Google is removing the safe browsing signal from the Google page experience update, the company announced. Google said “we recognize that these issues aren’t always within the control of site owners, which is why we’re clarifying that Safe Browsing isn’t used as a ranking signal and won’t feature in the Page Experience report.”
New page experience diagram. Here is the new diagram that removes “safe browsing” from the list of page experience signals:
You can compare it to the original diagram:
Why is Google removing safe browsing. Google said it is removing this as a signal because these are issues that are not always in the control of site owners. Google said “sometimes sites fall victim to third-party hijacking.” Google will continue to flag these notifications in Search Console but outside of the page experience report.
Google is also removing the Ad Experience widget, Google said “to avoid surfacing the same information on two parts of Search Console.” But Ad experience was never used in the Google page experience update.
More changes to the page experience report. Google made additional changes to the page experience report including:
Fixed a bug that caused the report to show “Failing HTTPS” when Core Web Vitals data was missing.
Rephrased the empty state text in the Page Experience report and Core Web Vitals report.
Why we care. This is one less ranking signal and factor you need to worry about when it comes to your performance in Google Search. Of course, you don’t want to provide an unsafe browsing experience for your users, but you can still learn about those in Search Console, but it won’t count against you in your rankings.
Bing has introduced “Make Every feature Binary” (MEB), a large-scale sparse model that complements its production Transformer models to improve search relevance, the company announced Wednesday. This new technology, which is now running on 100% of Bing searches in all regions and languages, has resulted in a nearly 2% increase in clickthrough rate for the top search results, a reduction in manual query reformulation by more than 1% and a 1.5% reduction of clicks on pagination.
What MEB does. MEB maps single facts to features, which helps it achieve a more nuanced understanding of individual facts. The goal behind MEB seems to be to better mimic how the human mind processes potential answers.
This stands in contrast to many deep neural network (DNN) language models that may overgeneralize when filling in the blank for “______ can fly,” Bing provided as an example. Most DNN language models might fill the blank with the word “birds”.
“MEB avoids this by assigning each fact to a feature, so it can assign weights that distinguish between the ability to fly in, say, a penguin and a puffin,” Bing said in the announcement, “It can do this for each of the characteristics that make a bird—or any entity or object for that matter—singular. Instead of saying ‘birds can fly,’ MEB paired with Transformer models can take this to another level of classification, saying ‘birds can fly, except ostriches, penguins, and these other birds.’”
Discerning hidden intent. “When looking into the top features learned by MEB, we found it can learn hidden intents between query and document,” Bing said.
Examples learned by MEB model. Image: Bing.
MEB was able to learn that “Hotmail” is strongly correlated to “Microsoft Outlook,” even though the two aren’t close in terms of semantic meaning. Hotmail was rebranded as Microsoft Outlook and MEB was able to pick up on this relationship. Similarly, it learned the connection between “Fox31” and “KDVR” (despite there being no overt semantic connection between the two phrases), where KDVR is the call sign of the TV channel that operates under the brand Fox31.
MEB can also identify negative relationships between phrases, which helps it understand what users don’t want to see for a given query. In the examples Bing provided, users searching for “baseball” don’t typically click on pages talking about “hockey” even though the two are both popular sports, and the same applies to 瑜伽 (yoga) and documents containing 歌舞 (dancing and singing).
Training and scale. MEB is trained on three years of Bing search that contain more than 500 billion query/document pairs. For each search impression, Bing uses heuristics to gauge whether the user was satisfied with the result they clicked on. The “satisfactory” documents are labeled as positive samples and other documents in the same impression are labeled as negative samples. Binary features are then extracted from the query text, document URL, title and body text of each query/document pair and fed into a sparse neural network model. Bing provides more specific details on how MEB works in its official announcement.
How MEB is refreshed on a daily basis. Image: Bing.
Even after being implemented into Bing, MEB is refreshed daily by continuously training on the latest daily click data (as shown above). To help mitigate the impact of stale features, each feature’s timestamps are checked and the ones that have not shown up in the last 500 days are filtered out. The daily deployment of the updated model is also fully automated.
What it means for Bing Search. As mentioned above, introducing MEB on top of Bing’s production Transformer models has resulted in:
An almost 2% increase in clickthrough rate on the top search results (above the fold) without the need to scroll down.
