🔍 Siri's makeover, Google's revenue challenge and Facebook boycotts

Jun 23, 2020

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Siri lost its groundbreaking luster after years of relative neglect. Apple finally seems to want to give Siri some of it sheen back. The virtual assistant is getting its first major redesign in more than 8 years. And, the company announced the update during its annual WWDC developer conference yesterday, that it now has 20x more facts than it did three years ago.

With Siri's default status on iOS devices, Apply computers and CarPlay, it now handles some 25 billion voice requests per month, according to the company. That still plays well for Google: Siri's web results are powered by Google.

The search giant, however, looks poised to take a revenue hit in the U.S. for the first time this year, says eMarketer. Paid search, in particular, is expected to fall by 7% largely due to travel advertiser cuts due to COVID-19. Facebook and Amazon are expected to grow. Though as Greg Sterling notes, if more advertisers follow The North Face, REI, Patagonia and others' and join the #StopHateForProfit boycott over moderation practices, Facebook's prospects could change. (That's a big if.)

Keep reading for a special shot of Audio Shorts and more.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief

Audio Shorts

Spotify expands ad offerings

Self-serve video ads. Spotify advertisers in the U.S., UK and Canada can now create sound-on video ad campaigns in the streaming service's self-serve Ad Studio. Spotify says that running both video and audio ads nearly doubles ad recall and increases brand awareness by 2.2x.

In-App Offers. Podcast advertisers have depended on vanity URLs and promotional codes to track their campaigns, but those techniques require listeners to commit that information to memory if they plan to act on those offers at a later date. Spotify's new In-App Offers now list sponsors on the episode pages and is in alpha testing in the US and Germany. Users can click through to the sponsors' websites.

Why we care. In-app offers could give podcast advertisers another way to gauge campaign performance. Spotify added impression, reach and audience data for podcast advertisers in January. The streaming service continues to build out its ad offerings to reach its 141 million active ad-supported listeners.

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Search Shorts

Google algorithm update again, not confirmed.

Google update again. Yea, the other day we reported on an unconfirmed Google search algorithm update but we are seeing more reports from over the weekend.None of this is confirmed by Google, but there is community chatter and signals of an update.

Search Console and Google Analytics. It seems like something is brewing with some sort of new reporting flow between Google Analytics and Google Search Console. It is hard to know what is coming exactly but there are some hints of new exports and reports.

E-A-T measured. Google's John Mueller reiterated on Twitter that E-A-T is "not something we'd explicitly measure for Search." It is part of the Google quality raters guidelines.

Fix slow LCP. Mueller explained how he would go about making a slow LCP faster. He said, "My basic approach would be to use webpagetest.org, get the timing there, and use the film-strip & waterfall views to work out which assets are critical to reach that time."

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