JBs Digital Update 10th October 2023

This week’s digital excitement knows no bounds! Meta has released some Generative AI tools (nothing to do with the metaverse); Xitter is desperately trying to fill ad inventory; Google goes nuts with two core updates in two months; Google Business Profiles finally link to your social profiles; and those naught bosses at Google have been revealed as trying to manipulate search results for increased revenue. Is nothing sacred?

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Remember that Metaverse thing that Meta changed their name for? Yeah, nah, that ain’t happening. Instead Meta are now rolling out Generative AI as part of its Ad Manager platform, enabling advertisers to use AI to expand / tweak / clean up their ads. 

There are three elements currently: a background generator – so you can have multiple backgrounds to your product shots; an image expander, which is kind of a fancy crop tool, but enables the same image to be used across posts, stories and reels; and a text varier, designed the vary text and call out various highlights. So yeah. Handy, but not jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring if I’m honest.

All good, and all being released slowly, but it’s taking a while and it’s a bit meh. Considering how much these companies got caught with their pants down by the launch of AI, it’s taking a while for them to catch up. 

Talk to me if you want to chat Paid Social Media, or using AI for content, or just web technology and development. 

Ahh Twitter, the poster-child of reasoned, scholarly, debate and sensible shoes business management. Regrettably the actions of its owner Elon Musk appear to be coming home to roost in that ad revenue over the last 12 months has plummeted by significant amounts, and so they are having to hawk their inventory (or some of it) through Google Display Network. 

Selling your inventory through a third party is not a good sign. You either do not have enough inventory to make running your own ad sales department profitable, or your inventory value is not high enough to do so. Eek.

For a number of brands who made a conscious decision to step away from Twitter they may be making a swift move towards updating their exclusion lists to keep their ads off Twitter. (or they may miss the memo and their brands re-appear on Twitter). 

Of course, if you want to try Twitter ad spots and have campaigns running through GDN, this is a relatively pain-free way. 

Mind you, I remember when Rupert Murdoch took over MySpace and everybody laughed at him for selling his ad inventory to Google. But he only paid $1 billion and he pre-sold the space for something like $5 billion. That’s not happening in this case.

If you want to chat about social media, paid social, digital marketing and constructing proper marketing strategies with a VCMO, contact me. 

I’m pretty sure there was a Broad Core Update only a few weeks ago, and yes, yes there was. August 22nd in fact. Considering it’s now early October, that’s quite a quick release schedule. Maybe we are reverting to a monthly Google Dance?

Google is not known for speed and agility these days, so to have such a quick follow-on update is a bit surprising. It is not a rollback of the previous one (despite many site owners wishing, hoping, praying), Google doesn’t do that, and it’s much too soon for any issues with the August core update to come to light, go through the approvals chain and be released. 

Unfortunately, it’s also being released at the same time as a Spam Update, so no doubt that will go well, and people will end up getting very confused. My best guess is that this is part of the last core update but it didn’t get released at the time for some odd reason. 

From the last update content-rich and comparison sites (which tend to be content-rich) made gains. I have yet to see any substantive commentary on this one, or evidence of any particular issues yet. Generally, all updates tend to end up with “make your content better”, which is true for every day site optimisation, and this is likely to be no different. 

If you have a well-optimised, normal, site with decent quality content, and a normal backlink profile, chances are you won’t be affected. If you are over-optimised in any area, it’s quite possible you will. Build normal, decent sites people. 

Talk to me about SEO & Google update recovery, content strategy & creation, and replacing lost organic traffic with paid search if neccessary. 

It seems like Google is joining the 21st Century and allowing you to add your alternative social profiles to your business profile. Wonders will never cease. I had forgotten that Business Profiles didn’t have this, despite the Knowledge Panel on businesses often incorporating their social links. 

Better late than never I suppose, and if nothing else, make sure all of your social profiles, web properties and apps all link to each other using the same profiles and URLs. Consistency is absolutely key to the right Local Search signals being sent. 

Let’s chat about Local SEO, NAP, citations and the like. 

Google’s Antitrust hearings roll on, and they continue to provide shocking evidence / sad confirmation that Google is just like any other Big Corporation: obsessed with numbers, looking to use any and all methods to further itself, and only focused on the very short term. What quarterly reporting and quarterly bonuses do to the executive mind is writ large.

Following on from last week’s revelations that Google was fixing ad bid prices to increase profit, this week’s sad indictment is that Search, Ads and Chrome heads were working together to increase revenue from search by modifying the layout and by getting more search queries via Chrome, increasing revenue in both these instances by increasing the number of queries, due to making the user search again. Ouch. 

Google was once all about speed and winning by having the best product. Now it really is about time on Google page and the number of page views / ad views. To quote a not particularly likeable fellow: Sad.