A reduction in manual query reformulation by more than 1%.
A reduction of clicks on pagination by over 1.5%.
Why we care. Improved search relevance means that users are more likely to find what they’re looking for faster, on the first page of results, without the need to reformulate their queries. For marketers, this also means that if you’re on page 2 of the search results, your content probably isn’t relevant to the search.
MEB’s more nuanced understanding of content may also help to drive more traffic to brands, businesses and publishers, since the search results may be more relevant. And, MEB’s understanding of correlated phrases (e.g., “Hotmail” and “Microsoft Outlook”) and negative relationships (e.g., “baseball” and “hockey”) may enable marketers to spend more time focusing on what customers are really searching for instead of fixating on the right keywords to rank higher.
For the search industry, this may help Bing maintain its position. Google has already laid out its vision for MUM (although we’re far from seeing its full potential in action), and MEB may bolster Bing’s traditional search capabilities, which will help it continue to compete against the industry leader and other search engines.
Having spent the last 11 years surrounded by sales leaders, Amanda Farley Partner and Director of Accounts and Digital Strategy at SSDM, picked up on some of their biggest successes and opportunities. But recently, she had the idea to apply them outside of the sales box and into her digital marketing campaigns. “This is really what sales and marketing integration is all about,” said Farley. “It’s about building the relationships, the trust and guiding [buyers] to impactful solutions that ultimately lead into more sales or leads.
Learning from the sales process: An introduction to buyer influencers
These buyer personas are based on a book called, The New Strategic Selling by Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman. “Your strategy can only begin when you know who your players are,” added Farley. “The best way to think of it is like a football team: every player must be on the field to close the deal.”
Economic buyer. Has the ability to commit funds to a purchase
User buyer. The end-user of your product or service
Technical buyer. Ensures all the technical specifications are met
Coach. Really wants your solution to win
When we take this into our marketing efforts, we need to understand what each audience cares about most, what their content preferences are, and what channels they’re most likely to engage in.
Economic buyer
“This person prefers content with data visualizations, photography, and charts because they’re ROI-focused and need the social proof behind any decision that they’re going to make,” said Farley. They’re also high consumers of video content and love to see case studies and financial models.
User buyer
The user buyer is the one responsible for screening out potential solutions and understands all the key factors that go into various options they’re considering. This person is interested more in the details than the high-level overview that the economic buyer might find more interesting. The user buyer engages with charts, infographics, solution comparison guides, or category matrices.
“They’re whole ‘thing’ is being able to pitch [the product/service] to their economic and technical buyers,” added Farley. This user also cares deeply about how the solution will help them: will it make my job easier, better, faster, etc.?
Technical buyers
This buyer’s main role is to run interference for the economic buyer. “At the enterprise level, we see this with purchasing departments or procurement, but it can also be an operations manager. The question this buyer is always asking if the solution has what it takes to make the entire organization successful. The technical buyer is focused on data and leverages the user buyer for expertise.
Coach
This can be any of the other buyers or an outside influencer. They have potential personal gain from you winning. “This is someone who’s going to get something from your solution being the key decision,” said Farley. If you have a key influencer in your audience who is also a coach, that’s how to unlock success from marketing campaigns.
How to leverage these buyer personas in your PPC campaigns
Step 1. Define the buyer influencers. This is the part where you amass as much information as you can. Talk to customer service, sales teams, marketing teams, and more. Determine the person’s role in the buying process, their background and education, the company size, the buyer’s demographics or other defining traits, and their motivations, pain points and entry points.
“If they’re in growth mode, that’s a good foot in the door. But if they’re in trouble, it will always trump growth in sales,” said Farley. “So, from a marketing perspective, if we know trouble pain points, that’s also where we should focus because we know that it will ultimately make the difference.”
Step 2. Perform audience research. Now that you’ve found each buyer type and maybe new ways to think about your audience, you need to deep dive into the data. Figure out what your audience cares about most. What websites are they on? What YouTube channels do they watch the most? What social media preferences do they have? What types of content are they sharing?
Data pulled from Sparktoro
From there, Farley recommends noting the differences in this information between influencers. You may find some overlap, but the differences can help inform your strategy even more. In an example with an aerospace client, she found that the economic buyer’s second most-used social media channel was LinkedIn while the user buyer went to Instagram. This can change how you focus your campaign strategies and messaging for each platform.
