Digital Marketing News – Top 5 Stories, January 2017

Keeping up with digital news and trends can be time-consuming. Let Adam from our Digital Marketing Team take you through the top 5 things to come out of the Digital Marketing sphere in January!

5. Google Maps Parking Difficulty

You know what it’s like, you’re in a rush to get somewhere and once you get there it is a right royal pain to find somewhere to park. Well worry no more as Google Maps now includes parking difficulty for locations.

While this is currently only available in the US, expect it to hit our shores soon.

Full announcement: https://blog.google/products/maps/know-you-go-parking-difficulty-google-maps/

4. Bing Ads Is Making Your Life A Little Easier

One of Bing Ad’s most popular and used features is the Google Import. This allows users to effortlessly copy over their Google Ads to Bing’s platform.

Bing is now making this even easier with automatic imports which can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly and take the hassle out of managing it – no more manual updates to ad text!

As you’d expect, the platform allows complete control by campaign. This allows users to pause, delete or adjust settings for imports.

Not every AdWords optimisation will or should translate to Bing, of course, but this can help advertisers that are low on resources ensure that ad copy, landing pages and promotions used in ad extensions are updated uniformly across both Google and Bing, for example.

Full article: http://searchengineland.com/bing-ads-automated-imports-adwords-campaigns-267996

3. Mobile Pop-Up Penalty

Google is finally doing something about those annoying ads which pop-up on websites as soon as you load them up. Google confirmed the penalty began rolling out on January 10^th 2017 but only impacts websites where the pop-up is intrusive to the user experience.

Google explained which types of pop-ups are an issue:

• Showing a pop-up that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results or while they are looking through the page.
• Displaying a standalone pop-up that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
• Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone popup, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.

Although there are some pop-ups which would not be affected, leading to the standard Google grey area. Pop-ups not to be included:

• Pop-ups that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
• Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable.
• Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible.

Full article: http://searchengineland.com/searchcap-google-interstitial-penalty-adwords-pathways-267423

2. Google’s Mobile-First Index Is Coming

In 2016 Google saw more searches performed on mobile devices than desktops and laptops combined. It’s not surprising really – in a world of smart phones who has time to wait for a computer to load up? That is so 2014!

In 2017 Google will move away from separate indexes for desktop and mobile and just have one index – The Mobile Index.

This means that you will need to make sure the users have a great experience on their mobile when they are on your site as well as desktops.

While this is a big shift in thinking, it should really be viewed as an opportunity to refresh your website and make sure it performs equally well on all devices.

Full article: http://searchengineland.com/simple-google-mobile-index-preparation-checklist-266074

1. Chrome Lets Users Know your Site Is Not Secure

That’s right – the change we knew was coming has finally landed and now it has never been more important to have an SSL certificate for your website.

Without one, at best, your website looks insecure, at worst, broken.

Google has been using HTTPS as a search ranking factor since August 2014, so this change shouldn’t come as a shock, but with ever increasing security concerns comes the desire for Google to do something about it.

Read Mike Finn’s blog article Should you secure your site with SSL - here.

Further to this, why not share your thoughts on the topics above via the link below or alternatively, submit your brain puzzling marketing quandaries to one of our digital nerds by coming along to our Marketing Leaders Lunch