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:
The post SearchCap: Google EU rivals, Bing Ads tracking fix & Google speed index update appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2EtNZgj
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Google’s Page Speed Update won’t impact how Google indexes your mobile or desktop content; it will only affect how the mobile pages are ranked in the Google mobile search results. To be clear, indexing and ranking are two separate things, as Google explains clearly in the How Search Works portal. We are covering this again because there appears to be some confusion around the Page Speed Update and whether it will impact indexing. Both John Mueller and Gary Illyes of Google chimed in to explain that this specific algorithm will have no impact on indexing. Here are those tweets:
We have a large FAQs on the Page Speed update algorithm that Google will be releasing in July. So please make sure to read up on that. The post Google’s Page Speed Update does not impact indexing appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2nqlnNt SMX London takes place May 22-23, 2018, at etc.venues, 155 Bishopsgate, Liverpool St., London EC2M 3YD. To increase the odds of being selected, be sure to read the agenda. Understand what the sessions are about. Ensure that your pitch is on target to the show’s audience and the session. Please also be very specific about what you intend to cover. Also, if you do not see a particular session listed, it is because there are no openings for that session. Use this form to submit your request. PLEASE NOTE: Many sessions have already been filled and are not open for pitches. If a session does not appear on the pitch form, it is closed, even if no speakers are appearing on the agenda yet. As you might guess, interest is high in speaking at Marketing Land conferences. We literally sift through hundreds of submissions to select speakers for the show. Here are some tips that will increase your chances of being selected. Pitch early: Submitting your pitch early gives you a better chance of being selected. Coordinators accept speakers as soon as they identify a pitch that they think best fits the session, just like colleges that use a rolling admissions policy. So pitching early increases the likelihood you’ll be chosen. Use the form: The speaker pitch form (http://marketinglandevents.com/speaker-form/) is the way to ask to speak. There’s helpful information there about how your pitch should be written and what it should contain. Write it yourself and be specific: Lots of pitches come in that are not specific to the session. This is the most effective way to ensure that your pitch is ignored. And this year, we’re no longer accepting pitches written by anyone other than a proposed speaker. If you’re a thought leader, write the pitch yourself… and make certain that it is 100 percent focused on the session topic. ‘Throw your best pitch:’ We’re limiting the number of pitches to three per person, so please pitch for the session(s) where you really feel you’ll offer SMX attendees your best. You’ll be notified: Everyone who pitches to speak will be notified by email if you are accepted or not. And don’t delay — the pitch forms for each session will close as sessions are filled, with everything closing the week of February 16. The post Want to speak at SMX London? Here’s how appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2npNkoN Most businesses keep track of customer phone calls. But is something getting lost in translation? With the release today of its keyword recommendation tool, Call Highlights, CallRail offers businesses a chance to identify trends and uncover insights from their customer calls. The company says the tool is the first one in the market. [Read the full article on MarTech Today.] The post CallRail adds a keyword recommendation tool to its phone call listening platform appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2DRM4AX When I first started out as a business owner, marketing my freelance copywriting services, I was very aware of my biggest constraint: I was a lousy salesperson. When I was a kid, I had a hard time selling raffle tickets to my own grandmother. And all the books I was reading said that I had The post The ‘Old School’ Factors that Lead to 21st-Century Sales appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger http://ift.tt/2GxeNg2 In the wake of the European Commission’s $2.7 billion antitrust fine against Google last year, the company opened up product listing ads (PLAs) to rival comparison shopping services. It also pledged to operate Google Shopping as though it were a stand-alone entity and to provide “equal treatment” for rivals. Implementing that program resulted in a number of changes to the auction and shopping ads in search results. However, rivals such as Kelkoo, among others, have been complaining these measures haven’t worked and that their competitive positions have deteriorated. Google’s shopping comparison rivals now formally seek additional concessions and have complained to the European Commission, which is reviewing their complaints and seeking information from Google to assess the efficacy of its remedies. Data and analysis released earlier this week by Searchmetrics appear to support the rivals’ cause. Searchmetrics’ analysis found that Google still overwhelmingly dominates shopping ads in the UK and Germany in five key retail segments. More than 99 percent of PLAs across the examined categories in the UK were still “by Google.” The German market is reportedly somewhat more competitive. Searchmetrics also found that organic visibility had declined for Google’s shopping competitors since the end of June 2017. This is mirrored in some of the complaints and allegations from Google competitors in Europe. According to The Wall Street Journal:
