Yesterday we posted about Google testing the breadcrumb version of the URL above the title tag in the mobile search results. It appears that this same test is also implemented for AdWords ads too, which could significantly affect the CTR of these ads, especially those whose landing page URL might not seemingly match the query, […]
The post Google AdWords Testing URLs Above Title on Mobile Search Results appeared first on The SEM Post.
Any marketer worth their salt, or at least one who has managed to stay awake during Marketing 101, can rattle off a long list of marketing mix “Ps.” You know what I’m talking about: product, price, place, promotion, people, processes and physical evidence.
Unfortunately, those old pillars of marketing don’t quite hold up under the weight of today’s digital marketing needs. Our aging mnemonic sorely needs a renovation. It’s time we add proximity into the mix.
Long gone are the days of unfolding a paper map to find out where you are and where you want to go. Back then, when you ran off the edge of the map, you either got a new map or assumed that “here be monsters.”
You’ll find no edges on today’s digital maps. You are limited only by the power of your zoom and the reach of your click. By default, you are the center of the digital map. The world fills in around you, depending on the whim of your search.
Proximity — the distance from the user to any given location — is a heavily weighted ranking factor for all “near me” searches. Only when you specifically move the focal point from yourself to an area without you in it does proximity seem to loosen its grip on rankings.
And it makes sense that digital maps should be organized this way. Something closer to you is usually easier to get to than something farther away. For marketers, the further a potential customer is from a store, the less likely it is that the customer will visit the location.
Since most people find businesses through local search and digital maps, proximity needs to be a major aspect of every marketing strategy. If you get everything else right but fail to optimize for proximity, you’ll have a hard time leading customers to your brick-and-mortar locations.
You can’t control where your customers are when they search, but you can put a finger on the scale of proximity to help you rank above another similarly distanced location in your business category.
How? You have two options: You either purchase a higher rank with PPC, or you optimize for organic and hope that the user is searching in an area wide enough that the map needs to filter out locations.
Google and the other major search platforms are making it harder to win the organic hustle with each passing year. But there are still things you can do that will help you improve your rankings on the map.
First, give yourself a chance to show up in local search results by doing the basics. Make sure that your location information is accurate and properly distributed to all the major location data aggregators. Specifically, your name, address and phone number (NAP) need to be accurate, and your geocoordinates for each location should lead customers to the right place.
But the bare minimum doesn’t really cut it anymore. It’s 2017, after all. If you’re relying on the incompetence of your competitors to win at local search, you’re in trouble.
So how do you tip the scales in your favor?
You increase the weight of your local credibility and authority.
Proximity’s influence diminishes as the map zooms out. The more area within your field of vision, the more important it is to filter out locations on the map to avoid clutter. If you’re only looking at the area covered by a city block, good luck trying to shake proximity’s influence. However, if you zoom out just a little, other ranking factors increasingly come into play.
Recently, Andrew Shotland and Dan Liebson gave a presentation about local search ranking factors at SMX West. Some of the most important factors they uncovered outside of proximity were local citations, reviews and optimizing for Google My Business (GMB).
Local citations are important in that they give Google a strong indication that your location is where you say it is and that you have enough clout to attract backlinks.
Meanwhile, reviews help establish the local authority of your brand. The more people vouch for your location with positive reviews, the more comfortable Google feels about sending customers your way.
Finally, Google My Business is critical for helping your cause in local search. This is especially true for filling out your GMB attributes. We’ve begun to see the proliferation of Google My Business fields for each business type. For example, a restaurant will have the opportunity to fill in fields ranging from payment options, takeout, delivery, patio seating and anything else you’d want to know about a location.
You can expect GMB attributes to become a significant ranking signal going forward, thanks to digital assistants and voice search. Why? Because digital assistants and voice search are allowing for much more discerning answers when it comes to helping us find locations.
The way we ask questions is changing. Thanks to digital assistants and voice search, when we talk to Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Siri, we give these search engines much more information than we typically do with a typed search.
We’re often terse when typing in search queries, mainly because we grew up having to do precise keyword matching if we wanted to see relevant search results.
But Google and the other search engines are getting much better at understanding the meaning of words. More importantly, they’re getting better at interpreting user intent. As a result, exact keyword matching is no longer as important — much to the chagrin of advertisers. However, this allows questions and answers to be much more nuanced.
