In March of 2022, Google officially announced it would sunset Universal Analytics (UA) and move all users over to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on July 1st 2023. If, like many marketers, you’ve grown comfortable measuring your website’s successes with UA, the idea of moving to a new system may be a daunting prospect.
At SQ Digital, we’ve been busy preparing for GA4 to ensure a seamless transition for our clients. However, if your business relies on the invaluable data offered by Google Analytics, it’s time to get familiar with the framework of GA4 and the changes you’ll need to make to prepare for the migration.
Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for any digital marketer. It allows us to track and monitor the performance of our website and different parts of our marketing campaign. It's, therefore, no surprise that more than 65% of agencies use Google Analytics as their primary analytics tool. We now have a new Google Analytics update – so what do we know about this new version?
GA4 is Google’s new Analytics dashboard. It combines the insights and updates Google has been implementing and fine-tuning over the last few years in response to the changing digital landscape. The new features will allow you to oversee your customers better and leverage Google’s machine learning and insights to make more informed decisions about performance and the customer journey.
If you’ve been using UA for a long time, you may wonder why Google has decided to permanently migrate to this new system. Well, UA is now 18 years old, and over the years, regulations surrounding data privacy and data collection have changed significantly, impacting how user data can be collected and used. The move to GA4 offers enhanced privacy protection, better integration with other Google Products (e.g. Google Ads), and more granular data collection and usage control.
GA4 rolls a lot of new functionality and makes certain features previously available to some users standard across all GA4 properties. Here are some of the new aspects of GA4 that you can use to improve your data:
We all know that last-click attribution models don’t accurately represent the complete picture of your digital marketing efforts. Instead, GA4 uses data-driven attribution to ensure the full impact of your digital marketing is considered when assigning attribution credit. You can also export this data to your Google Ads account to help with your optimisation.
Machine learning has long been a crucial aspect of Google’s work towards the future of digital marketing, and now these advancements are integrated into GA4. This new functionality allows GA4 to generate predictive insights about user behaviour. Then, you can use those insights to create new audiences or audiences likely to interact positively with your conversion points.
GA4 allows you to collect user data as they move between platforms and sessions rather than presenting the more fragmented view of how people interact with your site currently available on UA3. This improved visibility allows you to trace the customer journey more accurately and make informed decisions to improve customer drop-off and conversion rates.
By improving the connections across your Google platforms, you can use your GA4 insights more efficiently to inform your decisions across your digital marketing ecosystem.
As more and more country-level data protection laws come into effect, GA4 allows you to manage and minimise the user-level data you collect to ensure you remain compliant while not negatively impacting your key measurement functionality.
These new features allow you to access much more data and audience insights and provide you with the additional tools needed to use this data in your digital marketing strategy.
If you’re already using Google Tag Manager to implement Analytics on your website, setting up GA4 is straightforward. There is already a default GA4 tag that you can add to your existing Tag Manager property to get yourself set up.
If you have added your Global Site Tag directly to your site or through another method, you can update your Tag with the GA4 code using the same format you have used historically.
However, if you’re unsure how to set up GA4, we recommend contacting SQ Digital. We are more than happy to help you out so you can begin benefitting from its great features.
Since the initial announcement, several updates have been made to GA4 to help improve user experience in line with feedback given to developers; let’s take a look.
There’s a lot to unpack with GA4, but the main takeaway is that it will continue to help you track and analyse the data across your websites and other platforms. It will also provide you with a more streamlined set of tools to use your data in more informed ways.
If you don’t have a current GA4 property and would rather leave it up to the experts so you can focus on running your business, contact us today for set-up.
As a digital marketing agency, we use Google Analytics daily to help guide our marketing campaigns and have over 20 years of experience helping SMEs succeed online.
The digital marketing world is constantly changing, so staying on top of industry and system changes is crucial when creating ad campaigns that deliver the best results.
One of the latest industry updates is the replacement of Google Smart Shopping with Google Performance Max.
