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 Search Marketing The post SearchCap: Google Assistant, Bing Ads merchant promotions & AdWords settlement appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2oQMxff
0 Comments
In January, Stone Temple Consulting released a virtual assistant consumer survey showing the majority of respondents wanted the assistants to provide “answers” rather than conventional search results. Today, the firm published a follow-up study that measured the relative accuracy of the four major assistants. It compared results of “5,000 different questions about everyday factual knowledge” on Google Home, Alexa, Siri and Cortana, using traditional Google search results as a baseline for accuracy. The following table shows the study’s top-line results. As one might have anticipated, the Google Assistant answered more questions and was correct more often than its rivals. Cortana came in second, followed by Siri and Alexa. Of the questions it could answer, Amazon’s Alexa was the second most accurate assistant. Siri had the highest percentage of wrong answers of the four competitors. (Apple is reportedly “finalizing” its Amazon Echo competitor.) Here’s Stone Temple Consulting’s summary of the outcome:
One of the interesting observations in the report is about featured snippets. Cortana had more featured snippets integrated than any of the others, even Google Home, although Google search had more. Siri and Alexa lagged far behind in the category, although they want to use third parties to deliver “answers” and transactional capabilities. There’s a good deal more discussion of both the results and the study’s methodology on the Stone Temple blog. The post Report: Google Assistant bests rivals for questions answered and overall accuracy appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2oNoyg7 There are plenty of options for particular metrics to drive paid search programs toward, but not every KPI is created equal. Here, we’ll dive into what your preferred KPI says about you and provide recommendations to help you assess whether your KPI reflects the goals you care about. All insights are at least slightly hyperbolic and assume you have a one-track mind for your KPI of choice. I bet some of you out there can keep two, three, maybe even more KPIs in mind when managing accounts, as you should. You’ll just have to meld the descriptions to uncover those deep insights into your psyche that you’re reading this to find. Click-through rateYou waaaaaaant them to want you. You neeeeeeed them to need you. Some brands care a lot about how likely a user is to click on an ad, and for good reason. Click-through rate (CTR) is a key component of Quality Score, which Google uses to determine both how well an ad ranks and what price an advertiser must pay for clicks. Higher CTR means better rank and lower cost per click (CPC). Thus, brands should make their ads as appealing as possible to searchers. However, chasing CTR above all else can lead to some poor choices. Could I probably make a few friends at a college activity fair with this sign? Sure. Will they still be my friends if I don’t actually have the goods? Probably not. Similarly, advertisers might be able to draw more clicks with some versions of ad copy but end up hurting conversion rate or brand sentiment in the process. As such, it’s important to avoid pitfalls like overpromising or misleading searchers in the pursuit of higher CTR. Impression shareYou love to be seen, and ensuring your ads are present for a minimum share of relevant searches makes you feel good about your competitive position in search. Consistently getting in front of users searching for queries related to your business offerings is important, and that visibility can sometimes come at the cost of less flashy metrics like return on ad spend. Advertisers can access estimates for the share of relevant impressions their ads are showing on the SERP by using Google Auction Insights reports. These reports also feature information on how often specific competitors are showing ads, as well as other metrics such as average position and top-of-page rate. Shooting for impression share in search as your primary KPI isn’t that dissimilar from a television ad buy focused on reaching a specific segment of the television-watching population. Maybe in search you’re focused on getting in front of 100 percent of people searching for “red running shoes,” while on television you want to reach ESPN viewers in the 7:00–8:00 p.m. time block on the East Coast, with different categories of keywords somewhat analogous to different television channels in terms of audience differences. The difference is that the effects of online interactions with ads are, for the most part, much easier to track than the effects of television ads. Users can be cookied, and online orders and other interactions such as email signups properly attributed to ad clicks. Thus, shooting exclusively for impression share requires abandoning this information in pursuit of visibility. For many brands, performance metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS) are deemed more meaningful in allocating search spend as effectively as possible. However, there are some advertisers who would prefer to lock up a percentage of impressions related to particular categories of