Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, and happy Mom and Pop Business Owners Day, Ok, I generally don’t celebrate national “whatever” days unless it means I can get a free coffee or donut, but when I saw this one it definitely piqued my interest. The last year has been tough on SMBs. The pandemic forced many businesses to close their doors, adjust their offerings, move online, change how they reached their clients, and even potentially target new audiences. While most big brands have the capacity to make these adjustments during lean times, it’s much harder with fewer people, less budget and more need for DIY. This NYT piece profiles 5 small businesses that found success after the pandemic rocked their plans last year. Many of these businesses thought 2020 would be their end, but they made it work through digital marketing adaptations, production changes, and a little help from their friends. Make sure to support a small business today (and any day you can, for that matter). And long live “Mom and Pop” businesses. Carolyn Lyden Microsoft proposes method to automatically submit URLs from WordPress to search enginesFabrice Canel, the Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Bing, submitted a feature request to WordPress for the CMS to have the ability to push new and updated URLs directly to search engines. “Today, we propose integrating in WordPress Core the ability to notify not only Bing, but also all participating Search Engines, of any WordPress URL or Content change. Microsoft to develop and maintain the open-source code in close collaboration with WordPress. WordPress to approve, validate and include code,” wrote Canel in the proposal. Why we care. If WordPress does end up supporting this new feature request, then it would simplify the process of WordPress sites getting their content into Microsoft Bing Search. In addition, it may add pressure to Google to begin supporting a content submission API for normal content. Right now, Google only supports with its indexing API being pushed content for job posting URLs and live stream content. Google adds practice problems and math solver structured data and Search Console reportsEarlier this year we reported how Google was testing displaying practice homework problems in the search results. Now that this feature is fully live, and Google has come up with new structured data and Search Console reporting to help educational websites understand which pages have these types of content. Practice problem structured data. To help Google showcase your site’s content for these practice problems, you can add new supported structured data to your webpages. Google said, “relevance to the user, including topicality, grade level and curriculum standards, can be key considerations for users deciding what learning material to use.” Math solver structured markup. When you use math solver structured data, you can make your site eligible to be featured on Google Search when users enter a math equation into the Google Search bar. Why we care. If you are in the education online content business, you may want to leverage these new structured data types to get more exposure in the Google Search results. With many students still in online or hybrid education, there’s even more opportunity to draw traffic to your educational content with these structured data types. On the hunt for something new in 2021? Here are the latest career opportunities in searchHead of Digital Marketing @ KLIK Media (Chicago, DC, or USA remote)
CRO Specialist @ Dave Ramsey Solutions (Franklin, TN)
Senior Growth Marketing Manager @ Intercom (Ireland)
Google Ads PPC Strategist @ Interdependence Public Relations (Chicago)
Enter a job opening for an opportunity to be featured in this section. Watch out, Clubhouse. Here’s Facebook…After some snooping, developer Alessandro Paluzzi found some code on the back end of Facebook’s app that indicates a Clubhouse competitor is coming. It’s no secret that, if something is popular, Facebook wants in–whether that means they have to buy out smaller apps or create their own versions to compete. The top social media platform didn’t really have to stretch far for this one, though. They launched a video room feature in May that’s essentially the same thing, so all they’ll have to do is turn off the video aspect to compete with Clubhouse. Why we care. What’s interesting here, though, is that Clubhouse is still only open via invitation and they still haven’t launched on Android. Facebook, on the other hand, is available everywhere to anyone. Plus, “if Facebook can provide its own public Rooms discovery process while enabling people and Pages to reach their followers and friends by highlighting in-progress audio Rooms at the top of the app, its audio Rooms could also become a big lure for creators looking to maximize their reach and community-building efforts,” wrote Andrew Hutchinson for Social Media Today. “It’ll be interesting to see when Facebook looks to go live with its audio rooms feature, and how it looks to roll it out. Either way, it could definitely be a good option to consider, especially for brand Pages looking to build community, and maximize engagement in the app, with a view to driving more referral traffic.” Harry, yer a wizardAfter the debate a few weeks ago about Airbnb eliminating ad spend and still maintaining brand awareness, many search marketers pointed out that the only way that worked was because they’d already established themselves as a big brand in the travel space. When you’re a smaller brand and want to ramp up that awareness, how can you act quickly? Well, hiring a Prince is one option. This data from chartr shows that tech startup BetterUp dramatically increased their brand awareness and searches for their company name just by hiring Prince Harry as their Chief Impact Officer. Here’s some good stuff from Search Engine