As a leading pay-per-click agency in Lancaster, we’ve been looking into what Google Performance Max is. Here, we’ve provided an overview of Google’s Performance Max and its impact on Google Ad campaigns and how you can use it to improve your campaigns.
Google Performance Max offers automated, goal-driven campaigns. Its primary feature grants users access to all of their Google Ads inventory from one campaign. Performance Max provides users with all the data they need to drive better performance and reach more customers using its automation capabilities. By seeking customers across all channels, including Search, Discover, Display, Gmail, Maps, and even YouTube, you can extend your reach and, in turn, convert more customers.
Also, it allows you to focus performance on specified conversion goals, complemented by your keyword-based Search campaigns to optimise campaigns and deliver better results. This feature works alongside its Smart Bidding technology, allowing you to optimise your performance in real-time.
The idea behind Google Performance Max is for you to get the most out of your advertising objective, and its innovative technology allows you to do just that.
This new update provides users with a long list of benefits, and here are just a few;
As Performance Max provides insights from a range of Google channels, you can extend your reach and engage customers from channels you hadn’t previously utilised.
Performance Max’s automation capabilities allow data-driven optimisation based on your goals and help you to define which audiences, creatives, copy, and ads work best for you.
The asset reporting feature of Performance Max provides you with accurate, real-time campaign results. This insightful information helps you see what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to act on the results and improve your ads.
The simplified campaign management of Performance Max gives you the tools to quickly and easily optimise your ads to deliver the best campaigns.
As experienced providers of Google Ads management services, we can advise you on when utilising Performance Max is the best path to take, for example:
Performance Max can assist you if you have specific areas you wish to target or have a dedicated goal in mind, e.g., increasing online sales.
Google’s Performance Max grants you access to all channels, from YouTube to Gmail. So, if you want to maximise your performance across multiple channels, utilise this tool for the best results.
Performance Max offers various tools and is best used by those looking to go beyond basic campaigns.
The switch to Performance Max is simple for advertisers currently using Smart Shopping campaigns to push their products across Google’s shopping network. Offering the same Merchant Centre product feed integration and targeting and additional reach across other channels, upgrading your Smart Shopping campaign to Performance Max should be at the top of your to-do list.
For other advertisers, the choices are a bit more nuanced. Performance Max represents the most efficient use of your budget to maximise reach and inform your Smart Bidding strategies; it can help you make the most of your Google Ads spend and put your brand in front of the right people as often as possible. However, the lack of keyword targeting means that you lose a measure of control that can help guide Google towards the right users. So, until negative keyword implementation is rolled out to Performance Max campaigns, something that Google tells us is in the pipeline, we wouldn’t recommend rushing to switch your Search Campaigns over.
Google released Smart Campaigns, replacing their existing AdWords Express campaigns, back in 2019 to streamline targeting and bidding in an increasingly competitive ads auction. Performance Max represents the next evolution of this, streamlining not only targeting and bidding but also combining multi-channel advertising to help inform Smart Bidding strategies
There are several reasons to choose Performance Max over Smart Campaigns; for example, Performance Max allows you to view many channels simultaneously, which Smart Campaigns do not offer. This gives the user a wider reach and enables them to access new audiences easier than ever before. It also provides tools to monitor campaigns across all channels in one user-friendly system.
In addition, another great benefit of Performance Max compared to Smart Campaigns is that it creates asset groups, which combine copy, images, links, logos, and more that all represent a specific audience. This allows you to categorise your audience to target certain demographics with one of your campaigns.
Change can be daunting, especially if you’ve become used to working with certain systems and how they work. However, in an ever-evolving digital landscape, it’s vital to stay on top of updates to continue to produce the best and most impactful advertisements.
If you need assistance with your Google Ads management, SQ Digital can help. Please enquire today to learn more about our digital marketing services and discover how our PPC experts can help your business reach its goals.
Google has recently announced two major updates to its algorithm; the helpful content update and the product review update. These updates plan to improve the user experience for searchers and website owners, removing unhelpful content to push valuable, people-first content that will benefit the user and improve traffic to worthy sites.
