Digital Marketing Updates: June 2024

Welcome to June! Every month, Two Octobers summarizes happenings in the digital marketing world, so our clients (and others!) stay on top of what matters for making good decisions about SEO, paid media including Google Ads and Meta, and marketing analytics.

SEO

Google has officially rolled out AI Overview

Google has released its AI Overviews feature to all US-based search users, with plans to extend it globally by the end of the year. Introduced as part of the Search Generative Experience, AI Overviews use Google Gemini’s generative AI technology to offer detailed snippets for complex questions, appearing only when Google determines it adds value beyond standard search results.

Clicks and impressions from sites sourced in the AI Overviews will not be distinguishable from clicks and impressions in standard search results, so determining AI Overviews’ benefits for organic traffic will become difficult. 

This is a very significant shift in the search landscape that is already resulting in criticism due to inaccurate results, lack of transparency in data, and Google profiting from other publisher’s content. It’s disruptive by nature, and time will tell whether this will truly be a benefit or detriment to the overall search market. 

Google had massive search document leaks

A tremendous amount of Google documents were leaked and has given the SEO community a plethora of insights to the intricacies of Google’s ranking system. There are various aspects still being investigated, but some highlights include:

• Google uses PageQuality (PQ) to measure the “effort” it took to create an article. Depth of information, images, videos, and a variety of other signals influence this metric.
• Google has an important component called navBoost that measures click quality such as “last longest clicks”, “good clicks”, “bad clicks” and site-wide impressions.
• Google stores the history of the last 20 updates of your page
• There is a major focus on identifying over-optimized anchor text, and lowering rankings accordingly

These leaked documents provide an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of Google’s algorithm. It’s important to note that these documents don’t include every single thing that Google has involved in their algorithm, and there’s a lot of context not given to these documents that are still left to interpretation. As the SEO community continues to reveal takeaways from these documents, there may be shifts in how we can effectively optimize a site. Expect the core SEO recommendations to still revolve around delivering positive user experience. The tactics of how we get there, however, will evolve thanks to these developing insights.

Paid Media

Google Ads mixed in with organic results

Official Google documentation has been updated to reflect what some users have seen throughout the past year: “Top ads may show below the top organic results on certain queries.” Google searchers have long expected ads to appear in top and bottom placements on a page of organic results, but the layout of search results has changed a lot generally, as well as in relation to specific searches, as Google works to combine its goals of satisfy users’ desire for information, balance keeping users on SERP with clicking off, and maintaining ad placements and ad revenue. 

Google Marketing Live focuses on AI

Google’s annual product showcase happened in May. It didn’t include any major or unexpected announcements, with most including some element of AI. Updates included:

• Google is testing ads in the AI overview boxes. We expect quite a bit of variation in where ads appear as search engine results pages continue to evolve as Google’s Search Generative Experience continues to roll out, and itself evolve into different ways of being displayed.
• Immersive ads, with 3D product views and videos in shopping, and ad format changes for Discovery and YouTube ads.
• New Customer Acquisition is a campaign goal. It uses an AI-powered mode to focus on new customers, and works best with additional tracking. This comes after another campaign goal introduction, profit optimization, which is an intriguing model if you don’t mind sharing profit data with Google.

Meta Ads Updates

• Catalog Product Ads can now use video assets.
• Facebook ads can now include Sitelinks.

Analytics

This month, Two Octobers’ Head of Analytics launches a new in-depth monthly update covering the world of marketing analytics. This month, he talks about AI tools useful for data analysis, the introduction of saved comparisons in GA4, and clears up misconceptions about Google Consent Mode. Read the full update here.