In 2021, PPC professionals navigated changes in keyword match types and automated bidding, scratched their heads at the prospect of a future without third-party cookies and navigated their role in an increasingly automated industry.

Prompted by the vision that platforms, like Google, have for their services as well as increased concern over user privacy, these changes underscored adaptability as one of the traits that define successful marketers. Below, we’ve summarized the most impactful changes, announcements and developments that shaped PPC this past year and, in all likelihood, will continue to influence the years ahead as well.

Farewell, broad match modified keywords

In Q1 2021, Google announced a significant change to how it treats phrase match keywords by expanding it to include broad match modifier traffic (BMM).

“Broad match now looks at additional signals in your account to deliver more relevant searches,” Google also announced. These signals include landing pages and keywords in your ad group.

The PPC community’s reaction to this news was mixed: “With the recent changes that Google has made, it seems like a bit of a (very) thinly veiled attempt to take back control from advertisers,” said Amy Bishop, owner of Cultivative, “You can’t optimize against what you can’t see, and you certainly can’t optimize against controls that have been taken away.”

Kirk Williams, owner of ZATO Marketing, had a different opinion: “This is simply a logical progression in [Google’s] ever-changing match type behavior that mirrors changes in other areas, pointing towards a world in which Google uses the millions of signals under its control to make auction time decisions for which the limited, human advertiser is unable to make as technology and machine learning bidding solutions progress.” 

In Q2 2021, the final nail in BMM’s coffin was hammered in when the platform announced a deprecation date for BMM keywords. To put an end to the saga (for now), Google also made it so that phrase match or broad match keywords that are identical to a query are now always preferred as long as they are eligible to match.

And, a few months after Google’s initial announcement, Microsoft Advertising said it would also expand phrase match to include BMM traffic.

Bundled bid strategies replaced standalone options

Google updated its Smart Bidding in April 2021, bundling the Target CPA (tCPA) and Target ROAS (tROAS) strategies with the Maximize Conversions and Maximize Conversion Value bid strategies.

Three months later, the company removed standalone Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value bid strategies for search campaigns. Shortly after that, Google removed the old tCPA and tROAS options from standard campaigns, effectively completing the bundling of these bid strategies.

Microsoft Advertising made an important change in this area as well: Beginning in March 2021, it migrated all search, shopping and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns without an automated bidding strategy in place over to Enhanced CPC.

FLoC was heavily debated, but not rolled out

With the deprecation of third-party cookies slated for 2022 (which Google later pushed back to the latter half of 2023), it wasn’t much of a surprise when Google first announced that it was testing an alternative targeting technology in October 2020. Known as Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), the proposal was opened for advertiser testing in Q2 2021.

Related: FLoC is coming — Here’s what we know so far

Despite being billed as more privacy-friendly for users, there were widespread concerns about techniques such as fingerprinting, which could be used to reverse engineer individuals from the cohort. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even published an article opposing the proposal. Marketers also shared concerns that Google was being opportunistic and using the deprecation of third-party cookies to create a “walled garden” for itself.

Chrome’s competitors have no plans to adopt FLoC, which will limit its functionality. There was even a proposal by WordPress to block FLoC by default. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority also engaged Google about the proposal and the search company agreed not to favor its own products or access personal user data.

To keep the industry updated about its progress with FLoC, Google published a Privacy Sandbox timeline. As of December 2021, FLoC is scheduled to undergo testing from Q1 to Q3 2022, with adoption slated for Q4 of that year.

Related: FLoC and the future of audiences: Understanding the limits and capabilities of FLoC, FLEDGE and TURTLEDOVE

Google Ads gave PPC professionals a lot to adapt to

In addition to the updates mentioned above (and below), Google Ads made a number of other impactful announcements in 2021.

One of the most noteworthy changes was that responsive search ads (RSAs) became the default ad type for Search campaigns. Google later followed that news with a sunset date for expanded text ads (ETAs), which will become unavailable beginning in July 2022. As it did with the phrase match change, Microsoft Advertising also announced that it would be deprecating ETAs starting on June 30, 2022.