Land you might have missed…The onus of diversity should not fall to Black marketers. Data proves that diversity improves business outcomes and helps us reach more customers–but the onus of representation and inclusion should not fall solely to Black and non-white marketers. Everyone on the team should make it a priority. How to audit Core Web Vitals. Knowing what Core Web Vitals are is one thing, but finding a way to audit and communicate Core Web Vitals issues to clients in a way that is both useful and actionable is a challenge that SEOs across the globe are facing. What is FLoC? Here’s what we know so far. Google has positioned FLoC squarely between users, who have grown increasingly privacy-conscious, and advertisers, who view it in the shadow of the third-party cookies they’ve become accustomed to. Handwriting vs. Typing: Which is better for actually remembering those important meeting notes?If you want to remember something–write it down. Like, put actual pen to paper. “A new study from the University of Tokyo concludes that writing with a stylus or typing on a touchscreen keyboard just isn’t the same as handwriting,” said Arianne Cohen of FastCompany. Study participants were asked to take notes about a student’s very busy schedule and then recall the details later. Some wrote notes with a pen and paper while others took notes digitally–either with a stylus or keyboard. The participants were under an MRI when asked to remember the schedule. “The hand writers remembered the schedule more accurately, and their brains displayed far more brain activity in areas associated with language, memory, navigation, and visualization, the latter two of which indicate that the mind’s eye is recalling some of the information,” reported Cohen. Not only did they remember more, but taking handwritten notes was much faster than typing or writing with a digital pen. So next time you’re in an important meeting where you really need to remember something, whip out the old notebook and ballpoint pen. The post Long live small businesses and brand awareness with Prince Harry; Monday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3foF308
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Today, modern buyers expect you to know who they are and what they want before you even meet them. The first time they interact with you, they are looking for the exact right content at the exact right time. Your customers want you to immediately know what they need. In a digital-first world, how we engage audiences, from webinars to virtual events and more, needs to evolve from static presentations to dynamic, memorable experiences that your audiences will love. Most importantly, consumers are looking for authentic, approachable, helpful human experiences – not marketing. Because of this change, marketers need to look beyond tools and strategies and put customers at the center of marketing. For example, a webinar is more than a fully-branded presentation with polls and downloadable content. And virtual conferences are not just a COVID band-aid placeholder until live events ultimately return. Engagement is experiential. It’s creating a system and journey of experiences that you put your prospects on and let them go where they want to go. Regardless of where they are in the world, what apps they use, or how they interact, customers can access the immersive experience you are providing them. The experience you provide is only limited to your imagination. Join Mark Borenstein, VP of marketing, ON24, in his informative MarTech session and learn how you can create a continuous journey of experiences, personalize digital engagement to accelerate the buying journey, and turn digital engagement into data that converts. Register to attend the session here and get started on providing your customers with engaging digital experiences to take with them wherever they may be on their buyer journey. The post Beyond the Webinar: Engaging experiences your audience will love appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/31uAb1m User-Generated Content (UGC) is one of the most effective ways to create a highly successful, long-term SEO and conversion strategy. This report from Shopper Approved covers the various tools to used generate and distribute UGC, as well as how it works to improve online visibility in search results, and how it drives traffic and sales. It also addresses the underlying psychology behind UGC, why it matters, and how it works to influence decision making. This report will show you how UGC can improve all your search marketing KPIs:
Learn more. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “How To Optimize SEO With UGC.“ The post User-Generated Content — The secret SEO weapon appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3co8uNM “Data doesn’t speak for itself, it needs a good storyteller,” said Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Inc., the largest communications firm in Silicon Valley. Her keynote launched the second day of MarTech and gave all those who listened a sense of what the data world is missing – effective communication. “Some have said data is the new oil,” Duarte explained. “The findings [from the data], though, will stay buried without the help of a communicator.” The soft skills gapJob opportunities for data scientists and analysts have thrived in recent years. (Statistician and data scientist were two of the top jobs of 2020.) At the same time, an even greater demand for soft skills (writing, problem-solving and the like) has emerged. Duarte cited soft skills as the number one skills gap identified by LinkedIn’s Talent Insights tool. They found that 1.6 million jobs remained opened for those with soft skills, nearly a million of which called for oral communication skills. A separate study by Burning Glass Technologies showed that demand for soft skills was greater for