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This March not only saw the arrival of Spring, but also some major updates across both organic search and paid advertising. From Google’s recent algorithm updates and Performance Max improvements, to changes in YouTube advertising and AI security developments, here’s a look at what’s been happening in the digital marketing space.

 

This month ​Google rolled out its March 2025 core update, which began on the 13th of March and completed on the 27th of March. Although Google has not disclosed which parts of search have been impacted by this update, there have been some early reports which show search fluctuations across a range of different marketplaces. As with all core updates, it is important to monitor your search performance and ensure that your content and overall site technical performance is in good health. Mackerel Media are on hand to assist with a review of search visibility, and advise on strategies to mitigate and improve search performance and overall user acquisition.

 

The Future of Google Search

Google’s Head of Search, Elizabeth Reid, made headlines this month by predicting that over time the standard Google search bar will become less prominent, and voice queries and image based queries will continue to rise. An ex-Google executive hinted that Google is moving away from its standard model of sending users to websites, and instead wants to keep users on the Google platform as much as possible. This coincides with the recent rollout of AI overviews which gives users answers to their questions within the search results, reducing the need for users to visit external websites. The effect that this will have on the SEO space means that it could lead to fewer users visiting websites directly. Optimising your site for better visibility within Google’s AI overviews, whether that is through optimised content, featured snippets and structured data becomes more important now than ever.

 

 

Performance Max Ads Reveal Their Secrets

Google also responded to the demand for more visibility in Performance Max campaigns. Advertisers can now see the actual search terms that are triggering their Performance Max ads, thanks to a recent update which integrates this data into the existing Search Terms report. Ad managers can now add negative keywords directly from the report which will help reduce spend and ensure ads are only showing for relevant searches. For brands running Performance Max campaigns at scale, this update is a useful step towards greater ad control and performance.

 

Google’s structured data guidelines have recently been updated, allowing merchants to display new pricing details directly in search results. The new properties include priceType, which labels prices as ‘strikethrough’ to indicate discounts and savings, and validForMemberTier (currently in beta), which displays prices exclusive to loyalty program tiers. These new improvements provide users with clearer pricing information which could lead to an overall increase in engagement and conversions. If you are planning on running any upcoming Spring sales or tiered offers, it would be worth checking your schema markup to ensure you’re making the most of these new features.

 

YouTube’s New Ad Strategy

YouTube has unveiled new plans to revamp their mid-roll ads starting in May 2025. Ads will now appear during natural content breaks to help reduce interruptions, such as during natural breaks and transitions in the video. YouTube creators will be able to add manual, automatic or a combination of both ad placements. Early tests show that using both ad placement types can increase video revenue by 5%. These changes could affect video monetisation strategies, especially for videos with manual ad placements, and so it is worth staying on top of any ad placement updates when planning future content.

 

 

On the AI front, ​Cloudflare has introduced AI Labyrinth, a free, opt-in tool designed to prevent unauthorised web-scraping bots collecting data from your website. When this tool is enabled, it will redirect any known bot to AI-generated decoy pages, which consumes all their crawling resources and prevents them from scraping important data. This new feature allows Cloudflare to identify and analyse malicious bots while protecting the site content from potentially being repurposed by AI in the future. As more companies and users are using AI for search and content, protecting your content could become just as important as optimising for it.

 

TikTok Turns Scrolls into Billions!

Finally, Sensor Tower’s Q4 Digital Market Index revealed that TikTok has led the mobile app market by generating $6 billion from in-app purchases in 2024. This total is almost double that of its closest competitors, and marks a 36% increase from the previous year. This surge shows the influence that TikTok has in both product discovery and user engagement. Additionally, 70% of TikTok shoppers have reported that they’ve purchased products after seeing ads or shoppable content. As TikTok continues to grow, it is important to consider ways to best maximise TikTok’s advertising and shoppable content to improve visibility and drive conversions.

 

Welcome to our February round up of the latest updates in SEO, social media and digital marketing. There have been quite a few notable updates this month, including advancements in Google’s predictive ad models, changes to LinkedIn conversion reporting and recent findings in the popularity of AI-powered search.

 

Landing Your Page in the Spotlight

Earlier this month, ​Google introduced a new ads prediction model which is able to evaluate the effectiveness of a landing page for Google ads. This update helps to ensure that whatever pages are linked to offer a good user experience and relevant content to the search query. Any ad which directs a user to a poor, hard to navigate page is less likely to rank in ad results. This recent update means that brands need to ensure that the landing page offers relevant information to the users query and offers a good navigational experience to ensure that their ads remain visible.

 

Tracking Conversions through Clicks and Handshakes! 

LinkedIn has updated their advertising platform by introducing new Conversions API (CAPI) and the Revenue Attribution Report (RAR) features. Their Conversions API report allows brands to connect first-party online and offline data directly into LinkedIn, making it easier to track conversions from sources such as website actions, phone sales and live in-person events. Their Revenue Attribution report allows business to business marketers to connect their sales data into LinkedIn campaigns to measure campaign performance such as return on ad spend and pipeline growth. These features have been added to make it easier to calculate return on ad spend and allows brands to further optimise their internal and external campaign performance.

