This Week in Digital Marketing - May 13, 2022

Another week, another set of updates and changes to the digital marketing space. We have new information about LinkedIn, Google, some email marketing tips, and more!

LinkedIn Changing Feed, Will Show Less Low-Quality Content, Polls
Several types of content, including polls and engagement bait, are now less visible in LinkedIn's feed.

• Less “low-quality content.” 
  
• Fewer polls. 
  
• Less irrelevant updates. 
  
• “I don’t want to see this.” 
  

Why We Care: These are great and necessary adjustments, and LinkedIn expects that they will result in a feed that is full of relevant, trustworthy, genuine, and authentic content. Hopefully, you haven't used engagement-baiting strategies for your clients or companies on LinkedIn (or yourself). If you have, be prepared for a drop in engagement and reach as LinkedIn's algorithm no longer rewards these approaches with increased visibility.

Google’s Responsive Display Ads Go Vertical for a Better Mobile Experience
In the second half of this year, the popular automatic display ad type Responsive Display Ads (RDAs) will undergo a dramatic makeover. RDAs have been the default display option since 2018, and these new changes are aimed at provide advertisers with a stronger mobile offering.

Why We Care: Google claims that combining a responsive display ad to an ad group with a static display ad results in "2X higher conversions, on average." Advertisers should be able to give more targeted messaging by device with this increased picture size and vertical video capabilities.

Six Ways Email Reporting Builds 
Email reporting, despite being a critical component of successful email marketing, can be a huge headache for many email teams. When the email team is small or the team controls other channels in addition to email, reporting often takes a back seat.

• Track trends: Reporting at several time periods, such as weekly, monthly, yearly, and year-over-year, will help you see where your data are trending up or down.
  
• Generate insights: Based on these trends, your reports will include your insights into identifying problems and offering ways to improve your program or new topics to investigate.
  
• Effective budgeting and planning: Regular reports will show you if you're spending your present budget wisely and will point out areas where you may need to seek additional funds to fill gaps or advance your program.
  
• Drive testing: The information you obtain from regular reporting can help you identify areas to test. This is far more than a one-time subject line or call-to-action test. Your reporting can instead be used to lead experiments in message content, design, strategy, and other high-level areas.
  
• Inform Leadership: Your leadership will be kept informed about your email performance thanks to an in-depth, organized report with data, analysis, and insights. If your executives know they'll learn something useful instead of merely staring at columns of statistics provided without context, they'll be more likely to read your reports.
  
• Demonstrate the importance of email to everyone: Reporting allows your entire email team to see how email contributes to the company's goals and bottom line. You can more readily develop a business case if everyone knows the value.
  

Whether you're putting together a presentation for your senior executives, preparing for your weekly team meeting, or summarizing what you know as a one-person email department, good reporting compels you to assess what the numbers tell you.

Google Now Allows Virtual Food Brands to Have Google Business Profiles
Google has revised the "rules for chains, departments, and individual practitioners" section of its Google Business profile guidelines page to allow virtual food brands to be featured with "conditions."

Why We Care: As a result, Google now allows virtual food companies to be listed in Google Business Profiles, as well as Google Maps and local search results. You can now show up in the local search results in Google Search and Google Maps if you have any clients who offer virtual food brands or if you run your own. This is true even when the company's address is not disclosed and there is no physical presence of the company other than another company slapping a fresh label on the product.

Google’s Digital Marketing Course Offers Bad SEO Device
Google’s official advice from the course:

• Write more than 300 words on your webpage.
  
  • Your webpage is more likely to be ranked higher in search engine result pages if you write a higher volume of quality content.
    
• Keep your keyword density below an industry standard of 2%.
  
  • This means that 2% of the words on the webpage or fewer should be target keywords.
    
• Be thoughtful about keyword placement.
  
  • Your keywords should be used only once in the following places on each page within your website: page title, subheading, first paragraph, and body conclusion. 
    

“I’m not on the team that produced that, nor are they part of the Search team,” Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, replied. “As someone from the Search team, we don’t recommend any limits or ‘density’ or anything like that. This can be ignored; I’ll pass it on.”

How Estimated Reading Times Increase Content Engagement
Mentioning an article's projected reading time appears to have a favorable impact on bounce rates and time spent on the site. According to a research conducted by Simpleview Europe, engagement rates increased by up to 40% once reading times were added to the post.

Online Inflation is Beginning to Ease
According to the newest Adobe Digital Price Index (DPI), online purchasing prices are still rising year over year, although at a slower pace. Prices rose 2.9 percent in April 2022 over April 2021, but fell short of the record-breaking 3.6 percent YoY increase witnessed in March. Although April marked the 23rd month of online price inflation, more over half of the Adobe-tracked categories had a price decrease from March to April.

The DPI is based on one trillion visits to retail sites and over 100 million SKUs across 18 product categories, and it is powered by Adobe Analytics.

Why We Care: The increase could not persist indefinitely. Digital purchasing took off like a rocket in 2020 and 2021, thanks to a mix of limited availability and pandemic-fueled demand. Prices, it appears, have risen as well. The recent DPI's minor flattening could reflect customers returning to brick-and-mortar purchasing, but it could also reflect waning consumer confidence in the economy as a whole.

Social Media Platforms See Sales Boost as Pandemic Shopping Habits Take Root
According to a new survey of over 7,000 global shoppers conducted by user-generated content company Bazaarvoice, digital consumers on social media are looking to buy, indicating that the steps social platforms are taking to make products more shoppable to fit pandemic-era digital behaviors are working.

Buy here now: 69 percent of shoppers think social media has influenced their purchasing decisions. And 54% said they'd be more ready to pay for things if they could get more information without having to go to another app or website.

Most Popular: The two most popular social sites worldwide, according to the report, are Facebook (where 45 percent of respondents engage) and Instagram (33 percent ).

Digital Marketing Snippets

• TikTok ads are a great option for e-commerce, especially unique products.
  
• U.S. cable subscriptions are down by 30 million since 2020. When it comes to television advertising, it’s important to consider all entertainment streams, not just satellite/cable options. Digital streaming services and Twitch/YouTube creators/channels are other options for advertising your company or products.
  

Some of this information is relevant to your business, and some of it might not be. This is where we can help. We’re able to break down these updates and figure out which ones are most important for you and your business. Contact us for a consultation!