Google's December spam update, Meta's Community Notes addition, & Reddit trend tracking
Happy New Year!
We hope your holidays were bright and cheery, and that you're feeling rested, recharged, and ready to tackle 2025.
After taking some time off to celebrate the holiday season with friends and family, we're excited to get together this afternoon for our company holiday party, where we'll celebrate our 2024 successes and set the tone for a positive and productive 2025.
But first, we're here with the latest digital marketing updates – and there were quite a few big ones that are worth sharing. Let's dig in.
Paid Media Top 5
1. Improvements to LinkedIn Campaign Manager
At a glance: LinkedIn is adding new features to its Campaign Manager to improve ad performance. Updates include:
Are you advertising on LinkedIn this year? These updates offer solutions for businesses looking to grow on LinkedIn.?
2. Reddit trend tracking
At a glance: Reddit kicked off the year with new trend tracking reports within its Reddit Pro dashboards, giving businesses a better view of how relevant topics are trending on Reddit.
Users can build their dashboards off of relevant keywords and topics, making the tool great for tracking seasonality, staying on top of trends, and uncovering new opportunities.?
Reddit is also launching Ask Me Anything ads to promote their Ask Me Anything chat feature. These ads will feature a Remind Me CTA so users can get a notification when an AMA is coming up.
3. PMax budget reallocation experiments in Google Ads?
At a glance: Google Ads is launching new in-platform experiments that give advertisers the ability to evaluate the impact of moving budget from Display campaigns to PMax campaigns.
This feature allows advertisers to assess how their budgets and campaign performance would be affected by switching from traditional campaigns like Display to a PMax campaign. This is useful to the advertiser, yes, but also a smart move by Google as it continues pushing advertisers toward PMax as the best advertising solution.
Perrill perspective:
If you've been considering testing a PMax campaign, this update is great for proving the ROI shift. But ultimately, this does service Google Ads. The platform has increasingly been encouraging advertisers to adopt Performance Max campaigns, and creating a way to demonstrate the value in transitioning from Display to PMax may be an extremely effective way of doing that. - Grace Hallen , Digital Marketing Specialist
4. Google Ads to incorporate more AI in 2025
At a glance: Google Ads is turning its attention to AI in 2025, focusing on:
These AI updates ladder up to Google's larger focus on scaling Gemini to become a more competitive AI platform. In 2025, staying updated on Google's AI usage and learning how to incorporate AI into your advertising efforts will be necessary.
5. Google Ads’ new brand report gives a holistic view of brand campaign performance
At a glance: This new dashboard in Google Ads, located under Insights and reports, offers a consolidated analytics report on campaign performance with deduplicated reach and frequency metrics across campaigns.
With all brand campaign data consolidated in one report, advertisers can better measure campaign performance and identify ways to maximize return.
Social Media Top 5
1. Meta replaces fact-checking with Community Notes
At a glance: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, announced Meta’s plan to remove its current fact-checkers and instead implement Community Notes that function similarly to X’s community notes.?
In its announcement, Meta shared that “as well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable." The fact-checking program was first installed in 2016.
In this statement, Meta holds up X as its example of an empowered community of users that decide when posts need more context, encouraging a diverse range of perspectives.
2. Trump moves to save TikTok
At a glance: With TikTok’s sell-or-ban deadline rapidly approaching, the social media app appealed to President Trump to try to save the app. And it seems to have worked; Trump filed a Supreme Court bid to save TikTok or find an alternate solution.
The Supreme Court will hear TikTok’s final appeal today, January 10th.
3. X’s coming algorithm update will prioritize entertainment
At a glance: At the end of December, Elon Musk encouraged X users to “post a bit more positive, beautiful, or informative content on this platform,” a far cry from Musk’s typical content. And just a week later, X is planning on updating its algorithms to focus more on entertaining content.
The algorithm update could help the app return to a more neutral state with less politically charged content and more of the entertainment factor it used to have.
4. Meta launches AI profiles
At a glance: Meta was met with much backlash after it released a handful of AI profiles and encouraged users to interact with these profiles by chatting with them.?
Aside from ethical concerns around these characters, some of the fictional personas were criticized as being offensive and unnecessary. Meta paused the rollout and removed the profiles in response to the criticism.
