Digital Marketing Agency Round-Up: The Top News in June 2021

Welcome back to our Digital Marketing round-up series where we summarise the top news each month!

ICYMI: May 2021 Digital Marketing Round-Up

Gmail Campaign Changes

Google is simplifying the Google ads experience by retiring standalone Gmail campaigns.

Starting from 1 July, standalone Gmail campaigns will become "read only". Advertisers will not be able to create new standalone Gmail campaigns or gmail ads, or edit existing ones. You'll only be able to pause or delete the ads.

If you want to continue serving Gmail ads, you'll have to create a Discovery campaign, which enables you to reach up to 3 billion customers across Google platforms, including Gmail.

Google Core Algorithm Update

Google's core algorithm update was rolled out on 2 June and completed on 12 June. Another core update will follow in July.

While Google rolls out thousands of updates a year, a core algorithm update, which only happens a few times a year, involves broad improvements to Google search ranking processes.

Scan through your rankings to see if you were impacted by June's core update. If you are, don't panic. Next month's core update may reverse the gains or losses experienced in June's core update.

Your website shouldn't be too affected if you make sure to adhere to Google's best practices and recommendations, which include:

• E.A.T content (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness)
• Original and quality content

Google PageSpeed Scores Update

Lighthouse 8.0 has been released, rolling out a mix of stricter and easier scoring.

Lighthouse is a tool by Google to help publishers, web developers and SEOs measure page speed and other metrics linked to accessibility and SEO.

Changes to Google Lighthouse Tool include:

• Re-weighting of performance score
• Stricter scoring for Total Blocking Time (TBT) and First Contentful Paint (FCP)
• Ease in scoring for Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• Majority of the sites (about 60%) are expected to see a positive change, from moderate to 5 points improvement or higher. Around 20% of all sites will experience a drop of up to 5 points. Meanwhile, the remaining 20% may not experience much fluctuations.

Learn more here.

Instagram Reels Ads

Instagram has officially launched Instagram Reels ads worldwide, providing businesses with another advertising platform for greater reach.

Similar to Instagram Stories ads, Reel ads will be full screen and vertical. It will appear in between individual reels and last up to 30 seconds.

Unlike Instagram Stories ads which disappears after swiping, consumers can comment, like, view, save and share Reels ads, making it more interactive and long-lasting.

WordPress WebP Support

WordPress has announced that WordPress version 5.8 will support the advanced WebP image format.

The latest version of WordPress is scheduled for release in late July 2021.

WebP image format has been gaining popularity as it is able to produce quality images at much smaller sizes, in comparison to JPG, PNG and GIF formats.

Find out more here.

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That's all the updates we have for now! As one of the top digital marketing agency in Singapore, we aim to bring you the latest updates. Keep your eyes peeled for next month's round up!