The growing intelligence of search engines is fueling the rise of voice search. Instead of typing a simple query on Google like nearby Mexican restaurants, we’re much more likely to get long-winded with voice search and say, “Okay Google, where’s a good nearby Mexican restaurant with patio seating and a short wait?” Thanks to the blossoming artificial intelligence of search engines, these nuanced questions are becoming much easier for digital assistants to answer.
But just because Google can understand the intent behind more complex questions, it doesn’t mean that Google has the data to answer them. It’s no mystery why Google is crowdsourcing business attributes through Google Maps by asking users about their recent trips to a location. Google is gathering as much information about a location as possible to have the data to answer more nuanced questions.
This presents marketers with an opportunity. If you meet the nuanced criteria of a user’s question by filling out as many applicable attributes as possible in GMB, your location can leapfrog businesses that might be closer but fail to meet the search criteria.
After all, there may be only be a handful of restaurants in an area that meet the criteria of my previous voice search question. Proximity is still a factor, of course, but you at least lessen its tyranny and raise your odds of ranking higher organically.
No matter what marketers do, thanks to the way digital maps are organized, it’s hard to escape the influence of proximity on search results. That’s why, even though our list of marketing mix Ps is growing long, it’s time that proximity joins the list.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
It always attracts a lot of attention when Googlers are up on stage and open for questioning. The Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Google Search at the recent SMX West conference was no exception. This panel, moderated by Danny Sullivan, featured two prominent Googlers: Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes and Webmaster Outreach Specialist Mariya Moeva.
In this post, I’m going to recount the bulk of the questions asked, and the answers from Illyes and/or Moeva. Please note that responses have been summarized rather than directly quoted. Let’s get started!
1. Does Google maintain any metric along the lines of a “Domain Authority” concept?
Gary Illyes: This is something that Google feels does not really work. For example, on blogspot.com, the user blogs created there really shouldn’t inherit the authority of the main domain. All ranking is page-specific.
2. What about subdomains?
Illyes: No such thing as subdomain authority.
Mariya Moeva: Before we get asked, I’ll add that there is no similar signal for folders, either.
3. Can you talk about the update called Fred?
Illyes: We make tons of updates all the time, and this is not something we would have thought to name or announce. It only got a name because of an interaction on Twitter with Barry Schwartz.
Google won’t communicate about what this particular update did, but you can find the things that it targeted if you carefully read all of the Webmaster guidelines. Unfortunately, we can’t say which particular ones.
Moeva: One of the issues with naming updates is that people start attributing all sorts of things to those updates, even though they aren’t actually related.
4. When will Google stop ranking internal search pages? Why does this still work?
Illyes: We do frown on these pages getting indexed, as they are not that useful for users. We do have algos that try to get rid of them, and for that matter not even crawl them, but sometimes these don’t catch everything, and we may have to manually intervene.
Moeva: If you’re trying to get these pages out of the index for your site, you can use the parameter handling feature in Search Console to say, “Don’t look at these pages.”
5. What data does Google use to see the “also try” info in a Knowledge Panel?
Illyes: Maybe we leverage the Knowledge Graph categories to find similar pages, but that’s just a guess.
6. What if your site does not get a Knowledge Panel? How do you get one?
Illyes: There is no way to do that really. Google does consume Wikidata, so that could get you in. Google also uses the CIA World Factbook. Anything that gets in requires multiple sources of data to support the need for it to be in there.
7. How do I control the picture that shows up for my business in the Knowledge Graph?
Illyes: If an incorrect image comes up, report it. Note, though, you need many people to report it for it to get looked at, and they have to come from accounts that have not previously abused the system.
(Illyes then mentioned the example of Stone Temple Consulting, which shows an incorrect image of a Chinese temple, and explained that sometimes the problems are hard to fix, but they are working on it.)
8. Can you bring back the link operator?
Illyes: No.
9. We heard you say that Baidu uses AMP, but we thought they had their own thing.
Moeva: Baidu started with mobile instant pages (MIP), which they still support, but more recently, they have expanded to support AMP pages as well.
10. Do you plan to expand the Google Posts feature? (Note: This is a feature where people can post information directly into the search results, but it’s used in a very limited way today. You can read more about it here).
Moeva: This feature was used during the US elections, and we are looking at future potential uses. Of course, for this to work it has to be high-quality info. The target groups are usually not really savvy on the SEO side, so the feature is good for the website-challenged. So we don’t know how we’ll expand it, but we’re trying to see what kinds of groups it makes sense for.