analytics-enabled jobs than the average demand across all occupations. “This conveys that employers want their data-wranglers to know how to communicate well,” Duarte said. This gap presents an opportunity for career advancement for individual data scientists. This is because, as Duarte suggests, “most data roles are becoming less about statistics themselves, and more about making sense of the data and applying it to business use.” Communicating problems and opportunities from dataData scientists and analysts explore data all day. But for others in the organization to make use of the data, it has to be explained. “Communicating about data is difficult for some people,” Duarte said, “because when you’re analyzing the data you’re going to find one of two things in it. You’re either going to identify a problem or an opportunity in the data.” To address the problem or opportunity requires action. “The ability to identify the action and communicate it moves [the data scientist] from being an individual contributor to a strategic advisor,” she explained. “As you build this muscle, you’ll become a more trusted data storyteller.” With trust, the data scientist can inspire others and become a leader. But this only happens by learning how to tell an effective story. Duarte calls this “getting traction from your data.” 5 ways to get traction from your dataTo make an impact on an audience, the presentation has to mean something. For Duarte, meaningful communication is achieved by these five strategies:
Watch the full presentation here (free registration required). Know your audience, know your roleHumanizing the data makes for a more compelling story, but it also reminds the analyst why they are telling the story in the first place. “Often in many roles when we’re working in data, we have to dispassionately and analytically look at data,” Duarte said. “We need to suspend our bias, let our critical thinking rule all of the analysis. But once that step is done and the data is all analyzed, we sometimes forget the power in getting to know the humans that generated that data.” As an analyst, the data one is looking at corresponds to a company or the customers they are serving. This promotes the analyst into the role of a mentor, a leader. Once the roles are clarified, a better story can be told, because the ground has been laid to grow and develop an empathetic connection. Only though empathy and relatability can the storyteller truly “create a sense of awe in the audience.” The post How to tell stories using data appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2Qymyf8 Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, I’ve got to go off on a bit of a rant on this zero click business. Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro came out with a study saying about 65% of all searches in Google Search do not lead to a click to a website. Shortly after, Google responded saying Google sends more traffic to the open web every year. One study says Google is gatekeeping the search traffic and Google saying, no we don’t. Who do you believe? The truth is, both are right and both can be believed. The beauty of data, especially statistics, is that you can make numbers look like anything you want. You see it a lot during election season, where one politician can use the same data to say the complete opposite of what their opponent is saying. One of my favorite topics in college was statistics because it was so easy to take the same data source and use different statistical models to make the data say what you want it to say. That being said, does this make a difference to you as a marketer? It does not. We can complain and whine about it but it doesn’t matter. The truth is, I believe the study that was presented by Rand Fishkin told the story Rand wanted to tell. The response Google had told the story Google wanted to present. Both are honestly wrong and not telling the full truth. There is absolutely no way that 65% of all searches do not lead to a click to a website. But even if that is true, those clicks can lead to driving directions to your local restaurant for curbside pickup or those clicks can lead to a tap on a phone number to call the local hardware store to find out what supplied to order to fix the leaky sink in the house. Searchers can be refining their queries and not clicking on any website during that first search but then end up going to a car dealership down the road and buying that new Jeep Wrangler they always wanted. Google’s goal is to satisfy the searcher and we search marketers don’t always think about it from the searcher’s perspective. Trust me, I didn’t think about it this way for years. But if you search for the weather, Google wants to tell you the weather and not make you click on a website to find who won last night’s tennis match. At the same time, there are many queries that drive people to websites, including featured snippets that, if you remember, we lost for a few weeks earlier this month, and we were all complaining we wanted back. So don’t read a blanket study about how evil Google is and take it at face value and, at the same time, don’t read Google’s official response and take that at face value. There is a middle ground. These studies can be more transparent and, at the same time, Google can and should be more transparent with its data. As search marketers, we have to focus on how to get the best and most useful traffic to our customers and focus less of our time on complaining about who is right or wrong. Barry Schwartz, New practice problem and math solver structured dataWe have brand new, out of the box, structured data for you all to play with – that is if you are in the education content business. Google has added new practice problem and math solver structured data support to their developer documentation. Yes, this is for the practice problem search results we spotted