As SEO experts, we understand the importance of Google’s regular updates and the impact they have on users, such as business owners who have spent time on valuable, SEO-friendly, and people-centric content for their websites.
In this article, we’re taking an in-depth look into the helpful content update and product review updates, how they work, and how they might benefit you as a user.
Google announced the helpful content update on the 18th of August 2022 when they Tweeted:
“We’re improving Search, so you’re less likely to find content made for search engines and more likely to find helpful, authentic information – particularly for education, entertainment, shopping and tech content.”
The tweet was followed up with an article detailing what the update does. It was designed to help original, helpful content rank higher on Search and negatively impact search-engine-driven content that is often unhelpful for the user. For example, if a user comes across a website that claims to have details of a movie’s release date, even if it hasn’t been announced, this will be negatively impacted by the helpful content update as it is unhelpful, misleading, and only exists to drive traffic to the site.
The helpful content update works automatically, meaning the system is triggered by low-value content and content deemed unhelpful for those searching.
It is important to note that site pages are not affected individually. So, if one page of a website is deemed to have unhelpful content, the entire website is less likely to perform well. This means that by removing unhelpful content from individual pages, you are helping your website perform well overall. But how do you know if your website content is helpful? And what does helpful content look like?
Helpful content, or people-first content, is content that is deemed to be rewarding for searches, providing them with a satisfying experience and giving them everything they came to a website for. This is the opposite of search engine-driven content, created to bring traffic to a website and is usually unhelpful and worthless to a user.
If you’re concerned about your website being negatively affected by the helpful content update, there are several steps to ensure your website’s content has a people-first approach; let’s take a look.
If you follow these steps, your content should be reviewed as valuable, and you should see improvements to your rankings.
If you do not follow the above advice, you could find that your rankings may decline following the update’s rollout. Therefore, it’s imperative to remove your unhelpful content and focus on refining and improving your website until it is people-focused.
The helpful content update is weighted, which means that websites with large amounts of unhelpful content will be affected the most. People-focused content will still rank, even if it is on a page with unhelpful content, but it is best to remove the latter to avoid the risk.
The second of Google’s announcements was the product review update. This update aims to improve rankings on thorough reviews that are much more than the standard reviews that take up a lot of space on review search results. These insightful reviews will rank higher above shorter reviews that don’t provide as much information about a product to provide users with valuable reviews straight away. Much like the helpful content update, the product review update focuses on improving user experience and providing people-focused content that is valuable and created for humans by humans.
Reviews are imperative when selling a product, as they allow users to gain trust through the advice and recommendations of other like-minded people. In addition, it has been proven repeatedly that helpful reviews directly correlate to the success of a product’s purchase rate, as people value the opinion of others, especially when purchasing a product online.
But how do you know what is considered a helpful review and what will be pushed down the rankings? Let’s take a look.
The new product review mark-up available to add pros and cons to your pages’ snippets in Google search, is only available for editorial product reviews, not merchant product pages. However, as a website owner with product review content on product pages, we would advise that you follow the same steps advised by Google as they make these recommendations based on data they have found helpful to a user. In time, we may find that these rich snippets are rolled out to merchant product pages, but you can also know that by doing this you are improving the user experience of your product pages.
There are several steps to take to ensure that your reviews add value to your target audience:
If your reviews follow this format, they have a much better chance of ranking highly due to the product review update.
If you need assistance with your SEO marketing or help understanding how these and other Google updates will affect your website, please get in touch. We also recommend that you submit your website to our FREE SEO website audit and find out how SQ Digital could help you.
If you have a Google Search Console account, then you may well have seen a new notification appearing in the last few weeks, similar to:
That’s right, Google’s mobile-first index has finally arrived. Or at least, it’s begun to progressively roll out, which means that it’s never been more vital to have a mobile-friendly website.
For many years, Google’s way of crawling, indexing and ranking has prioritised the desktop version of a website, but that’s no longer the case. With mobile browsers now in the majority, desktop sites vastly different to their mobile versions generate too many issues relating to user experience. Hence, the mobile version of any page is now the first port of call for both indexing and ranking.