Google has taken the position that its changes to shopping ads and the auction in Europe comply with the European Commission’s order and that rival shopping services are treated equally. Google’s competitors disagree. Should the Commission find that Google’s measures are inadequate or don’t comply with its antitrust order, the company could receive additional fines equivalent to 5 percent of its global daily revenue until compliance. Indeed, the European Commission is likely sympathetic to Google’s competitors and will be inclined to demand further action with the threat of additional penalties. It’s not entirely clear what should happen or what would indicate compliance. The simple answer might be a substantially higher percentage of rival ads in PLAs and rival sites in organic slots. But that implies a high degree of regulatory involvement and potential intervention in the SERP itself. Google maintains it has leveled the playing field for PLAs in Europe. Its competitors see something quite the opposite. Are those competitors right, partly right or not entirely competent and blaming their failures on Google? Google is in the process of appealing the EC antitrust ruling and fine, but that could take several years. The post Google EU shopping rivals complain antitrust remedies aren’t working appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2Gx7rsZ Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic in PPC, but until the machines fully take over day-to-day account management, there are a few key areas where human PPC pros can still add a lot of value. Use business data for bid managementBid management can be one of the most repetitive and boring tasks of managing PPC because after a model has been built, you are left with an ongoing task of executing on the plan, and this may involve downloading the data, putting it into the correct format, and then running it through your formulas to determine the new bid. For machines, this might sound like the perfect dinner on a Caribbean beach at sunset, but for us humans? Not so much. Repetition is dull, and since it’s a dull task, we tend to become a bit less thorough with our analysis as time goes on. This is why both Google and Bing offer automated bid management solutions. There are also many third-party bid management solutions which aim to improve on shortcomings of the bid management solutions from an engine. Though it is a well-known fact that the engines can do amazing bid management work, their solutions are generic and can ignore aspects that the business owner knows will impact their online conversions. There are four clear advantages to using the engine’s bid management systems:
But there are several things these automated bid systems cannot do:
The ideal bid management system combines the algorithms from the engines with data from your business. To this end, advertisers should calculate their own CPCs based on in-house data and then submit these bids to the engine as an Enhanced CPC, so that Google or Bing can adjust the bid up or down based on what they know about each auction. This is a reason why tools like Optmyzr are popular for managing bids. They can help automate bid strategies that use a combination of data from the search engine (like historical conversion rates for individual keywords) and business data (like phone sales data, e-commerce returns data, or even how the weather impacts sales). Optmyzr’s Rules-Based Optimizations for bids are also ideal for agencies that want to add value beyond what the engine’s own bidding system can do but don’t want to build complex technology in-house that they need to maintain as Google and Bing go through their frequent updates to the API. Prebuilt recipes can be installed in seconds to help advertisers reach goals like target CPA, target ROAS or target position. These recipes can be enhanced over time as more is learned about factors that impact performance, whether they’re based on Google’s data or internal business data. Use keywords to target shopping adsA second area where PPC pros should take back some control from the machines is with managing keywords for shopping ads. While shopping ads are automatically targeted to relevant queries that match the product in an advertiser’s feed, there is always the option of adding negative keywords. In a rather extreme, yet interestingly practical way, you could actually target a specific keyword not by the inclusion of that term, but rather by the exclusion of all other terms. This is the foundation of “Query Sculpting,” a PPC technique that deploys negative keywords to