Nothing brings people together like watching their national team compete on the world’s stage. The excitement unites a diverse set of fans, each with their own stories to be told.
In the martech world, a tool unites customer data just like fans at a national sporting event: a Customer Data Platform (CDP). A database often used by marketers and CX teams to ingest customer data from relevant platforms and channels, CDPs provide a single, unified view of your customer.
The U.S. Soccer Federation was looking for a solution to revamp its antiquated digital infrastructure, including an outdated website, lack of mobile app and plenty of tedious, manual tasks to keep track of customer data. Before investing in Treasure Data’s CDP solution, U.S. Soccer mapped out three business challenges:
Create a mobile-first experience, including a robust, personalized mobile app and tailor its website for mobile device traffic.
Achieve a 360-view of the customer and keep that data in one place to ensure each customer has their own ID/profile for business intelligence and personalized marketing campaigns.
Create an infrastructure that scales. As a small organization with millions of fans, U.S. Soccer needed the technology to deliver personalized but automated campaigns, including:
Tracking account status (active, lapsed, renewal date, upgrade amount, etc.)
Creating a digital hub for users to manage their account
Building journey orchestration and personalization
To learn more about why U.S. Soccer decided to invest in Treasure Data’s CDP to address the above challenges and more, join Ross Moses, senior director of analytics and insights at U.S. Soccer Federation, and J.T. Wash, senior account executive at Treasure Data, in their informative MarTech session.
This exciting, data-rich case study highlights how U.S. Soccer improved its fan experience and increased member loyalty by creating a unified view of its customer journey.
After this session, you’ll be able to:
Understand how a CDP can help you optimize your marketing efforts
Identify opportunities in your business to increase LTV and customer loyalty
Create a unification strategy that breaks down data silos and drives meaningful insights about your customers
Register and attend the session here and learn how to drive relevant, real-time customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey with a CDP.
Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, and what is content?
I’ve been chatting with someone on the marketing ops side of marketing a few times a month just to get an idea of how they think the upcoming cookieless world will affect things on their end. She was telling me about tagging and attribution in the many CRMs that she helps clients with and the conversation drifted to what happens in “the middle.”
Her work encompasses the beginning (planning campaigns and tagging) and the end (collecting attribution data and making decisions based on it). But she didn’t have a lot of insight into the middle. Her assumption was that all SEO and PPC were essentially just “content.”
We walked through the technical basics of SEO and PPC and she asked, “So does anyone not need content?” And it got me thinking about the definition of content. We just assume it means pages or posts on our sites, but content can also encompass Google My Business and social media posts, ad creative and landing pages, infographics and videos, and more. Content is what makes the web work. It goes beyond both SEO and PPC but is also at the core of what they are.
P.S. Love my musings? Join me for more at my SMX Next keynote. If you don’t, then you should still join for other people’s expert knowledge. 🙂
Carolyn Lyden, Director of Search Content
Another Google algorithm update likely happened this weekend
“Many of the tracking tools are showing levels that we have not seen since a Google core update. Moz reported 101 degree weather, Advanced Web Ranking was at the top of its chart,… and the other tools are also super hot,” said Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable.
The SEO community has only seen some chatter, however, but it was a big deal to some marketers: “USA traffic [is] still way off, down about 30% from the first two weeks of Sept and still dropping. USA has dropped so much that my UK traffic is now 2/3 of USA, for a population 6+X larger,” said one SEO. “Big movements across all topics and countries. The volatility is similar to a core update. It’s the update they started rolling out yesterday,” said another.
Why we care. If you saw big dips in USA traffic last week or over the weekend, it might be attributed to what’s going on algorithm-wise. Let your clients and stakeholders know what happened before they come to you asking about metrics anomalies.
Facebook and Instagram outages could affect your social advertising metrics
Facebook and Instagram were down for over two hours yesterday. The outrage resulted in quite a few funny tweets, as Twitter was one of the only social media platforms still up at the time. The error message suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error. Those who used Facebook as a login verification for other apps also could not log in to those third-party systems. The outage isn’t the first for Facebook. The app and websites were down in March and July this year, too.
