Digital Minute – the latest digital marketing news and analysis Stickyeyes

Facebook has started testing search ads, as part of a new strategy to turn around its declining ad revenues. The social network is testing a new search advertising concept with a small number of advertisers in the automotive, ecommerce and retail sectors in the US and Canada. The concept involves inserting news feed ads into the search function of the site, although Facebook is being quiet on the specific details of how the model works. Facebook last trialled search ads in 2012, although the idea was shelved just a year later, and is looking for new advertising revenue sources as it faces competition from Google, Amazon and its other social media brand, Instagram.

After investing heavily in promoting search carousels, Google appears to be cutting down the time that these search features appear. Data from two independent search software provides suggests that the Google has reduced the number of occasions that image and video carousels appear in the search results by as much as 30%. The development could have a major impact on the traffic of brands that have used these features as a way to secure prominent placements in the search engine results.

Could brands soon start being able to promote their YouTube content as a Google search ad? That’s the question that has been raised after Google was spotted trialling a new approach to promoted video in the search results. In what appears to be a test involving a small number of film studios, movie trailers have been seen appearing in a carousel ad unit in Google search results. These ads include content hosted by YouTube, raising questions over whether brands will soon be able to promote their own YouTube content in Google’s search results pages.

Some advertisers are moving more than half of their digital advertising spend into Amazon, according to a survey of leading advertising agency executives in the US. A survey by CNN found that many agencies were seeing clients move as much as 60% of their ad budgets away from mediums such as Google search, display and programmatic, and towards Amazon – lured by a more product-focused audience, better conversion rates and Amazon’s power as a “product search engine”.

Google used its 20th birthday celebrations to announce a number of new search marketing features, with a much stronger focus on the user search journey and the way in which users consume content as part of that journey. The biggest of the announcements was a number of features that will essentially see Google pre-empt the user journey for what it considers to be “high consideration” search queries, where multiple sub-topics may play an important role in the overall search journey.