11. In Search Console, when we see links from hacked sites, should we disavow them?
Illyes: Do you trust the links? If you don’t, then disavowing them makes sense. Our algorithms do their best to auto-discount these, but these algorithms are written by humans and sometimes subject to error.
12. Should I have my exact keywords in the domain name?
Illyes: Exact match domains (EMDs) are not inherently bad, but some people do things with them that makes them bad. If you see someone else that’s ranking and you think it’s because they have an EMD, our advice is to not worry about it and try to figure out the other reasons it ranks.
13. If we have an EMD, but it is really the company name, do we need to worry about EMD algos?
Moeva: Unless you have really poor content on 50 EMDs simultaneously, don’t worry about it.
Danny Sullivan: If you have an EMD that matches the really good solid content you are already doing, you’re on the right side of history, and you’ll be fine.
14. Is a subdomain or subdirectory better for targeting different countries?
Moeva: Our site has a good post on this. It shows a table for when/how to pick which variant.
15. How does Google deal with the new domain names (such as .SHOP).
Illyes: These are treated the same as any other TLD.
16. Is it true that Google won’t crawl a URL that has more than two folders?
Illyes: No.
Moeva: There is a limit to the characters in a URL, though.
17. Does folder depth make a difference ranking wise?
Illyes: No.
18. If we launch a subdomain, and it gets penalized, will the domain be impacted?
Moeva: It depends on the reason why. If a blog got hacked, then that impacts only the subdomain. Generally, we try to be as surgically granular as possible.
19. Does Google access info from Gmail and other sources to personalize results?
Illyes: Yes, if you’re logged in.
Sullivan: This happens only within Gmail (I think).
20. Why did you decide to do a video on how to hire an SEO?
Moeva: Our target was non-savvy people, to help them understand how to approach it.
21. How many sites do you manually review in a week?
Moeva: Every Googler has to do 20 sites before breakfast (joke). Seriously, scale is the main objective. Google is trying to find patterns, more than sites. Ideally, we do this in a way that you find a pattern that scales across many sites.
22. How does it affect our ranking if our responsive mobile site has the same content as the desktop?
Illyes: This is the desired behavior, and there is no duplicate content issue since they are on the same URL. Also, there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.
(Author’s note: If you have duplicate content because you are scraping other people’s sites, this can result in your site being hit by Panda, but that is not what Illyes is addressing in his response.)
Having a responsive site will help you, especially in the future. With mobile-first, when it rolls out, responsive sites won’t have to change anything. Other sites may have to do something more to not suffer when that transition happens.
23. What would be harmed by Google being more open and transparent?
Sullivan: To be fair, they are very open on many things.
Moeva: The issue is that we’re trying to get people to focus on the right things. If we start dissecting (and sharing) what we do every day, this would prevent people from focusing on their sites. You should try to focus on the good stuff. Worrying about what Google change happened, when the next one will be, etc., diverts your focus from where it belongs.
Illyes: Both of us teach a class to Nooglers (new Googlers) called the “life of a query.” We know a lot about how it works, and this class is very specific. But, we have to decide if revealing a piece of information will hurt us in the long term. If we share info that causes people to do the wrong things, this can hurt the search results, and we can’t allow that. But we try to be as transparent as possible.
24. Can Google see a bounce on your site, even if not from a search result, and is it a negative result when that happens?
Sullivan: In other words, do you use click-through rate (CTR) as ranking factor?
Illyes: We only use CTR for QA purposes, not direct ranking purposes.
Moeva: We also don’t use things like Chrome to capture data like that.
25. If CTR is not a ranking factor, then why do tests sometimes show that it does influence rankings?
Sullivan: What if you believe that Google is lying about this — that you believe they’re using CTR, even though they say they aren’t? What would you do differently with your site? In principle, nothing. You should be trying to optimize to improve CTR and retain users anyway!
26. What about RankBrain and machine learning? What’s up with that?
Illyes: Not really anything new happening. The team is focused on some other machine learning ideas, and I can’t say what they are or whether they will be applied to search. But we’re always throwing out ideas on how to better understand pages or queries and working to make search better. Machine learning is just a tool that you can apply to different things.
