Archive for category: Digital Marketing

2020 is almost over, and what a year it has been!

Aside from the obvious, there have been a whole load of interesting (and perhaps concerning!) developments in the world of digital marketing. We’ve covered many of the most important updates in our monthly digital marketing roundups, but with 2020 nearly behind us it seems a good time to look back at the biggest stories of the past year!

Google Algorithm Updates Rock SEO 

Right from the off, Google made it clear that it was going to make serious updates to it’s behind-the-scenes algorithms. Back in Jan 2020, Google rolled out the first of more than 10 confirmed updates; the first of these had impacts across the SEO world, with Mordy Oberstein from RankRanger suggesting that this first update impacted what he called “Your Money, Your Life” signals – in other words, websites which weren’t able to make visitors feel safe about spending their money were most heavily impacted. 

Next, May 2020 saw a huge core update – again, RankRanger called it an “absolute monster”, impacting almost all online sectors including Retail, Travel and Health. Reports at the time suggested that Google’s May 2020 update was a broad scope update, with no specific focus on what Google was trying to achieve with it’s algorithm changes, but evidence suggested that 93% off all Top 10 results were impacted in one way or another! 

Finally, Google released it’s last core update of the year – another broad scope update, this was officially announced by Google on December 3rd:

Investigation by industry leader SearchMetrocs showed clear shifts in rankings for areas related to E-A-T (Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness) and quality unique content such music, health, finance, news, and ecommerce. Some individuals claimed to have lost over 40% of their Google organic traffic, while others did well from this update. Indeed, a number of Mackerel media’s own clients saw large improvements in Page ranking for key search terms.

iOS Blocks 3rd party Cookies

With iOS 14 being released in September, all Apple devices & Safari browsers are now able to block all cookies from third-party websites, and prevent third-party advertisers from targeting you based on your browser history and online habits. Apple has argued that third-party cookies are mainly used for cross-site tracking and advertising purposes, but they also allow website owners to provide additional useful services – such as live chats or social media buttons.

We’ve already seen some interesting cookie workarounds coming from the tech giant in the past month, with its recently announced “Consent Mode” being far less reliant on the deployment of cookies for tracking. 

The impact of this discovery is that data for Safari devices may not be as accurate as pre-ITP times. However, as with all data interpretation, digital marketers need to be aware of the bigger picture – how are the trends on other devices shifting, and what can we learn from the data that IS available to us?

In addition to this huge shake-up in cookie-tracking, rumours have persisted that Apple is preparing to launch its own Search Engine to rival Google – whom it currently receives a reported $12bn from to be the ‘default’ search engine for both Safari iOS and Siri searches.  

Google Analytics 4 Rolls Out 

In October, Google revealed a new version of Google Analytics. The exciting rollout completely changes how data is captured using “Streams”, tracked and integrated with other Google tools such as GTM or Search Console. As with all of Google’s current updates, Machine Learning & AI are at the heart of the new Google Analytics 4.0 – meaning that we might be able to expect even more exciting features in the future! 

Google Passes on Digital Services Tax, Others Follow

Much to the annoyance of its customers, digital marketers were forced to absorb Google’s own digital services taxes in the UK from 1st November 2020 via a 2% hike. Aimed at collecting revenue from digital companies with a UK revenue of £25 million, the tax had been in the works for some time – but came as a surprise to many that Tech Giants would pass the cost on to customers.

Following the announcement of this 2% tax, many of Mackerel Media’s own clients opted to absorb the tax into their monthly budgets – essentially reducing their overall media spend without increasing budgets. 

Other large digital companies have also announced they will be passing on the Digital Services tax, including Amazon who will charge an additional 2% on referral fees, fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fees, monthly FBA storage fees and multichannel fulfillment (MCF) fees. 

There has been no word yet as to whether of not Facebook will follow suit, however as of 1st January 2021 they will be charging a 6% service tax on ads sold in Malaysia, suggesting the UK’s DST may be next on their list.

Digital Media Grows in 2020

Finally, it should come as no surprise that paid search and social media spend grew faster than ever during 2020, with traditional media formats suffering thanks to the impact of COVID-19. 

The report suggests that Paid Search channels will see an impressive 26% growth year on year from 2019, while social advertising closely follows with a 25% increase in the same period. While the report doesn’t mention specific companies, it would be safe to assume that Google and Facebook will have captured a lot of the increased digital ad growth.

The survey also looked into expected spend levels during 2021. Unfortunately, most businesses reported they expect only a 5% growth in their budgets over 2020, with almost 70% saying they didn’t have a clear indication of what their 2021 digital budgets look like yet. 