 

 

ChatGPT Traffic Soars

On the AI front, a recent study by Semrush revealed that between July and November 2024, the number of domains receiving traffic from ChatGPT increased from under 10,000 to over 30,000 daily, revealing the popularity growth of users searching for information with ChatGPT. They also found that approximately 70% of ChatGPT prompts are unique and don’t fall under traditional search intent categories (navigational, informational, commercial, transactional), which suggests that users are finding new ways to obtain information and solve problems. With the recent announcement of ChatGPT search becoming available to all users without requiring an account, the popularity of AI search is expected to grow even further.

 

 

Elliott Henderson, Technical SEO Consultant at Mackerel Media shares his thoughts on optimising for AI-powered search:

While there are no official guidelines for ensuring that your website is included in AI-generated search results, here are some general best practices which could help improve your chances of being featured:

Create High Quality Content – Whilst ranking in the top 10 organic results is not a guarantee your content will rank in AI Overviews and ChatGPT search, it does help if your content performs well for related user queries. Ensure your content is optimised to answer user queries with in-depth explanations, including relevant primary and secondary keywords. The more detailed your page is, the more likely it is to be recognised as valuable by AI search engines.

Improve Readability and Content Structure – Ensure that your content is easy to read and understood by AI. Place key information higher up on the page for relevancy. Make your content digestible with bullet points, numbered lists, comparison tables, shorter sentences, concise paragraphs and clear headings which can be easily referenced and summarised. Also keep your content up to date to maintain relevancy.

Optimise Heading Elements – Ensure your website has a keyword optimised heading structure so that AI understands the flow and relevant sections of the content on the page. Add a table of contents with relevant anchor links and a key takeaways summary which aids in navigation and contextual understanding.

Optimise Site Structure – Organise your domain with logical page and category hierarchies which make it easier for AI bots to crawl your site effectively. Include clear directory structures, descriptive URLs, an accessible sitemap and optimised page title tags.

Implement Structure Data – Use structured data to help AI understand your content more accurately. Implement relevant structured data types such as ImageObject, FAQPage and HowTo schema for informational content. Also make use of industry specific schema types such as LegalService for legal firms, RealEstateAgent for property renting and sales, and Hotel and Collections schema for travel websites. 

Allow AI Crawlers – Ensure that your site can be crawled effectively by AI crawlers. This means not blocking ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI bots in your robots.txt file and firewall rules. There are different bots for retrieving data vs. collecting training data, and whilst there may be overlap between the two, ensuring that retrieving data bots are allowed helps AI search access and reference your content.

Optimise for Speed – Many AI bots have limited time frames to retrieve content (from 1-5 seconds). Ensure that your site performs quickly by compressing images, using CDN and caching and minimising the amount of excess JavaScript and/or plugins which AI crawlers have a hard time rendering.

 

As 2024 comes to a close, December has delivered some significant developments in the digital marketing space. These include search updates from Google and Microsoft, and some notable controversies surrounding TikTok.

 

Google’s Christmas Gift: Another Core Update

The main news this December is that Google rolled out its fourth core update of the year, following on the heels of the previous November update. This new update has been reported as being more volatile than the previous November update, with some websites seeing major fluctuations in their search positions. Early results show that news, arts and entertainment websites have been predominantly affected. Whilst it is still unclear what impact this update will have, Mackerel Media are able to assist clients with identifying any issues and opportunities to optimise the performance of their domain.

 

As an extra December surprise, Google rolled out their December Spam update. This new update helps to detect any search spam, which are low quality, deceptive pages which can often harm or mislead users when visited. This new update will address the removal of parasite SEO content, which is when publishers create low-quality content on third-party domains to manipulate their search rankings.

 

 

Track Data Around the Clock

Google has made some significant changes to their Search Console interface, including the new addition of a 24-hour data performance filter. This feature allows users to see the most recent data and provides hourly data breakdowns across Search, News reports, and Discover. This is especially useful for users to track recent performance changes such as during peak sale periods or to monitor the launch of new pages and services. 

 

To round off the year, Google published their Year in Search 2024 report which highlights the most popular search trends in 2024 across different industries. It was the U.S. presidential election that dominated the news and people category, whilst the most searched movies were Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine and Saltburn. Some of the more surprising results were ‘Mob wife aesthetic’ being the most popular global lifestyle search term, and over in the UK, Oasis hold the top spot as the most searched artist/band.

 

TikTok Gets A Global Time-Out

There’s also been drama around TikTok. The European Commission has opened formal proceedings against TikTok due to allegations of the app breaching EU laws by enabling foreign interference in Romania’s presidential elections. If this is to be proven, it means there could be significant penalties for the platform and its use in Poland. The United States is also coming close to banning TikTok. This is due to a law mandating that its parent company ByteDance divest ownership of the platform. If this isn’t resolved TikTok faces the risk of a complete United States ban starting January 19, 2025. This is not the first time a ban has been put in place, as India fully banned TikTok in 2020, which only slightly slowed its growth. This means that anyone using TikTok in the USA may need to look for alternative advertisement options should the ban be put in place.