Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land:
Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
Search News From Around The Web:Industry
Local & Maps
Link Building
Searching
SEO
SEM / Paid Search
The post SearchCap: Google local pack mentions, Google Shopping reports & PPC evals appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2gmdVyB
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Google is testing displaying in the local pack results if the local website returns the keywords you searched for on their website. For example, if you search for [climate control] in a specific region, the local pack might add an additional line to the search snippet, mentioning if the website in the local listing actually has those words on their web pages. Here is a screen shot from Matt Schexnayder of Sparefoot, who sent this tip to us: It is unclear if this means that the local results use the local listing’s website content for ranking purposes or not. All this is telling us is that Google local is indeed aware if the local business website has the query’s content on their website. We have emailed Google for a comment, but at this point, it seems like a limited test. The post Google local pack tests displaying website mentions matching your query appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2xyNGg0 Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land:
Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
Search News From Around The Web:Industry
Local & Maps Link Building
SEO
SEM / Paid Search
Search Marketing
The post SearchCap: Alexa & Cortana, Google Assistant speakers & Google Maps parking appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2wJeDAo The digital space has given marketers massive reach and capability. But with that power comes responsibility, along with an obligation to protect data that can be recognized as personally identifiable information (PII). Recurring audits and safeguards built into your technical layer are critical to ensuring that PII doesn’t pass into your Google Analytics. Read Cardinal Path’s guide to data security and privacy for:
Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download ” Personally Identifiable Information: Responsible Practices to Safeguard your Google Analytics Data” The post Safeguard your Google Analytics data appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2xNH3WL When it comes to managing AdWords, something I’ve come across time and again is that lots of accounts are oversegmented. I’ve seen AdWords accounts with almost awe-inspiring intricacy. No dimension unsegmented; no campaign setting untweaked; no minute negative keyword unadded. I think we’ve officially reached the point at which some of you are too good at your jobs. Automation is better than it’s ever been. It’s so good, in fact, that it often beats oversegmented, even overengineered accounts. Campaigns can be segmented by devices, match types, audiences, geographies and more. Campaigns shouldn’t be segmented by all of those. AdWords Smart Bidding looks at specific queries (and the context of those queries)Overly segmented account structures are attempting to approximate something that Smart Bidding already does: bid to a user’s specific search query and adjust bids for devices, time of day and audiences to control the impact on the advertiser’s objective. AdWords Smart Bidding considers dozens of additional signals and the combinations of them, like mobile devices at nighttime in a specific area. You don’t need to manually define each segment’s value if you’re accurately tracking your conversions in AdWords. Tell Smart Bidding what your end goal is, then track performance. You can stop using CPC bidding as a proxy for value; Smart Bidding can boil everything down to what really matters for you, whether that’s a CPA or ROAS goal. A simpler proposalYour default campaign structure should be a lot more straightforward. This may sound insane, but here’s how I think campaigns should be organized:
Some aspects of campaign setup warrant separate campaigns — such as budgetary control and the countries/territories where you can actually sell your goods and services. There is no longer a need for additional campaigns to work around long-gone AdWords limitations surrounding bidding and messaging. Bidding has Smart Bidding. Ad text has ad customizers. Audience targeting benefits from both Smart Bidding and ad customizers. One thing in particular that I want to highlight is separate campaigns or ad groups by match type. The AdWords system is set up to prefer the more specific keyword, and in those rare cases when it doesn’t, it’s to your benefit. A less specific keyword will trigger only if you’re projected to have a higher Ad Rank and a lower CPC. (You might even consider de-duplicating your match types of the same keyword in your account. That’s too big a topic to cover here.) Ultimately, what may seem like sloppy structure is actually saving you money. If you have a set of high-performing keywords that deserve their own budget, you should break those out. That’s a case where it makes sense to make such a management decision. But that should be for your best stuff. Let performance dictate what gets priority. The benefits of aggregated campaignsAn overly segmented AdWords campaign structure can actually be a serious barrier to performance. 