Moeva: A great example is what video to show you next on YouTube; that’s an interesting challenge that is a perfect application for machine learning. We can leverage what people have watched and match them up with choices made by others with similar affinities.
Sullivan: Could you have a machine learning search algorithm system now?
Illyes: We probably wouldn’t want that, as we still look at search pages manually, and machine learning algorithms are freakishly hard to debug. For example, if we see some problem manually, it would be impossible to figure out why the decision was made. If we replaced the traditional algorithms with machine learning, we would have a really hard time improving results, because we would not able to identify where the failures are or what caused them.
Moeva: The algorithms are only as good as the training data that we give them, and that’s a big issue in coming up with good ones.
27. How do you measure voice searches? Can the rest of us get to see that?
Moeva: Voice queries are often super long-tail because of their use of natural language, so it’s hard to decide what to show. (Moeva then asked people to provide feedback on what they would do with it.)
28. Is it possible to highlight quick answers in Search Console separately?
Illyes: We get this request a lot, and we’ve talked to the highest possible person in the search team to see if they can, but we have not persuaded them yet. We’re still fighting for it, but it’s not a simple problem. Please ping us on Twitter and tell us how you would use that data to help us.
29. How do you get featured snippets?
Moeva: Create content that is relevant to the query and structured well. Structure it as an answer to a question.
30. Is WHOIS info used as part of local ranking?
Illyes: No idea.
31. Does the percent of 404 pages on your website impact your ranking?
Illyes: No.
32. Should we cross-link between product and category pages?
Illyes: Does it help users?
33. Does a large e-commerce site have a natural advantage over a small site?
Illyes: It doesn’t matter.
34. Will traffic from email and social media help your rankings?
Sullivan: In other words, do you use social signals?
Illyes: We did it in the past for a specific feature, but then the social media site turned off the feature, and it was a really bad thing, and for this reason we’re not willing to be dependent on social signals.
35. Is content length a ranking factor?
Illyes: No. The quality and relevance of the content is the key.
36. Is it bad if we have http and https live on a site at the same time?
Illyes: In general, no — but we have seen situations where sites have some differences between the sites, such as they implement hreflang to the http version of the site, but not the https version. That type of thing could be an issue.
37. Do you look primarily at the source code for a page or the document object model (DOM)?
Moeva: We look at the DOM.
38. Will we see an AMP e-commerce carousel in the near future?
Illyes: We are looking into e-commerce features, and we’re very aware that this functionality is needed. If you want to see what’s planned, check out the AMP roadmap.
39: Is authorship really gone as a ranking factor?
Illyes: Yes.
Sullivan: Dead, dead, dead, deader than Google+.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
And because we can get things done quickly, it’s also the worst. The world expects things to be done quickly — and all the while, we’re bombarded with interruptions in our digital experience.
When push comes to shove — and that’s how it feels on the internet today — are you grateful for digital?
As a consumer, I’m exhausted by the constant digital interruptions. I find it challenging, if not utterly frustrating, to focus on a single task while advertising pops up all around me. To me, it’s the equivalent of trying to write a blog post when the kids want me to take them somewhere — that constant, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!” How can anyone focus and get anything done?
Because that’s the promise of digital, right? Helping you to get stuff done instead of hounding you with constant distractions.
With respect to marketing, the internet has delivered a vast amount of data. We understand the customer journey; we can decipher the signals that tell us when our target customers are ready to make decisions and ready to buy.
But we’ve gotten so immersed in our own way of communicating with these consumers that instead of gently persuading them to buy our product, it’s more like we’re jumping out of the shadows and threatening them with a large, blunt object. When we should be making persuasive offers, we’re instead shouting them down.
The problem boils down neatly to the fact that our goals are simply not aligned. Consumers want their internet experience to be efficient and effective: get the research done, buy the thing. We as marketers are focused on efficiency only, and effectiveness be damned. We want them to buy the thing from us, and we’re not putting enough thought into their overall experience.
It’s not that we don’t have manners. It’s because we need our message to that consumer to stand out on a page or device filled with engaging content and advertising. Today’s internet leaves us few options. How else are we supposed to get them to buy that shiny new toy?
So really, who can blame consumers for blocking ads? The marketer has trained the consumer to be an intrinsic ad blocker, ignoring everything. When we’re driven to creating ever more intrusive ads, it’s the only way they can preserve their own user experience.
