• 05 May 2021
  • 3 Min read

April 2021: Digital marketing news and Google updates

April 2021 was a busy month for the digital marketing world, with plenty of news and Google updates released for us to begin using, or at least learning about before their launch.

Not quite up to speed with last month’s digital marketing news? Don’t worry: I’ve rounded up the biggest and best bits that you need to know from April so you can enter the new month fully versed with what’s already launched and what’s to come.

Google launches regex support in Search Console

Last month, Google announced the launch of two new features that would boost the usefulness of their performance reports in Search Console: regex filters and enhanced comparison features.

Where performance reports could already allow you to break up your data with filters, it now supports regular expressions (regex) to allow you to capture more complex queries. For example, a brand name ‘X&Y’ could be searched for as “X and Y” or “X & Y” to cover the different ways people might refer to the brand.

With the enhanced comparison features upgrade, Google now allows full support for cases where more than one metric is selected to show a comparison between queries with percentage differences. The result is more detailed and better presented data.

Want to learn more? Read our blog post on the launch of regex support in Search Console.

Google Ads rolls out auto-applied recommendations

Google is constantly committed to helping marketers and businessowners better optimise their website performance, but with this latest upgrade they seem to have acknowledged that it’s not always easy to keep up and implement the newest features.

Instead of relying on you to manually review and add these to your Ads profile, you can now subscribe to certain types of recommendations to automatically be applied to save you time and help ensure you’re getting the most out of your ad spend.

The recommendations can range from adding new keywords automatically to bidding more efficiently. Find out more in our blog post about the roll-out of auto-applied ad recommendations.

Google launches new Page Experience report

April was the month where Google announced it would be pressing the brakes on rolling out the full Page Experience update all at once, but that it would still be bringing out elements more gradually. First up was the Page Experience report that will allow marketers to gain better insights into how each of their site pages are performing and presenting them with more opportunities to improve their onsite SEO.

The report will offer information on aspects of your website including:

  • The percentage of URLs with a good page experience rating
  • Search impressions over time to show relevancy of them against searcher intent
  • Page Experience signal to gain more information on how to improve your pages

Find out how you can get the most out of your technical SEO strategy with our blog post on the launch of Google’s new Page Experience report.

Google Ads rolls out dynamic exclusion lists

Ads accounts have gained plenty of new features this month, and one of these included the roll-out of dynamic exclusion lists that are designed to save marketers time and resource, and to streamline the process.

Although the feature already existed in some capacity, manually entering sites to avoid undesirable ad placements meant new sites that cropped up were at risk of being missed. Going forwards, ads accounts will be able to automatically detect and block certain sites continuously over time, meaning it can save you plenty of time so you can spend it on more important matters.

Didn’t see this news when we first wrote about it? Read the original blog post on the roll-out of dynamic ad exclusion lists.

You’re now up to date with the latest digital marketing news and Google updates from April 2021. To be the first in the know in future, make sure you’re following us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

Interested in working with a digital marketing agency that can always keep you in the loop with the latest news and make suggestions for getting the most out of your strategies? Get in touch with us for a free and friendly consultation.


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