With April now in the rearview mirror, it’s time to take a look at the big stories in digital marketing in the past month. As you may have guessed, Google has yet again taken over the headlines in all three segments covered in our roundup. While there were certainly some interesting stories from the search giant in April, it faced some challenges, too.
Keep reading to learn more about those stories and others in our April 2022 Digital Roundup!
SEO stories
Google crawls and indexes images slower than pages
Did you know that Google indexes and crawls images at a much slower rate than web pages? Google’s John Mueller made this very clear in an Office Hours chat in April. As he explained, a site that relies heavily on images (like a recipe site) may run into indexing issues if the webmaster was to, say, update thousands of images at once. There are ways to get around this, though, and Mueller recommends a faster server response and redirecting previous image URLs to the new ones. You can get the full story at Search Engine Journal.
Google is testing two new types of featured snippets
Google is trying out a pair of new featured snippet types called “From the web” and “Other sites say.” Per Barry Schwartz’s reporting at Search Engine Roundtable, the “From the web” snippet looks to provide multiple responses and sources for a query. In this case, the SERP for the query “expressvpn review” highlighted quotes from three different reviews. As for “Other sites say,” the SERP for “benefits of carrots” had one major featured snippet followed by quotes and links to additional sites. Check out the SER article for more info.
Paid media stories
Updated features coming to Performance Max campaigns
Google announced that it’s rolling out several updated features for Performance Max campaigns throughout May, including the option to target new customers only. This “new customer acquisition goal” is particularly good news for lead gen accounts, because it allows you to focus optimizations on new leads or bid more for new customers. There’s also the up-coming “consumer interest insights” feature, which will uncover more information about how your customers view and react to your ads. You can learn more about these changes in Google’s announcement.
Quick reminder for everyone: Smart shopping and local campaigns will automatically upgrade to Performance Max between July and September 2022.
From Google to Facebook, platforms plagued by bugs
A lot of bugs plagued major platforms this past month, leading to headaches for those using Google Analytics (latency issues), Google Ads (even more latency issues), and Facebook (Meta bug turning off ads). But it wasn’t all bad! In better reporting news, Google Ads released MCC level dashboards that are both faster and easier to use than before. Plus, Google Ads added new functionality to custom columns, which our team was very happy to see.
Digital analytics stories
French sites ordered to stop using Google Analytics
Three French websites were ordered to stop using Google Analytics (GA) following an investigation by data watchdog group Commission Nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL). CNIL deemed GA as “illegal” under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). And if the sites don’t comply within 30 days, the site owners may face fines of up to €20 million, “or 4% of the annual turnover,” according to Adweek. The worry is there could be a domino effect in which other countries—namely Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Poland—make similar rulings. We’ll be sure to keep you updated.
Apple privacy changes had little impact on tracking, per study
We’ve covered Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes in our roundups over the past year or so, particularly in regards to the impact on data tracking. But according to an Oxford study, there may not have been much of a difference, if any, for larger companies engaging in tracking. The study found that major data brokers have moved on to non-invasive tracking techniques, such as fingerprinting. The study also stated that Apple may have made it more difficult to track individuals, but “they reinforce[d] existing market power of gatekeeper companies with access to large troves of first-party data.” You can get the full story at The Register.
Ayima news
Ayima earns Amazon Ads Verified Partner status
We're happy to announce we achieved the status of Amazon Ads Verified Partner. We accomplished this by demonstrating our expertise and delivering results for advertisers. This status gives our team access to new learning, developer, and product resources that we can leverage for our clients.
Ayima Insights articles
Here’s what we published in April 2022:
- SEO Reporting with the Ayima Reporting Tool: Client Growth Manager Richard Ingilby provides a case study detailing why our Ayima Reporting Tool (ART) is so useful for SEOs.
- Free Python Script for Google Ads n-grams: What are n-grams exactly and how can you use them? Richard Ingilby explains why you should know more about this “significant weapon for analyzing search queries” along with a free script to use them.
