In this week’s digital news to watch, our Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Tom, and Senior Performance Marketing Executive, Kylie, discuss how agencies can avoid wasting their marketing budget, more Google updates, and changes made by Google and Facebook to ad targeting.
An estimated 33% of marketing budgets are wasted due to poor briefs
A classic problem facing lots of industries is brief vs result, but now there’s research that backs this up. 80% of marketers think they write good briefs with only 10% of creative agencies agreeing. There’s an estimated 33% wasted marketing budget based on poor briefs and incorrect work.
Although it may be longer in the beginning a rigorous briefing process could save significant time and budget moving forward.
Google updates Mobile Search to use continuous scroll
Google is removing the need to click to ‘see more’ results on Mobile Search by implementing a continuous scroll functionality so that the next page of results automatically loads when a user reaches the bottom of the first page. This is currently only being rolled out in the US but we don’t expect it will be long until it gets rolled out everywhere.
Google announced this update as another way to help users find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Google are constantly looking for new ways to enhance the users’ experience and continuous scroll on mobile will mean that users can more easily discover new content without being aware they are physically clicking through to the second and third pages.
It will be interesting to see whether this results in sites that are on page 2 or below getting more clicks as a result. We’re keen to keep an eye on this in the coming months.
Google publishes new best practice guide for writing Page Titles
In Google’s new Advanced SEO section of Google Search Central, they have provided updated guidance on writing page titles following the update rolled out a couple of months ago where Google started re-writing page titles they deemed not relevant using other text from the page. The new guidance lists the most common issues leading to titles getting replaced and a best practice list to use when creating your page titles.
We recommend visiting Google’s guidance to assess how well your titles are currently written and re-writing them if they don’t meet the criteria.
Facebook features allow ad targeting to be specific to one user
A new research paper carried out by academics from Spain and Austria has shown it’s possible to target an ad to an individual on Facebook. Using a number of ads and the inbuilt advertising tools they were able to demonstrate the platform could be used to reach one person. This evidence of ‘nano-targeting’ is interesting considering the problems Facebook has faced with targeting users after iOS14.5. This is likely to be a further blow to Facebook’s damaged reputation.
Google ads are shifting toward becoming automated
Google is heavily pushing their automated solutions and one b2b has run a test on a fully automated campaign using broad and DSA solutions. Despite having come on a long way in the last few years these results clearly show Google have a lot to work on and as with many of Google’s tools they don’t work as well when you’re working with low conversion values.
If you need any help with your digital marketing, please get in touch with our team of specialists at team@modo25.com
