top of page
Search

State of Digital: May 2020 Edition

  • Writer: Stephanie Danckert
    Stephanie Danckert
  • Jun 10, 2020
  • 7 min read

Updated: Jul 7, 2020

Digital is constantly changing and May 2020 saw some pretty big updates. This post contains brief updates for all channels.


COVID & Digital Marketing


COVID has changed the way we market and the way consumers. As economies reopen, companies should continue to be agile in their marketing efforts. Below are some resources from Now Loading, WordStream, Microsoft, Google and Pinterest on advertising and data/trends during COVID.



 

Q1 Revenue Reports


Google, and Facebook released their Q1 earnings and caution about earnings to come in Q2 and the rest of the year.


Google’s Q1 Ad Revenue Results

Google saw a strong Q1, beating analyst estimates. Ad sales were up about 10% versus Q1 of 2019, a dollar amount of $33.8 billion.


YouTube saw strong growth in users and consumption, despite the reduction in ad budget across many industries due to COVID.


Despite the strong start, Google does not feel optimistic for the rest of the year. As COVID-19 began to impact more businesses and consumers, ad revenues began to decrease. It is likely that this decrease will reflect in Q2 revenues and could possibly impact the rest of the year.


“Performance was strong during the first two months of the quarter, but then in March we experienced a significant slowdown in ad revenues.” – Ruth Porat, CFO of Google


There have been many analysts who lament the economic slowdown will last much longer than COVID-19 will, with a yawning recession to follow. This would continue to impact brands’ bottom lines, and their ability to expend marketing dollars.


Google’s full Q1 report can be viewed here.


Facebook’s Q1 Ad Revenue Results

Facebook saw similar growth to Google. Ad revenue grew 17% year over year for Q1, which is better than originally expected.



The final weeks of Q1 hurt Facebook’s growth as ad prices dropped and businesses

began pulling back on marketing budgets.


However, with a large portion of the population experiencing shelter-in-place orders,

Facebook saw an increase in engagement.

Year over year, Facebook itself saw an 11% increase in daily active users. The other

Facebook apps (Instagram, Messenger and Whatapp) saw a 12% year over year increase

in daily active users.


As Whatapp and Messenger aren’t monetized, this increased in engagement does not

help the company’s ad revenue bottom lines, though it’s likely that usage will continue

to grow.


“The impact on our business has been significant, and I remain very concerned that this health emergency, and therefore the economic fallout, will last longer than people are currently anticipating.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook’s full Q1 report can be found here.



 

Platform Updates


SEO


Google May 2020 Core update

This was a pretty big update. The update started on May 4th and finished May18th. So what happened in those two weeks?


This monster of an update has impacted organic search results more significantly than the previous Core Update from earlier this year.


According to SEMRush’s data, the industries most impacted were travel, real estate, health, pets & animals, and people & society. Their data also contained a list of the big winners and losers of the update. The winners were local.com, yellowpages.com, superpages.com, businesswire.com, prnewswire.com, globenewswire.com, xe.com, mapquest.com, and gamekidgame.com. The losers included linkedin.com (note, LinkedIn did drop off of SEO search on May 6th for the day due to technical issues), manta.com, allmusic.com, idaily.com, nypost.com, discogs.com, afiavillage.com, eventbrite.com, peoplepill.com and owler.com.


The update was met with a lot of negative feedback and some confusion over why certain sites ,like Pintrest, were now dominating the SERP.


Trying to determine how your site was impacted by the core update? Make sure you’re comparing the data correctly. The “‘pre” period should include data predating May 3rd. As this was a two week roll out, your post analysis should begin on May 19th.


Need more information? Here are some great resources from leading industry experts:

 

Performance Marketing


Google’s Smart Shopping product is currently beta testing a new Conversion goal: New Customer Acquisition.Shortened to “NCA,” this new goal type will allow advertisers to create Smart Shopping campaigns optimizing towards acquiring new customers specifically.


For Google’s system to know whether a user is new or not, three things will be taking into consideration:

  • Google’s Native Data: 540 day lookback window used based on Google’s own data. This automatically happens when the NCA Goal is chosen.

  • Self-Reported Data: Advertisers can tag new customers with a combination of the Global Site Tag and new customer parameters.

  • First-Party List: Advertisers can upload their customer list to Google Ads


To set up the new goal, go to the conversion goals section of your campaign. There will be a new option for “New customer acquisition.” Select this and assign a value.



Google has noted that a Lifetime Value Tag will be available in the future.


To access this beta, contact your Google rep.