The marketer must find a way to reach consumers that’s unobtrusive and polite but will still get their attention. The challenge is finding out what that looks like.
Native ads seem to be the obvious alternative, but limited inventory could be a problem — as well as the inevitability of blocking, not to mention all of the other digital pain points marketers deal with, like ad fraud and viewability.
What’s a marketer to do?
Maybe take a breath and consider the basics and start from scratch. What do consumers care about? What do they interact with? What do they gloss over, and what do they keep?
Remember, marketers, you are consumers, too. Put yourself in their position. I don’t think we do this often enough.
We’ve become so obsessed with the concept of the “silver bullet” — getting the right message to the right consumer at the right time. Programmatic, data-driven advertising was meant to solve that, even ensuring that the message arrived on the right device at a critical moment along the path to purchase.
But have we ever considered that while “right message” and “right consumer” are obviously keys to the conundrum, the “right time” for us may not be the “right time” for the consumer?
Take a minute and think about that. Imagine the consumer’s situation for a moment when they’re online. Are they ready for your ad? Receptive to an interruption?
If a purchase is more than, say, $20, do we know for a fact that surfacing a digital advertisement to a consumer will compel them to buy within an hour? What if we could deliver something more valuable and tangible — something non-digital — to that consumer, and give them control over when (and if) to respond?
A consumer considering a luxury purchase — a watch, for example — may not be swayed by yet another digital ad, no matter how graceful the storytelling. If they’re already in that consideration phase, it may take something more personal and more high-touch to move them on to checkout: a phone call, an invitation to see the watch in-store (assuming that’s possible) or a personalized, tangible piece of collateral they can open and touch.
Any one of these options could help a marketer rise above the noise of the internet and stand out — and could meet the “right person, right message” criteria.
However, we may have to reconsider the “right time” leg of the stool. Our marketing goals may be driving that time; the consumer isn’t in a rush. From that perspective, they may not be grateful for the internet either. Looking at a watch online shouldn’t mean you get harassed by ads for 30 days to the point you wished you had a restraining order.
Perhaps it’s time we started giving consumers a little more time to consider their purchases — and a little less digital interference. Perhaps, if we put the customer journey back in the customer’s control, and maybe, just maybe, showed them a little more respect — in the form of a discount or promo code, or even just a tangible “thank you” of some kind — they would appreciate our efforts more.
If we try in earnest to respect consumers’ experiences online, maybe we could begin to make them feel honestly grateful for the internet.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
Recent headlines and Tweetstorms about Google ads—specifically ads on the Display Network and YouTube—appearing alongside potentially offensive domains or videos have caused an increasing number of globally recognized brands to pull their whole Google advertising budget. Take Pepsi, the latest domino to fall, for example; they “just pulled all ads from Google and YouTube.”
While this creates the illusion that these brands are doing “the right thing,” it’s little more than an ill-informed, feel-good PR stunt.
Here’s some potentially shocking information: Google is a search engine, a smart advertising company, and a bastion of innovation. It is not a moral compass.
As such, there are websites on the Google Display Network and videos on YouTube that may very well offend or upset some people. It makes sense for Google to cast as wide a net as possible: a broader network of websites running AdSense and videos bookended or interrupted by ads means more revenue. Inevitably, this net will scoop up driftwood, garbage, and the occasional body part.
However, since advertisers pay for clicks or impressions, and Google cares about its customers continuing to pump billions per annum into advertising, it behooves Google to give advertisers some measure of control over where their ads are shown.
In fact, these controls have existed for some time now; you just have to know where to find them.
By simply dropping all of their Google ad spend on principle, these brands are going to lose out on valuable advertising opportunities that, for the most part, would have had limited affiliation with any kind of offensive content. For “limited” to become “zero,” all it takes is an understanding of negative placements and content exclusions.
If you feel there are websites or YouTube channels that don’t align with your brand, you can eliminate them from your campaigns with ease.
Here’s how.
There are two ways to eliminate websites that trade in offensive content from your GDN advertising strategy. The first involves making sweeping changes to the types of website eligible to display your ads using “Site Category Options.” The second involves curating a list of custom placements that you’ll add as campaign-level exclusions.
The easy, catch-all way
You, too, can cast a wide net.
By using site category exclusions, you can negate websites that Google has identified as fitting into one or multiple categories from your Display campaigns. You can find this option at the bottom of the Display Network’s “Placements” tab.
