There aren’t many good things to remember 2020 by, so let’s try to focus on some of the things that happened in digital marketing, and those that are expected to happen in 2021.
Digital Marketing in 2020
Google opened Google Shopping organic listings, allowing businesses to display their products without having to pay for advertising.
Google My Business offered different tools and features to help businesses to easily update their status following covid-19 restrictions and interact with customers.
Google rolled out two core algorithm updates, in May and in December. Even Amazon was hit by the December update and lost traffic precisely during Cyber Week.
Google Analytics 4 was launched in October, offering a glimpse at the future of predictive analytics using AI-based insights.
Google introduced “Passage Indexing”, a new way to crawl the web and to display search results, expected to affect only 7% of all search queries in all languages.
And in social media, Tiktok bypassed Facebook and became the most downloadable app, and the most popular social network among generation Z.
What will happen in 2021?
AI will play a bigger part, both in Google algorithm and in the day-to-day work of digital marketers – from content writers to developers.
Google and Facebook are facing several lawsuits in the US and Europe. It’ll be interesting to see how it will change the online marketing industry.
Apple is expected to build a search engine. And if it will succeed where Microsoft failed, it may change the way we do SEO.
Google will roll out mobile-first index on all websites in March 2021, and in May – the Page Experience update, which will be followed by some type of visual signaling on the search results.
Google will probably continue to expand “zero clicks” results, the question is how will publishers respond to this traffic theft.
Read the full 2020 summary and 2021 prediction on nekuda blog.
