Good morning Search Marketer, it's nice to be back at it.
I was fortunate to be able to take some time away from digital media over the past week to spend time with my kids and to try to immerse myself in their online learning without the distraction of work (my fractions are rusty). Yes, it feels strange to take a so-called vacation under these circumstances, but if you can swing it — even just a morning or afternoon — do it. Your brain will thank you. (And I am so thankful to my colleagues for all they did while I was off.)
Now, on to the news.
We've all been living it, but Google's first quarter earnings report Tuesday painted a picture of the Covid effect on digital advertising. After strong growth during January and February, "in March we experienced a significant slowdown in ad revenues," said Google CFO Ruth Porat, confirming what we already knew.
The question had been, how bad was it for the ads giant? Overall, Google ad revenues still increased by 10% year-over-year in Q1. For context, ad revenue was up 15% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2019. So we can interpret that as January and February are camouflaging just how bad March was, or the slump wasn't that bad. Keep in mind, the slump effect really only hit the final two to three weeks of the quarter.
However, yesterday, Facebook added some color of its own, signalling signs of improvement in April: "After the initial steep decrease in advertising revenue in March, we have seen signs of stability reflected in the first three weeks of April, where advertising revenue has been approximately flat compared to the same period a year ago."
One item worth noting from Google's earnings call: direct response advertising persisted on YouTube through March, while brand advertisers pulled back heavily starting mid-March, the company said. I've spoken with several marketers who've said they kept the pedal down on their YouTube performance campaigns for the cheap CPMs and strong performance.
On the Facebook front, the company is expanding its in-stream ad test to more Live content.It's got several brand safety controls baked in (lessons learned), and the test consists of both pre-roll and a kind of picture-in-picture mid-roll ad format.
Google's Martin Splitt offered a handy refresher on the right way to apply JavaScript to links for SEO — and good UX — including how to think about fragment identifiers in your URLs.
Keep reading for an update on Microsoft Advertising's spiffier UI from Duane Brown and much more.
Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief
