Our Senior Performance Marketing Manager Tom and Senior Performance Marketing Executive Kylie discuss the Google core update, ranking factors, Google Ads audiences, data, and the crypto market crash in this week’s digital news to watch.
May 2022 Google Core Update
Google has rolled out a new broad core update which comes six months after the last update in November 2021. Google’s Danny Sullivan announced on the 25th of May, “Today, we’re releasing our May 2022 core update. It will take around 1-2 weeks to fully roll out.”. The rollout of the update started at 11:30 am E.T. There have since been rumours of a potential Google Algorithm Update, but Google has not confirmed these rumours.
Google has released this statement: “Core updates are changes we make to improve Search overall and keep pace with the changing nature of the web. While nothing in a core update is specific to any particular site, these updates may produce some noticeable changes to how sites perform, which we’ve noted in previous guidance on what site owners should know about core updates,”. Google has also released advice on what to do if you have been negatively impacted by a core update in the past, and has advised that a negative ranking as a result of the update may not signal anything is wrong with your website.
Google ranking factors: User-generated content
Is user-generated content considered to be a Google ranking factor? User-generated content can be text, images, video, or some other form of content (e.g., blog comments, forum posts, product reviews) that has been created by someone who is not associated with the company. Google’s John Mueller has spoken out about UGC: “User-generated content can take lots of forms, from comments on the bottom of your pages to discussion between users to complete pages written by users. Overall, Google doesn’t differentiate between the content you’ve written and content your users wrote. If you publish it on your site, we’ll see it as the content that you want to have published, and that’s what we’ll use for rankings.”. UGC is considered to be an organic ranking factor for SEO, however, it can negatively impact your ranking too with UGC spam.
Three changes coming to Google Ads audiences
Last week Google announced further changes to Google Ads audiences including reusing audiences and new naming conventions. These new naming conventions are clearly designed to make it clear which is your data and which isn’t with remarketing becoming ‘Your Data’. Most audiences will now also be named segments instead.
Data is the strongest marketing currency
According to this article 90% of all data captured has been in the last few year with estimates for 464billion gigabytes of data daily by 2025. With data becoming more and more complex alongside added difficulties in collecting and storing it, data analysis, storage and measurement are going to become even more critical when it comes to marketing. As the platforms simplify, data will continue to get more complicated.
Crypto market crashes and pulls ad spend down with it
As quickly as it increased, crypto ad spends are set to fall as the crypto market itself sees significant drops in value. It remains to be seen how this will impact marketing budgets over the next few months but with the market halving in less than a year, crypto marketing budgets are likely to be slashed to stay ahead of current prices. Coinbase, the biggest advertiser in the market reduced spend by 98% between Feb and March. It remains to be seen how quickly crypto will bounce back but further dips could continue to strip back marketing budgets.
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