Why we care. Make sure to mark the outage in your Analytics if you rely heavily on leads or traffic from social. The outage will have a heavy impact on both paid and organic social media campaigns, but fortunately only for a short period of one day.
Search Shorts: Keyword data trends in keyword planner, responsive video ad scripts, deep links with content and PR, and the socialization of GMB
Google is showing trending keyword data within Google keyword planner. “This is a small experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve our experience for our advertisers and users, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a Google Ads spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Hat tip to Arbab Usmani for sending us a screenshot.
Support for Responsive Video Ads in scripts. Reminder: Last week Google Ads launched support for responsive video ads in Google Ads scripts. If you were using the TrueView for action campaign type, you must update your code to use the new video ad type.
How to use content and PR to build deep links. Deep links can drastically improve organic performance in the long term, but they are hard to get and we can’t influence where publishers link to. Screaming Frog has a guide to work around those issues, though.
Google local search trends: Socialization. Google’s local platform — comprising Google My Business, Google Maps, and the local component of Google Search — has become, under our noses, a massive social network. Google has achieved this status not through traditional methods of connecting users to each other, but by allowing and encouraging users to share their experiences, questions, and opinions about local businesses in a variety of forms and at a massive scale.
What We’re Reading: The podcast ad glossary: A whole slew of new jargon for advertisers
Sure you may know what a pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ad is in podcast advertising, but how about inventory source targeting or a baked-in ad? Podcasting is experiencing a serious boom, and with that comes all the different ways advertisers can reach those very targeted audiences of listeners.
SXM Media recently published a guide to podcast advertising lingo to clarify the new jargon that’s come along since podcasts have really taken off (especially in the ad world).
So a baked-in ad is “part of the actual podcast recording, meaning they live with that episode forever.” This is the opposite of a dynamically inserted ad which gives podcasters “the ability to insert ads, either client-provided, announcer-read, or host-read, at the time of download. This ensures that all ads are relevant to the time of year (we wouldn’t want any holiday ads in the peak of summer) and to the listener themselves.”
Oh, and inventory source targeting is “the ability to target the inventory of your favorite publishers at-scale, like Stitcher or Pandora.” Make sure to check out the guide to stay up to date on the latest podcabulary — there will be a pop quiz later.
In September, I put up a poll here on Search Engine Land to see if readers would like to have an instruction in robots.txt to mark pages for No Indexation. Today I’ll present the results along with a review of what the key issues are (and why Google won’t be adding support for this).
In the current environment, robots.txt is used exclusively for guiding the behavior of web crawling. Further, the current approach to marking a page “NoIndex” is to place a tag on the page itself. Unfortunately, if you block it in robots.txt, Google will never see the tag and could still potentially index the page even though you don’t want that to happen.
On large sites, this presents some challenges when you have different classes of pages that you’d like to both block from crawling AND keep out of the Google index. One way that this can happen is in complex faceted navigation implementations where you have pages that you create that have significant value for users but end up presenting way too many pages to Google. For example, I looked at one shoe retailer website and found that they have over 70,000 different pages related to “Men’s Nike shoes.” This includes a wide variety of sizes, widths, colors, and more.
In some tests that I have participated in with sites with complex faceted navigation like the example I shared above we have found this large quantity of pages to be a significant problem. For one of those tests, we worked with a client to implement most of their faceted navigation in AJAX so the presence of most of their faceted nav pages was invisible to Google but still easily accessed by users. The page count for this site went from 200M pages to 200K pages – a thousand to one reduction. Over the next year, the traffic to the site tripled – an amazingly good result. However, traffic went DOWN initially, and it took about 4 months to get back to prior levels and then it climbed from there.
In another scenario, I saw a site implement a new e-commerce platform and their page count soared from around 5,000 pages to more than 1M. Their traffic plummeted and we were brought in to help them recover. The fix? To bring the indexable page count back down again to where it was before. Unfortunately, since this was done with tools like NoIndex and Canonical tags the speed of recovery was largely impacted by the time it took Google to revisit a significant number of pages on the site.