1. Automation works better on large sets of information. AdWords’ Smart Bidding can work on pretty paltry data. But it works even better when it has large amounts of insight to feed into its machine learning. Larger campaigns, including data across all different types of cross-device, cross-user-list, cross-time insights, tend to perform better. A bigger campaign is actually more likely to perform better when you fully embrace automation. 2. There are fewer ads to maintain. Keeping up with your ads is a lot of work. The smarter you are about the amount of work you create for yourself, the more your work time is spent on finding and deploying great messaging. And the less time you have to spend making sure that you’ve copied/pasted your ads across all nine device-specific campaigns that advertise women’s tankinis to previous customers who reside in New England. There are ways to customize ads geographically without a duplicate campaign. If you find yourself copying/pasting tons of ads, while only changing the tracking parameters to capture the name of your highly specific ad groups and campaigns, you might not need that additional campaign. 3. There are fewer ad extensions to maintain. Ad extensions are fantastic. They’re a universally good thing, and it’s important to enable everything that makes sense for your business. As your campaigns multiply, so does your need to monitor all of those extensions. You’ll have to start by ensuring that they’re implemented, then you’ll have to ensure that they don’t overlap with your ad text. 4. It’s easier to manage negative keywords. I totally get the impulse to use negative keywords to shape traffic, but the obsession with seeing that every query matched to the intended ad group is misguided. As I mentioned earlier, the system is set up to save you money when serving less specific keywords. You should instead investigate why a less specific keyword/ad group is that much better than what you intended. And once you let go of using negatives as traffic cops, they can return to their original usage: eliminating queries that aren’t a match for what you’re selling online. 5. It’s easier to identify insights. Instead of looking through 9+ campaigns, you can look at one campaign and see how things are trending. And you’ll always have the ability to segment for deeper insights down the road. The current status quo of pivoting a bunch of campaigns into one high-level output can be turned on its head. You’ll instead start with aggregated insights, then segment data as needed. I think it’s a much more useful way to keep an eye on trends. 6. It’s easier to make decisions. When you’re doing a better job identifying insights, you make it easier on yourself to make decisions that improve your account. Once your structure allows you to spot trends, you can adapt to those trends more quickly. ConclusionI know moving away from oversegmentation is a big change, but I think it’s an important one. If you want to dip your toe in the waters to start, consider consolidating some ad groups together and see how performance trends. You could even use campaign drafts and experiments to run a split test of consolidated ad groups against segmented ad groups. (As you’re evaluating performance on that campaign, remember to factor in management time.) If performance is roughly even, that’s a big win for consolidated campaigns/ad groups. You’re saving time, which frees you up to do bigger and better things for your account. The post Your account structure might be hurting performance. Here’s why (and how to fix it) appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2woGrXS Earlier this morning Amazon and Microsoft announced that their virtual assistants will soon work together. Alexa devices will be able to access Cortana, and Cortana will be able to open Alexa:
It’s an enlightened approach on the part of both companies. Alexa will benefit from Cortana’s general knowledge and web-search capabilities, as well as Office integration. Cortana gains distribution via Amazon hardware devices. It’s also consistent with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s vision to make Microsoft software tools available on rival platforms, such as iOS and Android. “Later this year” is the stated time frame for the availability of the integration. At least on the Amazon side, you’ll have to use the awkward multistep language now familiar to Alexa users (“Alexa ask . . . “). Third-party content integrations — let’s call them “voice apps” and not “skills” — are keys to the long-term success of these assistant platforms. The more difficult it is to access that third-party content, the less likely it will be used. The New York Times has an interesting story on the genesis of the Microsoft-Amazon partnership and the thinking behind it. The article quotes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos extensively. He says he has not reached out to Google or Apple but would welcome similar arrangements with those companies. Both are unlikely to make their assistants available through Alexa devices. However, it’s not entirely out of the question. Apple made a version of Safari and iTunes for Windows, and Google apps are obviously available on iOS. Some analysts have predicted as many as 30 million virtual assistant devices in US homes by the end of the year. Given how rapidly the market is developing, that number may turn out to be conservative. The post Alexa and Cortana will soon work together, allowing each to access the other appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2xxFFYT It’s the end of the month, so chances are you’re spending a lot of time thinking about PPC budgets. Will you spend the full amount you allocated for the month and do so without going over budget? It’s pretty amazing that simple questions like this have to take so much thought from account managers. There’s gotta be an automation for this, right? Once again, AdWords Scripts to the rescue! So read on, and I’ll point you to some useful ones that have been around awhile and share a brand-new script for allocating budgets equitably among multiple locations in hard-to-target cities. Translating PPC budgets to business budgetsPart of the reason budgets are such a pain is that the engines think about them differently from the average company. A company sets monthly, quarterly or annual budgets. AdWords, on the other hand, relies on daily budgets. Companies tend to think about budgets pretty broadly; for example, they might have a marketing budget with a subset of that allocated for AdWords. But AdWords works primarily with campaign budgets. Facebook gets even more granular with Ad Set budgets. Because of the way advertisers have to set up budgets in the engines, even a simple business requirement like spending $10,000 on AdWords this month can get pretty tricky. Solution #1: Spend your whole budget for the monthLet’s tackle the first common budget problem: how to make sure that every campaign or shared budget spends the full amount, even when there are a few days in which traffic may have been unexpectedly weak. Google automatically handles this to some degree with overdelivery. But overdelivery is limited to 20 percent of the budget per day, so it won’t always be able to make up the difference. It’s also a challenge for advertisers because they will often set a daily budget they think will help them achieve a goal, but they’ll have a monthly budget amount in the back of their mind. There’s no way to communicate the true budget goal to Google. Google simply assumes that the real goal is to spend 30.4 times the daily budget in any month. Luckily, Google has written a great AdWords script to help reach budgets, wherein you set a monthly target, and the script updates the daily budget based on how much is left to be spent and how many days are left. At Optmyzr, we made this script available in our patent-pending Enhanced Scripts library, and we even gave it the ability to use historical day-of-week patterns to allocate more budget to higher-potential days of the week — a feature that’s particularly useful in the last few days of the month, when Google may miss out on the fact that you typically spend relatively little on the weekend. While these tools help ensure you’re not underspending, we’re still left with the problem over overspending. Solution #2: Don’t exceed your budgetsIf you don’t make many changes in AdWords, you could use the daily budget to make sure you’re never spending too much for a campaign for the month. Remember, they will not bill you more than 30.4 times the daily budget amount for any month; they call this the monthly charging limit. But advertisers reading posts on Search Engine Land are probably not content to use a set-it-and-forget-it approach. The moment you shift budgets between campaigns in an attempt to optimize, or the moment you use a script like the one above, the calculation of the monthly charging limit no longer matches your true monthly budget goal. Furthermore, a well-managed account uses as much granularity as possible because it provides more control. So advanced advertisers likely use campaign-level budgets rather than one shared budget for the whole account. This means that the company goal of a certain monthly AdWords budget still has to be translated into separate campaign budgets. Now, you could use Automated Rules to turn off campaigns when they spend too much, but these rules can only run once per day, so your ads could continue to accrue additional cost for 23 hours and 59 minutes after they hit their limit. To address this, we created a free script that can pause all campaigns in an account when the monthly target budget for the account is reached. It’ll even re-enable all the campaigns it paused when the next month starts. When I created this script, I thought it’d also be useful to give advertisers the ability to set budgets at a lower level than the campaign. So I added budgets for ad groups, keywords and ads. The use case this solves is when advertisers add new keywords to experimental campaigns because they fear these new keywords could take away too much budget from keywords that have been in the account awhile and whose performance is already well understood. When these keywords eventually prove themselves, they have to be moved into the non-experimental campaign, and they lose history. With this script, an advertiser can simply add a new keyword or ad into the place it should eventually be and use a script to limit its budget until it has proven itself. Solution #3: Maximize traffic and split budgets fairly for franchisesBut could we use a script like the one mentioned above to enforce budgets at another level, like by location? At first that may seem like a bit of a stupid suggestion, because after all, campaigns have location targeting and a campaign budget, so aren’t budgets in AdWords today effectively location budgets? While that’s true, there is a scenario