drive traffic to the desired target. And because negative keywords are much more explicit than positive keywords, they are the main tool. Even in search campaigns, query sculpting is done with the addition of negative keywords. And while this makes a strange sort of sense, our logical side is still asking, “Why can’t it be done by simply adding exact match positive keywords?” Because ever since Google’s latest change to the algorithm, exact match no longer truly means “exact.” Query sculpting for shopping campaigns was invented by Martin Roettgerding and later refined by various entities, including SmarterCommerce. Martin’s technique requires maintaining three parallel Shopping campaigns and proactively adding certain types of negative keywords. But proactively adding extra campaigns and unnecessary negative keywords can really eat into an account’s allowance for number of keywords under management. Optmyzr, taking into account the pros and cons of both sides, has a solution that uses recent performance data to sculpt queries when it is clear they could perform better elsewhere in the account: The Shopping Negatives Tool. The Shopping Negatives Tool analyzes the performance of the same search queries across different ad groups in a shopping campaign, finds the ad group in which the query is not performing well and recommends adding it as an exact match negative. Using this technique, advertisers can run as many shopping campaigns in parallel as they want or keep everything in one campaign, and Optmyzr’s analysis will make suggestions for how to sculpt the traffic to drive more sales at a better ROAS. Create better ad testsGoogler Matt Lawson has recently covered the new ways to think about A/B ad testing. Thanks to Google’s improvements in Machine Learning, there is less need to manually cull underperforming ads from an account. The premise is that the worst ad in an ad group could actually perform quite well with a subset of users hitting that ad group, which means that removing a slightly losing ad could actually be counterproductive. But he also says, “Delete stuff whenever an ad stops seeing a large fraction of the impressions and therefore generates minimal to no clicks. Then add a new ad to the mix. It’s better to have options.” To help with cleaning up ads that are seeing a minimal share of impressions in an ad group, you could use AdWords Scripts, like some that are part of Optmyzr’s suite of tools. While Google is removing the need for manual testing of ads, and though they’re even doing some automatic generation of new ad text challengers, this remains an area where the human expert — someone who is close to the business being advertised — will have a leg up on automations. You’ve heard the story that if you gave 1,000 monkeys typewriters and an infinite amount of time, they’d eventually write all the works of Shakespeare. But monkeys eat lots of bananas and tend to prioritize climbing trees before writing those famous soliloquies, so they’d most likely take forever. And though the concept of play-writing monkeys does seem very attractive, advertisers aren’t willing to wait for an infinite amount of time. That’s why we still need tools that help us write great ads in the least possible time. Tools like Optmyzr can help with the ideation for new ads by highlighting ad text elements that have performed well historically. Frederick Vallaeys made the point that the PPC agencies of the future will be the ones with the best process for testing. Machine learning means computers can figure out the winners and losers, but conclusive test results will happen more quickly when using human insight to prioritize the most valid hypotheses for testing. ConclusionExciting and perhaps scary times are ahead for all sorts of professions where AI will take over a plethora of tasks that used to require human intelligence. There’s a slight fog surrounding the future of human intelligence in the workplace, and though it isn’t thick enough to cover us just yet, it creates a bit of unease in many circles. What will happen when machines take over? It’s an inevitable passage, but the more human input we give these machines throughout this transition period, the more effective they will be at helping achieve the shared goal of improving PPC performance. And in the meantime, human PPC pros have many opportunities to transform their day-to-day into something that will endure over time and set a solid foundation for working in an AI-first world. The post 3 ways humans can do PPC better than machines alone appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2GzTg6D In September, Google announced its solution to maintain campaign tracking from Safari, with a new Google Analytics cookie. Now Bing is introducing its method for addressing the challenge of tracking ad clicks from Safari posed by Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). Some advertisers may have noticed an alert in their Bing Ads accounts to enable auto-tagging of Click ID “for accurate conversion tracking”. You guessed it, this has to do with Bing Ads’ solution to ITP tracking issues. Checking the box will automatically tag destination URLs with the Microsoft Click ID. It can be set at the account