In both cases, results for the companies involved were driven by Google’s crawl budget and the time it took to get through enough crawling to fully understand the new structure of the site. Having an instruction in Robots.txt would rapidly speed these types of processes up.
What are the downsides of this idea?
I had the opportunity to discuss this with Patrick Stox, Product advisor & brand ambassador for Ahrefs, and his quick take was: “I just don’t think it will happen within robots.txt at least, maybe within another system like GSC. Google was clear they want robots.txt for crawl control only. The biggest downside will probably be all the people who accidentally take their entire site out of the index.”
And of course, this issue of the entire site (or key parts of a site) being taken out of the index is the big problem with it. Across the entire scope of the web, we don’t have to question whether this will happen or not — it WILL. Sadly, it’s likely to happen with some important sites, and unfortunately, it will probably happen a lot.
In my experience across 20 years of SEO, I’ve found that a misunderstanding of how to use various SEO tags is rampant. For example, back in the day when Google Authorship was a thing and we had rel=author tags, I did a study of how well sites implemented them and found that 72% of sites had used the tags incorrectly. That included some really well-known sites in our industry!
In my discussion with Stox, he further noted: “Thinking of more downsides, they have to figure out how to treat it when a robots.txt file isn’t available temporarily. Do they suddenly start indexing pages that were marked noindex before?”
I did also reach out to Google for comment, and I was pointed to their blog post when they dropped support for noindex in robots.txt back in 2014. Here is what the post said about the matter:
“While open-sourcing our parser library, we analyzed the usage of robots.txt rules. In particular, we focused on rules unsupported by the internet draft, such as crawl-delay, nofollow, and noindex. Since these rules were never documented by Google, naturally, their usage in relation to Googlebot is very low. Digging further, we saw their usage was contradicted by other rules in all but 0.001% of all robots.txt files on the internet. These mistakes hurt websites’ presence in Google’s search results in ways we don’t think webmasters intended.“ * Bolding of the last sentence by me was done for emphasis.
I think that this is the driving factor here. Google acts to protect the quality of its index and what may seem like a good idea can have many unintended consequences. Personally, I’d love to have the ability to mark pages for both NoCrawl and NoIndex in a clear and easy way, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t think that it’s going to happen.
Overall robots.txt poll results
First, I’d like to acknowledge a flaw in the survey in that question 2, a required question, assumed that you answered question 1 with a “yes”. Thankfully, most people who did answer “no” on question 1 clicked on “Other” for question 2 and then entered in a reason for why they didn’t want this capability. One of those responses noted this flaw and said, “Your poll is misleading.” My apologies for the flaw there.
The overall results were as follows:
In total 84% of the 87 respondents said “yes,” they would like this feature. Some of the reasons offered for wanting this feature were:
There are no situations where I want to block crawling but have pages indexed.
Noindexing a large number of pages takes a lot of time because Google has to crawl the page to see the noindex. When we had the noindex directive we could achieve quicker results for clients with over-indexation problems.
We have a very large cruft problem…very old content…hundreds of old directories and sub-directories and it takes seemingly months if not years to de-index these once we delete and ergo 404 them. Seems like we could just add the NoIndex rule in the robots.txt file and believe that Google would adhere to this instruction much quicker than having to crawl all the old URLs over time …and repeatedly…to find repeating 404’s to finally delete them…so, cleaning up our domain(s) is one way it would help.
Save development effort and easily adjustable if something breaks because of changes
Can’t use always a “noindex” and too many pages indexed that should not be indexed. The standard blocking for spider should also “noindex” the pages at least. If I want a search engine not to crawl a URL/folder, why would I want them to index these “empty” pages?
Adding new instructions to an .txt file is much quicker than getting Dev resources
Yes, it’s hard to change meta in head for enterprise CRM so individual noindex feature in robots.txt would solve that problem.
