A monthly update on overall marketing trends, PPC search and social, SEO, and development trends.

Happy June everyone! We’ve got another Digital Marketing Industry Insights for you all. We ship these newsletters to our team and clients on the first of every month. If you’d like to receive these via email, join our email list!

The digital marketing world is changing fast, and we’re dedicated to keeping everyone in the loop with the latest insights. We believe staying ahead is key, and we’re here to share new and helpful information with you. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Let’s dive in!

Overall Marketing Trends/Insights:

• Shopify Checkout Extensibility
  • A big change is coming to Shopify’s checkout that needs to be taken care of before 8/13/24 for Shopify Plus users (non-Shopify Plus users have until 8/25/25). We’ve put together a blog post in the link above that outlines exactly what’s happening and how to take care of it before it becomes a bigger issue.
• ChatGPT 4o Has Been Released
  • OpenAI released GPT-4o, a new model that can process and generate text, audio, image, and video inputs and outputs, offering faster performance, improved multilingual capabilities, and enhanced vision and audio understanding. If you’re looking to test out the voice assistant, you’ll need to download the mobile app.
• US Consumer Confidence Improves in May
  • Consumer confidence has shown slight improvements among higher-income and younger demographics. Despite this, the overall sentiment remains cautious, especially regarding long-term financial stability and recession risks​.

Search Insights:

• Google Rolls Out Immersive Ad Types
  • Getting used to image extensions in search ads? Buckle up for video now being incorporated into search ads as well.
  • The apparel industry is now getting a huge boost in the ability to showcase their products, with Google now launching the ability for brands to show how their products fit different-sized people.
  • Do you sell shoes? Expect to see 3D models of all your shoes appear in shopping ads now, with a 360-degree view of your shoes, provided merchants share these videos.
• Google Testing Ads In AI Overviews
  • Buckle up, it has begun. Google will now start testing ads and sponsored links in AI overviews as Google continues to roll out SGE and monetize their new AI offerings. Existing search, PMax and shopping campaigns will be opted into these new offerings.
• Search CPCs Rise Again – And CVR Falls
  • Just like 2023, we’re once again seeing CPCs increase year over year, while CVR continues to decrease across most industries. This is likely related to more competition entering the market, the rise of Performance Max and/or competition increasing their bids – with some speculation that Google is increasing bid floors. Interestingly enough, CVR increased year over year by around 112% for the apparel/fashion & jewelry industry.
• Google Expands PMax To Online Marketplaces
  • Want to drive more traffic to Amazon or Walmart.com outside of search ads or Amazon Ads? Google now allows you to connect Google Ads to your other marketplace listings and send traffic directly there!
• You can now create Performance Max Campaigns in Google Ads scripts

Amazon Insights:

• Amazon’s New Social Attribution
  • Amazon has integrated social attribution, allowing seamless checkout on Facebook and Instagram, enabling accurate attribution and retargeting opportunities for brands.
• New Creative Format For Sponsored Brands
  • This new beta has only been rolled out to a few brands, but Amazon has launched a new Sponsored Brands ad format. This new ad format includes a header that showcases a brand’s store and displays multiple ASINs.
• Negative Product Targeting In Sponsored Display
  • The new feature of negative product targeting in Sponsored Display campaigns allows advertisers to exclude non-converting ASINs or brands, optimizing ad spend and improving targeting efficiency, although it’s not available for vCPM campaigns.
• New Inventory Age & Excess Analytics Dashboard 
  • This new tool was designed to offer sellers a concise overview of their inventory’s aging trends. It also highlights correlations between various metrics and aging inventory, while providing insights into excess inventory recommendations and aged inventory surcharges.
• New Audiences Added To Brand Tailored Promotions
  • Amazon has added three new audiences to brand tailored promotions, these include:
    • Declining Promising: Customers from your brand’s Promising audience who are predicted to spend less with your brand in the coming year.
    • Declining Top-Tier: Customers from your brand’s Top-Tier audience who are predicted to spend less with your brand in the coming year.
    • Promising: Customers who have purchased recently, buy occasionally, and spend above average. To convert them into Loyal customers, encourage purchases through marketing engagement.
• Sponsored TV Introduces 6 New Metrics
  • Add to cart, add to cart from clicks, add to cart from views, detail page view (new to brand), detail page views from clicks (new to brand), and detail page views from views (new to brand) are now available metrics for sponsored TV.
• New Listing Quality Check Note
  • When setting up a campaign, there is now a quality check note that indicates if the product listing quality meets the standard for ads to generate impressions and clicks.
• Amazon Introduces New AI Feature
  • The LLM model will answer any product-related queries in real-time on the product detail page. It analyzes listing content, reviews, Q&A’s, and web information about the product and brand to provide answers in the Q&A section.
• New Feature Displaying Customer Ratings 
  • Customer ratings are now displayed directly below the product bullet points. This allows potential buyers to quickly gauge customer opinion before deciding to purchase.
• New ‘+’ Sign On Products Main Image On Mobile
  • Now, when shoppers browse on their phones, a “+” plus sign appears in the left corner of the main image on product listings. Clicking on this plus sign reveals 14 additional items similar to the one being viewed, applicable to both advertised and non-advertised listings.
• Amazon Updated It’s Advertising Console UI
  • The new interface aims to enhance user experience with a more intuitive layout, detailed insights and easier access to key metrics.Users have also noted faster load times and smoother transitions between sections.

