2017 saw the rise of influencer marketing multiply (with brands willing to pay more than £67,000 per video post with a YouTube influencer, according to Marketing Week), programmatic advertising spend grow even further, and social media giants tighten their guidelines on ‘inappropriate material’ (after advertisers tightened their purse strings to distance themselves).
It was also the year when machine learning and voice search continued to revolutionise the search experience (both organic and paid), Google had a tinker with its search ranking algorithms, added greater support for rich results (previously called rich snippets, rich cards or enriched results) and gave Knowledge Panels a makeover. Meanwhile, businesses began reviewing their data protection procedures for the GDPR.
