In this weeks digital news to watch, our Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Tom, and Senior Performance Marketing Executive, Kylie, discuss whether URL length effects SEO, how advertising giants are struggling due to the new iOS updates, the demand for content creation being on the rise, and how much Christmas advertising is expected to increase by.
Does the length of a URL affect SEO?
Google’s John Mueller talks about whether the length of a URL affects SEO. In the article, Mueller explains that URL length does not matter, however he tries to keep his URLs below 1000 characters. Mueller stresses that it is a myth that ranking is affected by the URL length, however search engines such as google, may select a shorter URL for search results than a longer one. In short, URL length can influence on search results, but not on search rankings.
Google does not care about document images for SEO in web search
When it comes to web search, Google does not care about the image attached to a document, only about the alt text. Googles web search algorithm does not look at the image quality or type to decide the ranking as it adds no SEO value, but rather the data structure in the body of the document itself. Google’s John Mueller discusses the load speed of websites with too many images and encourages a lazy loading setup to increase the load time for readers.
Advertising giants performance plummets due to iOS14.5 updates
Advertising giants are starting to see the full brunt of iOS14.5 changes to their revenue with nearly $10b lost in the first quarter since these changes happened. Snap was hit particularly hard based on them missing revenue targets and blaming this fully on Apple’s changes. Facebook’s COO has outwardly commented on the poor performance Facebook users have been seeing with poor targeting and higher costs to achieve their goals. The estimated loss in nearly 12% for these brands with many customers reporting that performance is up to 50% worse than before these changes.
We’re potentially going to a knock on effect of other channels as these brands will still have marketing budgets to use but with Facebook and others seeing poor results, this budget is going to be reinvested into the channels that do work which will push up prices further.
Content creation demand is on the rise
Content is king, a phrase that’s been around for a long time but it’s becoming ever more important in a world where customers are doing more research and reading more online. Over lockdown 71% of agencies interviewed said demand for content had increased and 75% expected this growth to continue. Only 3% expected less revenue to come from content next year. With the cost of content relatively low compared to other digital channels and the opportunity for success being relatively high we’re going to see a lot more brands moving into content creation over the next few years, especially if tracking and privacy focused changes begin make an impact on digital targeting.
Christmas advertising is expected to grow by £1bn this year from last year
The Guardian is expecting Christmas advertising spending to grow by another £1bn year over year up to £7.9bn, with many dropping spend last year due to the pandemic, things look to be back on track for a big Christmas this year. Interestingly TV is expected to see its fastest growth since 2010 up 9% from the previous year to £1.56bn. As per usual, search and display are expected to dominate the spending this year as it’s called a ‘digital marketing Christmas’ up a massive 15% from the previous year.
Digital spend has gone from strength to strength during lockdown and this shows no signs of changing towards the end of the year.
If you need any help with your digital marketing, please get in touch with our team of specialists at team@modo25.com