Quicker, less problematic site indexing blocking 🙂
Other reasons for saying no included:
Noindex tag is good enough
New directives in robots.txt file are not necessary
I don’t need it and don’t see it working
Don’t bother
Do not change
Summary
There you have it. Most people who responded to this poll are in favor of adding this feature. However, bear in mind that the readership for SEL consists of a highly knowledgeable audience – with far more understanding and expertise than the average webmaster. In addition, even among the yes responses received in the poll, there were some responses to question 4 (“would this feature benefit you as an SEO? If so, how”) that indicated a misunderstanding of the way the current system works.
Ultimately though, while I’d personally love to have this feature it’s highly unlikely to happen.
Beginning June 30, 2022, responsive search ads (RSAs) will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited in standard search campaigns, Microsoft Advertising announced in its October product updates on Tuesday. The announcements also included reporting improvements for Microsoft Audience Ads with view-through conversions, In-market Audiences expansions, an open beta for auto-generated remarketing lists, several Microsoft Audience Network updates and expansions and more.
Sunsetting ETAs
As stated above, starting on June 30, 2022, advertisers will only be able to create or edit RSAs in standard search campaigns. Existing expanded text ads (ETAs) will continue to serve, but advertisers will not be able to edit or add them.
This move brings Microsoft Advertising in line with Google Ads, which announced in August that it would sunset ETAs on the same date (June 30, 2022).
Microsoft Audience Network updates and expansions
Feed improvements. Now, advertisers can filter their feed by ID and category, enter multiple values at once and exclude values. This may enable advertisers to more easily manage their feed-based campaigns and filter with more granularity.
Introducing CPM pricing. CPM pricing (cost-per-thousand impressions) is coming to standalone audience campaigns targeting users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, France, Germany, or New Zealand.
The CPM option in the Create campaign steps. Image: Microsoft Advertising.
If this feature isn’t available in your account yet, contact Microsoft Advertising’s support team or reach out to your account representative.
New metrics for view-through conversions. View-through conversions are conversions that customers make after seeing your ad, even though they did not click on your ad. Microsoft has added four new view-through conversion types:
View-through conversion rate: This is the number of view-through conversions divided by the number of impressions.
View-through conversion CPA: This is the total amount you have spent divided by the number of view-through conversions.
View-through conversion revenue: This is your conversion revenue, but only for view-through conversions.
View-through conversion ROAS: This is your view-through conversion revenue divided by your total ad spend.
18 new markets. The Microsoft Audience Network is expanding to include the following new markets: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Venezuela.
Microsoft Audience Ads are already available in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany.
In-market Audiences expansion
The regions that In-market Audiences are available in is also expanding to include, as an open beta: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. Segments have been expanded as well; advertisers can view the list of In-market Audiences at Microsoft Advertising’s help center.
Auto-generated remarketing lists open beta
An auto-generated remarketing list notification. Image: Microsoft Advertising.
Microsoft Advertising is introducing a new product that can automatically generate remarketing lists for advertisers. The three types of auto-generated remarketing lists are:
All Visitors list: A list of users who visited the advertiser’s website in the past 30 days.
All Converters list: A list of users who converted within the past 180 days.
Smart Remarketing list: A list of users likely to convert, powered by Microsoft Advertising’s audience intelligence and designed to deliver a higher conversion rate.
Advertisers can use one, two or all three lists simultaneously, along with their existing remarketing and audience targeting lists. Universal Event Tracking and active conversion goals will need to be configured to leverage the All Converters and Smart Remarketing list options.
Competitive insights at the multi-account level
The platform also announced that competitive insights are now available at the multi-account level.
Why we care
The deprecation of ETAs aligns Microsoft Advertising with Google Ads, making it easier for advertisers to work across both platforms without having to account for any differences in available search ad types. As we stated when Google first made this announcement, this move means that advertisers will have less direct control over their accounts and will have to get accustomed to working with Google and Microsoft’s machine learning, if they haven’t already. We recommend testing your ETAs and RSAs to figure out what works best well before the June 30, 2022 deadline.