Apple has always been at the forefront of the Privacy Revolution, and the company has often held a user’s online privacy up as being one of its most important ideals. But has Apple gone too far with it’s latest attempts to protect user privacy online?

Back in 2017, Apple first announced its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) features for Safari & iOS devices, and we’ve seen a number of key ITP updates since then – the most recent back in April 2020. 

Previously, ITP allowed advertisers some unintentional wiggle-room; that is to say enough data could be gathered to allow for some tracking across the web. However, with the ITP updates back in April, these loop-holes are now firmly closed. 

With iOS 14 being released in September, all Apple devices & Safari browsers are now able to block all cookies from third-party websites, and prevent third-party advertisers from targeting you based on your browser history and online habits. How has this impacted the world of digital marketing? 

A Brief History of Cookies

There are two types of cookies a website may pass onto your browser, known as party and third-party. Both types of cookies contain the same pieces of information, and can perform broadly similar functions. The real difference between first-party & third-party cookies is how and where this information gets used.

First-party cookies are always used by the website you are currently visiting. In general, first-party cookies are considered to be useful – and Apple doesn’t have an issue with websites deploying them. They allow experience-enhancing functions on-site, but also let website owners collect analytics data about how you’ve interacted with their website.

On the other hand, Third-party cookies are created by domains other than the one you are currently active on – usually an advertising provider. However, whether or not third-party cookies are “good” or “bad” is a slightly greyer area.

Apple correctly argued that third-party cookies are mainly used for cross-site tracking and advertising purposes, but they also allow website owners to provide additional useful services – such as live chats or social media buttons.

Third-party cookies which are set by an advertiser are accessible on any website you visit which also loads the third-party servers code, such as ads.doubleclick.net. By recognising the cookie created on a previous website, ads are able to use your information to provide tailored content across multiple websites based on your browsing history.

Years Ahead of Google Chrome?

Apple’s push for privacy is an important milestone for web privacy advocates, and it puts Safari officially two whole years ahead of Google’s own browser – Chrome. 

Unsurprisingly, Google itself has a lot more to lose from this move towards total online privacy than Apple, as so much of its earnings depend on the deployment of third-party cookies and advertising through DoubleClick, Google Ads and the Google Display Network.

Despite this clear and present danger to Google’s bank account, Google said back in January 2020 that it would begin the process of phasing out third-party cookies and expected third-party cookies to be fully blocked by 2022. 

So is Google biding its time, working out what their next move is? 

We’ve already seen some interesting cookie workarounds coming from the tech giant in the past month, with its recently announced “Consent Mode” being far less reliant on the deployment of cookies for tracking. 

Watch this space.

Has Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking Affected Digital Marketing?

With 93.1% of iPhone users opting for Apple’s Safari, and 37.9% of Mac users browsing the web on Safari, ITP can potentially account for a lot of lost traffic to your website. Neither Apple nor Google has made any official statement about how ITP impacts Google Analytics, there is some evidence of the implications of blocking third-party cookies. 

Reviewing Safari traffic of our longest standing clients, we can draw an interesting conclusions to the impact of Apple’s push for privacy:

The primary impact Mackerel has identified is a clear jump in “New” Safari users visiting the site from April 2020 when ITP 2.0 was introduced:

We can see clear increases in “New Visitor” from Safari & iOS devices during May & October 2020. This strongly suggests that Apple’s updates to ITP (introduced one month before both the May & October spikes) have cleared the Google Analytics cookies stored on a users browser which would have previously identified the user as “returning” to the site. While a simple test, this information does allow us to understand that Apple’s ITP third-party cookie blocking does have an impact on the data we are seeing. More concerningly, this “refreshing” of a users data can impact any A/B tests advertisers are running – with a real potential that a single user could be placed into multiple experimental groups.

The impact of this discovery is that data for Safari devices may not be as accurate as pre-ITP times. However, as with all data interpretation, digital marketers need to be aware of the bigger picture – how are the trends on other devices shifting, and what can we learn from the data that IS available to us?

In addition to this, other digital marketing authorities eCPMs on Safari inventory are around 30% lower than Chrome due to identifying data on Safari audiences being stripped out – although this has not been verified by Mackerel Media.

Are There Any Benefits to the Introduction of ITP?

Since the rollout of ITP 1.0 Apple has faced a fierce backlash from the digital ad industry – which also relies heavily on tracking cookies to advertise. There’s no doubt that Apples’ push for user privacy on Safari has led to significant losses in advertising opportunities since it’s launch.

However, the most recent versions of ITP might actually be beneficial to digital advertisers by forcing marketers and agencies alike to focus on information that can be learned from first-party cookies only. 

