Latest News from the World of Digital Marketing – July 2024 Part 4
Artificial intelligence
Everything you need to know about the future of WooCommerce
In this special edition, Beau Lebens, Woo’s head of engineering, shares plans for WooCommerce, highlighting investments in the core platform, improvements to the developer experience, and increased collaboration with the community. This overview ranges from REST API improvements to a more accessible and customizable shopping experience.
Commitment to open source
WooCommerce integrates deeply with WordPress, which powers over 43% of the Internet. The open source nature of WooCommerce allows for flexibility and customization, adjusting business models, payment processors and carriers. Beau Lebens, with 25 years of web technology experience, reaffirms WooCommerce’s commitment to adding more essential commerce functionality.
Improving the developer experience
WooCommerce seeks to facilitate creation and innovation through several specific enhancements:
- Developer newsletter: A dedicated newsletter provides updates on new features, practical tips and advancements to the WooCommerce roadmap.
- Blog and documentation improvements: Improvements are being made to the navigation and continually updated documentation, including comprehensive guides, best practices and step-by-step tutorials.
- REST API improvements: Improvements and fixes are being made to the REST v3 API, ensuring backward compatibility, better error handling and debugging capabilities.
Extensibility as core philosophy
WooCommerce focuses on extensibility, designing features that can be adapted and extended by developers. GitHub Discussions, Developer Office Hours and other channels are being used to collect and prioritize extensibility points, strengthening the WooCommerce ecosystem.
A future based on blocks
Since last year, WooCommerce has focused on a block-based user experience, opening up new possibilities for flexibility and customization for non-programmer users. This transition aligns with the WordPress project and is moving towards a more intuitive and adaptive commerce platform.
Building the definitive commerce solution for WordPress
WooCommerce is investing in improving the store experience and providing a better foundation for developers to customize. Future features and enhancements are focused on attracting and serving merchants from a variety of industries. A few areas of focus are highlighted here:
- Simplified Onboarding: Since last July, simplifying the onboarding process has increased completion rates by 60%. Onboarding flow will continue to be optimized from the beginning.
- Modern store customization: Integration with WordPress site customization tools, including drag-and-drop editing options.
- Flexible product management: New product editor is faster and more intuitive, with a focus on extensibility and customization.
- Streamlined order management and fulfillment: Improved order status management and payment and fulfillment options.
- Revamped Merchant Analytics: Complete re-evaluation of the analytics feature to help merchants understand and improve their business.
- Accessible stores: Improvements to platform accessibility, with an initial focus on shopper experience and then administrative functionality.
- Unbeatable checkout experience: Continued evolution of block-based checkout, improving conversion and simplifying user interactions.
- Elegant order confirmation: Improved integration of shipping details and order summary, with the option to create an account after checkout.
Building the future together
WooCommerce developers, merchants and the WooCommerce community are thanked for their collective efforts. The invitation is open to participate in GitHub Discussions, join the Community Slack, contribute to WooCommerce core code or improve documentation. Together, you can create, innovate and excel, building a platform that empowers individuals and businesses in the digital age.
This summary highlights WooCommerce’s vision of leveraging open source and community collaboration to drive innovation and continually improve the platform. With these enhancements and new features, WooCommerce is positioned as a robust and adaptable commerce solution for WordPress, ready for the future.
Artificial Intelligence
Bing's AI update that will please SEOs
In February last year, Bing introduced chat responses powered by large-scale language models (LLMs). Since then, they have been working on evolving search. Today, they preview their new generative search experience, available for a small percentage of user queries.
This new feature combines generative artificial intelligence and LLMs with Bing’s search results page, creating personalized and dynamic responses to user queries. For example, if a user searches for “What is a spaghetti western?”, Bing provides an AI-generated experience that explains the film subgenre, its history, featured examples and more. The information is easy to read and understand, with links and sources for further exploration. Traditional search results are still prominently displayed on the page.
The generative search experience is based on Bing search results and uses large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs). It understands the search query, reviews millions of information sources, dynamically combines content and generates results in a new AI-generated format, fulfilling the intent of the query more effectively.
Bing has optimized the accuracy of this feature and is evaluating how it affects publishers’ traffic. Initial data indicates that this experience maintains the number of clicks to websites and supports a healthy web ecosystem. Generative search is designed to retain traditional search results and increase the number of clickable links, such as referrals in the results.
This is an important stage in the evolution of Bing search. They are implementing this feature gradually, gathering feedback, testing and learning to create a great experience before making it more widely available. Users can provide feedback by using the thumbs up or thumbs down icons in the generative results or by clicking the Feedback icon at the bottom of the results page. More updates will be shared in the coming months.
