E-E-A-T 🍽
Google’s just
released a huge new update on how they evaluate content. They used to grade on Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Now they’ve added another E, Experience: do they believe that a real (read: non-AI) person wrote the article based on something they actually did?
Why this matters: Google, like the rest of the world, is scrambling to catch up with the rise of AI-generated content. Since AI can most easily write content in an objective, 3rd-person voice, this is designed to address it. Our SEO team is bracing for a ton of upcoming rankings changes.
What you can do: Take stock of your top landing pages and blog posts. Ensure they reflect your distinct brand or author voice and incorporate multimedia wherever possible. For example, Reels, screen recordings, or photography. AI can’t mimic those… yet.
Death of the Bounce Rate 📉
One of the biggest changes in
GA4 is that Google has removed the
bounce rate metric altogether, replacing it with
Engagement rate, a measure of the % of your visitors that stay at least 10 seconds or click an internal link.
Why this matters: Bounce rate was a favourite for junior marketers, but it was never actually that useful to begin with. Some pages, like articles, will naturally have a high bounce rate, and bounce rate rarely corellates with conversion rate. We’re hopeful this makes people think critically about what they’re measuring.
Modular Creative 🧱
Since iOS14.5, we’ve been moving all our clients’ social ads towards a modular creative framework. What does this mean?
Instead of rolling out an ad for our clients, or even ad variants, we “modularize” the creative into its individual parts. For example, instead of rolling out a single, 15-second video, we’ll chop that video into 3-second cuts, and reconfigure the hook, order, and accompanying copy, in 5 different ways.
Why this matters: Most people don’t watch an ad past the first 2 seconds. If you’re spending $10,000 producing a social ad video and only advertising 1 or 2 versions of it, you might be missing out on 90% of the ROAS that just a few hours of editing could’ve earned you.
What you can do: Start by adding a custom “Thumbstop rate” metric to your Meta ads account (below). This will show you what ads are doing the best job of hooking people in – the first step in modular creative.