Feed improvements may make it easier to filter through your campaigns to find the products you want to promote exclude the ones you don’t. CPM pricing may be a useful option for advertisers that prioritize ad impressions, such as those seeking to increase their brand awareness. The new view-through conversion metrics may help advertisers track how ad impressions affect their conversion rate, CPA, revenue and/or ROAS.
And, auto-generated remarketing lists may provide advertisers with a quick option to expand their remarketing efforts to various users who’ve already interacted with their brand or are likely to convert.
Google Chrome is now testing side search, a new feature that makes it easier to compare search results on a single browser page. “We’re experimenting with a new side panel in the Chrome OS Dev channel, so you can view a page and the search results at the same time,” Google announced on the Chromium blog.
This side search feature lets you view a page right in your main browser window without needing to navigate back and forth or losing your search results or with the need to use more tabs. “The goal of this experiment is to explore how Chrome can better help users easily compare results,” Google said.
What it looks like. Here is a GIF showing this in action:
How it works. First, you need to be in Chrome OS Dev channel on desktop to see. To open the side panel and view the search results, click on the G icon next to the search bar at the top left. Again, this is a test Google is trying on a beta version of Chrome.
Journeys. Google is also testing Journeys, a new way to see your browsing history in Chrome. Journeys will cluster all the pages you’ve visited related to a specific topic so you can easily view them without having to sift through your browsing history. This will also show you related search suggestions so you can continue planning your trip right there in that section. So search is embedded in your Journey’s browsing history.
Here is what it looks like.
Google is rolling out Journeys as an experiment in Chrome Canary on desktop.
Why we care. These experiments may show you how Google is trying to embed search more into Chrome and increase searches on Google. All of this may lead to more searchers on your website. Plus these two experiments seem like very useful features for Chrome users and searchers. There is a possibility, though, that the sidebar potentially leads website users to bounce from your site and potentially head to a competitor when they have the SERP open right next to their browsing window.
Google’s monthly Privacy Sandbox timeline update indicates that the company will push back FLoC testing from Q4 2021 (announced in July) to Q1 2022. Testing of FLEDGE, the company’s remarketing solution designed so that third parties cannot track user behavior across sites, is being delayed to Q1 2022 as well.
The Privacy Sandbox timeline, as of October 1, 2021.
The “Discussion” period, originally set to end in Q3 2021, in which “technologies and their prototypes are discussed in forums such as GitHub or W3C groups,” has been extended through to the end of Q4 2021. This also has an impact on when testing is estimated to end, pushing that back from the end of Q2 to the end of Q3 2022.
Additionally, testing for the APIs that fall under the “measure digital ads” category have also been delayed to Q1 2022.
Why we care
These changes may affect when Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies. Google has eliminated the “Ready for adoption” stage from the FLoC and FLEDGE parts of the timeline and another delay may mean a shorter testing period or that Google will have to push back its planned Stage 1 period (the green column in the table above, expected to last from Q4 2022 through to the end of Q2 2023). At some point during Stage 1, the company will announce a new timeline that lowers third-party cookies’ “Time to Live”.
More about the Privacy Sandbox timeline
The timeline divides initiatives into four categories (“fight spam and fraud on the web,” “show relevant content and ads,” “measure digital ads,” and “strengthen cross-site privacy boundaries”). APIs shown on the timeline are based on Google’s current expectations and are subject to change. The timeline will be updated monthly.The phases indicated on the timeline are as follows:
Discussion – The technologies and their prototypes are discussed in forums such as GitHub or W3C groups.
Testing – All technologies for the use case are available for developers to test and may be refined based on results.
Ready for adoption – Once the development process is complete, the successful technologies are ready to be used at scale. They will be launched in Chrome and ready for scaled use across the web.
Transition period: Stage 1 – APIs for each use case are available for adoption. Chrome will monitor adoption and feedback carefully before moving to next stage.
Transition period: Stage 2 – Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three-month period finishing in late 2023.
Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, and have you ever been “Instagram-influenced” to buy something?
Even when I know I’m being “influenced” or retargeted, sometimes the marketing is so good that I just have to cave and buy it. My most recent targeted buy was a fancy set of new pans that Instagram just knew I needed.
