The COVID-19 pandemic has not left the digital marketing industry unscathed. Although e-commerce has experienced an admittedly predictable boom, caution and general negative sentiment has clipped advertising budgets in some sectors and shelved expansion plans temporarily in others.
TMI has weathered the storm in an emphatic manner. In the first month of lock down, we recorded the highest number of new starters and we’ve driven record sales volumes and ROAS numbers for many of our e-commerce clients. For these and other reasons, we are ecstatic at having won a B2B Campaign award at last night’s entirely online – a COVID-19 first – Global Digital Excellence Awards. This award debuted this year and we’re very glad we got onboard for the inauguration.
TMI won in the ‘Global PPC Campaign Of The Year – B2B’ category with an entry entitled The Media Image & Refinitiv – Rebrand and Restructure, Sustaining Efficiency at Scale For A New Brand. Our entry was a follow up to a shortlisted Refinitiv rebrand entry submitted by TMI in 2019. Prior to last night’s win, this entry had been shortlisted 3 times in 2020. Refinitiv was founded in 2018 when Thomson Reuters sold a 55% majority stake in its Financial & Risk (F&R) unit to private equity firm Blackstone Group LP. Collectively, these nominations and yesterday’s win speak to our ability to help blue chip brands successfully negotiate transitions of this nature.
Alistair Alber, TMI’s managing partner, had this to say, “We’re absolutely thrilled to have won Best Global PPC Campaign Of The Year in partnership with our amazing client Refinitiv. It underscores our commitment to results and client collaboration even at a time of global uncertainty about the future and the attendant shift in the way business is done.”
The 2020 awards season is in full swing and TMI is honoured to announce that we’ve been shortlisted for 2 categories in the 2020 Global Digital Excellence Awards – #GDXAwards. As a UK-based agency which opened our US office in New York last October following 3 years of successful expansion across the pond, TMI is particularly excited to be shortlisted for the Large Global Integrated Digital Agency Of The Year. This shortlisting comes just a month after winning our first client on the West Coast and so the expansion continues.
TMI’s second GDXAwards shortlisting is for Global PPC Campaign Of The Year – B2B. Our entry in this category has now earned its 3rd shortlisting in 2020 and is entitled, “The Media Image & Refinitiv – Rebrand and Restructure, Sustaining Efficiency at Scale For A New Brand”. This year’s submission was a follow up to a shortlisted Refinitiv rebrand entry submitted by TMI in 2019. Refinitiv was founded in 2018 when Thomson Reuters sold a 55% majority stake in its Financial & Risk (F&R) unit to private equity firm Blackstone Group LP. Collectively, these nominations speak to our ability to help blue chip brands successfully negotiate transitions of this nature.
Reacting to the nominations, TMI’s Managing Partner Alistair Albers said, “We’re delighted to be shortlisted for Large Global Integrated Digital Agency Of The Year. This speaks to and validates TMI’s considerable international expansion over the last few years and the growth in variety and strength of our lines of service during that time. I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to our incredible teams and, of course, the amazing clients that make our work possible”
The winners will be announced virtually on Tuesday 23 June at 08:00 pm BST. Join us for the announcement of the winners via this live stream link.
What is the name of the Google Update? The Page Experience Update
What’s new? An increased focus on Core Web Vitals.
What are Core Web Vitals? Loading, Interactivity and Visual Stability
When are these changes due? There is no set date, but they’re planned for at least 6 months’ time.
Where can I read more? You can find more information about page experience here.
A closer look at Google’s Page Experience algorithm update
Anybody who has worked in SEO knows that Google isn’t afraid of releasing sweeping updates to its organic search algorithm — and from what we know so far, the upcoming Page Experience update is no exception.
The proposed algorithm will significantly change the way results are presented in SERPs. The ranking ability of any page will now be affected by a number of new factors that Google has collectively termed “page experience”. This represents how the user interacts with the site, and how convenient it is for them to find the information they’re looking for.
In short, the more accessible, understandable, and user-friendly the website, the higher it will be displayed in the SERP.
Numerous parameters are in place to determine the overall Page Experience score: the algorithm will take into account download speed, interactivity, stability, and much more. Google calls these key parameters Core Web Vitals.
Current metrics will also be taken into account, including mobile-friendliness, browsing security, HTTPS support, and the absence of intrusive advertising. At the same time, AMP support will no longer be required to achieve top positions for mobile searches.
Google plans to implement these changes after 2020. A reminder will be sent six months in advance of the new algorithm’s launch (at some point in 2021) so that site owners have time to prepare.