With Retail Category Reporting, advertisers can now see performance for pre-defined product categories across Search and Shopping campaigns in one report.


Advertisers can access the retail category reports either through Google Ads’ predefined reports or through a customized report in the Report Editor.


Google is launching a commissions (per stay) program allowing Hotel ads partners to pay a commission only if a customer follows through with their stay, automatically adjusting bids to maximize booking value. In the next few weeks, a “Free Cancellation” filter will be available to users searching for hotels. This will highlight which hotel rates are refundable as users are looking to book.

With this update, Google is attempting to assist advertisers with future bookings.


Gallery Ads (introduced last year) will be retired. Moving forward, Image extensions will receive additional testing focus.


Last year, Google introduced Discovery campaigns to help advertisers reach consumers when in the learning phase regarding new products and services.


Facebook has had shops on it’s platform for quite some time, but the new shop features go far beyond what the previous version offered.

Now, advertisers can customize their virtual storefronts with customizable fonts and coloring. Users can convert and checkout without ever having to leave the app. Businesses have more control and the experience is more convenient to the user.


Facebook has announced that there are plans to roll out additional features, including loyalty programs and live shopping options.


These changes have also been rolled out to Instagram.



Facebook is aware that small and local businesses are hurting right now and seeing significant financial losses. Facebook has been working on rolling out new features designed to promote and support small businesses.

#SupportSmallBusiness is a new hashtag created in the app to encourage users to show their love for small businesses. Similarly, creators can use “in support of” tags to promote small businesses to their followers.


Facebook is also prioritizing their “Businesses Nearby” feature to help users discover more local businesses.


Facebook has implemented these changes on Instagram as well.


As more advertisers turn towards digital to reach their audiences, Facebook has added several new courses to BluePrint to help them get started: Blueprint just rolled out 15 new courses, including the following:


✔️Decide Who You Want to Reach

✔️Map the Customer Journey

✔️Set Marketing Goals

✔️Select Your Marketing Channels

✔️Tell Your Business Story

✔️Create and Manage a Content Calendar

✔️Create Authentic Messages

✔️Stay Connected to Customers Online

✔️Bring Your Business Online with Instagram

✔️Attract an Audience on Social Media

✔️Engage with People and Build an Audience

✔️Plan What to Post on Instagram

✔️Communicate with Customers on WhatsApp

✔️Set Up Digital Gift Cards for Your Business


Best part about these courses. They’re FREE! Learn how to make money on Facebook Ads for free? Yeah, I'm interested.

You can check out more of their courses here


Aware that users have been forced to move towards online communication, Facebook has been working to keep up. Facebook has just launched the new app “CatchUp” which was created to facilitate group chats.

Think of this as Messenger Rooms but for voice calls. Users can use it to speak with someone one-on-one or use it for it’s group calling feature.

This is basically Messenger Rooms for voice calls, allowing you to call users one-on-one or in groups.

Currently, this app won’t impact marketers that much, but it’s good for us to be aware of it. As many users already have tools with one-on-one call and group call features, it will be interesting to watch how (and if) this picks up.


Pintrest launched a new app with Shopify that allows Shopify’s merchants to quickly (and easily) upload their catalogs to Pintrest and turn their products into shoppable Product Pins.


The app includes a suite of shopping features (tags, catalog ingestion, ads buying interface, etc) making it easy for Shopify merchants to showcase products on Pintrest, report on results and maximize their reach. Easy for all businesses to use as the app automatically creates a connection between the store and Pintrest -- no coding required.


In April, Pintrest introduced many new updates to their shopping features. In May, shopping was about giving users inspiration with “shopping spotlights” Shopping Spotlights bring the expert recommendations from publishers and influential fashion/ home influencers directly to the user. In addition to seeing the top picks, it will be easy for users to shop curated ideas based on what is currently trending.



Twitter is testing out new conversation settings for users to choose who can reply to their tweet and join the conversation. This setting is still currently in Beta, but it will allow users to limit irrelevant conversations. As Twitter is a platform focused on public conversation, the platform did announce that they are looking to continue to improve these settings as well to continue to give users the ability to weigh in on conversations while still giving users control over the conversations they start.




 

Any other interesting updates from May catch your eye? Share links below!


Commentaires

More About Me

About Me

10 years in Paid Media. Passionate about omni-channel marketing approaches, data analysis, wine and travel. 

 

Read More

 

Privacy Policy 2020

Disclaimer Policy 2020

Terms & Conditions 2020

© 2023 by Going Places. Proudly created with Wix.com

Join My Mailing List

Thanks for submitting!

  • White Facebook Icon
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
bottom of page