I’ve seen ads for this brand for probably at least a year (good on ‘em for playing the long game), and I finally broke down this past weekend and did my pan research. It included Googling, competitor comparisons, clicking search ads and visiting multiple social media profiles. After chatting with a friend, who confirmed that my pans from college likely needed replacing, I finally converted.
It made me think of Google’s recent DDA announcement and the offline conversion importer they just launched (more on that below). Was the pan company able to attribute my journey to all the channels I participated in before I finally made a purchase? I assume not exactly.
And that’s the thing with attribution. No matter how much we try, there’s always going to be something that may not get all the credit it deserves, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t contribute at least something toward the final conversion.
Carolyn Lyden, Director of Search Content
The tl;dr: What happened in search this week? Here’s the DL…
Google Ads announces machine learning-based data-driven attribution models in new privacy landscape. In the wake of losing data to FLoC, Google’s new DDA solution seems to offer more attribution options even for smaller accounts.
Should robots.txt support a feature for no indexation? “I’d like to avoid adding more directives. I’m still not aware of common issues caused by this documented functionality,” said John Mueller.
Microsoft Advertising’s new Credit card ads continue its streak of vertical-specific products. The new format is rolling out as an open beta to advertisers targeting customers in the U.S. and Canada.
Ecommerce SEO guide: New documentation from Google. The new guide from Google gives e-commerce SEOs documentation they can take to clients and stakeholders to get their recommendations implemented.
Best SMX rates expire this Saturday… book now and save! Don’t miss your opportunity to learn brand-safe, actionable tactics to overcome the critical search marketing obstacles you’re facing today — and prepare for what’s coming in 2022.
Google Ads launches new budget report
Google Ads is launching a new budget report to visualize monthly campaign spend behavior, the company announced Thursday.
What the budget report shows. The budget report shows daily spend, your campaign’s monthly spending limit (solid grey line), your monthly spend forecast (dotted blue line), cost to date (solid blue line) and any budget changes you’ve made during that particular month.
Why we care. This new report can help advertisers understand how editing their budget can impact the campaign’s spending limits, how past changes to average daily budget can affect performance and spend limits, and how much they’re projected to pay at the end of month. That information can then be used to improve their planning.
Yelp adds virtual restaurant attribute to help reduce customer confusion
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Yelp has rolled out a number of profile attributes for restaurants, ranging from vaccine-related notices to attributes for LGBTQ and Asian-owned businesses. Now, the platform is rolling out a Virtual Kitchens attribute (shown above) for ghost kitchens, virtual restaurants and virtual food courts to identify themselves to potential customers and cut down on confusion regarding the dining experiences they offer.
Why we care. In Q2 2021, business openings for food delivery services were up 166% above pre-pandemic levels, according to Yelp. While these takeout or delivery-only restaurants present customers with a potentially safer dining option, they may also disappoint customers that are looking to dine in. The Virtual Kitchens attribute may help frame expectations, and that may, in turn, result in better reviews and more business.
Google Ads launches Offline Conversion Importer (OCI) tool
“Importing your offline conversions makes this easy—you can measure what happens in the offline world after your ad results in a click or call to your business, and then use that data to find similar high-quality leads,” said Stephen Chang, Product Manager, Google Ads in an announcement this week.
To help advertisers with the offline conversion import process, Google Ads announced the launch of Offline Conversion Import (OCI) helper tool this week. Here’s how it works:
Answer questions to confirm your account’s compatibility, tracking solutions, lead-to-sales journey, and the team who will help you with implementation.
Once you’ve assigned team members for each role in the process, OCI helper will assist them at each step, providing detailed instructions and timely email notifications when it’s their turn to act.
Holiday shoppers are starting early this year according to Microsoft Advertising data
While Black Friday used to be the official kickoff of the holiday season, new survey data from Microsoft Advertising indicates that starting your retail strategy in late November is probably too late.
“Consumers are increasing research on products before purchase. Now, the research phase can be 30 days or more. So, while they may be shopping more, they’re taking longer than ever researching before they buy. That’s a good thing for advertisers who plan for it,” said Stephanie Worley, global brand marketer at Microsoft Advertising.