Social Insights:

• TikTok Strengthens Their Approach To Countering Influence Attempts 
  • They share updates on their ongoing work to counter influence attempts on TikTok. This is especially pertinent during an election year. 
• UMG and TikTok Announce New Licensing Agreement 
  • This new agreement allows Universal Music Group’s global family of songwriters and labels to return their music to TikTok’s community.
•  TikTok Is Working To Increase Transparency Around AI 
  • Much like Meta, TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content when it’s uploaded from certain platforms. They’re partnering with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity to become the first video-sharing platform to implement their Content Credentials technology. 
• Reddit Explores Advertising In Its Search Results Page 
  • The Reddit platform has over 1 billion monthly searches on the platform. This creates a huge opportunity for high-intent impressions for advertisers. 
• New Stickers Available For Instagram Stories 
  • Instagram rolls out new stickers so you can kick off music trends, create custom stickers from your photos or videos, post a secret story, and more. New stickers include Add Yours Music, Frames, Reveal, and Cutouts. 

SEO Insights:

• Google’s AI Search Errors Cause a Furor Online
  • Google has rolled out AI Overviews in Search Results and they’re receiving national attention, but for the wrong reasons. Users are sharing instances of the AI Overviews displaying incorrect, nonsensical and sometimes dangerous outputs. 
• Google’s AI Overviews Shake Up Ecommerce Search Visibility 
  • 16% of eCommerce queries now return an AI Overview in the search results, accounting for 13% of total search volume in the sector
  • 80% of the sources cited in eCommerce AI Overviews do not rank organically
  • Rather than summarizing information from the organically ranking collection and category pages, Google is highlighting individual Product Pages in their eCommerce AI Overviews. 
  • To capitalize, clients should optimize PDPs with useful information, product reviews and high-quality images. 
• Google Rolls Out New ‘Web’ Filter for Search Results
  • Google launched a new “Web” filter that shows only text-based links, a throwback to when search results were more straightforward–before AI and Rich Results. The filter appears on the top of the results page alongside other filters as images or videos.
• Google Search API Leak
  • Google’s internal API documentation was leaked, revealing complex mechanisms like NavBoost, which uses Chrome clickstream data to enhance search rankings. Key insights include Google’s reliance on user engagement metrics, click data, and quality rater feedback, as well as the use of whitelists during major events. It confirmed SEOs should focus on building recognized brands and improving user engagement.
• ​Google Search Liaison: “We have not gone live with algorithmic actions on site reputation abuse”
  • ​Danny Sullivan says that Google will be very clear when the algorithmic action on “site reputation abuse” goes live.

Development/Conversion Tracking Insights:

• Extensions added to Github Copilot
  • Copilot – the revolutionary AI powered coding virtual assistant will gain the ability to use 3rd party extensions
• Stack overflow partnering up with OpenAI
  • Stack Overflow and OpenAI have announced a partnership that aims to provide developers with accurate and vetted solutions by integrating Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI and validated technical knowledge into OpenAI’s products, including ChatGPT.
• Bot traffic accounts for a huge portion of internet traffic
  • In 2023, nearly half of internet traffic was generated by bad bots, which exploited applications and APIs.

That wraps up our Digital Marketing Industry Insights for this month! Subscribe to our mailing list to get these updates every month, and if you have any questions, reach out to us at info@digitalposition.com.