In this week’s digital news to watch, our Performance Marketing Manager Tom and Associate Director of SEO Jamie, discuss how Apple is at war with Facebook, a brand new tech bidding technology, how the digital marketing industry is suffering from shortages in skilled people, and how Google is vastly improving its page experiences.
New bidding features to help you reach your goals
Google has announced improvements to its smart bidding technology, with a key feature being top signals for Target ROAS and Maximum conversions.
Essentially, a cosmetic feature that will give you more insight into what is driving these campaigns, which can help you make changes in campaigns or elsewhere in your ads account. Google has also added in seasonality adjustments allowing you to have an aspect of manual control over changes such as sales where you would expect a big shift in performance.
How Apple screwed Facebook
The battle between Apple and Facebook has ongoing on for months and it’s finally coming to end. With only 5% of users opting in to be tracked on Facebook, their collection of audience data has essentially been wiped out.
Facebook is going to have to move fast to make changes to their platform or they risk losing marketing budget to channels with known performance and safety. Many brands are going to be wary of investing in Facebook ads if they cannot be sure of the results, they once had.
‘Huge shortage’ in digital skills says Apprentice winner
According to the BBC, there aren’t enough people who are highly skilled in digital marketing. Mark Wright, winner of the Apprentice in 2014 told Radio 5 it was very worrying about the skills gap in the UK and that we risk being left behind without the right training. 40% of the UK currently lack ‘digital skills’ which include tasks such as sending emails and joining video calls.
MUM: A new AI milestone for understanding information
Google has announced a new artificial intelligence milestone. Named “Multitask Unified Model” (or “MUM” for short), the goal is to enable Google to help users with particularly complex needs/queries and is said to be 1000x more powerful than its similar predecessor – BERT.
MUM will also remove language barriers and aim to transfer knowledge across languages. For example, users are currently unlikely to be served with content not in their language even if it contains very useful information about it.
Google Page Experience Update Coming To Desktop As Well
Google’s Page Experience algorithm will launch on desktop as well as mobile. This may not come as a huge surprise but it was worth Google clarifying, that it will be bringing the imminent Page Experience update to both desktop and mobile searches. For a while now, Google has been indexing “mobile-first” however a significant percentage of searches are still conducted on desktops therefore it is important for users to continue to have a strong experience regardless of their device.
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