The last part of the research is keyword and topic analysis. Any of the main keyword tools work for this part. “We look at — what are the key focus points? Is there any overlap? But also can I actually spot the buyer influencer” in what and how they’re searching, Farley said. This can craft how you’re displaying content and creating search ads or messaging landing pages. The key, she says, it tweaking the messaging for each product or service campaign to target those buyer personas.
Step 3. Other ways to use data and audience research. You can look at top channels for sponsorship opportunities like in podcasts or influencer campaigns that each buyer might listen to. You can target your media buys to these channels and even build relationships with hosts and reporters in these areas.
Implementing the research in PPC campaigns
Firstly, Farley recommends paid search advertisers think big and imagine what they would do if budget wasn’t a limiting factor.
Google Ads. “Go into each channel and create, cast, and layer. With Google, I like to use the custom audience or sandbox building of display campaigns. You can upload things like all of the YouTube channels that you found along with those key topic or purchase intents that you found in the keyword research to really get those estimates of: How many people are looking for this? And what could potential costs look like?” she added.
Farley also recommends layering custom with affinity or intent (especially if you have good lookalike or first part data) to see what works. You’ll have to balance what’s too narrow with what’s big enough to be able to serve. The key is understanding what’s possible and testing from there.
Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft’s Audience Network gets kudos from Farley, too. “You can actually target using LinkedIn data into their display network, so things like job function, industry, company, in-market segments… you can build that all and get your estimates and figure out what could a potential budget or strategy look like,” she said.
Facebook and Instagram. While these options are constantly changing and evolving, Facebook and Instagram have allowed us to target by job type and interest, and use our first-party data.
Working within your budgets
Now that we’ve dreamed big and seen what’s possible, we have to work within the frameworks set by clients and stakeholders including budget and regulations, etc. Farley offers a planning framework where she starts off looking at who her primary audience should be. She determines if there are specific focus areas like industry or location. From there she finds the best channel based on the audience insights we gained earlier and keeps her KPIs in mind. Leverage the percent of potential investment based on those set KPIs.
It’s also critical to look at the content or pain point to determine what it means for your ad assets. “We can’t be everything to everyone all the time because we have to work in the budgets,” Farley reminds PPC marketers. She recommends looking at your media map as percent by channel by funnel: “If we can say, if search will need to be 50%, then display is 20% because we can’t be always on for everything.”
Seasonality. Don’t forget seasonal trends, reminds Farley. “It just gives us a high-level look at what the seasonality in each market tells us.” You can know the best times to leverage campaigns, know when competitors will be bumping up costs, and more.
Testing. Make sure your settings are limiting waste before you launch! “Once you launch, test, monitor, optimize, and test again,” she recommends. After that, you can remove low-performers and update creative, ads and messaging to better fit your target audience. And, of course, amplify your best strategies. The cycle is never-ending, though, as she recommends advertisers continue to test, log, optimize, and test again.
Top insights:
Find your buyer influencers, then leverage into audience targeting for campaigns.
Determine what’s possible and then laser-focus in, on what matters most with realistic investments.
Test and optimize audience layering with creative performance. Report, optimize, evaluate for success and repeat.
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, “are we there yet?”
That seems to be the question on everyone’s mind: are we really getting closer to the end of the pandemic or are we getting ready for another wave? How do we even know what to prepare for?
Amazon share prices took their biggest drop in a year on Friday, and Etsy, eBay and Wayfair also saw their prices drop, too. The return of pre-pandemic consumer behavior may help explain the slowdown for these companies. But, the seven-day average for new COVID cases is on the rise; it’s currently back to where it was at the end of October.
To the e-commerce marketers among us, I’d like to know what your strategy looks like over the next three to six months: Are you planning for a “normal” rest of the year? Has your supply chain been impacted? What are you doing to navigate that? How will your ad budget change? Did you pivot your content strategy? Please send me an email, I’m gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com(subject line: Sounds like a plan!).
George Nguyen, Editor
Google math solver guidelines require accuracy
Google has added several new technical and content quality guidelines to its math solver structured data help documentation. The new guidelines list a number of requirements in order to be able to show math solver and practice problem rich results in Google Search.
