In April 2023, Google Ads announced new features for better ad targeting and optimization, while YouTube updated its policies for creators and advertisers. Google Trends introduced a new interactive visualization tool, and Google Workspace unveiled new collaboration features. OpenAI released GPT-4, the latest version of their powerful language model, promising even more advanced natural language processing capabilities. Stay up to date with these updates from some of the biggest players in tech.
First click, linear, time decay and position-based attribution models are going away
April 6, 2023
Rules-based attribution models assign value to each advertising touchpoint based on predefined rules. These models don’t provide the flexibility needed to adapt to evolving consumer journeys. That’s why we made data-driven attribution the default attribution model in Google Ads and Google Analytics 4. It uses Google AI to understand the impact each touchpoint has on conversion, and when combined with auto bidding, data-driven attribution improves performance. Data-driven attribution is now the most-used attribution model for conversions used for automated bidding in Google Ads1, resulting in a decline in the overall use of rules-based models. Today, less than 3% of Google Ads web conversions are attributed to using first click, linear, time decay, or position-based models.2
Twitter’s new feature will show ‘half ads’ to Blue subscribers
Twitter is rolling out additional features for Blue subscribers, including showing 50% of ads in their timeline compared to non-paid users and a visibility boost in search.
Elon Musk has long promised that Twitter Blue subscribers would get a feature to see fewer sponsored tweets. Now the company has finally implemented the feature, which will be applicable to the “Following” and “For You” timelines.
“As you scroll, you will see approximately twice as many organic or non-promoted Tweets placed in between promoted Tweets or ads. There may be times when there are more or fewer non-promoted Tweets between promoted Tweets,” Twitter’s description of the feature says.
Experiment updates
2023.05.15
More concise summaries
- What: We’ve updated Bard with better summarization capabilities by incorporating advances we’ve developed in our large language models.
- Why: We’re making Bard better at summarizing information, which is especially helpful when you want to get the gist of a topic quickly. Bard won’t always get it right but will keep improving with your feedback.
Making sources more useful
- What: Bard can now help you identify which parts of a response match a source. For the responses with sources, you’ll see numbers alongside the response. By clicking on the numbers you will now be able to identify the section of the text that matches the source and easily navigate to it.
- Why: We want to make it easier for you to understand which parts of a response match a source and provide you with source links in line with the text.
2023.05.10
Expanding access to Bard in more countries and languages
- What: You can now collaborate with Bard in Japanese and Korean, in addition to US English. We have also expanded access to Bard in all three languages to over 180 countries and territories.
- Why: As we continue to build Bard responsibly with more real-world feedback, we’re gradually expanding access to more languages, countries, and territories over time.
Export to Google Docs & Gmail
- What: We’ve added new one-click options to export content generated by Bard, including formatting, directly into Google Docs and Gmail.
- Why: We want to speed up and simplify your workflow by giving you a way to export Bard’s responses and edit them directly in these Google Workspace apps.
Read more comfortably in dim light
- What: We’ve launched a Dark theme on Bard, giving you the ability to easily switch Bard’s appearance between a light background with dark text to a dark background with light text.
- Why: Dark theme can make using Bard easier on your eyes in dim light.
How we fought spam on Google Search in 2022
Every day, we’re discovering, indexing, and serving billions of web pages, and a significant portion of pages we discover are spam. In 2022 we launched multiple updates to our systems to thwart these attacks and ensure a spam-free experience for all Search users.
Improvements to SpamBrain
SpamBrain is central to our spam-fighting efforts and we made many improvements in 2022 to improve coverage. SpamBrain detected 5 times more spam sites compared to 2021 and 200 times compared to when it first launched. Thanks to SpamBrain, we were able to make sure that more than 99% of visits from Search are spam-free.
Tackling abusive links and hacked spam
We also improved SpamBrain as a robust and versatile platform, launching multiple solutions to improve our coverage of different abuse types. One such example was link spam. As we shared in December, we trained SpamBrain to detect sites building spammy links, as well as sites created to pass spammy links to other sites. Thanks to SpamBrain’s learning capability, we detected 50 times more link spam sites compared to the previous link spam update. Similarly, our efforts to teach SpamBrain more about hacked spam resulted in a 10 times improvement in hacked site detection.
Google’s April 2023 Reviews Update – Exploring its evolution from PRU to RU, a powerful tremor on 4/19, and how its “Review Radar” found larger publishers
Google launched the first Product Reviews Update in April of 2021 and it’s been fascinating to watch the evolution of the system over time. With each successive update, you can see Google fine-tuning the system, expanding to other languages, and more. And now we have the next step in its evolution, and it was a big step. The Product Reviews Update is now just the Reviews Update, and that change has significant ramifications for publishers across the web. The update started rolling out on April 12, 2023, and took 13 days to fully roll out.
With the change to the Reviews System (notice “Product” has been dropped), the system now evaluates any content that can be considered a review or recommendation. For example, Google explains in its updated documentation that the system is “designed to evaluate articles, blog posts, pages, or similar first-party standalone content with the purpose of providing a recommendation, giving an opinion, or providing analysis.” That’s a big jump from focusing on just product reviews. And it also explains why so many sites were impacted by the April 2023 Reviews Update.
Simplifying video presentation on Google Search Results
Today, we’re making a change so that video thumbnails only appear next to Google search results when the video is the main content of a page. This will make it easier for users to understand what to expect when they visit a page.
Previously, we showed video thumbnails in two different ways. For pages where the video was the main content of the page, it appeared at the beginning of a listing:
This remains unchanged. The other format was for when a video was present on a page but not the main element of a page. In that case, the thumbnail appeared after a listing:
New Features on Instagram Reels: Trends, Editing, and Gifts
April 14, 2023
We strive to make Instagram a home for creators like you to express your creativity, connect with your audience and earn a living. Today we’re announcing improvements to Reels — to empower you to do what you do best.
Find Out What’s Trending on Reels
Creators are always looking to discover fresh content ideas, so now we’re adding a dedicated destination for you to be inspired by the latest trends. You’ll be able to see the top trending songs on Reels, see how many times the audio has been used, tap in to use it or save the audio for yourself.
