14 Feb 2024
- 27 Sep 2016
- 4 Min read
Industry round-up: Penguin 4.0 goes live and our online shopping habits are revealed
In this edition of our industry round-up you’ll find all of the latest digital marketing news, including: the details of Google’s latest Penguin update and Twitter’s extended word count, as well as the results of a new survey that reveals our online shopping habits.
Penguin 4.0 finally goes live
On 23rd September, Google began rolling out the much-anticipated fourth update to its Penguin algorithm. So, what’s new?
In a post on the webmaster blog, Google announced that Penguin now works in real-time. The algorithm, which is designed to detect sites that are unethically manipulating Google’s algorithm, has historically only analysed each site periodically. If your site was hit with a penalty after one of these checks, this would remain in place until the next time it was analysed, which could be months later.
With this latest update, these delays are set to be a thing of the past, as the algorithm will work in real-time alongside the Google bots that crawl and index pages across the web. This will ensure that websites engaging in spammy practices are instantly caught, those who have cleaned up their act are rewarded for doing so in real-time, and users are ultimately provided with the best possible search results.
Google also says that Penguin is set to be more “granular”. They don’t clarify exactly what this means, but Search Engine Land suggests that Penguin 4.0 may penalise individual pages rather than the entirety of a site in some cases.
New research reveals consumers’ online shopping habits
In its most recent e-commerce report, Monetate analysed more than seven billion online shopping sessions and found that just 42% of purchases happen within an hour of a customer’s first visit to an e-commerce site. The majority of purchases, then, happen after consumers have checked out the competition, done their research, and thought about their decision.
With this in mind, what can digital marketers do to increase the chance of a sale?
Firstly, knowing when your customers are most likely to make a purchase will help you get the biggest bang from your buck when it comes to pop-ups, remarketing emails, and mobile push notifications.
Secondly, as visitors to your site will more than likely to do their research before making a purchase, it’s wise to focus your efforts on providing them with the information they need during the information gathering phase to help guide them through the sales funnel. You can do this by publishing quality comparison guides, as well as making sure your site shows visitors why your products stand apart from the competition through your on-site copy and product videos. If you don’t provide potential customers with this information on your site, they are likely to try and find it elsewhere, meaning you might miss out on a sale.
Twitter extends its character limit
Way back in our first industry round-up of 2016, we reported that Twitter was planning on increasing its famous 140-character limit to a massive 10,000 words.
However, since then, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has taken a step back from this rumour, tweeting in January that the 140-character limit is a “beautiful constraint”. He said that “the majority of tweets will always be short and sweet and conversational”, but didn’t deny that the limit may be increased at a later date. Somewhat ironically, he conveyed this information through a screenshot of a long-form transcript rather than in 140-character snippets.
— 🚶🏽jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
Back in May, the company announced in a blog post that the 140-character limit is going to remain in place, but media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer count towards it. Neither will mentions when they’re used at the beginning of replies.
While nowhere near the wholesale change to the platform that was rumoured at the start of the year, this change — which was finally rolled out on 19th September — will give users a lot more leeway when composing their tweets.
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