The technical guidelines require that MathSolver structured data be added to the homepage of your site, your host load settings allow for frequent crawls, canonical URLs are used on each copy of a page (if you have several identical copies of the same math solver hosted under different URLs) and that your math solvers aren’t entirely hidden behind a login or paywall.
The new content guidelines state that “promotional content disguised as a math solver, such as those posted by a third party (for example, affiliate programs)” is not allowed and, if a certain amount of your data is found to be inaccurate, Google may remove your solver until you resolve the issue.
SEOs and e-commerce marketers weigh in on product ranking factors
Image: Joe Youngblood.
Over 80% of respondents selected keywords in the name of the product as the most important ranking factor for products in Google Search, according to a study conducted by Joe Youngblood. There was a three-way tie for second place between keywords in the reviews, keywords in the title tag and the number of inbound links. And, internal links took fifth place, with 68.2% of the responses.
Youngblood’s study goes as far as to list the top 20 product ranking factors for Google Search, according to the 35 SEOs and e-commerce marketers that participated in the study. At the bottom of the list are recency of reviews, linking document quantity and number of photos or videos of the product.
Why we care. While reviews and media may not be the most important ranking factors, they’re still worth putting effort into as they may convince prospective buyers to make a purchase. The sample size here is quite small, but it may still be worth taking a glance at the responses to see if your experiences align with that of the participants.
Google Ads Editor v1.7 brings support for Hotel ads and lead form extensions
Managing Hotel ads in Google Ads Editor v1.7. Image: Google.
Google Ads Editor v1.7 will be available in just under a week, on August 9. With this update, advertisers can use the Google Ads Editor to manage their Hotel ads, YouTube audio ads and lead form extensions, and select specific parts of their campaigns to download for offline work.
Why we care. For advertisers that use lead forms or run Hotel and/or YouTube audio ads in the web interface, the Google Ads Editor now supports these features so they can be managed offline. The ability to download specific parts of a campaign may also make it easier for advertisers to work on their campaigns while offline.
Chatbots have been around for decades, but have they gotten any better?
Bing is testing a new chat feature. Sunny Ujjawal caught a glimpse of a chat box on Bing. “This is an experimental AI-powered Chat on Bing.com,” the disclaimer reads. Bing added a CDC coronavirus self-checker chatbot to the SERP last year, but this test doesn’t seem to have a specific application in mind.
Google removes rich result type from performance reports. Google has removed the generic rich result type from GSC performance reports and the API. The company gave us a heads up about this in May, and now it’s officially gone.
Interview with Veruska Anconitano. Women in Tech SEO has a weekly interview series, and this week, Veruska Anconitano, who focuses on helping startups enter non-English-speaking markets, shared her approach to SEO as well as advice for women who are starting out in the field.
Analyzing the performance of various GMB Post types
Sterling Sky’s Joy Hawkins recently shared a case study in which her team manually analyzed clicks (according to Google My Business [GMB]) and clicks and conversions (inside Google Analytics) for over 1,000 GMB Posts from a variety of small businesses. The findings cover the types of Posts that perform best, whether to use titles and emojis, what to include in Post images and what to post about.
COVID Posts performed the best, followed by event Posts, offer Posts and update Posts. COVID Posts appear higher up in the local knowledge panel, but they’re text-only. Note that COVID Posts actually replace your Posts carousel, so your other Posts won’t be visible anywhere else.
Posts with titles got almost twice as many clicks and conversions as ones without titles. Just make sure you’re not writing them in all caps — Posts with regularly capitalized titles received nearly twice as many clicks.
Posts that contained emojis received double the clicks, according to GMB insights, and also got more conversions than ones without.
Photos that contained text in them received nearly four times the clicks compared to photos without text. Logos don’t seem to count, though, as there was no measurable difference between Posts that contained logos and ones that didn’t.
The GMB Post types that received the most activity were about specials or discounts. Second to that were ones that contained CTAs. And, the third-best-performing Post type contained a sense of urgency (e.g., same-day appointments).
“With this strategy, you set your budget, where you want your ads to appear, and your Target Impression Share, and Microsoft Advertising automatically sets your bids,” wrote Kevin Salat, Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft Advertising.
