Senior Director, Marketing

The Most Notable Digital Media Updates of 2019

As we begin a new year (and a new decade!), we’re amazed at how much the digital media landscape evolved in 2019. If you haven’t caught up, read what each of our channel leads considers to be the most notable changes in their field from last year.

Paid Search

“It is evident that Google’s main focus in 2019 was to enhance automation across new ‘smart’ campaigns, as well as improving automated bid strategies within Google Ads and Search Ads 360. Google also made significant changes to loosen keyword match type restrictions for BMM and Phrase Match keywords.

  • Smart Campaigns Launched. Implemented automated campaigns that scale across multiple Google platforms, such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, and Google Shopping. A few examples of this are Smart Shopping Campaigns, Discovery Campaigns, and other forms of Smart Campaigns.
  • Bid Strategies. Google Ads launched, and made improvements to, a number of automated bid strategies in 2019: including Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Clicks, Maximize Conversions, Target Impression Share, and Budget Management (SA360).
  • Match Types. As of August 2019, Google changed the rules to Phrase Match and Broad Match Modified keywords allowing them to match to search queries that include same-meaning close variants. This could be advantageous for advertisers who want to spend less time managing keywords vs building a granular structure account with thousands of exact and broad match keywords.“
 

Amazon

“This was a big year for Amazon. Our team observed massive changes to the UI, including the adoption of basic Adwords functionalities and structure, such as Ad Groups and search term reports for Auto and Sponsored Brand Campaigns.

Amazon also began testing out a carousel of exciting ad formats on both the SERP and PDP. Advertisers have more placements to consider on Amazon, and these new options have come with new bidding strategies, reporting metrics, and more. It was a great year for identifying your brand’s potential on Amazon and finding new ways of maximizing results.

We've also seen Amazon prioritize their brand-name products over other sellers in Amazon-only placements, a notable change to traffic that will have to be considered in strategies moving forward.”

Social

“2019 was a huge year for both automation and privacy. We saw platforms massively push towards automation. Facebook released CBO and encouraged its use and the eventuality of it being mandatory for all campaigns, taking away the ability of advertisers to control budget at the adgroup level and replacing with their results-focused, algorithmic budget allocations. ITP and CCPA both made it easier for consumers to opt-out of data collection and significantly harder for advertisers and adtech companies to collect and report on data that was previously available.”

Programmatic

“We noticed an expansion of top-of-funnel capabilities in the Connected TV space. CTV continued to grow tremendously due to changes in consumer behavior and increased targeting sophistication from our DSP partners. We expect this trend to continue into 2020 and beyond. We are excited to help our clients grow their omni-channel programmatic initiatives.”

SEO

“Many pivotal improvements were made in the world of SEO. Firstly, BERT, considered "one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search," made its debut. The BERT Update focuses on Google better understanding the nuances of queries and systematically improved the relevance of search results. Moving forward, Rise recommends analyzing your site content with your target audience in mind to ensure it addresses searcher intent.

Providing quality content on your pages is not a new concept, but it became more important in 2019 with multiple core algorithm updates focused on providing the best content to users. While Google stresses that sites losing rankings during updates are not necessarily doing anything wrong, you can potentially improve your site by improving content. For more information on these updates, review the March, June, and September 2019 Core Updates.

Finally, we saw new schema released this year that brought more attention to its purpose. If you’re not targeting universal results (the organic portions of a search results page that are not the main links), you are likely missing out on an opportunity to reach consumers.”

Affiliate

“In 2019, brands sought to reach their customers in new and creative ways. Influencer, especially, grew in importance as advances in technology enabled brands to easily leverage these influencers while measuring campaign performance.”

To learn more about how these updates will impact the performance at your company, or to find out how Rise can assist, contact us.

01/14/2020 at 02:03