back in January – remember those? If not, you will be quizzed on it later. Google also released updates to Google Search Console’s rich results report to show debugging information around the new practice problem and math solver structured data. They updated their rich results testing tool to help you fix issues related to those new structured data types. Google announces global launch of property promotion ads for hotelsProperty promotion ads are now available globally for hotels looking to capture demand for users who are searching but don’t know what hotel they’d like to book. “They show prominently in search results for geographical locations, allowing advertisers to position specific hotels in a particular place. Previous to this launch, direct participation in property promotion ads was done through a whitelist,” wrote Peter Fernandez, Product Manager, Hotel Ads in the announcement. While standard hotel booking link ads are meant for advertisers to capture a booking for a hotel a user already chose, property promotion ads are designed to enable advertisers to influence the buying decision for users still looking for a hotel. Why we care. With the COVID-19 vaccine rolling out across the US and globally, more travel-related industries are hoping to capitalize on the incremental increase in travelers–for both business and pleasure. As more people are booking flights and hotels, these newly available ads can help hotels reach consumers who are more top- to middle-of-funnel searchers in the travel space. Google Search Console crawl stats report bugGoogle informed us that there was an internal data issue with the crawl stats report in Google Search Console. This may have resulted in a drop in your data between the dates of March 10th and March 23rd. So if you saw this decline in your crawl data within this report, do not be alarmed – it was a reporting issue. Glenn Gabe shared a screenshot (see above) of showing how alarming this data issue can be, but again, it is a bug on Google’s end and there is nothing for you to do. Google said this reporting issue does not reflect an issue with actual crawling or accessibility of your website. Microsoft Advertising introduces more automation via ad suggestions with auto-applyBeginning this month, Microsoft Advertising users may see ad suggestions with auto-apply on their Recommendations page, the company announced Thursday. The ad suggestions are variations of your existing ads, based on their keywords, landing page, targeting, ad extensions and other relevant content. Microsoft Advertising will generate them when it thinks an ad group may be better served with more quality ads, which also means that many ad groups may never get suggestions. At any given time, advertisers will receive a maximum of 50 suggestions per account. It’s important to note that ad suggestions marked as auto-apply will start serving after 14 days if no action is taken. We’ve reached out to Microsoft about whether this is going to be enabled by default, and we’ll update our article with their response. You can also navigate to your Account settings page to toggle the auto-apply setting on or off. FTC letters, hyphenated words, robots/noindex and first-party data.FTC warning letter Google penalty. The FTC has been sending out warning letters to some websites over providing misleading information around COVID-19 and other health matters. John Mueller of Google was asked if Google takes into account these notices from the FTC, the answer seems to be no – but should they? Hyphenated words. Does Google understand words with and without hyphens differently? The answer is, it depends, of course. But it is much more complicated than yes or no, Google uses many techniques to understand language as explained by Google’s John Mueller. Robots & noindex PSA. Gary Illyes from Google posted a PSA on Twitter saying “your periodic reminder that crawlers that obey robotstxt won’t see a noindex directive on a page if said page is disallowed for crawling.” First-party data for vanity domains. Ginny Marvin was asked if sub-domains count for first-party data purposes with Google Ads. Ginny said “subdomains, country TLDs and vanity URLs owned by the same company would be considered a first-party context. (I believe for vanity URLs there’s a 5 domain limit per first-party set.)” We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.
The post The big Google zero click debate; who is right?; Friday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/31nW6qJ Smart Shopping campaigns allow you to benefit from what Google’s automation does for you. As a result, you have more time for the optimization of campaigns. But how do you optimize these automated campaigns? An important method is to optimize traffic for Smart Shopping Campaigns (Using Google Smart Shopping better in 5 steps – Adchieve) by adjusting ROAS targets. By adding predictive insights regarding profit margin to Google’s bid simulator, you can see which target yields the best result for you in terms of turnover and margin (Profit on Ad Spent). The method you use is the (profit) buckets method. This article will show you how to better manage traffic by adjusting your goals in combination with the bid simulator using this method. What is a POAS target?With a Profit On Ad Spend (POAS) target, you look at the profitability of your ads, in contrast to a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) objective, where you look at the sometimes “misleading” revenue from ads. We call this misleading because you can perform quite well based on turnover, but you can ultimately suffer a loss. Take a look at the calculation example below. Both handbags’ gross margin is the turnover excluding VAT, minus purchase costs, shipping costs, and payment costs. However, advertising costs have not yet been included. If you then subtract the advertising costs from the gross