[Ep110] - Google Announces May 2022 Broad Core (SEO) Update

In 14 mins, get up to speed on the must-know Digital Marketing updates from the week of 23rd May 2022.
1. Post To TikTok From Your Favorite Social Media Management Tools - TikTok's Marketing Partners Program has expanded to include a new set of social media management tools that will allow you to organize, schedule, and, yes, publish content to TikTok from your preferred platform. Per TikTok:

“Today, we are excited to introduce the TikTok Marketing Partners Program’s inaugural group of badged partners in the Content Marketing specialty. These eight industry leaders - Brandwatch, Dash Hudson, Emplifi, Hootsuite, Khoros, Later, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social - have built innovative solutions that make it easier for brands to publish, manage, and track their content on TikTok, all within the content management tools that brands already use and love. We are excited to connect brands with these trusted partners who can help them lean into and level up their TikTok-first content strategies.”

This will make planning and posting TikTok updates much easier, as well as streamlining the repurposing process so you can re-share your video assets across platforms.


2. TikTok Introduces Livestream Subscription Service - You can now subscribe to your favorite LIVE TikTok creators with a monthly membership to LIVE Subscription.

Currently, LIVE Subscription is only available to invited TikTok creators, and it will be available to everyone in the following months. This functionality contributes to TikTok's efforts to give creators more ways to earn money on the platform.

The current subscriber benefits are fairly similar to those found on Twitch and YouTube. Subscribers will receive badges that will be displayed next to their names, as well as personalized emotes to use in chat and access to a subscriber-only chat.



3. Ads In YouTube Shorts - With Shorts now driving more than 30 billion daily views, Google will be a fool not to monetize it without Ads. Now Google revealed at its Marketing Live event this week that it will begin to gradually roll out ads in YouTube Shorts around the world. The company has been experimenting with ads in YouTube Shorts since last year. 

Video action marketing and app campaigns will automatically scale to YouTube Shorts starting this week. Advertisers will be able to connect their product feed to their video campaigns later this year, making their video advertising on YouTube Shorts more shoppable. 

FYI: TikTok already has shoppable video ads, allowing users to view things without having to switch to a browser.



4. Google Marketing Live ‘22 Event Announcements - Google's Discover feeds are getting additional additional video options.

“Discover is where people scroll through their favorite personalized content for ideas and inspiration. We’re exploring ways to help you bring short video assets to Google’s feeds so you can offer more compelling and engaging ad experiences.”

Although Discover is a less-used personalization feature within the Google app, the new video ad possibilities may assist to engage with users who are interested in specific themes and trends.

A/B testing, support for store sales targets to optimize for in-store sales, new insights and explanations, including attribution, audience and auction data, and optimization score and suggestions, are all part of Google's Performance Max updates. Performance Max campaigns enable advertisers to effectively extend their Search ad efforts, by enabling Google’s system to showcase your promotions across more surfaces.

In order to increase contextual understanding and targeting, Google is now adding fresh search data to its ad insights page.

“Based on the billions of searches we see every day and the millions of signals we analyze for every ad auction, we’re introducing three new reports that will roll out worldwide over the coming months.”

The three new reports are:
  1. Attribution insights - show how your ads work together across Google surfaces — like Search, Display and YouTube — to drive conversions.
  2. Budget insights - find new opportunities for budget optimization and show how your spend is pacing against your budget goals.
  3. Audience insights - for first-party data show how your customer segments, like those created with Customer Match, are driving campaign performance.
Google is also introducing automatically generated assets for responsive search advertising, which will generate assets for your campaigns based on material from your landing pages and existing ads.

“The system will then display the best-performing combination of automatically created assets, and the assets you provide, to make your ads more relevant.”

Check out the sessions from Google Marketing Live here.


5. How Does LinkedIn Feed Algorithm Work? - LinkedIn is facing the same issues as other platforms: re-posts from other platforms, spam, vaguely topical polls, and various other low-interest posting actions, designed specifically to generate shallow engagement. So, LinkedIn’s VP of Engineering Sabry Tozin shared what types of content LinkedIn seeks to amplify in-stream:

a.) In “What kind of conversations are welcomed on LinkedIn?” Tozin emphasized the importance of constructive and respectful conversations. Conversations that people care about and talk about.
b.) In “What does it mean to be professional when it comes to content on LinkedIn? Tozin, share advice on what it means to be "professional" on LinkedIn. Be authentic and talk about what’s important to you.

Things you ought to know about:
  • LinkedIn considers a user's 'dwell time' when ranking content, which is the amount of time someone spend looking at an update or link as a measure of relative interest.
  • LinkedIn posts containing double-spaced text, which are intended to entice clicks by requiring the user to tap on the post to see the entire message, are now penalized with lower reach.
  • Posts that ask or encourage users to interact with them through likes or reactions will have a lower reach.
  • LinkedIn is now actively limiting the number of polls that viewers see in-stream.
So, if you want to get the most out of your LinkedIn content, stay away from these elements and concentrate on writing useful, engaging pieces that are relevant to your target audience.


6. Google Ads Prohibiting Skin Lightening Products - Starting in June 2022, Google Ads will ban any skin whitening product Ads that implies one skin tone is superior to another. 

Google has already published this new policy, which can be seen here "In June, Google will update the Dangerous and Derogatory policy under the Inappropriate Content section to enforce against the promotion of skin lightening products that imply the superiority of one skin tone over another. These products will be prohibited under enforcement guidance."

Advertisers who promote such products are being warned by Google to delete their advertising before June 30, 2022, or Google will do so for them.

Through this policy update, Google is telling the world they “value diversity and respect for others, and we strive to avoid offending users, so we don’t allow ads or destinations that display shocking content or promote hatred, intolerance, discrimination, or violence”


7. Google Ads Display Campaign Changes - Google announced that, to simplify campaign creation and management, Smart Display campaign features are now available within all Display campaigns. What do you need to do? Nothing. Any Smart Display campaigns in your account (on Aug 1, 22) will automatically migrate (keeping your settings intact.) without any action needed on your end. Per Google, the migration will not cause any fluctuations with your campaign’s performance and Optimized targeting is now set as the default targeting method when you create new Display campaigns.

Display campaigns will be the only Display campaign type. Your migrated Smart Display campaigns will become Display campaigns.

To replicate Smart Display campaigns you can use the recommended defaults for a new campaign. This will include using the Smart Bidding strategy that works best for your needs, using optimized targeting, and using responsive display ads.

FYI: Optimized targeting looks beyond manually-selected audience segments in your campaign to find audience segments that you may have missed to improve the campaign’s performance. Optimized targeting works best for advertisers in any of the following situations:

  • You want your campaign to serve to audience segments most likely to convert. 
  • You want to acquire new customers beyond your existing segments and still meet your goals. 
  • You want to identify new people who perform well for your campaign. 
  • You want to increase conversions without increasing bids or the cost per customer.

8. Google Announces May 2022 Broad Core (SEO) Update - Google announced "Several times per year, we make substantial improvements to our overall ranking processes, which we refer to as core updates. Core updates are designed to increase the overall relevancy of our search results and make them more helpful and useful for everyone. Today, we're releasing our May 2022 core update. It will take about 1-2 weeks to fully roll out."

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
  • Name: Google May 2022 Broad Core Update
  • Launched: May 25, 2022 at around 11:30pm ET
  • Rollout: It will take about one to two weeks to roll out
  • Targets: It looks at all types of content
  • Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
  • Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
  • Impact: Google did not share what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
  • Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
  • Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's advice below.
  • Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

If you are impacted by this update, check out the Google core update advice story for more.