search, regardless of how ROAS turns out. Return on ad spendYou care about profitability — unimpressed by all the impressions and clicks your ads are getting, you care about how much they cost and what your business gets out of them. Paid search is great for you, because it’s easy-peasy for most advertisers to track events such as orders and information inquiries to the clicks driving them. The trickiness comes in how you measure that ROAS. Are you using last-click attribution? Accounting for offline interactions such as phone calls or store visits? Baking in the interactions that occur on a different device from the one searched on originally (cross-device)? Not all ROAS measures are created equal, and the better an advertiser can get at attributing value to ads, the more effective optimization efforts will be. But since you care about performance so much, I bet you’ll put in the work to get attribution just right. New customer acquisitionYou’re all about growing your customer base, reaching those shoppers you’ve never been able to pull through other marketing channels. Maybe your business is such that paid search clicks from existing customers don’t carry much incremental value, or maybe you just really want to expand your market share. There are a number of ways you can go about targeting those new customers. One is to shoot for cost per new customer acquisition as the primary KPI of search campaigns, while another strategy might involve trying to turn ads off to all existing customers via audience exclusions using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) and Customer Match audiences. Choosing between these different methods of focusing on new customers should include evaluating what bringing back existing customers is worth. Is there literally no value to these interactions (very rare), or is it just that interactions with new customers should be valued more than those with existing customers (more common)? Everyone likes new customers, but if you’re going to use new-to-file acquisition as a key measure of success, it’s best to make sure you’re not neglecting valuable existing clientele in search out of a desire for those shiny new shoppers. Average positionI suppose what kind of person you are depends on what average position you want to be in. Want to stay in first? You’re a winner at heart who wants be number one. Really just hoping for position three? That’s a losing attitude right there. Really though, shooting for average position in general is kind of a losing attitude. Sure, it might make sense to try to stay in position 1 for your own brand keywords, but shooting for a specific spot on the page with non-brand keywords regardless of cost and return on ad spend is pretty risky given the competitive nature of AdWords auctions. Get in a bidding war with a couple of competitors, and the ad spend can add up pretty quickly. While there are some studies and individuals out there proclaiming that specific positions on the page magically perform better than others in metrics like conversion rate, most of the data and studies behind those conclusions can be politely characterized as pseudoscience. What’s more, even if those conclusions were true, they would change with every SERP update, such as the removal of text ads on the right rail and the addition of a fourth text ad above organic results rolled out in early 2016. As such, we recommend taking such declarations with a grain of salt. Look at it all, focus on what’s importantThe awesome part of paid search is that you can measure ALL of these metrics at the same time. The slight downside is that you have to choose what’s most important to your brand, which can be harder for some to pin down than others. Paid search ads almost certainly have an impact on brand awareness and recall, though those effects can be hard to measure. Thus, it makes sense to take into account metrics like impression share to see how visible ads are for particular keywords. At the same time, impressions don’t directly put money in the bank, and focusing on metrics like return on ad spend and cost per new customer acquisition can better ensure brands are getting enough out of their spend to justify the expense. In the big scheme of things, brands should keep track of all of these metrics (as well as others, such as conversion rate, average order value and more) but optimize toward those that prove the real value of search. The post What your paid search KPI says about you appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2qaDDdv Bing is rolling Merchant Promotions out of pilot in the US, giving advertisers a way to highlight offers in their product ads. When Merchant Promotions are active, ads can appear with a “Special Offer” extension. When users click on the notice, the offer pops up with a description, promotional code, expiration date and a link to shop the product. Sellers need to fill out a form to apply for Merchant Promotions. Bing Ads says the approval process takes three to four business days. Once approved, you’ll see a new Promotions tab in your Bing Ads Merchant Center account. You can set up promotions in the UI (shown below) or with a promotion feed. To get reporting details on Merchant Promotions, select Click Type ID and Total Clicks on Ad Elements in the product partition and product dimension reports in Bing Ads. For more details, see the blog post announcing the rollout. The post Bing Ads rolls out Merchant Promotions for Shopping campaigns in US appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2oArKjX Paid search advertising accounted for roughly $35 billion in 2016, split almost evenly between the desktop and mobile. That’s according to the IAB’s 2016 revenue report, released yesterday. On a percentage basis, desktop paid search declined by 10 points and was down by a little under $3 billion in real dollars. However, overall paid search revenues were up vs. a year ago by almost $6 billion. Mobile ad spending surpassed spending on the desktop for the first time, and represented 51 percent of digital ad spending in the US; in Q4 2016 it was 53 percent. Total digital ad spending was $72.5 billion in 2016, up 22 percent from 2015. Mobile was responsible for growth across all digital formats: search, display, video, social and so on. Overall, mobile spending (across formats) came in just under $37 billion in 2016. Growth of mobile ad spending in the US Read a more complete breakdown of the IAB report on Marketing Land. The post IAB: Paid search was 48 percent of total digital spend in 2016 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2qa56fz Advertisers have begun receiving claim notice emails related to a $22.5 million settlement in a class action suit against Google. The case, Google AdWords Litigation, Case No. 5:08-cv-03369-EJD, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, stems from a 2008 claim that Google did not disclose that it placed ads on parked domains and error pages in violation of California’s unfair competition and false advertising laws. The advertisers sought restitution for the difference between what they paid per click versus what they would have paid had they known their ads were appearing on low-quality pages that typically sent low-quality traffic. Google has consistently denied the allegations that it didn’t provide proper disclosure of where ads might show and maintains advertisers should have been aware. The parties agreed to the settlement in February, ending the years-long dispute as the case wound through the courts. This week, many advertisers — the class comprises about 2.3 million members, according to the settlement — received the email below, with instructions on how to file a claim. US-based advertisers that were charged for AdWords clicks on parked domains or error pages between July 11, 2004, and March 31, 2008, may qualify for a portion of the settlement. Potential payouts will depend on how much an advertiser spent and how many claims are filed. In the fall of 2007, Google began testing a way for advertisers to opt out of having ads showing on parked domains and error pages. That option eventually rolled out globally in March 2008 and remains active today. A Final Fairness Hearing is scheduled for July 27, 2017, at 9:00 a.m. PT in the Northern California District Court in San Jose. The post Advertisers get claim notices for Google’s $22.5M settlement over ads on parked domains appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2oA2iLD Ever feel like AdWords is one giant juggling act? You cut your cost per click, only to watch your conversion rate drop. You increase lead volume, but those leads don’t turn into sales. You finally boost sales, but now your cost per click is unprofitably high… When does the madness stop? With all of these apparently conflicting priorities, it can be easy to drop the ball a few times. Or, worse still, you might feel like AdWords isn’t worth the effort, throw your hands in the air and quit. However, there is a way to juggle all of your marketing goals — a way to balance clicks, conversions, sales and return on investment (ROI). The secret to this juggling act is… keyword tiering. Keyword tieringThe idea behind “keyword tiering” (coining a new term here, I guess) is fairly simple: you categorize your AdWords keywords into different tiers based on the results they generate. Then, as your business needs change, all you have to do is turn tiers on and off to meet your goals. So, if leads are more important than sales today, all you have to do is turn on a few more tiers. If profitability is more important than sales volume tomorrow, turn off a few tiers. Once you have effective keyword tiers in place, you can instantly adapt to the needs of your company. It’s a straightforward way to match your AdWords advertising to your business goals. And the good news is, it’s fairly easy to implement: Step 1: Make sure you’re tracking the right metricsAs great as keyword tiering is, it does come with one caveat. In order to set up meaningful keyword tiers, you need to know which keywords are producing which results. If you’re optimizing for leads, you need to be tracking leads. If you’re optimizing for sales, you need to be tracking sales. If you’re optimizing for ROI, you need to be tracking revenue. Depending on which metrics you’re tracking, that may mean you need to implement conversion tracking on your site or ensure that your CRM is tracking sales at the keyword level. Unfortunately, only 29 percent of AdWords advertisers are even tracking conversions effectively enough to use keyword tiering. Far fewer are tracking sales and revenue at the keyword level. If that describes your