margin, you arrive at a net margin, which on the left comes to -825 dollars and on the right to +1665 dollars. ROAS versus POASIf you look at the ROAS and POAS results in the calculation example above, you might have stopped ad B based on ROAS. That would be a good choice if you are looking at sales, but if you look at the ads’ profitability, you see that ad B (POAS> 100%) wins over ad A. POAS <100%, in the case of ad A, means that your gross margin is less than your Ads’ costs and that you are therefore at a loss. POAS> 100%, on the other hand, means that you are making a profit. Note: the term gross margin is interpreted differently by marketers; sometimes, for example, as a metric where the shipping costs are not yet taken off. Do you want to understand this method properly? It is then important that you interpret the terms in the way we use them in this article. Bucket = Smart Shopping campaignGoogle recommends creating Smart Shopping Campaigns based on margin%. After all, for products with a low margin%, you want to offer less (or: set a higher ROAS target) than for products with a high margin%. Smart Shopping Campaigns, classified based on products with an equal order margin%, are translated as buckets. These are flexible (profit) buckets in which you place products with the same gross order margin% or gross order margin/turnover of order (both excluding VAT). If we go back to the example with the handbags and apply the above calculation to it, the ad with handbag B would end up in a bucket where the following gross margin% of 42% fits because: 6165 / (18000 – 3200) * 100% = 42% You prefer not to have a separate bucket for each gross margin%, so it is advisable to divide it into ranges. You can have eight buckets, but also three. The layout must fit your business. Each profit bucket (i.e., Smart Shopping campaign) then receives its own ROAS target based on the gross margin%. Note this concerns orders from advertisements with equal margin%. The most important thing is that you base this gross margin% on the orders resulting from the product’s advertisement. The product you sell is not always the product you advertise on. You can find out more about that in this blog entry on the cross and upsell insights Google Shopping Campaigns: new insights for SEA specialists (adchieve.com). See the below image for an example: Buckets for search campaignsBuckets can also be used for search campaigns, but not per product but per keyword. Instead of classifying products based on gross margin%, you can also determine the gross margin% for each keyword and thus create the bucket classification. A ROAS target is then set for each bucket. In practice, you often take the gross margin% of the campaign or multiple campaigns together instead of the gross margin% of a keyword. This is preferred because, with search, it is less easy to move keywords to another bucket. You advertise not only on products but also on brands, product types, etc. (You could also adjust your campaign structure to your gross margin%, but you will prefer not to do this too often because this takes a lot of time.) How do you use ROAS correctly?The ROAS objective is often a “given” that is adjusted by a marketer with the aim of, for example, generating more sales or reducing costs. However, this can be used in a much better way. Ideally, a bucket with a high gross margin% will have a lower ROAS target than a bucket with a low gross margin%. As you may know, a ROAS target is actually always indirectly based on the gross margin%. For example, if a bucket has a gross margin% of 20%, then you want to be able to pay your Ads costs from that 20% margin and probably still have some left over. So for every dollar you spend on Ads, you want at least 5 back. If you look at the image above, in the case of a 20% margin, it corresponds to a ROAS target of at least 500%, because 1 / 0.20 * 100% = 500%. This way you can also calculate that for the green and blue bucket. How does the Google bid simulator work?We’re now going to make the switch to Google’s bid simulator. The Google bid simulator can provide insight into how different objectives can influence your traffic for different ROAS objectives of one Smart Shopping Campaign (bucket). For example, the bid simulator looks like this for the blue bucket: The bid simulator shows how changes to ROAS targets can affect campaign performance. In this example, you can see that the current ROAS target is 500%. By lowering the target to, say, 460%, Google expects you to get around 8,000 additional clicks for just over $6,000 in costs and nearly 200 additional conversions. Improve bid simulator in two stepsAs you saw in the image above, the bid simulator is about conversion value, but not about profit. You want to set the ROAS objective in such a way that the net margin (or gross margin minus ads costs) is the maximum you can achieve. To do this, you must first take two steps: 1) Improve conversion value Google wants to simplify its service and keep it simple to be able to serve as many parties as possible with automation. It is good to know that the conversion value in Ads depends on your implementation. For example, the conversion value including or excluding VAT can be used here, but the shipping fee (what the customer pays) can also be included in Google or not. Our advice is to at least optimize this conversion value, which you do by setting the conversion value ex. VAT as a starting point and also by processing cancellations and returns. These are almost never corrected in Ads. Also, the conversion value in the bid simulator does not consider the conversion rate change when lowering or increasing the goals. The conversion rate will be lower when the ROAS target is lowered because you will be shown more with generic, and often less converting, search terms and vice versa. For these reasons, we recommend calculating the conversion value yourself by determining and combining the following factors separately: ● The conversion rate; ● The average conversion value per conversion; ● The number of clicks from the bid simulator. 