Video
This month's news on YouTube
As they have us used to, they have once again released a video compiling the main news and novelties of the platform, and here we bring it to you so that you can take advantage of it in your channels.
Learnings from the video
00:02 Text-to-speech generator in Shorts.
Available for Android and soon for iOS. Once you record your Short, tap the text icon to add text. When you type it in, tap the voice options icon and choose one of the four voices.
00:27 YouTube Shopping affiliate extension.
There is a new extension on Chrome for computer where you can easily save products from your favorite stores and look at similar ones, and compare prices. For now only in the US.
00:42 Merchandising on your channel home page.
If you have merchandising on your channel a kind of showcase will be added to your home page with your products and a “See all” button to see the whole store. To do this go to YouTube Studio and “Customization”.
01:07 “Delete song” for audio copyright claims.
They have changed “Delete song” on the copyright page. Allows you to easily delete copyrighted songs from your video without altering the rest of the audio such as voiceovers or background noise. Available in YouTube Studio for mobile.
Google prepares an update for Merchant Center
Merchant Center provides retailers with a centralized platform to manage how their products are displayed on Google. It is a comprehensive tool for listing products, creating new product images, measuring performance and planning future strategies.
Last year, an enhanced version of Merchant Center was introduced, providing an even more useful and intuitive platform for retailers. These changes have had a positive impact: retailers who have migrated to the new Merchant Center have shown a significant increase in retention and engagement. In addition, 25% more omnichannel retailers have added product offerings in the new experience.
If you have not yet migrated to the new Merchant Center, you will be upgraded before September, giving you plenty of time to familiarize yourself and start taking advantage of the updates before the holiday shopping season. Key features, such as supplemental data sources and rules that help brands work at scale, have been retained. Here are more details on what you can expect.
Product Studio: Easing the burden of creating content
Product Studio, available in the new Merchant Center, is an AI-powered tool for content creation, allowing you to generate custom product assets with fewer resources. You can create animated product images or adjust existing images to match your brand’s unique visual style. You can also perform simple tasks, such as removing backgrounds or increasing image resolution. 80% of marketers who use Product Studio see it as an efficiency builder, and one in three product images generated are published or downloaded.
One-stop review of business insights
To make business decisions easier, we’ve enhanced our data and analytics tools. The new analytics tab brings all your insights together in one place, from pricing reports to competitive visibility tools, helping you better understand your position in the marketplace. You can also explore retail-specific search trends directly in Merchant Center, allowing you to anticipate popular trends and compare them to your popular products report. The majority of Merchant Center’s surveyed users express high satisfaction with its insights and reporting tools.
Easy platform navigation
The new Merchant Center is more intuitive from the moment you log in. We have seen a significant increase in the setup success rate for new merchants. Improvements include simplifying the process of verifying your brand’s website and the ability to pre-populate your product information to save time during setup. You’ll also see suggestions on the home page with simple ways to optimize your Google presence.
It’s easier to manage your products and control how they appear on Google. You can see the status of your products at a glance, search for specific products and easily control where they appear. If you are an advanced user, you can customize Merchant Center for your business with add-ons, such as those for loyalty programs.
Get started with the new Merchant Center
Once you have been upgraded, here are some tips to get you started with the new experience:
1. start with the overview page to see key information at a glance. Then, browse by products (don’t skip the “needs attention” tab), analytics and ad campaigns.
2. Click on the Products tab in the left navigation to start experimenting with the AI generative imaging tools in Product Studio.
3. Advanced features such as supplemental feeds and rules are now available as add-ons, accessible in the settings.
These updates make Merchant Center easier to use, freeing you from time-consuming tasks so you can focus on growth. If you have not yet upgraded to the new Merchant Center, you will soon receive an email inviting you to get started.
In short
Latest Tech and Digital Marketing Updates
📌 Meta launches Llama 3.1, its new open source IA model. With 405 billion parameters and enhanced capabilities, it has even more powerful performance than the current one.
📌 WordPress releases version 6.6.1 to fix several major bugs, including issues affecting certain page and theme builders, as well as bugs in security plugins.
📌 Important to know this. The Skeepers study says that 75% of consumers are informed by online reviews before they buy. Reviews are influential, and very influential. So try to have up-to-date, quality reviews.
📌 Google advises you on internal links. They have made a video explaining three key tips to improve your positioning and user experience through internal links on your website. If you want to watch it, I’ll leave the link here.
📌 The conflict between Reddit and Microsoft has arisen because Reddit updated their ‘robots.txt’ file blocking Bing and other search engines from crawling their site, while allowing Google to continue.