business, now is the time to fix things. A full description of how to track AdWords performance through to sales is beyond the scope of this article, but this article should help you get started. Step 2: Define your keyword tiersOnce you are tracking all of your relevant metrics and have keyword data for a couple of sales cycles, you can define your keyword tiers. How you define your tiers will depend on your specific business and marketing goals, but it’s often easiest to start with four basic tiers. For example, if you are using AdWords to drive leads for your business, you might set up your tiers as follows: Tier 1: Highly profitable keywordsTier 1 keywords are your all-stars. They have a proven track record of producing profitable sales — in fact, there are very few reasons why you should ever turn these keywords off. These keywords should always get budget priority and should never have their impressions limited by budget. If a Tier 1 keyword isn’t profitable above a certain average ad rank, it’s okay to lose impressions to ad rank, but never let these keywords lose impressions to budget limitations. Remember, Tier 1 keywords are always profitable, so if you aren’t bidding on these keywords, you are losing money. Tier 2: Break-even to slightly profitable keywordsYour Tier 2 keywords aren’t quite as reliable as your Tier 1 keywords. They might deliver hit-and-miss leads or mildly profitable sales, but you can’t count on these keywords to always deliver. There are a few different categories of keywords that can end up in Tier 2:
The good news is, you can often turn a Tier 2 keyword into a Tier 1 keyword with a little time and effort. But until that happens, keep your Tier 2 keywords in Tier 2 — no matter how much potential you see in them. Tier 3: Keywords with potentialTier 3 keywords are usually more bark than bite. These are the keywords that produce a lot of interesting results (like good lead volume or putting a product in a shopping cart), but that’s as far as things typically go. As a result, these keywords have potential, but since you haven’t really figured out how to capitalize on that potential, they aren’t the first place you should be spending your advertising budget. However, if your business is trying to grow and you’ve already maxed impressions for Tier 1 and Tier 2, Tier 3 can usually get you in front of a lot of potential customers. All you have to do is figure out how to turn that potential into actual revenue. Tier 4: Long-shot keywordsSometimes, you simply need more clicks and conversions. Maybe you’ve got a sales team that is starting to lose momentum due to low lead volume. Maybe your business needs more sales to bring on potential investors — even if those sales aren’t particularly profitable. Business is complex, and sometimes volume is more important than profitability. Tier 4 keywords are a perfect fit for these sorts of situations. In general, Tier 4 keywords seem like a borderline lost cause (you’ve had lots of leads but no sales from these keywords). That doesn’t mean they can’t produce good results, but the odds aren’t in your favor. In general, I prefer to leave Tier 4 keywords off most of the time, but it’s good to have them on hand for the occasional time when you really, really need to boost clicks and/or conversions. Testing tierOkay, so this isn’t technically a tier, but I wanted to point out that new keywords you are actively testing should not be grouped into your regular tiers. The whole point of your tests is to determine whether or not a new keyword is viable, so you can’t exactly assign new keywords into a tier until you’ve finished your test. Step 3: Create your tiersOf course, simply tiering your keywords in a spreadsheet somewhere doesn’t do your business a whole lot of good. To really use your tiers, you have to be able to sort your keywords in AdWords. To do that, you need to label your keywords. Hopefully, you’ve used labels before, but just in case this is new to you, let me show you how to label your keywords by tier. First, open your AdWords account and click on “Keywords.” Check all the boxes next to your Tier 1 keywords: Then, click on “Labels” and check the box next to the tier you want to assign your keyword to. If you haven’t created your tier labels yet, click “Create new” and do it now. Guess what? You just assigned all of your checked keywords to Tier 1! Now all you have to do is repeat the same process for all of your other tiers (you can also label keywords using the AdWords editor if you want to speed things up a bit). As a quick side note, to see which keyword is assigned to which tier, you’ll need to make sure you’ve added the “Labels” column to your Keywords report. To do that, click “Column,” click on the double arrow by “Labels,” and hit “Apply.” Congratulations! You just set up keyword tiering! Not too bad, eh? Step 4. Use your tiersNow that you’ve set up your tiers, it’s time to take your AdWords juggling skills from this… To this… First, you’ll need to create and save a filter for each keyword tier. If you’re still on the Keywords tab, click “Filter” and “Create filter.” Set the drop-down menus in the filter to “Labels” and “contains any.” Then, click on the last drop-down menu and choose Tier 1 (or whatever you named your tier). Give your filter a name, make sure “Save filter” is checked, and click “Apply.” You can now pull up all of your Tier 1 keywords simply by running your custom filter. Use this same process to create filters for your other tiers, and you should be good to go. Now that you have your tiers set up, the next time your boss says, “We need to cut our AdWords budget by 50 percent this month,” all you have to do is run your Tier 3 and Tier 4 filters, check the box to select all, and click “Edit” and “Pause.” In no time flat, you’ve cut ad spend to all of your poorly performing keywords. You might still have to make some adjustments to get to that 50 percent budget cut, but you know that you’re spending that limited budget where it matters most. This tactic might seem fairly straightforward, but the ability to quickly maximize AdWords performance in any given situation can have a huge impact on your business. Just to show you how this works in real life, here’s what happened when we set up keyword tiering for a lead gen client last year: In just three months, their cost per conversion dropped by 62 percent. To make things even better, this benefit filtered through to their cost per sale and tripled the profitability of their AdWords account! ConclusionIf you set it up right, keyword tiering can allow you to juggle priorities in your AdWords account with ease. As a result, your AdWords campaigns will perform better, and your life will be easier. Talk about a double win! So, if you’re sick of dropping the ball on AdWords, try setting up keyword tiering. You might not end up in Cirque du Soleil, but life will certainly be easier! The post Keyword tiering: A systematic way to juggle your AdWords priorities appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2plI0T0 Hey there! Before we get rolling, remember that if you’ve been thinking about moving your site to StudioPress Sites, this is the time. Because we love to make your life easy, we’ll move your existing WordPress site over for free. And because we love to let you try stuff without stress, we’ll also give you your first month for free. It’s a sweet deal, but it goes away tomorrow, Friday, April 28, 2017 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific U.S. Time. If you’d like a cost-effective way to get a fast, great-looking WordPress site that you don’t have to endlessly mess around with, I would strongly recommend you check this out. This week on the blog, Brian Clark got our motor running on Monday with a thoughtful piece on what influence really means in a socially hyper-connected world — and how cheap shortcuts won’t do much more than waste your time. On Tuesday, we introduced you to Loryn Thompson, our crazy-smart Data Analyst who also happens to love riding and working on vintage motorcycles. She’ll help you get started with social media advertising — without crashing into a concrete pillar. And on Wednesday, I wrote about surviving the annoyances of social media, based on my nearly three decades of getting into pointless fights with people on the internet. I actually have figured a couple of things out, and I’m happy to share them with you. On the Copyblogger FM podcast this week, I talked about the seven things that (in my experience) writers need to make a genuinely good living. And on The Writer Files, Kelton Reid looked into how bestselling author Douglas Coupland writes. Hope you enjoy all the good stuff, and we’ll catch you next week! Chief Content Officer, Rainmaker Digital Catch up on this week’s contentThe Three Key Elements of Influential Digital Marketingby Brian Clark Your No-Nonsense Guide to Getting Started with Social Media Adsby Loryn Thompson Surviving the Social Web: 7 Things You Need to Knowby Sonia Simone The 7 Things Writers Need to Make a (Good) Livingby Sonia Simone How Bestselling Author Douglas Coupland Writesby Kelton Reid Are You Overlooking This Proven Podcast Format?by Jerod Morris & Jon Nastor The State of Freelancing in 2017, with Emily Leachby Brian Clark The post Gear Up for a More Powerful Online Presence appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger http://ift.tt/2pCLV0B Marketers and advertisers understand the importance of reaching consumers wherever they are— sometimes even before consumers get there themselves. Preemptive planning, tracking preferences and behavior, targeting, SEO, modern-day campaigns have tried it all in an effort to be seen and heard by their ideal consumer. For success in today’s digital marketing world, you need a well-rounded, holistic advertising strategy that encompasses various mediums and methods of communication. Multi-touch point advertising campaigns aren’t just important, they’re absolutely necessary for a successful advertising campaign. In this white paper from Experts Exchange learn how to meet users where they are and deliver an effective multi-touch point campaign. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “4 Critical Touch Points of an Effective Ad Campaign.” The post 4 critical touch points to reach consumers and deliver an effective ad campaign appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2oKIQqk 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:Local & Maps
SEO
SEM / Paid Search Search Marketing The post SearchCap: Google Home recipes, app indexing & Doodles appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2qfHnto |
Archives
April 2024
Categories |