While this isn’t going to eliminate all potentially offensive websites, content, and placements that your banner creative might appear near, it’s an excellent start.
The #granular way
If you already know there are specific websites you’d like to avoid, there’s no need to leave their exclusion to chance.
Negating specific website is like the bizarro version of Managed Placements. All you need to do is enter a single site (or list of them) in the field depicted above and Google will stop showing your ads there. You can leverage placement exclusions across all Display and Remarketing campaigns, ensuring your ads avoid any content that exists in opposition of your brand’s mission.
Today, the ability to control the types of videos your ads are shown on is more limited that the controls available to advertisers on the GDN; per Google, that’s going to change soon (more on that in a moment).
For now, advertisers making use of pre-and-midroll creative can adjust their content exclusion settings from the default, “all content except mature and unlabeled content” to the more discerning “all content except mature, unlabeled, and sensitive subjects.”
Again, this isn’t a perfect solution; it’s ostensibly the YouTube version of site category exclusions.
Coming soon though…
Starting in Mid-March, Google rolled out a suite of advertiser-focused measures they’re calling them “Expanded Safeguards.”
Per Google, these changes will make it easier for advertisers to control when and where their ads are served. Google aims to establish a “safer default for brands,” adjusting automatic settings to make site and YouTube channel exclusions easier. This means companies can balance morality and business growth without feeling compromised.
In relation to video specifically, there’s talk of tightening safeguards and making it easier for advertisers to eliminate offensive content placements. Google’s also taking a hard look at what kind of content (paid or otherwise) should be allowed to exist on YouTube.
It’s also worth noting that brands can opt into the original, broader audiences if they choose.
When the first wave of advertiser backlash began back in November, our resident data scientist Mark Irvine wrote about excluding ads from certain sites. When asked to touch on brands pulling their ad spend from Google, here’s what he had to say:
“A few months ago we began to notice that clients became more selective in how they bought programmatic ads. Before November, our clients didn’t think twice about their ads appearing across 1 million different sites (in fact, that was considered a value prop). Over the past few month, though, about 40% of our clients have asked about removing different controversial sites and content categories from their targeting. Google’s ad inventory is large enough that removing 1 domain or one category of domains doesn’t strictly limit your reach on the platform nor does it reduce spend.”
In short, the GDN and YouTube are so large that eliminating one or even a whole industry’s worth of websites and video will have no discernable impact on your advertising.
If you implement negative placements and content exclusions, you can continue using AdWords with a clear conscious and without passing on valuable prospects and brand-building opportunities. No gestural morality needed.
Moving forward, Google’s promise to provide more in-depth reporting on video ads. They’re developing tools and throwing money behind new measures to improve their ability to identify questionable content, and escalation procedures to fix issues that slip through the cracks in “less than a few hours.”
Allen Finn is a content marketing specialist and the reigning fantasy football champion at WordStream. He enjoys couth menswear, dank eats, and the dulcet tones of the Wu-Tang Clan. If you know what's good for you, you'll follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
This week, the Google SERP has got a bit more interactive with the addition of rich results for podcasts, and a new study has found that marketers are still failing to use advanced search tactics in their campaigns.
Plus, Google has launched a new website to bring all of its open-source projects under one umbrella, and an unlikely partnership has arisen between Google and Chinese search giant Baidu to bring faster mobile web pages to a wider user base.
Google has stealthily launched some new guidelines for structured data on its Developers blog, to bring rich results for podcasts to the SERP.
At the moment the new feature is only available via Google Home (where you can use voice activation to start up a podcast) or in the Google Search app v6.5 or higher on Android, but Google hopes to soon add support for Chrome on Android.
Google’s blog provided a sample image for how this will look in practice:
In his article for Search Engine Watch this week, Clark Boyd explains how you can get your podcast indexed on the SERP, and how to add the right structured data to your podcasts.
Those of us who keep close tabs on search innovation and strategy – or comment on it – are probably familiar with search tactics like retargeting lists for search ads (RLSA), voice search optimization, ad extensions in paid search listings, and schema markup. We know how to use them, and the benefits that they bring to ROI and visibility.
But a study by Bing and search agency Catalyst has revealed that among marketers as a whole, very few still are making use of advanced search tactics like these in their campaigns.