in which I believe this can still be useful. Say you’re running ads for a franchise. Typically, you’ll set up separate campaigns for each location, each with its own budget. But in densely populated areas, you might have multiple franchises in the same city. For example, in Mountain View alone, there are eight Subway sandwich shops. If each of those locations needs to get their fair share of PPC advertising dollars, you could use separate campaigns with ZIP code targeting. But the problem is that as you get more granular with targeting, Google is not always able to know where a user is, and you end up losing traffic. In one of my own campaigns, I looked at postal code data for our ads when they show in Australia. There were 18 clicks with a postal code associated. But in that same day, there were 30 clicks from Australia. So Google didn’t know enough about the location for these 12 clicks to associate them with a postal code. These 12 clicks would have been lost if I were targeting only postal codes, rather than broader entities like cities or regions. So, to get more volume and to reduce the number of campaigns you need to maintain, it’s often desirable to target broader locations, like cities or regions. But as a franchise, if I run a campaign for all of Mountain View, it’s possible that one of the locations eats up 70 percent of the budget, leaving just a small amount for the remaining six locations. While it may make sense from a business perspective to spend more where there are more people, in a franchise model, there is often a contract that says every location will get its fair share of the ad spend. So here’s a script that looks at location data for a campaign and lets you disable specific granular locations when they exceed a certain level of spend for the month. ConclusionBudgets are not hard to understand, but they can be time-consuming and tedious to manage manually. Looking at whether daily budgets are dialed in to fully spend the target; ensuring an account hasn’t spent too much; and analyzing budget usage for granular locations are all well-defined tasks — all of this makes these tasks ideal for automation with AdWords scripts.
The post Advanced budget management made easy with scripts appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2vJZvxM Earlier today at German consumer electronics and appliances show IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung) in Berlin, Google announced that the Google Assistant will be coming to new smart speakers and home appliances. With the move Google is more aggressively competing with Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana for third party hardware and software integration. The company said that a range of new speakers will get the Assistant:
These devices will be able to deliver the capabilities and functionality of Google Home and will be available in the US and Canada, Australia, Germany and France. On a smaller scale (right now) this is analogous to Google’s Android OS strategy, with the Assistant powering third party hardware. Alexa and Cortana are also pursuing a similar strategy. Perhaps more interesting than the extension of the Google Assistant to more smart speakers is its integration with a range of home appliances. This is what I had originally envisioned for Samsung when it announced the acquisition of Viv (founded by the former CEO of Siri). In its blog post Google announced South Korean manufacturer LG as its first major appliances partner:
Participating appliances will be controllable from the Google Assistant and any Assistant-enabled device (e.g., third party speakers). It doesn’t appear from the material I’ve seen that the Assistant will be directly integrated into the appliance (e.g., the dishwasher). In other words you talk to Google Home or your smartphone or an equivalent device, rather than directly to the dishwasher. However that could quickly change. Google also said in its post that there are “more than 70 home automation manufacturers” (e.g., Honeywell), currently compatible with Google Assistant. And the company indicated in an email that more brands will be announced over the course of the week at IFA. There are several noteworthy things here:
We’re going to have to wait to see how well and smoothly these appliances work with Google Assistant. Simplicity and usability will be key to adoption and success. But make no mistake we are now living in an episode of The Jetsons. The post Google Assistant coming to more speakers and home appliances from LG appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2wnYD3V Last week, Google declared that the “near me” search query and other “geo-modifiers” (e.g., ZIP code, city name) were, if not dead, then certainly not worth spending your valuable SEO time worrying too much about:
But, as you can see through Google Trends, it’s not just that “implicit” local search queries (searches for local places without the local qualifier) are growing rapidly — it’s that they have always had a much higher base volume as well. So, we get it — the search term “tacos” is a better term to target than “tacos costa mesa.” However, Google treats implicit/explicit/”near me” searches differently. Just look at these different results (searches were all done from the same location with an incognito browser): Tacos (located in Costa Mesa, CA) Tacos Costa Mesa Costa Mesa Tacos Tacos Near Me (located in Costa Mesa) While there’s overlap, literally none of the results above are the same. That tells us that Google evaluates all of these queries differently. Not only that, but according to our 2016 Local SEO Ranking Factors study (2017 version coming soon), it looks like Google is looking at different ranking factors as well. Here’s how various factors correlated with high rankings in the Local Pack for implicit and explicit local search queries: So, this requires a more holistic approach to location-based SEO. Local SEO isn’t just about fixing data accuracy problems, it’s about making sure that clients are effectively optimized for the myriad terms and paths that will generate them business. That means implicit geo-location queries like “tacos” may have the highest search volume and best growth opportunity, but if you’re skipping other term variations, you are leaving money on the table. For example, here is the monthly search volume for these searches in Pleasanton, Calif.: Tacos — 210 If you are only focusing on “tacos,” that’s 210 monthly searches, or 51 percent of the potential traffic out there for core taco-related terms (and there are likely hundreds of long-tail “taco” queries for a city, each with their own unique results). Now, start applying that to, say, a 100-location business, and that’s 21,000 potential customers you are trusting Google to send to the right place. This is part of the reason why we treat ALL these terms as a “taco” search. Because given the particular searcher, their search behavior, and proximity to your location, they could theoretically be engaging in any of these searches. By the way, the #1 tacos-related search term? Tacos Nearby — 590 So I wouldn’t abandon “near me” optimizations just yet. The post Google says we don’t need no stinking location modifiers… or do we? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2vJW9uG In what is sure to be a model for other publishers, last week Google and Vogue magazine announced a partnership that offers “behind the scenes” audio content from selected Vogue magazine interviews. Most of these are monologues from the writers about their subjects. By asking Google Home to “talk to Vogue” (one of several ways to invoke the content), users hear a brief introduction and then a menu of choices, which in this case includes five articles from the September issue on Jennifer Lawrence, Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Serena Williams and Megyn Kelly. There’s a corresponding indicator in the print magazine about which articles offer Google Home companion “behind the scenes” audio content. Each piece is split into shorter and longer segments. The speaker in each case is the author of the article initially answering the question, “What is [interviewee] like?” Then there’s an option to hear more in-depth information. Julia Chen Davidson (Partner Marketing Lead, Google Home) told me that it was Google’s idea to approach Condé Nast but that the company was already in the process of exploring other content expansion and distribution options. When I suggested the experience was analogous to podcasting, she pointed out that the content from Vogue is more interactive, with the opportunity to select specific pieces in a non-linear order. “It’s more conversational,” she explained. While this is the first such partnership for Google, the company is already talking to other publishers and partners. “There’s lots of curiosity,” Chen said. Indeed, this is something that many more publishers should explore sooner rather than later. Google’s Chen wouldn’t discuss specifics but said that she and Google were “really pleased with the response” to the launch. To promote it, Google did a social/influencer campaign, and Vogue offered pages in the magazine (image above). The still photograph at the top of this page comes from a video, which shows a variety of women listening to the content as some browse the magazine. This dual-media opportunity is very interesting because it could make some print content interactive and “trackable” in new ways (e.g., articles that drive Home engagement). It very quickly opens the door to voice-based commerce as well. One can imagine a partnership between Google (Express), a retailer or brand and a publisher to enable selected items in print ads to be easily ordered and delivered. This is my speculation, however. Google didn’t talk specifically about monetization. As always with a new product, Google is focused on the consumer experience and “voice UI optimization,” as Chen described it. Magazines have suffered significant subscriber and ad-revenue declines in the past decade. Publishers might be able to use Home (and other smart speakers) to extend their brands and content into this new medium and, in some cases, connect print and audio — to “digitize” the traditional print medium. (This is not unlike what out-of-home advertising has done with mobile-location data.) But the model isn’t limited to traditional publishers. One can imagine brands and retailers creating entertaining or instructive audio content for smart speakers that is exposed or marketed via other channels: print, outdoor, TV, and even radio. The Google-Vogue partnership points the way to a great many provocative scenarios ahead. The post Google Home partnership with Condé Nast’s Vogue offers new model for publishers appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2iIBmXv |
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