Long anticipated changes in the search world have begun rolling out, meaning changes to the way you manage ad spend and new ranking factors that Google is incorporating into its ranking algorithm to make the user experience more important than ever for your website. Learn about these updates below.

SEO  

Search Engine Journal: Google Page Experience Update Now Slowly Rolling Out 

After pushing the rollout of its page experience update back, Google is now slowly rolling out the update. Due to this gradual roll out, don’t expect to see a huge amount of volatility from a ranking perspective.  

Need a refresher on what the page experience update is? The page experience update will make user experience a direct ranking factor within Google. What this means is that if your page does not provide the user with a good experience, your page could rank lower on the search engine results page.  

Just how will Google be quantifying a good user experience? They will be using a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals. These Core Web Vital metrics include things such as how quickly the page loads, how people are interacting with the page and page stability as people scroll through the page. Google provides a more detailed list of page experience criteria in this developer document.  

What can you do as this update rolls out? Continue to keep an eye on your core web vitals with the core web vitals report within Google Search Console. If there are certain core web vitals that are sub-par, work to improve those aspects of your website. Don’t know how to improve these elements? We can help. Reach out to us here. 

Paid Search Advertising

The Verge: Nobody is Flying to join Google’s FLoC  

Third-party cookies are a near-ubiquitous tool to track users on the internet in order to serve more targeted advertisements. As users demand more privacy, third-party cookies are going to be phased out for more privacy-friendly tracking tools. However, there is a splintered view on what these replacement tools will be.  

Google has put their idea, FLoC, into the race. A FLoC, or Federated Legion of Cohorts, is Google’s solution to anonymize the data they gather while also delivering supposedly similar efficiency in online advertising. These FLoCs put groups of anonymized user data with similar behavior together, which add privacy to users. These groups share similarities in interest or demographic data, which allow online advertisers to continue to tailor ads to users in these FLoCs. However, for this new technology to truly work at scale, it needs to be adopted by other advertising technology companies and other online web browsers. That is where the main catch lies. This article goes into detail about the varying visions of different web browsers and other stakeholders on the web, and how it may not be possible to get everyone to accept the same future. 

While this does not affect anyone currently, the elimination of third-party cookies drastically changes online advertising in the future. It may not be possible to track users between websites or deliver ads as efficiently if a solution is not reached.  

Google Support: New announcements from Google Marketing Livestream 2021  

In late May, Google held a Google Marketing Livestream to discuss new updates to their marketing ecosystem and some future features Google is rolling out. This event featured a mix of product announcements and deep dives and conversations with business leaders about the importance and the future of online advertising. All of the sessions can be watched on demand at withgoogle.com. Many of the new additions center on future-proofing your data and online advertising in order to keep using relevant data while adapting to new privacy standards demanded by consumers. There was also a focus on tracking and aiding the customer journey as more and more touchpoints and attribution models are added.  

There were also changes announced at Google I/O to overall Google search. These changes included new options for Schema structured data markup, the impact of Core Web Vitals on websites and a new AI architecture iteration named Multitask Unified Models that aims to accurately answer increasingly complex search queries. This discussion touched on the June Core Update, which is using page experience signals like Core Web Vitals to help rank pages. As previously, this means that companies should focus on delivering a smooth, fast and useful experience on their websites. Doing so will provide a good journey for customers and aid you in ranking well on Google Search.  

Google Ads: Google Ads Rolls Out Monthly Spend Limits: What You Need to Know  

In addition to daily campaign budgets and bid caps, Google recently announced that advertisers will now also be able to set monthly spend limits at the account level, providing an additional level of control over ad spend.  

Once enabled, Google’s algorithm will use your daily budget for campaign level spend and bids while simultaneously monitoring your overall spend across the account to ensure your monthly budget limit stays in check. At the end of the day, whatever monthly spend limit you have assigned will override campaign level budgets and stop them from running if you hit your limit. 

The new monthly spend limit feature is only available for accounts using automatic (credit card) billing. To enable this feature, visit Tools & Settings > Billing > Settings and then enter a monthly spend limit.  

YouTube Advertising: YouTube is banning alcohol, gambling, and politics from its ‘most prominent’ ad slot 

YouTube’s most prominent ad slot, the large masthead on the homepage, will no longer allow ads featuring alcohol, gambling (which has been a big spender after legalization in numerous states) and politics. According to YouTube’s ad support page, ads in the masthead slot can “drive massive reach or awareness,” but now that option will no longer be available to advertisers in that category.