When asked which of a range of tactics their company used or was planning to use in 2016, only 34% of marketers reported using ad extensions; 30% said they used Product Listing Ads (PLAs); and 28% used retargeting lists for search ads (RLSA).
Just 28% of respondents reported using voice search optimization, 27% said they used sitelinks, and a dismal 17% reported using schema markup.
So why are many marketers still failing to tap into the full potential of search? Search Engine Watch spoke to Microsoft’s Rob Wilk and Catalyst’s Kerry Curran to find out what search marketers can do to improve their campaigns.
Pre-roll ads might just be everyone’s least favorite ad format – so much so that YouTube did away with 30-second unskippable pre-roll ads earlier this year. But Twitter-owned livestreaming platform Periscope announced this week that it will be adding pre-roll ads to live and replay Periscope streams.
The new ad product is named, unsurprisingly, Ads on Periscope, and is an expansion of Twitter’s existing Amplify ad product. The Periscope ads are expected to share revenue with content creators in the same 70/30 split as Amplify ads.
Amidst Twitter’s struggle to drive revenue on its social platform, monetizing Periscope could be one way to bolster its flagging fortunes. But the autoplay ads may prove to be unpopular with users, especially with the news that they will run over streaming content – meaning that viewers will miss several seconds while the ad finishes.
Google has launched a new website this week which is designed to act as a central directory for all of its open-source projects, bringing them together under one umbrella.
In its blog post announcing the launch, ‘A New Home for Google Open Source‘, Google wrote that the new site:
showcases the breadth and depth of our love for open source. It will contain the expected things: our programs, organizations we support, and a comprehensive list of open source projects we’ve released. But it also contains something unexpected: a look under the hood at how we “do” open source.
The site contains the source code for Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Project official website, as well as the source code for its Android mobile OS, the Chromium web browser, its Tesseract Optical Character Recognition engine, and hundreds of other Google projects, both well-known and obscure.
While Google has always made the code for these projects available on GitHub and its self-hosted git service (this being the nature of open source), this is the first time users have been able to browse them from a central location, and is sure to provide Google enthusiasts with plenty of cool material to scour.
And speaking of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an unlikely partnership has arisen in the world of search, as Baidu and Google confirmed that they are teaming up to bring a faster mobile web to a wider user base.
Google has a rocky history with China. It has had a presence in the country since 2005, but in 2010 decided to stop censoring its searches in accordance with Chinese law in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on itself and a number of other US tech companies, redirecting the searches instead to its Hong Kong search engine. Access to Google’s search engine and services has been blocked by the Chinese government on a number of occasions.
In the wake of this, native Chinese search engine Baidu overtook Google as the main search provider in China, and now enjoys around 80% of the Chinese search market, while Google China only has about 10%. But the two have evidently agreed to set aside their rivalry in order to pursue a higher goal: accelerating the mobile web.
At Google’s first AMP conference in New York, Baidu’s Gao Lei announced Mobile Instant Pages (Chinese-language link), or MIP, Baidu’s answer to Accelerated Mobile Pages. Hermas Ma reported on Search Engine Land that MIP has very similar technology to AMP, the main difference being that MIP are optimized for the Chinese internet.
Mobile Instant Pages can reportedly reduce the rendering of above-the-fold content by 30 to 80 percent, and Baidu has been considering giving MIP a ranking advantage in search results (something which AMP doesn’t yet have).
Ma also notes that the AMP Project website now loads in mainland China where it didn’t before, further pointing to a burying of the hatchet between Google and its Chinese counterpart.
It’s one of the hottest terms in marketing today: artificial intelligence (AI). It seems like almost everyone in the martech space is claiming to offer AI as part of their products and platforms, but behind the scenes there’s not even much agreement on what constitutes artificial intelligence.
In our latest Marketing Land Live podcast, we invite you to put on your thinking caps. Marketing Land’s Barry Levine visits with Scott Brinker, CTO of Ion Interactive and program chair for our upcoming MarTech conference, for a high-level discussion about the hype and reality of artificial intelligence and its role in digital marketing today and tomorrow. The conversation covers questions including:
This week’s show runs about 34 minutes. You can listen here or use the link below to subscribe via your favorite podcast service.
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This new AI-powered social marketing tool can predict engagement or write the post for you
Martech Today: Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence archives
Thanks for listening! Join us again next week for another episode of Marketing Land Live.
[This article first appeared on Marketing Land.]
