In this weeks digital news to watch, our Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Tom and Senior Performance Marketing Executive, Kylie discuss SEMrush’s new search intent feature, Google’s November updates and how improved marketing efficiency, has given Airbnb its best ever profits.
SEMrush adds search intent feature
SEMrush have added a very useful feature to their platform, allowing users to see keywords categorised by search intent.
There are four types of intent that SEMrush categorise keywords by:
- Informational – the user wants to find an answer to a specific question.
- Commercial – the user wants to investigate brands or services.
- Navigational – the user wants to find a specific page or site.
- Transactional – the user wants to complete an action (conversion).
The intent of keywords is helpful for us to decide which pages to target keywords on, helping us to understand what type of content is required to rank for that keyword. Previously, we’ve had to manually assign intent or use another tool, so it’s great for SEO practitioners that SEMrush now provide this too.
Google rolls out November 2021 spam update
Google continues its fight against spam and untrustworthy content in the SERPs, having rolled out their fourth spam update this year. The update began rolling out on the November 3 and is due to finish within a week of that, so by Wednesday this week.
No specific details were released about this update, it appears to be another update targeted at getting rid of spam from the search results, which Google specifically defines as: sites that are low quality, trick users into providing personal information or installing malware, phishing scams and websites disguising themselves as other sites.
You may think you’re not doing any of the above, you could still be at risk if your site is not adequately secure as it’s then left vulnerable to being hacked and may then serve spam to users without you knowing it. Whether its hacked or intentional spam, Google will treat it exactly the same as they simply want to protect users from it. So, if you notice a sudden drop in rankings following this update, you should check your site’s security.
Airbnb’s ‘high marketing efficiency’ responsible for its strongest ever quarter
A few months ago we talked about Airbnb shifting their digital strategy from performance marketing to brand based marketing. Airbnb has now just delivered its strongest ever quarter with an almost 4x increase YoY. Their campaigns have been focused on reviving the travel industry following the pandemic and hav run across digital and TV in 4 countries. Traffic in these countries is up 15% compared to 2019 and is outperforming countries where branding campaigns haven’t run.
This shift to brand focused digital over performance is relatively uncommon but can work effectively if backed up by high quality branding campaigns and a good product to offer. Lower funnel performance marketing is unlikely to grow a business as fast as branded campaigns and this is likely what Airbnb are looking to do following the pandemic. Airbnb has credited their ‘high marketing efficiency’ to these results, it will be interesting to see how they continue to perform with no performance marketing long term.
Google introduces conversion goals
Google is improving its conversion tags and goals for account and campaign level bidding optimisation. Alongside this, Google will also be introducing a troubleshooting tool for conversion tags which will help people fix common problems that arise during setup and auditing.
Conversion goals will let you group based on their type for example contacts and lead forms being grouped together. This will make it easier to optimise and measure towards multiple but equally important results.
Finally Google are going to make it easier to quickly see why results have changed by highlighting related metrics to help you explain why results are performing a certain way, for example revenue is down due to a decrease in CVR.
BT launch digital marketing hub to help businesses
BT have launched a new ‘digital marketing hub’ which will be an accessible platform run by experts to help businesses run their digital marketing strategy and campaigns. Allowing them to create and track results across multiple platforms from just one platform. Using a combination of dashboards and AI, this platform will help customers create new campaigns and measure their results, as well as giving budget recommendations. Designed to help small businesses that don’t have the time or experience to get started, this could be the key to helping them get started in the digital advertising world.
If you would like support getting started in the digital marketing space, our team of experts in paid search, SEO and affiliate marketing are more than happy to help. Get in touch by sending us an email to team@modo25.com
