What to look out for in the Digital World

As we start a New Year, we asked some of our digital team to give us an idea of what to look out for in the digital world during 2022; here are a few ideas:

Core Web Vitals

In June last year, Google rolled out a new update called Core Web Vitals, which scores a user’s perceived interactive experience with a webpage using three metrics. The purpose of Core Web Vitals is to improve user experience across all sites and continue in their campaign on improving mobile web performance.

The way they score Core Web Vitals is using three user-centred metrics focused on how quickly a page’s content loads. These metrics are:

• Largest Contentful Paint – the page’s loading performance; how long it took for a page’s main content to load
• First Input Display – the page’s interactivity, how long it took for the user to first interact with the page
• Cumulative Layout Shift – the page’s stability, how often does the layout of the page move

The scores from these metrics can be seen in your Google Search Console under Enhancements. Google will tell you the score of the pages on your website using a traffic light system; red being poor, amber being needs improvement and green being good. Alongside the score, Google will also tell you which metric needs to be improved so it moves up the traffic light system.

Core Web Vitals is important as it gives websites more visibility, recognition and ranking in Google.

Google Analytics future in the EU

Earlier this month, there was a legal ruling by Austrian’s data protection authority that continuous use of Google Analytics violates GDPR. The reason why this has happened is because tracking data from a user’s session is sent to Google’s servers and ends up in the United States. Austrian’s data regulators said the use of Google Analytics isn’t properly protected against potential access by US intelligence agencies which causes a breach with GDPR.

Currently, there are on-going negotiations between Europe and the US on new ways for data to flow between the two which would hopefully resolve these issues.

Our digital team is always looking out for new trends, ideas and practices that can help our clients to maximise the potential of their websites. Talk to your team today to find out how we can help.