Daily Minute Master Series – October 25, 2019

Social Media

LinkedIn Engagement Continues to Rise, as Per Microsoft’s Latest Performance Report

This week, as part of Microsoft’s FY20 Q1 report, the company included a brief update on LinkedIn’s current status. 22% growth in user sessions, continuing the trend of ‘record engagement’ levels which Microsoft has reported in its past few updates. That also adds to the 645 million members LinkedIn now sees globally, which has grown from 575 million a year ago. The platform has been working to increase user engagement through various means, including improving its feed algorithm to give more user updates a greater of a share of overall attention, and showcasing more engaging, relevant news stories from the day, via its expanding team of 65 journalists who work to maximize user activity. That’s facilitated new growth on the platform, and new opportunities for engagement. As noted, Microsoft has reported LinkedIn seeing ‘record levels of engagement’ in each of its updates over the last year, and the platform continues to boost those numbers.

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Marketing

Welcome BERT: Google’s latest search algorithm to better understand natural language

Google is making the largest change to its search system since the company introduced RankBrain, almost five-years ago. The company said this will impact 1 in 10 queries in terms of changing the results that rank for those queries. BERT started rolling out this week and will be fully live shortly. It is rolling out for English language queries now and will expand to other languages in the future. Google said BERT helps better understand the nuances and context of words in searches and better match those queries with more relevant results. It is also used for featured snippets. Google has told us SEOs can’t really optimize for RankBrain. But it does mean Google is getting better at understanding natural language. Just write content for users, like you always do. This is Google’s efforts at better understand the searcher’s query and matching it better to more relevant results. We care, not only because Google said this change is “representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.” But also because 10% of all queries have been impacted by this update. That is a big change. We did see unconfirmed reports of algorithm updates mid-week and earlier this week, which may be related to this change.

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E-commerce ad spend on search and social product ads keeps growing

E-commerce advertisers spent 39% of their search budgets on Shopping campaigns and 37% of their social budgets on product ads in the third quarter of the year, according to new Kenshoo data. Spending on social product ads among Kenshoo e-commerce advertisers accelerated in the third quarter, increasing 42% compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, product ad spend on search grew by 17% year-over-year in the third quarter – a deceleration from the previous quarter. E-commerce advertisers continue to increase spending on Shopping and product campaigns, and that growth is set to continue in the fiercely competitive fourth quarter. This holiday season will also put the new Google Shopping experience in the U.S. to the test. Kenshoo Senior Director of Marketing Research Chris Costello said that the Prime Day-related promotions in July “drove overall spending for the month to levels just shy of last November, which sets the table for another new high going into the holidays.”

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Featured snippets display on desktop 13% more often than mobile, study finds

Google showed featured snippets on desktop 86.6% of the time compared to 73.3% on mobile, according to a 30-day study conducted by Rank Ranger. The study looked at a dataset of 265 keywords known to produce featured snippets on desktop. It found that, on any given day, publishers are more likely to land a featured snippet on desktop than they are on mobile because there is a higher chance that Google will show a desktop snippet. Assessing whether the keyword you’re targeting for featured snippets appears more consistently on one device or the other can inform your content strategy. Further, researching which device your desired snippet is more likely to surface on can inform your user experience decisions.