Source: Microsoft Advertising
When to use this strategy. Microsoft Advertising’s announcement has recommendations for when to use target impression share bidding including finding more visibility and awareness, gaining a competitive advantage, and increasing the likelihood of more click and conversion volume.
Best practices. Salat also included some best practices for those just trying out the target impression share bidding strategy. “Start with low-risk campaigns setting an impression share to target based on historical performance at first,” he said. This gives the AI time to learn and determine performance over the learning period. Salat also recommends using experiments “in A/A mode for 1-2 weeks before testing the strategy.” Salat also does not recommend setting a max CPC cap because it can limit performance.
Why we care. This strategy could be helpful for those who trust AI to drive their bid strategy. Automation has been taking over a lot of paid advertising, so it makes sense if search marketers may be wary of this at first, but Microsoft’s best practices could help ensure that you’re using the right strategy for your campaign goals.
Other news from Microsoft Advertising:
Product conversion goals. In the same announcement blog, Microsoft launched product conversion goals for Shopping Campaigns or other feed-based campaigns. With these “you’ll now be able to get a better understanding of the products your customers are buying after clicking on your ads,” said Salat.
Automated extensions. Beginning in August there will be new automated extensions in Microsoft Advertising:
Dynamic Location enhances ads with location information from your location extensions and Bing Maps
Dynamic Multimedia enhances ads with multimedia assets, such as images and videos (begins flighting in early 2022)
Syndication Decorations enhance ads with additional decorations added by search partners.
Account organization. Advertisers will also be able to organize their accounts with a new labeling system. This will be helpful for advertisers with multiple accounts. “Account-level labels will help you easily tag accounts, campaigns, ads, and keywords in your management scope with labels and also allow you [to] pivot your reports and insights with those labels,” wrote Salat.
Unified account changes. With the latest update, “users of unified campaigns are now able to manage multiple sub-accounts underneath a single parent account,” according to the announcement. Users will be able to do the following:
Create multiple unified campaigns accounts underneath the same manager account.
Create a mix of unified campaigns and expert mode accounts underneath the same manager account.
Link to and from manager accounts that contain a combination of unified campaigns and expert mode accounts.
Google Ads Editor v1.7 is now available, Google announced Monday. With this update, advertisers can now use the Google Ads Editor to manage their Hotel ads, YouTube audio ads and lead form extensions, and select specific parts of their campaigns to download.
UPDATE: This update is now delayed and will release in a week, on Monday, August 9.
Managing Hotel ads in Google Ads Editor v1.7. Image: Google.
Why we care
For advertisers that use lead forms or run Hotel and/or YouTube audio ads in the web interface, the Google Ads Editor now supports these features so they can be managed offline. The ability to download specific parts of a campaign may also make it easier for advertisers to work on their campaigns while offline.
More about Google Ads Editor
The complete list of new features in Google Ads Editor v1.7 can be viewed at the Google Ads Help Center.
Google Ads Editor v1.6 was released in April 2021. Version 1.6 brought support for responsive video ads, asset-based promotion extensions, video lineups and more.
Google Ads Editor v1.5 was released in November 2020, although it wasn’t announced until mid-December 2020. This version added support for image extensions, dynamic ads feeds, the ability to filter by various criteria and more.
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, who should foot the bill?
More accurately, who should pay for digital service taxes (DST)? Earlier this week, Google announced that it would be passing on a 2% “regulatory operating cost” surcharge to advertisers’ invoices for ads served in India and Italy — the company is already doing this for ads served in Austria, Turkey, the UK, France and Spain.
These fees are imposed by regulators on companies that sell ads (e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc). “Typically, these kinds of cost increases are borne by customers and like other companies affected by this tax, we will be adding a fee to our invoices, from November,” a Google spokesperson told the UK’s City A.M back in September.
It’s true. One way or another, taxes imposed on companies usually end up getting paid by customers. If the motivation behind these taxes is simply to bring in more tax revenue, then it probably doesn’t matter to regulators whether a platform or its customers are paying. But, the thresholds for these taxes seem to suggest that large businesses are the target.
Take, for example, the UK’s DST thresholds: a company must make more than £500 million in global digital services revenues and £25 million in UK digital services revenues within a 12-month period to be subject to the tax.