2) Add POAS margin information By subsequently adding POAS data to the bucket and combining this with the improved conversion value, you can predict what the net margin will be for the various ROAS objectives. POAS data is about gross margin data: including purchase costs, shipping costs, etc. The net margin is the gross margin minus the Ads costs: decreasing the ROAS target will increase the Ads costs and increasing the ROAS target will decrease the Ads costs. You would therefore prefer to increase your net margin. 25,000 more turnover due to 2000 less margin In the example below, you can see the blue bucket with a 40% margin again, but in combination with the bid simulator, improved in the above way. Pay attention to the 10 colored boxes, which we will explain below: In the example above, 500% is the starting situation of this marketer (see dark blue boxes). As you can see, the net margin has reached the optimum with a ROAS target of 550% (see green boxes). You can set this optimum, but you can also choose to settle for less margin but more turnover, for example, with a target of 420% (see yellow boxes). At EUR 2000 less margin (EUR 33076: orange box) than the margin at the optimum (EUR 35050: green box), the conversion value will increase by almost EUR 25,000 (see two light blue boxes). What a top insight, isn’t it? You could never have known this without adding this data. We don’t know whether that would also be the best outcome for you. What is best is different for every organization, depending on your KPIs. Please note: these figures are less reliable when lowering/increasing the ROAS target in large steps. Google, as you know, is not very good at dealing with extreme changes (it is then more difficult to achieve objectives), so ideally, you better move towards the optimum in small steps. How can you apply the above principle yourself? Data science comes into playA very basic version of the above principle is not difficult to implement. It can be achieved by, for example, creating buckets based on product margins, followed by finding the optimal ROAS target using the bid simulator. Please note that this can deviate strongly from reality. In such a basic version, you assume that the product that is advertised will also be bought. But in many cases, the order contains products other than the one advertised, as I explained above. As a result, the gross margin% of the order will probably be different from the gross margin% of the product. It is also not easy to include cancellations and return dates in such a basic version and the gross margin% is less reliable. With a small difference in gross margin%, the optimum of the net margin can be completely different. It is therefore advisable to include the order data (preferably including returns, etc.) in determining the optimal ROAS target. To make the above clear, you need at least knowledge of different data sources and how to link them together. Data science certainly comes into play here. Conclusion: Use automation in the ultimate wayBy including ROAS and POAS objectives, you can steer on net margin, turnover, or both. Depending on what fits the KPIs of your organization. PPC management software automatically adds improved insights to Google’s bid simulator through the use of data science. Does this all sound like a far-off show? In any case, start with step 1 from this article: making your POAS transparent. A small step in the right direction, but already extremely valuable in automation. Are you interested in more world-leading advertising expert content? Adchieves’ advertising automation expert team writes about new, groundbreaking insights on a regular basis. Please follow the Adchieve LinkedIn-page or download Adchieves’ Supreme Shopping Guide. This article is the first in a series of three. The post Optimize Smart Shopping campaigns: Manage turnover and margin appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3cnhDWN Fabrice Canel, the Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Bing, has submitted a proposal, aka feature request, to build into the core of WordPress the ability for WordPress to push new and updated URLs directly to search engines. The proposal. You can access this feature request at the WordPress ticket site, where Fabrice wrote “today, we propose integrating in WordPress Core the ability to notify not only Bing, but also all participating Search Engines, of any WordPress URL or Content change. Microsoft to develop and maintain the open-source code in close collaboration with WordPress. WordPress to approve, validate and include code.” “Behind the scenes, WordPress will automatically submit URL or Content ensuring that the WordPress content is always fresh in the Search Engines; in exchange Search Engines will limit crawl or not crawl WordPress sites. Site owners will have the ability to opt-out or select the content they don’t want to submit to search engines,” Fabrice explained. URL submission API and WordPress Plugin. Doesn’t Bing already have this built into WordPress and its search engine. The answer is not exactly. Microsoft did create the Bing URL submission API that allows publishers and site owners to automatically feed Microsoft Bing, through Bing Webmaster Tools, new and updated URLs for indexing. This way, Bing doesn’t have to crawl your site to find the new or updated content. In July, Bing released a WordPress plugin to simplify the process for WordPress sites to use this URL submission API. What is new. Microsoft wants to avoid all of this and just have WordPress at its core, out of the box, automatically work with the Bing URL submission API, and also support any other search engine that wants to participate. This way you do not need to install the plugin or build your own integration into this API. More details. Fabrice Canel posted more details in the ticket saying:
