This week in search marketing [14/10/2019]

Monday

Survey uncovers SEO challenges

Zazzle Media’s second annual State of SEO Survey has assessed the value and ROI of SEO, looking at its impact in securing funds or resources. The data suggests that 60% of marketers find that resources and a shortage of budget are the main reasons they don’t spend more on organic search activity. However, almost a third of surveyed marketers still don’t know how to measure the impact of SEO on their results. A quarter of those surveyed called for clearer guidelines on best practice from Google Webmasters, revealing that there is, in fact, a knowledge and skills gap around SEO.

Tuesday

Personalisation key to email marketing success

People are now spending less time checking their emails, according to research from Adobe. Personal emails have seen the biggest drop since 2016, in terms of minutes spent checking them,. When it comes to business emails, while they are checked less than in 2016, they have seen an increase in minutes being spent looking at them compared to 2017 and 2018.

Accurate personalisation is important, especially for Millennials and to B2C recipients. The biggest frustration with both work and personal emails is that the recommendations provided don’t match the recipient’s interests (33% work email and 31% personal email).

Bing tests content submission pilot

Bing is testing a feature to let some publishers submit their full content and images as well as their URLs.  This will allow the search engine to see your content without actually crawling the content first. There is no public documentation as of yet and no way to be part of this pilot.

YouTube tests tool to reserves ads in advance

YouTube is testing a new Instant Review tool in Google Ads that allows advertisers to reserve ad space on a 120 day-rolling window via an automated process with no minimum spend. The tool is being tested globally by advertisers across multiple industries, including consumer goods, media and entertainment, food and beverage and politics. YouTube did not release an announcement when the tool was launched, but the Wall Street Journal reports political advertisers, and “hundreds” of other advertisers, were given access to it in early September.

Social media ad spend to surpass print

Advertisers will spend more on social media platforms than on print for the first time this year, according to Zenith’s Advertising Expenditure Forecasts. Advertising expenditure on social media will grow 20% this year to reach US$84bn, while advertisers’ combined expenditure on newspapers and magazines will fall 6% to US$69bn.

Social media will be the third largest channel for advertising this year, with a 13% share of global adspend, behind television (29%) and paid search (17%). Its growth is slowing as it matures, and is forecast at 17% in 2020 and 13% in 2021, when it will account for 16% of all global ad spend.

Paid search advertising will exceed US$100bn for the first time.

Keep up to date with the latest news as well as our other blogs and resources by signing up to our mailing list – or contact us today to see what we can do for your brand.