Knowing what a user is most interested in on your website, where critical drop-off points occur and how buyers interacted with your business as a whole can lead to a more meaningful sales experience than a procedurally generated advert for a product 6 months after a user visited your site. 

By focusing on how best to optimise your wider digital marketing strategy and on-site user experience, you could argue that Safari’s ITP updates are actually beneficial to your businesses online presence.

And let’s not forget – Google isn’t going to take Apple eating into its bottom line lying down. 

Over the last few years the technical definition of Google Ads’ keyword match types has shifted massively, but the naming conventions have remained almost identical. With the upcoming addition of close variants, are we seeing a final nail in the coffin of precise keyword and search query management?

How are keyword Match Types Changing?

In a nutshell, Phrase & Broad Match Modified keywords will follow Exact match in triggering your ads for queries which share the same meaning or intent as your targeted keyword. This differs from the ‘close variant’ matches rolled out in 2014 which included “misspellings, singular or plural, stemmings, abbreviations and accents” for keywords. Instead, Google will now use its machine learning algorithms to identify if a users search query has the same intent as your targeted keywords.

In Google’s own example, we can see that not only does BMM now match to queries in any order, but individual targeted keywords can be entirely replaced by queries with a similar meaning – notice that ‘+mow’ is matched with ‘grass cutting’ and ‘cut your grass’.

Phrase Match keywords will soon also match for queries with a similar meaning – however unlike Broad Match Modified above, keyword order will be preserved. The example below shows “lawn mowing” matching “grass cutting” and “lawn cutting” then followed by “service” and “services” as expected.

What is still unclear is whether or not these upcoming changes to BMM and Phrase match targeting will use the same ‘implied information’ targeting that Exact match keywords have taken advantage of since last November. Exact “Implied Intent” matching allows Google’s machine learning algorithms to identify and match search queries containing additional longtail information to keywords in your account which you do not actively target. You can see an example of Mackerel Media’s own below:

We can see that while Mackerel Media only actively target [digital marketing edinburgh] Google’s Exact Match now ‘intelligently’ understands the intent of the query is relevant to the exact match keyword we targeted. Thats why our ads would trigger for ‘digital marketing agency Edinburgh Scotland’, ‘online digital marketing agency’ and ‘digital marketing agency Edinburgh’ – because the additional information is implied by the the keywords we target.

Avoiding Competing Keywords

At this point, you might be thinking “But what if I’m already targeting a keyword that is intelligently matched by Google – won’t this mean I’m competing against my own keywords?”.

Well, you’d be right – and Google knows it. To stop keywords that match a query from competing against each other and costing you more money, Google plans to introduce a change to it’s keyword selection process: 

“If a query currently matches to an exact, phrase, or broad match modifier keyword that exists in your account, we’ll prevent that query from matching to a different phrase or broad match modifier keyword that’s now eligible for the same auction as a result of this update.”

In other words, if you are already actively targeting a keyword that Google’s algorithms intelligently identify as part of a same-meaning close variant, only your actively targeted keyword will be eligible to trigger an ad. 

Why is Google Making These Changes?

Google claims that 15% of all search queries are new, and this means that advertisers are missing out on customers because the tightly controlled nature of the traditional Keyword Match Types means there is no real way to target every possible variation of a keyword. 

Ultimately, the changes are an excuse for Google to flex their evolving Machine Learning capabilities. By using AI to infer intent and fill in the gaps between targeted keywords & user queries, Google hopes to reduce the vast numbers of keywords digital marketers have to create to get their ads to trigger for relevant search queries.

As a counterpoint to this: consider a company we spoke to today, who spends a generous monthly sum on Google Ads but focuses on – wait for it – three keywords. Three. 3. Troi. Drei. 1-2-3. Three in total. Those are the only ones that convert for them, and the only ones that have ever converted profitably, in years of advertising. What will this change mean for them? More negative keyword management, more wasted budget and probably a harder job to keep their account KPIs on track.

What Can We Expect?

Unsurprisingly, Google expects advertisers to see a 3-4% increase in clicks for Broad Match Modified and Phrase Match keywords. In addition to this, Google claims that 85% of those clicks will come from keywords that advertisers do not actively target. 

In our opinion, this means that while clients can expect to receive more clicks to their site than ever before, keeping a close eye on the source of these clicks will be vital – checking and updating negative keyword lists will become a fundamental part of daily account management, ensuring that Ad Groups remain as focused and relevant as possible.

Consider also the halcyon days when exact match meant exact match, and nothing more. We spent a couple of weeks on the overhaul of a huge ad account with over 100k exact match and long phrase-match keywords, building out combinations upon combinations…but safe in the knowledge what we were bidding on is what we would get. Can you imagine doing that now? Clue – the answer is almost certainly “No!”