level under URL options in the Shared Library as shown in the screenshot below. Some advertisers will already have the Microsoft Click ID auto-tagging enabled. Its what underpins Bing Ads’ offline conversion imports, for example. First, a quick overview of ITP, and then we’ll get into how Bing Ads’ solution actually works. What is Intelligent Tracking Prevention?With ITP, third-party cookies deemed able to track users across sites can only be used in a third-party context for 24 hours from the time a user visits a website via Safari. After 24 hours, those cookies can only be used for supporting user log-ins. After 30 days, the cookies are purged entirely. For marketers, that means that unless a user converts within 24 hours of visiting an advertiser’s site after clicking an ad, for example, third-party cookies are purged and conversion tracking is lost. As a result, with Safari accounting for nearly 50 percent of mobile web traffic share in North America by some measures, ITP has the potential to make a mess of mobile ad conversion attribution. The fix: Microsoft Click ID and Universal Event TrackingBing Ads uses the Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag to power conversion tracking. The tag, when placed on advertiser sites, captures what users do once they click through from an ad, including conversion actions they take. Like Google, Bing is responding to ITP with a method that is in line with Apple’s guidance around ad attribution, which states, “We recommend server-side storage for attribution of ad impressions on your website. Link decoration [ e.g., padding links with information] can be used to pass on attribution information in navigations.” Note: only the JavaScript version of the UET tags supports the ability to set these cookies. If you’re using the non-JS version, you might consider switching. When advertisers enable auto-tagging for the Microsoft Click ID, or MSCLIKID, the following process occurs:
This applies for conversions happening outside of the 24 hour window after a user visits the advertiser’s site. If a conversion happens within the 24 hours, the Microsoft cookie will still be present, and Bing Ads will use the IDs in that cookie for attribution as it does currently. Without auto-tagging enabled, the _uetmsclkid first party cookie won’t be set and Safari/ITP will likely purge the third-party UET/Microsoft cookie after the 24 hour window. The solution is already working for advertisers that enabled auto-tagging for other purposes. For everyone else, it will start working as soon as it’s enabled at the account level as shown above.It will also be selected by default when creating new conversion goals. As with Google’s solution, this fix only addresses tracking for attribution, it does not address how retargeting works (or doesn’t after 24 hours) on Safari. Bing Ads says is working on a solution for that. The post Bing Ads has a conversion tracking fix for Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2ErLxHa You can make all the money in the world, but there is a price. Dawn Cermak shows us that Network Marketing is all about sharing what is possible and showing people how obtain it. Also, be committed to helping people have a good experience. Who is Dawn Cermak?Dawn Cermak has been an entrepreneur for over 29 years and has owned and operated several event companies. She is a network marketing leader who has made over a million dollars in her MLM business. Dawn has also been featured as one of the authors for the book “Mom and Dadpreneurs.” Dawn lives in Washington D.C. and is a mother to four children. Favorite Quote“When in doubt, focus out” “Happiness is not the crop you harvest when your dreams come true, but rather the fertilizer that makes them grow faster” (Mike Dooley) Must Read BookHow to Be Your Biggest Fan by Renee Cermak Recommended Online AppRecommended Prospecting ToolContact InfoWhat Did You Learn?Thanks for joining me on the show. So what did you learn? If you enjoyed this episode please share it on social media and send it to someone that needs extra motivation in their MLM business. Do you have any thoughts or comments? Please take 60 seconds to leave an HONEST review for the MLM Nation Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely important for me to make this show better. Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes so that you get updates and new episodes downloaded to your phone automatically. Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes Click here to Subscribe via Stitcher Click Here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes feed) The post 446: Strategies That Will Help You Maximize Your Compensation Plan by Dawn Cermak appeared first on MLM Nation: Network Marketing Training | Prospecting | Lead Generation | Leadership | Duplication | Motivation. via MLM Nation: Network Marketing Training | Prospecting | Lead Generation | Leadership | Duplication | Motivation http://ift.tt/2GyZWlt 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:
The post SearchCap: Google featured snippets, Bing Ads audience segmentation & link building appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2rQHMIm |
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