• 01 Dec 2020
  • 5 Min read

November 2020: Digital marketing news and Google updates

In November, the coronavirus pandemic led to a second UK-wide lockdown, which meant all unessential shops were forced to close their doors for a month. This means anyone looking to get a start on their Christmas shopping or take advantage of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales would have had to do so online.

As a result, November has been an especially busy month in the world of SEO and digital marketing. Figures showed just how popular online advertising has become this year, Google released some new features for marketers, and we received confirmation about a Google update that will be coming in 2021.

Here, we’ll take you through the four biggest digital marketing news stories of the last month, so you can make sure you’re up to date and getting the most out of your strategies. 

Big tech companies saw record ad revenue in Q3

At the beginning of November, numerous big tech companies announced their earnings for the third quarter of this year, and they had all seen a significant growth in their advertising revenue. This isn’t particularly surprising — as we covered in our blog post about how Covid-19 has affected our shopping habits, more and more people have been online shopping this year. So, it makes sense that companies are putting the majority of their marketing budgets into targeting online shoppers.

Amazon has certainly been a huge beneficiary of the pandemic, as it’s been the go-to online store for a lot of people throughout the ongoing crisis. The company has reported gross revenues of more than $96 billion, which is a growth of 37% YoY. Advertising makes up most of what they’ve reported as “other” revenue” in the company’s earnings statement. This reached around $5.4 billion, which is up more than 50% YoY.

Google reported just over $46 billion in total revenue, with $37 billion of this coming from ads. Paid search contributed $26.3 billion and YouTube contributed $5 billion. This represents a YoY increase of 6% and 32% respectively.

Facebook also generated $21.5 billion in third-quarter revenue. Almost 99% of this is from ad spending, and 90% comes from mobile user engagement.

This surge in online advertising shows that, if you aren’t taking advantage of paid search channels, you could be missing out on a lot of sales. So, if you don’t already have a PPC strategy in place, it’s well worth getting to it.

Google confirms its Page Experience update will launch in May

On 10 November, Google confirmed that it would be rolling out its Page Experience update in May 2021. After the update, expected user experience will become a ranking factor. The search engine will also test showing a “visual indicator that highlights pages in search results that have great page experience”.

In order to understand what kind of user experience your website offers, Google will consider a variety of different factors. These will include how quickly a page loads, whether it’s mobile-friendly, whether it runs on HTTPS, and if content jumps around the page as it loads.

We have a guide to the Google Page Experience update, which you can check out for more information on this development. And, if you think your site could use some tweaks ahead of the update, make sure you check out our blog post on how to ensure your website offers a positive user experience.

Google launches new Crawl Stats report in Search Console

Towards the end of the month, Google announced that it would be launching a new Crawl Stats report in Search Console. This is to “help website owners better understand how Googlebot crawls their sites”.

Four main features have been introduced:

  1. Total number of requests grouped by response code, crawled file type, crawl purpose, and Googlebot type
  2. Detailed information on host status
  3. URL examples to show where in your site requests occurred
  4. Comprehensive summary for properties with multiple hosts and support for domain properties

If you would like to learn more about this development and what it could mean for your business, we have a guide to the new Google Search Console Crawl Stats, which has all of the information you’ll need!

Google tested using multiple contextual links in Featured Snippets

In November, Google also began testing showing multiple contextual links in a single Featured Snippet. Usually, a Featured Snippet would only include one link, which would send you to the website where its content was taken from. In these new tests, additional links were also added to certain phrases that need more of an explanation, in Google’s eyes.

There is some controversy over this, though, as the added links won’t take you to the original page Google originally took the Snippet from. Instead, they would send you to other websites, potentially taking traffic away from the original content.

Google has stressed that this is only something they’re testing for now, and that they’ll continue to experiment with and refine the feature. Ultimately, Google always wants to help the searcher, and this feature could go a long way towards simplifying technical language and jargon. However, some digital marketers are worried that publishers could be hurt in the process.

You’re now up to date with all of the biggest SEO and digital marketing news stories of November 2020! If you would like more regular updates, make sure you follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

If you’re struggling to stay on top of your digital marketing, we also have SEO, PPC, and affiliate marketing experts who can help. If you would like a hand with devising your strategies and getting the results you’re looking for, get in touch today. We’ll be more than happy to help.


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