Other trends Microsoft predicts this year?
Alternative payments and delivery methods will be in demand.
Sustainability will be a trend.
Advertising competition will be high.
Check out the blog for more tips on how to prep your retail strategy or download their holiday shopping report for more ways to get ready for the most wonderful time of the year.
Quote of the Day
“What everybody tells you: Get buy-in for your marketing strategies! What nobody tells you: HOW? FREAKING HOW? I thought the formula was: business case + action plan + ability. If you had those 3, you could do big things. But if you’re working somewhere that requires you work with other humans, all my old strategy does is turn you into the marketing version of Rick Sanchez: an erratic genius that’s just as likely to burn down the building as they are to double revenue,” wrote Brendan Hufford on LinkedIn. So how should you get buy-in? Check out the recommendations from a VP here.
As we approach the end of the calendar year, marketers are looking to squeeze every ounce of performance from their paid search campaigns. With this focus comes the risk of wastage or ineffective regional campaigns – all putting 2022 budgets at risk.
Join this session to hear five cutting-edge tactics to improve your spend efficiency. Each section will profile use cases, Adthena data and tips for the audience to apply in their day-to-day.
Google Ads is launching a new budget report to visualize monthly campaign spend behavior, the company announced Thursday.
The new budget report. Image: Google Ads.
What the budget report shows. The budget report shows daily spend, your campaign’s monthly spending limit (solid grey line), your monthly spend forecast (dotted blue line), cost to date (solid blue line) and any budget changes you’ve made during that particular month.
The shaded blue area shows the prediction intervals that indicate the upper and lower bound that the actual aggregate spend will likely land for a given day. Changes to your average daily budget are represented by arrow icons on the days the budget changed and you can hover over the arrows to see the budget changes.
How to access the budget report. To see the budget report, you’ll first need to have a campaign with a date range that includes the current month. The budget report is accessible from the Campaigns page, the shared library and the Ad groups page.
Why we care. This new report can help advertisers understand how editing their budget can impact the campaign’s spending limits, how past changes to average daily budget can affect performance and spend limits, and how much they’re projected to pay at the end of month. That information can then be used to improve their planning.
Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, Google’s Search On event was yesterday and we’ve covered all the announcements below.
The leading announcement was MUM’s integration with Lens to produce the first instance of multimodal search available to the public (launching in English in the coming months). Although it’s not a complete departure from what we’re used to, being able to snap a photo and add some text is definitely a new way to search.
At the event, Google provided an e-commerce use case for it (more on that below). I’m interested in learning more ways you think these capabilities might benefit businesses. Send me an email at gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com (subject line: A picture and a thousand words), and don’t hold back, these capabilities were unheard of a decade ago, yet here we are.
That’s just one of the many announcements from Search On, keep on scrolling to get caught up on newly announced SERP features, enhancements and more.
George Nguyen, Editor
MUM brings multimodal search to Lens, deeper understanding of videos and new SERP features
Image: Google.
Google announced new applications of its MUM technology, including multimodal search with Google Lens, Related topics in videos and other new search result features, at its Search On event on Wednesday. While these announcements are not an overhaul of how Google Search works, they do provide users with new ways to search and give SEOs new visibility opportunities as well as SERP and search changes to adapt to.
MUM enhancements to Google Lens (shown above): Google demoed a new way to search that combines MUM technology with Google Lens, enabling users to take a photo and add a query. E-commerce is another potential use case — users can take a picture of a pattern on a shirt and ask Google to find the same pattern on socks, the company provided as an example.
Related topics in videos: Google is also applying MUM to show related topics that aren’t explicitly mentioned in a video. This will be launching in English in the coming weeks, and the company will add more visual enhancements over the coming months. It will first be available for YouTube videos, but Google is also exploring ways to make this feature available for other videos.
