Google News – May 2023

Universal Analytics: Data Available Until July 2024

If you haven’t exported your historical data from Universal Analytics, no worries. You still have time!

Google has announced that historical data will be available until July 1, 2024. Until that date, users will have Viewer role permissions. So, it will be possible to view historical data and/or export it.

Just to make sure, we want to remind you once again – from 1st of July 2023, Universal Analytics will stop processing data. It is high time to switch to Google Analytics 4.

Find out more information about Universal Analytics and historical data.

Source: Analytics Help

Helpful Content Update Improvements

The Helpful content update is an update from Google that came out back in 2022. It helps identify pages where the content was primarily created to rank good in search results, not to benefit and help people answering their query. Google will try to prefer pages that are actually trying to help people.

According to the latest news, this system will receive an update in the coming months that will help Google to identify and prioritize pages with content that has been written by an expert or a person with extensive experience in a given field or topic.

Found out more about the Helpful Content Update.

Source: Search Engine Land & Google The Keyword

From Now On, Mobile-first Only

Google has officially completed the long, 6-years long process of migrating websites to mobile-first indexing. If you open Google Search Console and your site does not have mobile-first indexing, it means that it will only be crawled by Googlebot for desktops. The reason is insufficient optimization for mobile devices.

New pages will be automatically crawled by Googlebot for smartphones only.

Find out more about mobile-first indexing.

Source: Search Engine Land

 

A New Merchant Center Is on the Horizon

Google announced a new version of Merchant Center at Google Marketing Live – conference organized by Google. In addition to the new design, new features will also be added as well. And the name is changing too – Merchant Center Next.

Amongst other things, there will also be an interesting feature that will automatically populate the feed with products using the data that Google finds on your site.

Google Merchant Next is already available for new users. Google announced a slow transition from the old version to the new one. Google will inform you before switching to the new version in advance. However, the entire migration to Merchant Center Next should be completed in 2024.

Find out more about Merchant Center Next.

Source: Google – They Keyword

 

Google Ads: Getting Friendly With AI

Google introduced a new way of creating ads in Google Ads using language models and artificial intelligence. The entire process includes the creation of keywords, headlines, descriptions, images and other assets.

First, you will enter you landing page and Google will crawl it. Then a conversion with Google’s AI will begin. Google will try to creative the best possible ad by having a one-on-one conversation with you. After answering Google’s questions, you can still change and customize the ad before running it. The main goal is to simplify the process of ad creating and increasing the ad quality.

Still not sure how it works? Take a look how Google uses AI to create ads.

It looks quite interesting, what do you say?

Source: Google – Ads & Commerce Blog