To clarify, Google does not have a separate “mobile-first index”; it’s simply the case that mobile content is now the starting point for their index ahead of desktop versions, which hasn’t historically been the case.
So, with all that in mind, what exactly is changing for you?
For many websites, it’s business as usual. Nothing changes for you if:
However, the mobile URL, content or version of your site will now be used for indexing if:
In a nutshell, if your site possesses content that appears differently on mobile browsers than it does on desktops, then you’re going to need to adhere to Google’s best practices. These include:
Although the first few waves of Google Search Console notifications have been rolling out over the last month or two, there’s still no need to worry if your own site hasn’t been included in this initial wave. The mobile-first index relates to gathering content, not how it is ranked, so if your website already contains mobile content, but your Search Console account hasn’t updated, you’re not at a disadvantage. However, having mobile-friendly content definitely is important for search results performance. If your site only has desktop content, it will still be indexed, but it may now need to be extremely relevant indeed if it’s to be ranked ahead of faster-loading, mobile-friendly content.
The bottom line is, it’s extremely difficult – if not impossible – to be certain about how this will influence future SEO strategy. After all, the need to consider mobile-friendliness has been a factor for some time, so little is changing there. However, there is a growing theory that Google is steadily moving away from a dependency on HTML URLs and traditional links when it comes to ranking factors, while other methods like structured data are growing in prominence. It’s definitely true that mobile content tends to have fewer links than desktop content, but does this mean that it’s now viable to claim that “links are dead”? The jury is still well and truly out on this one. Nevertheless, to futureproof your website, your mobile SEO strategy should be well-rounded, if it’s not already.
If you’re looking to thrive in a mobile-first index world, then the best pieces of advice we can give are to:
If you want to know that your website is mobile index ready, please fill out our contact form. One of our experts will be happy to offer you a free audit and discuss an SEO and digital marketing strategy fit for mobile-first market space.
Have you wondered how Google manages to provide you with amazing search results on the first page? And how do your website’s rankings fluctuate in position? With its mission to provide only the best and most credible results, Google updates its algorithms for an optimised experience.
Small updates are common and happen daily with little impact on websites. But when Google makes a bigger update, everyone feels the shockwaves – whether good or bad. Major search updates are often discussed within the industry, with the most prominent algorithmic changes typically being named and released with an announcement. But did you know that on the days leading up to a big algorithm update, we can actually tell something’s on the way? And it’s not just because we’re a Google Premier Partner!
Did you know that on the days leading up to a big algorithm update, we can actually tell something’s happening?
With major algorithm updates, Google usually announces it on its Webmaster Central Blog, causing everyone in the SEO world to take a deep breath with the knowledge that some major changes might be coming their way. Google announced the update, Penguin 4.0, which meant the famous link-related algorithm is now in real-time and part of the core algorithm that provides key changes to how websites are analysed and ranked.
Sometimes, Google can be evasive when asked about more regular search updates, as per the evidence of self-proclaimed “Chief of Sunshine and Happiness” at Google, Gary Illyes (he’s really a Webmaster Trends Analyst).
“Most likely” is about as close to a “yes” as we can hope for!
Google Grump is a feature on AccuRanker’s website that allows you to know the level of fluctuations in rankings. You can filter results by country and device (desktop or mobile). The mood swings represent every small change in the rankings, with four moods representing the level of alterations.
The measure works through calculating an average of changes to the rankings over the top 100 results of 28,000 randomly selected keywords. A comparison with the previous day is then made to provide a mood rating.
Another great predictor of algorithm fluctuations is MozCast. It shows the fluctuations, or turbulence, happening in the Google algorithm. Like Google Grump, it’s quite easy to use: the stormier ‘the weather’, the more alterations to the rankings on Google.
MozCast picks 1,000 keywords and the top 10 organic Google searches every 24 hours and compares them to the previous day’s top 10 results. MozCast calculates the current day's temperature by crunching data of all 1,000 keywords and then multiplying it by a fixed number, currently 28°F. The result? An average of about 70°F; anything above is indicative of possible impending changes.