While encouraging competition may not be a primary driving force behind these DSTs, it’s hard to imagine that it’s not a related subject, given the criteria above. Either way, taxes increase the overall price of a good or service, which affects how much of it we can buy, and that could have real implications for businesses that rely on advertising to generate revenue.
I’m still doing my research on this topic, and I’d love to hear your opinion. Send your thoughts to gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com(subject line: My two cents on that 2%).
George Nguyen, Editor
Analyzing the top 10 YouTube results
Image: Semrush.
Semrush recently conducted a YouTube SEO study based on 15,000 keywords that triggered a featured video in the SERP. Then, it took a look at the top 10 YouTube results for each of those keywords. The findings seem to be in line with many of the YouTube best practices that I’ve seen. The study found that:
45% of videos were between three to five minutes, and 5% were shorter than one minute.
52% of videos ranking for “how-to” keywords are longer than five minutes. For the general sample, it was only 33%.
More than half of the videos that ranked in the first position have more than 50 words in the description.
Only 8% of videos with timestamps rank in position one — so while they may be important for UX, they’re not crucial to ranking highly.
Title similarity with keyword ratio, number of views, and video duration were the most important parameters, according to the machine learning model Semrush used.
18% of videos were from channels that have less than 1,000 subscribers, so even smaller channels can find themselves among the top 10.
How-to content has been a topic of interest as of late, and the study zooms in specifically on those videos as well. You can read the entire study over at the Semrush blog.
Google’s local ads tips for the back-to-school shopping season
Local inventory ads with pickup options. Image: Google.
More than half of North American back-to-school shoppers say they’ll check for in-store inventory online before going into a store and 48% will shop at stores that offer curbside pickup or contactless shipping, according to Ipsos data commissioned by Google. To help retailers take advantage of these consumer preferences, Google has published a list of local ads solutions.
Get your local inventory online: Businesses that don’t yet have a local inventory feed can use Pointy from Google, a hardware device that attaches to a point-of-sale barcode scanner to pull its title, image and description to add it to Surfaces across Google. Pointy is free for eligible retailers until September 30.
Local inventory ads: These ads enable brick-and-mortar stores to showcase their inventory online. They can also indicate immediate curbside pickup or pickup later options.
Local campaigns: This campaign type can be used to promote your locations. Local campaigns measure and optimize specifically for store visits and local actions (calls and clicks to driving directions), and appear across Google Maps, Search, YouTube, Gmail and the Google Display Network.
Start the week off with some food for thought regarding “the algorithm”
“The algorithm” isn’t a singular thing. Understanding that many algorithms may be working together to power a platform is crucial to optimizing for that platform. Lea Kissner, head of privacy engineering at Twitter, has a great thread on this topic.
Google recommends one primary video per page. If you’re applying video structured data, Google’s John Mueller recommends doing it to just one main video per page.
“Pretty much.” This one’s for those who love doge and SEO memes. Tip of the hat to Izzi Smith.
From carrot to stick: The dam has broken on COVID vaccine mandates
“It took mandates to eradicate smallpox and eliminate polio,” Nicole Wetsman wrote for The Verge, “We control measles, diphtheria, and other infectious diseases by requiring kids get their shots before going to school. When vaccines aren’t required, uptake tends to stay low — it’s one reason rates of HPV vaccination aren’t as high as health experts would like, even though the shots can prevent cancer.”
Much of the marketing data that’s been published for Q1 and Q2 2021 show increased consumer demand (compared to last year) across verticals — we’ve even published a few of those figures in this newsletter. These positive signs were made possible by the COVID vaccine, but the future isn’t looking so promising now that new cases have spiked, giving way to the “fourth wave.”
As a society, we’ve stalled out on administering the vaccine. Incentive programs, ranging from free beer to baseball tickets and now, possibly even a $100 payment to newly vaccinated Americans, have only succeeded in nudging people who were on the fence. It seems that businesses and governing bodies are recognizing that mandates may be necessary to curb the threat of the Delta variant.
Last week, the Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs one of the country’s biggest health systems, became the first federal agency to introduce a mandate. Then, President Biden announced that all federal employees would have to get vaccinated or undergo regular COVID testing and other protocols. The private sector is moving in the same direction: Google, Facebook and Lyft have announced that only vaccinated employees may return to the office.