Once the changes mentioned in our roadmap are rolled out, page experience will join the hundreds of signals that Google considers when generating Search results.”
Google launches Web Vitals: Important health performance for your site
What are Core Web Vitals?
Loading / Interactivity / Visual Stability
Core Web Vitals
In Google’s announcement of the Page Experience update, it’s mentioned that optimizing sites for good behavioural indicators is a strategically important area for the development of the web industry. Therefore, Google has decided to combine all the tools that measure site performance into a separate core service.
All Google web dev tools, including:
Lighthouse
Chrome DevTools
PageSpeed Insights
Search Console’s Speed Report
have been updated and can now measure Core Web Vitals.
How are Core Web Vitals measured?
Measuring site user satisfaction is a challenging task. Google has determined that download speed, interactivity, and visual stability are critical factors in determining the quality of a site.
Google identifies three critical indicators which form the basis of Core Web Vitals metrics:
Largest Contentful Paint measures the rendering time of the most significant visible part of the content on the first screen of your site. It can be an image, a caption, or raw text.
First Input Delay measures the responsiveness of your site. The lower this indicator, the more confident users are that they’re able to interact with your site.
In the new update, this parameter will be replaced with Total Blocking Time, which takes into account the time between rendering the first significant visible content (First Contentful Paint) and the time taken for the site to reliably and rapidly respond to user input (Time to Interactive). TBT measures the time during which the main thread is blocked from responding to user input.
Cumulative Layout Shift measures the degree of stability of the content on your site. If core page content is pushed back by ad units or other content when loading a site, this parameter will evaluate how critical the prioritized content is for visitors. A score between 0 and 1 is assigned, with a lower score representing a better result.
All these indicators can already be tested in the new version of Lighthouse.
More useful information from Google
Google has claimed that live data — that is, data sent to their database when you visit each site — is the most valuable. This entire database is stored in one Chrome User Experience Report. Guidelines for working with the file are described here.
Web Vitals Chrome extension
For ease of determining page loading speed, a new Web Vitals extension has been released for Chrome to help determine whether the page you’re on is fast enough.
When you visit any site, the extension automatically measures it for speed, interactivity and stability and displays a green or red colour rating. When you click on the coloured square, a window with specific measurements appears:
How to optimize for Web Vitals
If you would like to learn more about how to optimize for Web Vitals, you can visit web.dev/LIVE between June 30 — July 2, 2020.
If you would like to find out more about working with the upcoming Page Experience update, or anything else SEO-related, please contact us and we’ll do our best to help.
We are living in unprecedented times that have had a resounding impact throughout the world and as a company, TMI has been banding together to ensure that work carries on as per our usual high standards.
We are delighted to have been nominated in two categories in the European Search Awards 2020. After being shortlisted for a number of categories in 2019, it’s wonderful to see that the company is maintaining its reputation for innovative and effective search campaigns for our clients.
The first nomination comes in the “The Best Use of Search – Finance PPC” category for our work alongside Refinitv on Rebrand and Restructure: Sustaining Efficiency at Scale For A New Brand.
The second nomination is for the “Best Large PPC Agency”.
Managing partner Alistair Albers commented, “It’s a considerable challenge to function as normal during times that are fraught with uncertainty, but I am incredibly proud of how the teams at TMI have adapted to a dispersed working arrangement. They have been going above and beyond to ensure that we are producing the same outstanding results that our clients have come to expect. As always, it’s an honour to be nominated alongside such esteemed competition and it underscores the fact that hard work, innovation and dedication remain the default operating protocols at TMI.”
The European Search Awards are an international competition that celebrates the very best in SEO, PPC, Digital and Content Marketing in Europe. The awards are now in their eighth year and attract hundreds of entries from some of the leading search and digital agencies and professionals from across Europe. A full list of award categories can be found here.
The awards ceremony will take place in Bucharest on September the 3rd.
TMI is delighted that the new decade has started as strongly as the last one ended, with a nomination in the US Social Media Awards 2020 for the “Best Use of Social” category. Our campaign with Avon is one that we are incredibly proud of and it’s wonderful that all of the hard work and innovative thinking has paid off.
2019 was an incredible awards year for TMI and we are thrilled to have started the new decade on the same positive footing ﹣ being shortlisted for two 2020 Biddable Media Awards.
A lot’s been said about Google’s latest announce update – BERT, Bi-directional Encoder Representations from Transformers – so why do you need another take?
2019 has been an incredible year for TMI. We are delighted to announce that we have continued the fine form of late by bagging a nomination for the Rising Star of the Year Award for the 2019 Microsoft Advertising Regional Partner Awards.
