTube Launched YouTube Handles
YouTube has announced a new way for users to engage with content creators by directly tagging their handles. This new feature allows channels to use unique identifiers with the @username format.
Handles will appear in comments, video descriptions, and on channel pages, which allows users to quickly tag others.
New Content Suitability Center in Google Ads
Google launched a new content suitability center in Google Ads, where users can manage suitability settings for all campaigns on YouTube & Display Network. The new suitability center allows users to manage the suitability controls under a single point of entry.
Here is a screenshot of it:
Goodbye Webmaster Guidelines, Hello Google Search Essentials
Google has officially rebranded its Webmaster Guidelines as “Search Essentials”. Google Search Essentials now consists of three categories of points which are technical requirements, key best practices, and spam policies.
Google said that the main goal is to make this guide useful, easier to understand, and to help site owners focus on things that matter.
More Site Categories Impacted by Product Reviews Update
Google has added three new examples to the top of the “how to write product reviews” help document, which explains more types of sites that may be impacted by the product reviews algorithm updates.
The three examples are:
AdSense First-Party Cookies Now Support Personalisation
Google has updated its first-party cookie support with ad personalisation capabilities, arguably the number one reason to use first-party cookies over third-party cookies. This change will affect ads served through AdSense.
To access the control, log into your AdSense account and click Brand safety > Content > Blocking controls > Manage Ad serving.
Thank You for Reading
Have you noticed Looker Studio, or any other changes from Google this week?
Check back next Friday for the latest from Google This Week.
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