Industry NewsOrganic Search (SEO)Paid Search (PPC) Content This week in search marketing [01/07/2019] Jul 1st, 2019 Another week, another week in search, with a potential update on the 27th, there were a few stories reporting on the effects, but I’m sure there’ll be many more Thursday Podcasts The Drum featured an article today on a pet subject of mine – finding that “86% of advertising agencies and 66% of brand advertisers see digital audio as a “key part” of their integrated media strategies”, and that 85% of respondents to a survey will be increasing spend on digital audio in the next 12 months. Wednesday Instagram Instagram engagement is down according to a study covered by Search Engine Journal. The engagement stats are averaging at around 0.9% the study says – an 18% reduction since the beginning of 2019. Elimentary If it isn’t the name of the new Watson Marketing, then I’m afraid that is the final sign of the end times and we may as well pack it all in. Either way, the extremely impressive IBM AI’s marketing arm has split from the parent company in order to adopt a more agile growth strategy. They’ll be looking to deliver AI powered analytics and marketing automation and, if the demonstrations of IBMs AI work elsewhere is anything to go by, it will be well worth keeping an eye on. Tuesday Robots.txt Google are set to formalise the exclusion protocols for robots.txt and while Gary Illyes has stated that nothing is changing (as you can see in this Search Engine Land article), they have also announced that will no longer be supporting noindex in robots.txt (it’s fine in meta tags, so no need to worry if you’ve been doing it right so far). You can find a full list of the changes here. Privacy concerns slows US smart speaker sales Marketing Land featured a story on the negative impact that the proliferation of privacy horror stories has slowed the smart speaker adoption in the US. While there were plenty of positive stats (150+ million speakers in 50+ million homes), the following should give the big tech firms something to think about regarding their privacy policies. Monday AMP Autocomplete SEJournal featured a story over the weekend on the fact that Google’s AMP project will now allow for autocomplete options for forms and searches. While the industry at large remains largely unconvinced by AMP, the option for autocomplete and the additional speed boost it represents is another plus for the project. Microsoft Ads add parallel tracking I missed it last week, but came across an article on the Microsoft Ads blog announcing that they will be allowing parallel tracking of ad URLs. Rather than the couple of seconds it takes to redirect through various tracking URLs, consumers clicking on an ad, the blog says, will be taken directly to the final URL while the various measurements continue in the background. Amazon Prime Day Prime Day is set to return on the 15th and 16th of July, say Marketing Week, with the retailer promising “more great offers than ever before” while Prime members will get the first look at the offers available with early access to savings (two weeks ahead). The whole event will have a much more Amazon product focus this time, however, with many large discounts specifically on their own product lines. If you want to get yourself ready for Prime Day, we’ve got you covered. There’ll be plenty more news in the coming days, why not make sure you don’t miss a thing by signing up to our blog? Or contact us today to see what we can do for you.