5. LinkedIn is testing larger in-stream videos
At a glance: LinkedIn has been trying to push video content on the platform and is now presenting videos in larger panels between posts in the feed for more visibility.?
Videos will show more prominently, helping them stand out in the feed. Nothing will change on the user’s end, but it will change the look and feel of vertical videos on the app. Video is an engaging content format that seems to work well on the platform.
SEO Top 5
1. December 2024 spam update rollout complete + implications for Search campaigns
At a glance: Google’s third spam update of 2024 took a week to roll out and resulted in more volatility than previous spam updates.?
This update was reportedly more widespread than previous spam updates and affected a variety of websites. The update doesn't just impact organic; Google is now cracking down on advertisers with poor or spammy content on their websites. Advertisers directing traffic to websites that violate Google’s spam policies may be subject to automatic disapproval. PPC performance will now correlate with website quality, which is an important update for advertisers to note.
Perrill perspective:
If you were negatively impacted by the spam update, then you should review Google’s spam policies and try to determine which policy your site was potentially violating. The most common reasons a site is impacted by a spam update are spammy links and spammy content, but there are other factors in play as well. Once you’ve identified the reason you were impacted, you need to put together a plan to clean up your spam profile, but it’s not as simple as just removing the spam. For example, if you have a lot of spammy content on your site, you’ll need to take it down and replace it with high-quality content. Don’t expect an immediate recovery. It can take months to gain back your rankings after you’ve been flagged for spam. A recovery requires patience but also an aggressive approach to fixing your site. Adding one or two good blog posts a month isn’t going to save you from the doldrums of a spam update. - Nate Tower , President
2. Google is bringing Tag Assistant back
At a glance: Google is bringing back Tag Assistant after receiving negative feedback when the Chrome extension was first sunset.
With this relaunch, Google combined Tag Assistant Legacy with Tag Assistant Companion for a streamlined tag management process. Tag Assistant helps website owners confidently install and test tags for tracking conversions and ensures they’re getting accurate website data.
3.? Could ChatGPT become synonymous with AI?
At a glance: Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that in the AI space, “the stakes are high”, claiming ChatGPT could become synonymous with AI, similar to how Google is synonymous with search.?
AI is an extremely hot, competitive space right now, and Google wants to corner that part of the market. Pichai stressed that 2025 will be a pivotal year, and encouraged Google employees to stay strappy and get creative with their AI innovations, which includes scaling Gemini to become a more competitive, widely used large language model.
4. Google launches Daily Listen, an audio version of Google Discover
At a glance: Google’s latest Search Labs experiment is an audio feed that essentially gives users a recap of their Discover page in five minutes or less.
Called the Daily Listen, this feature uses AI-generated audio to provide a podcast that summarizes headlines that are fully personalized based on which articles Google thinks are of the most interest to you.
5. Export GSC 24-hour view performance report?
At a glance: Users can now export their hourly data from the past 24 hours in Google Search Console’s performance report.?
The new feature exports the data hour by hour, allowing users to view the data outside of the GSC interface.
Mixed Bag
1. xAI may launch a Grok app
At a glance: To compete with other AI chatbot apps, namely ChatGPT, xAI is testing an iOS app for Grok, X’s chatbot that currently functions only inside the X app.
This could potentially bring Grok to more users, expanding access to individuals who aren’t X users.
Grok may also be getting an “unhinged mode”, teased by Elon Musk on X. Unhinged mode responses would be much more subjective and could result in inappropriate or offensive content. So stay tuned for that!
2. Microsoft pulls back on updates to Bing Image Creator
At a glance: Microsoft announced plans to update its image generator using OpenAI’s DALL-E3, but after releasing the updated model, Microsoft ended up scaling back to its previous version when met with criticism and complaints.
The updated model generated images that just weren’t as good of quality. The latest version of DALL-E produces more cartoon-like images that aren’t as realistic.
3. Instacart creates new advertising opportunities for food manufacturers
At a glance: Cut+Dry, an e-commerce platform for food service distributors and manufacturers, is integrating a version of Instacart’s Carrot Ads to give manufacturers more opportunity to connect with distributors.?
This is an industry that hasn’t been represented well in the digital ads space so this update is an exciting opportunity for food manufacturers to connect with buyers.
That's all we've got for today. Check back again in two weeks for more digital marketing updates. Thanks for reading!