People need to stay employed to continue providing for their families and businesses need to stay operational to pay their staff. Nobody wants to give their employees ultimatums, but every government entity and business that does so sets a precedent, making it easier for smaller organizations to follow suit. “Mandates won’t fix [the COVID] problem on their own, but they’re one more strategy that could help,” Wetsman wrote, “At this point, we need all the help we can get.”
Google has added several new technical and content quality guidelines to the math solver structured data help documentation over the weekend. The new guidelines list a number of requirements in order to be able to show math solver and practice problem rich results in Google Search.
Technical guidelines. The new technical guidelines call for your site to have the structured data, that your server can handle Googlebot crawling your site, how you deal with duplicate math solver elements and ensuring the content is visible and not behind a paywall.
Here are those guidelines:
Add MathSolver structured data to the home page of your site.
If you have several identical copies of the same math solver hosted under different URLs, use the canonical URLs on each copy of the page.
Google doesn’t allow math solvers that are entirely hidden behind a login or paywall. Once users navigate from the feature on Google to your site, the solution and a step-by-step walkthrough for their initial problem must be accessible to them. Additional content can be behind a login or paywall.
Content guidelines. The new content guidelines aim to ensure that the content in your math solver problems are not promotional and also provide accurate and quality-based answers. Here are those new guidelines:
We don’t allow promotional content disguised as a math solver, such as those posted by a third party (for example, affiliate programs).
You are responsible for the accuracy and quality of your math solver through this feature. If a certain amount of your data is found to be inaccurate based on our quality review processes, then your solver may be removed from the feature until you resolve the issues depending on the severity. This applies to:
The accuracy of the problem types your solver is capable of solving.
The accuracy of your solutions for math problems your solver declares it can solve.
What practice problems look like. Google explained it as an “interactive feature that tests your knowledge of high school math, chemistry and physics topics directly on Search.” Here is a GIF of it in action:
Google added the structured data help documents back in March of this year. The company added these new guidelines late last week.
Another change made to the help document is that Google removed solution page markup instructions and said that it is fine to remove any existing solution page markup.
Why we care. If you are in the online education content business, you may want to leverage these new structured data types to get more exposure in the Google Search results. These may help increase your click-through rates on some of your snippets in the search results and it may help you gain more traffic to your site. It may also lead to fewer clicks, if the answer is solved directly on Google’s site but you should be able to track that within Search Console if they add this data to the performance report.
If you want to show up for math solver rich results, make sure you are in accordance with both the technical and content guidelines.
Now that COVID vaccines are available to everyone 12 years of age and older, children may be more likely to return to school this fall, which means many retailers are preparing for back-to-school shopping. To highlight a few options that can help retailers optimize for both in-store and online back-to-school shoppers, Google has published a list of local ads solutions.
Get your local inventory online. Businesses that don’t yet have a local inventory feed can use Pointy from Google, a hardware device that attaches to a point-of-sale barcode scanner to pull its title, image and description to add it to Surfaces across Google. For eligible retailers in the U.S., Canada, UK and Ireland, Pointy is free until September 30.
Local inventory ads. Retailers can bring their brick-and-mortar store online with local inventory ads. Local inventory ads also enable stores to indicate whether products are available for immediate curbside pickup or pickup later.
Local inventory ads with pickup options. Image: Google.
Local promotions, which are available in beta to merchants participating in local inventory ads and promotions in Australia, France, Germany, the UK, Canada and the U.S., can also be used to show store-specific offers.
Promote your locations. According to Ipsos data commissioned by Google, 60% of back-to-school shoppers plan to do at least a portion of their shopping at a small business this year. Local campaigns, which measure and optimize specifically for store visits and local actions (calls and clicks to driving directions), can help businesses take advantage of this by enabling them to promote their locations across Google Maps, Search, YouTube, Gmail and the Google Display Network.
Optimize for online and in-store. Advertisers can include store visits in Smart Bidding to help them grow sales both in-store and online.
Why we care. More than half of North American back-to-school shoppers say they’ll check for in-store inventory online before going into a store and 48% will shop at stores that offer curbside pickup or contactless shipping, according to Ipsos data commissioned by Google. Promoting your in-store inventory, pickup options and locations can help retailers make the most of these consumer preferences and potentially sell more products.
