Monthly Marketing Update: Google Introduces 12 New Performance Max Updates

Search Engine Optimization

Google’s Helpful Content & Other AI Systems May Be Impacting Your Site’s Visibility

Google's AI systems, SGE and Bard, have a strong potential to impact site visibility. If you’ve noticed an inexplicable decline in your organic search traffic, there’s a good chance that Google’s AI-driven ‘helpful content system’ is influencing your rankings. This system uses machine learning to predict whether content is likely to be the most helpful for a searcher or not. If your content consistently falls short, your site may be classified as having ‘unhelpful content’. Important questions to ask while evaluating your own content are “Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?” and “Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?”. If you find yourself answering “no” to these questions, it could be a significant impediment that prevents your site from reaching its full ranking potential.

Beyond SEO: Embracing the future of organic search optimization

To stay current with the changes in search means going beyond Google's Page 1 and optimizing for organic search across multiple platforms. With search evolving, it's important that we as SEOs think about multi-channel SEO. This article highlights that SEO professionals are highly encouraged to expand their skill sets to include video optimization, creating news content, and thought leadership, as organic search continues to grow across platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and others. An emerging concept in SEO is Organic Search Optimization (OSO), which emphasizes the importance of a growth mindset and is a crucial area of focus for SEOs to excel in the future.

Paid Search

12 New Performance Max Updates

Google is introducing updates to its Performance Max campaigns, which heavily rely on AI. The company highlights the benefits of AI in advertising, including simplifying complexity, multiplying marketing efforts, and boosting productivity. There were three main themes to the updates: more user-friendly AI tools, ease of workflows, and providing value and insights. The biggest callout is that Google understands the lack of insights and is working on solutions, along with tools, to give more detail into the performance. 

New brand settings in Search and Performance Max campaigns

With the digital marketing landscape quickly changing, Google has listened to our feedback and provided new solutions to allow marketers to gain more control when it comes to brand traffic. Broad Match search campaigns and keywords have been highly recommended, even favored, by Google’s algorithm but have attracted an influx of junk leads. To only reach the brand traffic desired, Google has enabled Brand Restrictions for search campaigns, giving marketers the ability to create an exclusive list of brands and products for their ads. This allows you to increase your reach with broad match while also restricting searches that are relevant to your brand. Brand Exclusions are also coming soon to Performance Max Campaigns, giving you the option to exclude searches of brands you don't want your shopping or search ads to serve on. 

Microsoft’s Performance Max is now in open beta

Microsoft's new advertising option, Performance Max, has entered the open beta phase. Like Google, Microsoft’s Performance Max utilizes automated ad placements across multiple Microsoft Advertising networks, enhancing campaign reach and effectiveness. Advertisers can optimize their ads through AI-driven tools and access more valuable data for better targeting. This system aims to streamline and improve ad performance for marketers using Microsoft Advertising's platform. This new beta option is highly beneficial to us as we can utilize automated placements for broader reach, enable AI optimization for higher engagement, and gain valuable data-driven insights to improve campaign performance and results. While Microsoft is not as big of a contender as Google has been, its compatibility with ChatGPT has made it something to look into as a new campaign type to test. 

Paid Social

Thought leader ads

LinkedIn announced a new ad type, Thought Leader Ads, that are available to elevate a company's presence in Industry Thought Leadership. You can now promote native content published by employees and executives from your company allowing for more reach with brand awareness and establishing credibility by using employee experiences. This supports Brand Awareness and Engagement campaign objectives by using single-image ads as of right now. Thought Leader Ads are great for upper-funnel efforts in establishing credibility with brand awareness or by getting users to engage with content relevant to the company without being overly branded because it's the employees and executives who are posting organic content.

Content

Introducing Threads: A New Way to Share With Text

Instagram created a hybrid between Twitter and Reddit but for creators, called Threads. Instagram users can now join Threads to share text updates and join the conversation. You can post up to 500 characters and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length. We encourage businesses to start experimenting with the new app and explore how to eventually incorporate it into your organic social strategy. There are currently no ads or monetization features at this time, but predict this will change with time.