This article dives into the latest Digital Marketing Trends for March 2024
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Welcome to our latest Digital Marketing News Update that we publish every two weeks, so you're always up to date on the latest trends. You can read the article below or, if you'd rather listen, click the player above. We'd love to know what you think of this format.
AI Video Everywhere
Video screenshot from OpenAI’s Sora AI video platform
If you’ve been on X or Linkedin in the last 10 days you unlikely to have missed the explosion in AI generated video beings shared. Curently the two tools from the major players are only in test mode, and are available to a limited audience. Both OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Lumiere are showing incredible promise, and are set to disrupt swathes of the media industry. However just like any aspect of AI we need to see these tools in action hands-on before we can leap to too many conclusions. Its also worth mentioning that Runway already have their Gen2 product available for free and it is progressing very quickly as well, but hasn’t received the same limelight achieved by Sora.
Check out the latest news and video examples from Sora and Lumiere.
Goodbye ChatGPT Plugins, hello Custom GPT Actions
The ChatGPT Plug-In Store will shut down on March 19th
ChatGPT plugins allows you to connect ChatGPT to external tools, and allowed the AI to do things it otherwise wasn’t capable of. Things like scanning PDFs, creating files and building travel itineraries from live data were all made possible by plugins when ChatGPT couldn’t achieve these things. However, with the release of custom GPTs, versions of ChatGPT created to do specific tasks, there was a huge overlap between the functionalities. Custom GPT allows for the creation of Actions, essential interacting with any platform that has an API, making the plugin functionality redundant.
It’s definitely worth checking out the wide range of custom GPTs that have already been created, and dozens are becoming available every day. It is expected that we will see a GPT store soon, just like we have seen App stores from Apple and Google.
Great Ad Transparency from Google
The Google Ads Performance Max campaign editor
After a damning report from Adalytics that showed Google display ads were showing on pornography websites, pirate software sites and in countries sanction by the US, Google has committed to improving transparency on where ads are showing up. Starting on March the 4th 2024, users will be able to see ad impression level insights for Google Performance Max campaigns, and we expect this to be rolled out to other formats in due course. This means we will be able to see exactly where our ads are showing up, even when they don’t get clicks. It will be interesting to see if Google also improves the transparency within GA4, so that we can see what type of ad and on what site our Performance Max clicks are coming from, rather than showing them all as ‘Cross Network’.
Learn more about the latest Google Ads updates
The New Google SEO Guide
The updated Google SEO guide
Google originally launched the SEO Starter Guide back in 2008, and its gone through several revisions since then, but it’s now been rebuilt and revamped. Although title as a started guide, there are plenty of insights for more advanced digital marketers, as some great insights on things like how E.E.A.T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust) really work in practice.
This should help resolve some of the furious debate on Reddit over how E.E.A.T. really works! It’s a worthy read for all marketers and a reminder of what Google is really trying to encourage within the SEO community.
Read the Google SEO Guide