“Things to know”: This SERP feature lists various aspects of the topic the user searched for — for example, if the query were “acrylic painting,” the searcher might see a step-by-step guide or tips in this section. This feature can enable users to see the different dimensions other people typically search for, which may help them get to the information they’re looking for faster.
Refine and broaden searches: This set of features act like search suggestions in the SERP, enable users to get more specific with a topic or zoom out to more general topics.
Google search gets larger images, enhances ‘About this result,’ gets more ‘shoppable’ and more
Image: Google.
While MUM was the highlight of Google’s Search On event, the company also announced a number of changes to the search results that are important for search marketers to understand. These changes include:
More visually browsable search results. For queries in which users may want to explore information visually, like “painting ideas,” Google may show a more image-heavy results page. This type of results page may also display for apparel-related queries.
“About this result” enhancements. Initially launched in February and expanded to include ranking information in July, this transparency feature now includes what the site in question says about themselves (which can be pulled from places like the “About Us” page) and can also show web results about the site, such as what others are saying about it, or related results about the topic.
Shoppable search. Now, when users browse for apparel on mobile, Google may show a visual feed of related items in various colors and styles, along with other information like style guides, videos or local shops. This feature is powered by the Google Shopping Graph and is currently limited to the U.S.
Local in-stock filters. Beginning today in English in the U.S., UK, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, users may see an “in stock” filter that allows them to see if nearby stores have a specific item available on their shelves.
Shopping with Google Lens. Soon, Google app users on iOS will see a new button that makes all the images on a page searchable via Google Lens. Similar functionality will also be arriving on Chrome for desktop: Users will be able to select images, video or text on a site to see search results in the same tab. Unlike the iOS version of this feature, which is only available in the U.S., Lens in Chrome will be available globally in the coming months.
Why we care. Review these new changes Google has rolled out and will be rolling out. See how you and your clients can leverage some of these changes to generate more business and traffic. The one area of concern is the About this result section having third-party information outside of Wikipedia that may be hard to change if it doesn’t have the most positive or accurate information about your company.
Another record-breaking holiday shopping season? Perhaps not…
Why container shipping delays are a big deal for e-commerce PPC in 2021. “The holidays this year are going to be even more different than last year,” said Fred Vallaeys, CEO at Optmyzr, “The effects of much higher shipping costs are going to be significant and ripple throughout the retail ecosystem.” In his post, Vallaeys breaks down how increased shipping costs will impact what retailers stock, the structure of their PPC campaigns and how customers may adapt.
You wrote an amazing article — here’s why influential people aren’t sharing it. This Twitter thread from SparkToro contains some pointers on why you’re not getting amplified and how you can go about changing that.
“When your data request is communicated transparently, 0P data helps build more trusted customer relationships that lead to higher lifetime value and 0P data, unlike some other methods, is free,” wrote John Cosley, senior director, brand marketing at Microsoft Advertising, “Plus, it’s more likely to be compliant and accurate, so incorporating it into your overall data strategy can better protect you as industry regulation evolves.”
With the looming demise of third-party cookies, there’s been an increased emphasis on first-party data, but, as Cosley reminds us, data that customers willingly provide you (zero-party data, or 0P data), is “the digital version of walking into a business and being immediately greeted by staff who ask how they can help you. It’s the main difference of how 0P data delivers a better value exchange over other consented models. The consumer now has skin in the game that forms a connection and directs the conversation.”
Brands can and should use zero-party as part of their larger strategy, which could also include first- and second-party data. One of the points Cosley emphasized was that brands should be mindful of how they’re asking for it: “You’ll find some opportunities immediately and others that will take more time to nurture. It could be off-putting for a person’s first experience with your brand to come with too many potentially personal questions, so gauge your approach accordingly,” he said.
He also shared the following tactics on obtaining your own zero-party data and using it in your advertising:
Set up Universal Event Tracking (UET) to collect data to measure and tune your ad campaigns.
Leverage tools like Custom Audiences to deliver personalized messages and offers with UET data.
Use remarketing to reengage customers and prospects.
Create look-alike, or Similar Audiences, lists and segments based on signals obtained through the above to provide more personalized ad experiences at greater scale.