Why we care. If WordPress does end up supporting this new feature request, then it would simplify the process of WordPress sites getting their content into Microsoft Bing Search. In addition, it may add pressure to Google to begin supporting a content submission API for normal content. Right now, Google only supports with its indexing API being pushed content for job posting URLs and live stream content. This is not a feature that is live tonight, this is just a feature request that will require months of approvals and testing to eventually go live. The post Microsoft proposes method to automatically submit URLs from WordPress to search engines appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3feKjmN Earlier this year we reported how Google was testing displaying practice homework problems in the search results. Now this feature is fully live in Google Search and Google has come up with new structured data and Search Console reporting to help educational websites understand which pages have these types of content. What practice problems look like. Google explained it as an “interactive feature tests your knowledge of high school math, chemistry and physics topics directly on Search.” Here is a GIF of it in action: Practice problem structured data. To help Google showcase your site’s content for these practice problems, you can add new supported structured data to your webpages. Google said “relevance to the user, including topicality, grade level and curriculum standards, can be key considerations for users deciding what learning material to use.” Google said it is encouraging “you to add all of the recommended properties that are relevant for your content.” Google laid out these high-level guidelines but you can see the full guidelines over here:
Here is what practice problems look like on desktop search: Math solver structured markup. Google also has new markup for math solver pages, specifically Google said “math solver page provides a tool to help users input their math equations and find explanations for how to solve a math problem.” Google said you can use using math solver structured data, you can make your site eligible to be featured on Google Search when users enter a math equation into the Google Search bar. Math Solver structured data is only for official math solvers. Google does not want you to add this structured data to pages where users cannot submit math equations for a step-by-step solution. Here is what it looks like in search: New rich result status reports in Search Console. With this, Google launched new reports in Google Search Console’s rich results status report to help you debug issues with both practice problems and math solver markup. Google said these reports will “show all errors, warnings, and valid items for pages with structured data.” Here is a screenshot of the report: Rich results test updated. Google also updated its rich results testing tool to support these two new structured data markups. You can post your code snippet in the box in this tool or paste the URL of a page. The test shows any errors or suggestions for your structured data as seen in the screenshot below: Why we care. If you are in the education online content business, you may want to leverage these new structured data types to get more exposure in the Google Search results. These may help increase your click-through rates on some of your snippets in the search results and it may help you gain more traffic to your site. It also may lead to less clicks, if the answer is solved directly on Google’s site but you should be able to track that within Search Console if they add this data to the performance report. The post Google adds practice problems and math solver structured data and Search Console reports appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/39dOiMJ Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning marketers, when attending events, do you prefer 20 minute or 40 minute sessions? That’s a debate we often have. How long should the sessions be? Especially this past year with virtual events where attention spans are already stretched. We get a lot of feedback on this topic as well. I spend a good amount of time reading all the comments and ratings we receive about our event sessions and I’ve seen many opinions about session length. As you would expect many people say 15 minutes is too short and not enough time for speakers to dig into the topic. I’ve seen that comment on 30-minute sessions too. I’ve also seen the opposite, that 30 minute sessions are too long. After analyzing comments and feedback for years, I finally realized what the magic session length is. There isn’t one. In the end, it’s not about the length of time, it’s about what you learned or didn’t learn in the session. I’ve watched 10-minute video sessions that I got more out of than a 60-minute webinar. It’s when a speaker jumps right into the subject matter and provides clear actionable solutions, a framework, or a process that I can replicate to improve my own work that makes me feel like the session was well worth my time. Below you’ll find tips on how to put together a successful presentation. I’m always interested in hearing your thoughts. Maybe you have some ideas about session lengths or more tips for creating memorable presentations. If you do, feel free to reach me at [email protected]. Kathy Bushman, Keep your presentation actionable and 5 other tips for a successful virtual sessionPresenters often get caught up in their subject matter and forget some of the basics that allow for clear informative presentations. If you’re getting ready to present a session at a virtual event or a webinar, here are some tips to keep in mind.
