Hi there.

Welcome to Far From Shore.

We’re your next favourite newsletter that dives into digital marketing, writing, technology, and at least one fascinating fact every issue.

To start things off today, we’re gonna be taking a look at some developments for Google Ads, a recent Google Core Update and its impact on SEO, and a reminder for November’s big holiday sales event.

Be sure to stick around for the coffee break at the end. Everyone needs a few minutes to themselves from time to time, don’t they?

Google wants us to get more video conversions with an upgraded campaign type - but will it?

Video is seeing tons of growth these days, both in terms of platform offerings and user consumption - especially among the under 35 demographics.

Google seems to have noticed this as well as well (surprise, surprise) and keeps placing more chips on its still relatively new Demand Gen ad format.

If you recall, Demand Gen replaced the older and fairly reliable Discovery campaign format oh not so long ago (and Discovery previously merged a couple of even earlier campaign types such as the Gmail format of old). While this format runs on many of the same placements, Google bulked it up with more placements and an emphasis on video assets. Now we're going to be seeing Google Video Action campaigns merged under this format too.

As part of this push, Google's been promoting its Demand Gen campaigns lately, claiming - as you might have seen - that advertisers who use the format receive 20% more conversions compared to video only (based on, what one suspects, highly selective, internal data).

Seems like win-win right? Right?

We hope so, but we’re not exactly holding our breath just yet.

Google's video network has never been a very significant driver of conversions (both lead gen and sales) compared to other channels like Instagram or TikTok. Even when looking at assists or first-touch conversions, the returns on Google’s video ads have never blown us away.

Worse, in all of our tests and comparisons from this past year, Demand Gen has significantly underperformed in driving action compared to the earlier Discovery format.

We’re seeing plenty of engagement, views, and other top of funnel markers, but very little that’s moving deeper along the customer journey. This wouldn’t be such an issue if Google was promoting these campaigns as early touchpoint champions, but we’re not seeing the last step actions being taken.

At least, not yet.

Have you experienced something else?

Maybe we’re overlooking some niches where the opposite is true, or maybe some products or markets are seeing this 20% push (it has to come from somewhere, right?). If that’s the case, we’d love to hear from you and your thoughts on all this.

Haven’t forgotten about Black Friday, have we?

Black Friday is arguably the biggest shopping event of the year, with the Saturday rivaling anything we see for Christmas and even beating out Boxing Day here in Canada).

If you’re running a B2C business, you can’t afford to miss it - even if the window to get your push ready is closing fast.

However, not every business has the resources to roll out mega promotions and multichannel campaigns for the event.

If you’re in a bind, here are some quick and easy action items to get the most out of the holiday weekend even if you’re running late or haven’t been able to set aside additional creatives or assets for the event.

• Give your best discount of the year. If you were thinking of saving it for Boxing Day - don’t. Offer it now.

• Use the Promo Callout on Google Search to highlight your offer. Consider also adding in an ad variant with new text.

• Update your images on Meta with a big, bright, and noticeable sticker pointing out your offer. Consider also adding ad text variations that spell it out more clearly.

• If you're on a fixed monthly budget, pull back some ad spend from before and after the weekend to ensure you can better meet the expected increase in clicks (for instance, if you’re running B2C ads, you can reasonably expect to spend double your usual advertising that weekend).

• If you’re getting leads or sign-ups, quickly draft up a new Landing Page that highlights your offer. You can swap back as soon as the holiday is over.

If you’ve got the time to read and are looking for more, Nichollas recently dropped some quick ecommerce tips on the blog.

Has your organic traffic seen a boost lately?

Ours has.

While we’d love to take all the credit for the organic work we’ve done on our site and those of our clients, the recent Google Core Update that was finalized on September 3rd gave many brands one heck of a boost.

We’ve always been advocates for crafting strong, human-crafted organic content that leverages experience, expertise, authority, and trust (or the E-E-A-T principle) and this latest core update to the algorithms, to our pleasant surprise, seems to have really benefitted sites that followed this approach.

We wrote about this traffic jump a bit more thoroughly in a recent article over on our site, but here’s a few highlights from our side of things.

Impressions are up. Way up.

Our very own website saw our search impressions go through the roof after September 3. If you compare September 2 to October 12, it’s almost a 1000% difference - and all we’ve been doing is following the same content strategy we’ve had since the beginning.

It’s possible some of our content pieces also just clicked around that time, but the dates we got the boost are too close to be a coincidence.

Clicks are doing good things.

This particular niche site’s growth is more subtle, but note the high points in the graph below.

Prior to the update, this site never had more than 60 clicks a day, while after, it started hitting 90 on some days - or a +50% increase.

In this case, the content pace had actually slowed down quite a bit (I was the sole content producer doing so as an experiment between March and Sept, and it was entirely for a niche website with no backlink or paid sources, which I wrote about previously in a short case study).

All around growth with some curious corrections.

The biggest surprise was a client site where I haven’t actively produced any new content (either blog, newsletter, product pages, etc.) in over 2 years.

It saw a one day spike of +475% clicks and impressions, before levelling out to around 2x what we were seeing before. That site’s blog was always popular, but it really jumped after September 3.

Takeaways

The main takeaway here is that there’s no secret trick to ranking better. No magic spell you can learn. Nor even a crystal ball you need to consult. We saw surprisingly big gains in this update by following common sense SEO tactics. These include:

• Assuming E-E-A-T is an authoritative ranking factor.

• Producing content that has value for the readers in the niche.

• Writing content that we would actually want to read if we saw it in the wild.

• Interlinking our content with relevant posts both on and off site.

• Demonstrating authority and trust with our language.

• Not relying on external backlink for growth.

• Minimal use of AI (primarily for ideation or repurposing existing content).

• Keeping it simple.

If your site didn’t see a similar boost - or even lost traffic from this update - from this update, it might be a good time to re-evaluate what your SEO strategy looks like.

Coffee Break

What do the following have in common?

• Standing up and stretching.

• Going for a walk.

• Taking a hot shower.