Our experienced SEO experts are well aware that Google’s algorithms directly impact website rankings. They keep up to date with industry chatter that helps predict when the updates are coming. When there’s a spike in temperature on MozCast, it becomes quite apparent that something is in the works, particularly when Dr Pete of Moz is just as intrigued as you are!
It’s important to understand when Google is about to remove the rabbit from the hat. It enables SEO consultants like us to get ahead of the game and respond to changes as and when they happen. But as long as you’re producing quality content, sourcing your links ethically and obeying the Google Webmaster Guidelines, then you really have nothing to worry about. Take as long as you want to predict what Google is up to: it's still for nought if your content isn't strong.
Our digital marketing agency is on hand to ensure that whatever Google may throw at you, we’re here to help. We can use our experience and expertise to drive more customers to your website. So, get in touch with our friendly team and find out just what we can do for you and your little slice of webspace.
Google Penguin 4.0 update: we’ve been waiting for this since 2014, but it seems like the wait is finally over!
Google has just updated its Penguin Algorithm after a two-year period. The last time Penguin went through an update was in October 2014 to introduce Penguin 3.0. Any websites that were penalised at the time remained so until now.
This is good news for these websites! They can now ‘begin anew’, given that the algorithm has finally been refreshed.
Google Penguin is the code name for Google’s algorithm that targets websites using ‘black hat’ SEO techniques. This tactic involves acquiring vast numbers of irrelevant and poor quality links to increase its ranking artificially.
Google Penguin is the code name for Google’s algorithm that targets websites that violate their Webmaster Guidelines using black hat SEO techniques. For those who don’t speak technical SEO, this involves acquiring vast numbers of irrelevant and poor quality links. Thus, manipulating the number pointing to a specific page to artificially increase its ranking.
Google uses its ranking algorithms to ensure that it can provide its users with a positive search experience. This means that they want only the most relevant, high quality and deserving sites that adopt white-hat SEO techniques to rank highly in their search results.
Penguin 4.0 is now rolling out across Google’s search results, and changes are coming your way.
First of all, what immediately catches attention in Google’s official press release is that Penguin is now real-time. While it can be difficult to say what this means to current website rankings, we can infer the impact 4.0 will have from previous updates.
Essentially, Google Penguin works as a filter; it tries to catch sites that it deems to manipulate search results by acquiring poor-quality links illegitimately. These websites were penalised back in 2014 and have carried the effects of this penalty until the recent update – even if they have since removed or disavowed the ‘spammy’ links.
Penguin 4.0 will continue to hunt for websites with these spammy links. However, since updates will now happen in real-time, it is likely that if your site is initially penalised, but you then fix the source of the problem, your site will be reconsidered by Google far more quickly than in the past. You won’t need to wait until a new version of the filter comes out and removes the penalty.
Keep an eye on your traffic and see if you spot any drops in organic traffic. If you do, you must deal with it as soon as possible to avoid dropping further in the rankings by taking action quickly.
In Google’s words, they’re not “going to comment on future refreshes”, which seems to indicate that there will indeed be no more large Penguin updates, but rather frequent real-time refreshes will occur without the need for announcements. The algorithm updates will be visible faster and will come into effect soon after your page has been indexed or re-indexed.
It might be too soon to tell, or you even see an immediate hit to your website – no matter the case, it’s important that you give it some time, at least a week or two, so that the update has time to roll out fully.
How can you know for sure if you’ve been affected? The best thing to do is to keep an eye on your traffic over the next couple of weeks and see if you spot any drops in organic traffic. If you have, you must deal with it as soon as possible since you can speed up your website’s recovery and avoid dropping further in the rankings by quickly taking action.
The SEO specialists at SQ Digital marketing agency have dealt with the Penguin updates since it first went live in April 2012, so we can certainly lend you and your site a helping wing when the Penguin algorithm decides to stick its beak in. From making sure you’re sporting healthy links to giving your website and blog a good ol’ clean, we can get you back up in no time.
