Our weekly roundup of the industry headlines is ready and waiting for you. Find out what’s going on in the world of digital marketing this week…
Google now shows snippets in search results
Google have started to show new snippets within search results for quoted searches to enhance user experience. When a user has searched for a query within quote marks, Google’s new style snippets will show a line of text from the page which explicitly indicates the quoted text. Although this change does not affect how pages are ranked and only affects what is seen on the SERP, it is yet unclear what impact this will have on CTR so worth keeping an eye on if you know your users generally search in this way.
TikTok to overtake Facebook in influencer marketing
TikTok is set to overtake Facebook in influencer marketing spend this year followed by YouTube in 2024. However, Meta’s other platform Instagram still leads the way by a large margin, seeing 3x the amount spend going on influencers. We’re seeing a bigger shift towards influencer marketing this year with brands already pushing the boundaries on what they can do with standard paid marketing channels. With Facebook struggling when it comes to advertising revenue they’ll be looking to push influencer options to close the gap with TikTok.
Google announces new Discovery ad features
Discovery ads are getting another update, this time with the focus being on an improved ad experience for end users, this includes visibility on products and prices following on from the feed discovery ads tested earlier in the year. This should help improve interaction and conversion rates with more interactable ads. To allow for this, ad creators will be getting more options in the creative process, including new headlines, overlays and aspect ratios as well as feedback on performance similar to the current RSA setup. Finally, new audience insights and audience builder will make it easier to apply new audiences and create new ones in both Discovery ads and across your other campaign types.
What marketers can learn from previous recessions
With a recession looming in the UK, businesses will be looking for ways to be more efficient with their spend and marketing budgets will be one area that comes under question. As this article mentions, those that survived the pandemic were the ones that adapted and developed better marketing campaigns rather than those that cut back in an effort to save money. With some businesses starting to struggle, we may see more gaps open up and it will be those businesses that take advantage that can really push through the next few years.
Google update shows product pros and cons in SERPs
Google have updated search snippets for product review pages to now show a list of pros and cons within the SERP. Product review sites often include lists of pros and cons to help users make decisions around which products to buy, so Google is seemingly wanting to speed up the process for users looking for this information by including it there and then on the SERP. There is new positiveNotes and negativeNotes structured data available which allows you to mark the pros and cons lists up on your pages to help indicate to Google that you have this information on your page, although Google have said it isn’t necessarily essential to have the structured data on the page for this to show up in the search snippet.
