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Ritu Sharma

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Ritu from PageTraffic is a qualified Google Ads Professional and Content Head at PageTraffic. She has been the spear head for many successful Search Marketing Campaigns and currently oversees Content Marketing operations of PageTraffic in India.

It has been confirmed by Google to Search Engine Land that the way info command is displayed in the search, has been changed. The info command is the search operator that provides you with more details about a website.

Earlier, the info operator would produce the snippet, along with additional links to find more operators that show links to the site, the Google cache link, similar sites to that site and more.

However, now Google only shows the snippet, and the entire other section has been removed.

A low-key announcement was made by Google, recently, regarding the new feature that they now support. It is called “selection attributes”. It requires selection of just one out of several predefined choices in the business description.

Google stated an example around kosher foods, saying you can choose from predefined business descriptions like “No Kosher food,” “Some Kosher food,” or “Strictly Kosher food.”

Facebook messenger is one of the most popular messaging services in the world and recently Facebook revealed details about version 2.2 of its Messenger platform, which comes with the most awaited customer chat plugin. Focused more on user engagement, this platform aims to help businesses and developers “reach their customers in new and engaging ways”.

The goal is to allow businesses to talk to their customers directly on their website and in Messenger.

That means a conversation can begin on a business’s website and then seamlessly transitions to Messenger, or vice versa, without losing any chat history or context.

Twitter is finally coming up with it’s doubled-up tweet length for all users. It has been testing the feature of extending a tweet’s length to 280 characters for almost two months, and has come to the decision to enable it, this Tuesday. The new feature will be applicable to all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean which have pictorial alphabets and thus do not face much of a spacing issue.

Although advertisers, who create ads through Twitter’s self-serve platform, won’t be able to take advantage of the new length as of now, but will be allowed to post 280-character-long organic tweets and run those as Promoted Tweets, said a Twitter spokesperson. The spokesperson added that the support for 280 characters ads will be out “in the coming months”.

Google recently announced that it will soon roll out a new feature to Google Search, followed by Google Maps, that will show you the estimated waiting time for area restaurants. This recent addition is an expansion of Google’s existing feature which shows businesses’ busy times.

Google’s new restaurant wait times also come from the aggregated and anonymized data from users who opted in to Google Location History – the same data that powers popular times and visit duration.

In case of restaurants, Google will include a pop-up box that appears when you click on a time frame in the popular times chart. The box shows live or historical data labeled as “busy”, “usually busy” and “usually not busy”, along the wait time.

Now brands can easily solicit feedback from their followers on Facebook to collect more data about their interests, likes and dislikes. On Friday, Facebook rolled out a polling tool so that people and Pages can quiz their respective friends and followers across Facebook. The feature is available on desktop and mobile apps.

The polling fever has been taking on Facebook since the last month which is almost two years after Twitter added its own polling feature. In early October, Instagram introduced interactive poll sticker in Instagram Stories that lets you ask a question and see results from friends and followers as they vote. After a couple weeks, the company announced that it had acquired teen-centric polling app tbh.

In a recent blog post Bings Ads announced expanding shopping campaigns to Canada and India. After launching the feature in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Australia, Canada and India are the new markets for Bing Shopping Campaigns. BSC in Canada will support only the English feeds, skipping French feeds for now. Other than this, no Product ads will not be displayed in Quebec.

Bing said, “With this launch, Bing users in Canada & India will see a more engaging product search experience. We encourage all retail advertisers (from the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Australia) to start creating Bing Shopping Campaigns targeting these two new markets. Over the next few months, we will continuously improve our platform and plan to add BSC capability in more international markets.”

Google has announced that it will now use user location to serve the country service. Historically these services have been labeled and accessed via country code top level domain names (ccTLD), such as Google.co.in, Google.nz, Google.ca.

This has been updated across mobile web, Google app for iOS, and desktop Search and Maps. The choice of country will not be indicated by the Google domain, instead by the user’s location. If you live in India, you will receive the service for India, but if you travel to Australia, your results will automatically switch to the country service for Australia. When you return to India, you will seamlessly revert to the Indian country service.

Google has announced about introducing innovations for the advertisers to meet consumer expectations and make more sales during holidays. Data says more than 40% still search for broad terms like “women’s clothing”, “men’s footwear”, “living room furniture”, despite knowing what they exactly want.

To help holiday shoppers discover your brand and product while they are still exploring, Google has launched “Showcase Shopping Ads” in the new AdWords Experience. Using Showcase Shopping Ads, brand can curate a collection of lifestyle images and products. This will help buyers discover what they want to buy and from whom.