Microsoft Advertising blocks 1.6 billion ads while dealing with the pandemicMicrosoft published its 2020 ad quality review about a week after Google released its annual ads safety report. The company said it put “strict measures in place to restrict advertising for products such as COVID medicines, COVID testing kits, etc.” As a result, Microsoft’s sensitive advertising policy rejected about 21 million ads. The company relied on automated fraud detection and other methods to determine which ads or campaigns violated their policies. They also used manual removals through human reports. Why we care. The past year was rocky at best and catastrophic at worst for many search marketers. The global ad market declined 10.2%, according to the Global Ad Trends: The State of the Industry 2020/21 report. With constant evolution, Microsoft and Google’s ad safety reports indicate that it’s evolving its platform and AI to keep up with the ever-changing global situation to help protect both advertisers and users. The majority of US adults have no interest in voice shopping“More than half of US adults said they have never shopped for goods via voice and have no interest in trying voice shopping. In fact, just 9% of US adults have ever shopped via voice, and only 2% have done so regularly,” according to data from Bizrates and eMarketer. Clubhouse on Android, healthcare on TikTok, and Facebook green screensClubhouse is coming to Android… eventually. Clubhouse co-founder Paul Davison said in a Townhall event that the company was working “really hard” to come to Android, but said it’s going to take a “couple of months” to make that happen. TikTok is changing healthcare marketing. TikTok’s health-and-wellness credibility has been bolstered by a host of savvy healthcare providers. Some have flocked to TikTok to spread public health messages to younger audiences, others to connect with other providers and still others to blow off steam during a desperately difficult time. Facebook Stories testing green screen option. The change could open up new creative considerations for brands looking to add Facebook Stories into their content mix. Facebook Stories still doesn’t seem like a major consideration, but its top of feed placement makes it a potentially valuable branding tool for those that can get it right. WhatsApp for work: Slack is turning into a full-on messaging appYesterday, Slack officially launched Connect DMs which allows any Slack user to message another Slack user from any other workspace. Here’s how it works:
In theory, this seems to be a useful move. Slack is where work happens, after all. So if you need to collaborate with a partner at another company, a vendor, a freelancer, or anyone–it can happen where you’re doing the rest of your work communication. But some have rightly pointed out that there is potential for abuse of Slack’s new DM system. “Look at the last 5 years of random messages on LinkedIn…yep. That’s what we’re looking at,” said Jeremy Rivera of SEOarcade. Slack “is an important internal company tool, especially during this era of 100% remote work. We don’t want employees having to fend off unsolicited messages while collaborating with each other,” agreed Catherine Thomas of CareMesh. Others have said the lack of a blocking and reporting tool makes this a no-go for their organizations. With notifications about the change coming through in Slack apps already, we’ll be interested to see how it plays out. The post Keep your presentation actionable and 5 other tips for a successful virtual session; Thursday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3cmrn3W Beginning this month, Microsoft Advertising users may see ad suggestions with auto-apply on their Recommendations page, the company announced Thursday. What it is. Ad suggestions are variations of your existing ads, based on their keywords, landing page, targeting, ad extensions and other relevant content. How it works. Microsoft Advertising will generate ad suggestions when it detects an ad group that may be better served with more quality ads. This also means that most ad groups may never get ad suggestions. Ad suggestions will continue to be created as long as Microsoft Advertising’s systems detect that your ad group performance can improve. Advertisers will receive a maximum of 50 ad suggestions per account at any given time. The auto-apply ad suggestions feature. Advertisers should be aware that ad suggestions marked as auto-apply will start serving after 14 days if no action is taken. If an ad suggestion is applied, the go-live date will appear in the Recommendations page and the advertiser is notified via email. Auto-applied suggestions can be viewed in the Ad & extensions page, with the tag “Auto applied ad suggestion,” where advertisers can pause, delete or edit them. To disable auto-applying ad suggestions, go to your Account settings page (shown above). Even if the setting is disabled, ad suggestions may still be presented, but you’ll need to manually add them to your account. Why we care. Advertisers should verify that auto-apply ad suggestions are toggled to their desired setting. Microsoft’s announcement does not state whether the auto-apply ad suggestions setting is enabled by default; we’ve reached out for comment and will update this article when we receive a response. Ad suggestions may help advertisers save time when creating ads, or serve as a jumping-off point to further tailor them to their audiences. For more about automation in ad creation, register for SMX Create, where our Director of Search Content, Carolyn Lyden, and I will be presenting a keynote entitled “Humans vs. machines: How content and experience are caught between platforms and people.” The post Microsoft Advertising introduces more automation via ad suggestions with auto-apply appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3fhrLSW |
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