This was also the year that Performance Max campaigns, an automated campaign type that runs across all Google ad inventory, became available to all advertisers. Google bundled that news (as it seems to have done quite frequently in 2021) with another announcement: Smart Shopping and Local campaigns would be “upgraded” to Performance Max in 2022.

Performance Max campaigns are also part of the Google Ads Insights Page, which shows currently trending searches, auction insights and interest predictions tailored to the account. In November 2021, the company expanded on the Insights page by adding four features: consumer interest insights, audience insights, change history insights and auction insights, and demand forecasts.

In April 2021, instant match rates became available for Customer Match, which allows advertisers to use their first-party data to remarket to customers on Google Search, Shopping, Gmail and YouTube. Then, in November 2021, the platform rolled out some of Customer Match’s features to all policy-compliant advertisers, enabling them to observe their lists to see how well they perform against the general audience, among other capabilities.

Advertisers gained access to some new data when Google announced that it would show historical data for queries that received impressions but no clicks in the search terms report for Search and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns. This didn’t reverse the September 2020 change that initially limited search terms reporting, as the data is still only for “terms that were searched by a significant number of users,” but the data could reveal what’s failing to attract the right audience. If you haven’t exported your historical query data, make sure to do so before February 1, 2022 — that’s when Google plans to remove historical query data collected prior to September 1, 2020, from the search terms report.

In terms of other fresh capabilities and updates, Google Ads ditched campaign drafts in an updated experiments page, which eliminated a clunky part of the workflow for testing. There was also a new budget report, which shows a monthly spend forecast that advertisers can use to understand how editing their budget can affect the campaign’s spending limit.

The Google Partner Program changes that were initially slated to go into effect in June 2020 were pushed back to February 2022 due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic. In addition to the postponement, Google revisited some of the changes, namely enabling Partners to either dismiss or apply recommendations to achieve a 70% optimization score and keeping the 90-day spend threshold at $10,000 (instead of the proposed $20,000 every 90 days). After the delay announcement, Partners that already met the 2022 requirements before the deadline requested to receive their new badges — Google consented.

The company also began testing a new three-strikes program for accounts that repeatedly violate ad policies. The system starts with a warning and no penalties for an initial violation. From there, each violation has an increasingly stringent penalty until the account is finally suspended. PPC professionals were largely in agreement with the program, though they were very skeptical about policy application due to the frequency of incorrectly flagged ads.

Microsoft Advertising made waves of its own

One prominent pattern we observed this year was Microsoft’s investment in industry-specific ad products: it released features specifically for automotive, tour and leisure, credit card and health insurance businesses.

The company also integrated Microsoft Clarity, its free tool to help site owners better understand visitor behavior, with Microsoft Advertising, which may help marketers analyze post-click behavior to identify roadblocks on the path to conversion.

Advertisers in the U.S. might also be happy to know that Microsoft rolled out support for Spanish language ads this year as well.

Vertical-specific ad updates

Shopping. Since Google and Bing launched organic Shopping results, many of their commerce-related product offerings have been designed to serve both advertisers and non-advertisers. One running theme in 2021 was the proliferation of shopping integrations, which are typically plugin-type solutions that enable retailers to get their product listings into organic results or run paid ads directly from their CMS, making it easier for SMBs that don’t work with an agency.

Google rolled out Shopping integrations for Shopify, PrestaShop, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, GoDaddy and Square. Microsoft Bing also launched an integration for retailers on Shopify.

Related: How to identify your products for Google

Local. At its annual Marketing Livestream event, Google announced a number of new local campaign ad formats, including:

• Auto Suggest ads, which show ads based on the searcher’s location. The example Google gave for this was that if you search for “oil change” in Maps, Google might show an ad for an auto garage that is near your current location.
• Navigational ads, which are shown when a person is en route to a destination using Maps driving directions.
• Similar Places ads (shown below), which can show when a user searches for a specific business that is closed at the time of the search.

In addition, the company also launched an open beta for US-based advertisers to expand store pickup options by adding a “pickup later” label to their local inventory ads.

Yelp also broke new ground by launching Yelp Audiences, its first offering that enables both location-based and non-location-based advertisers to reach Yelp users across the web, based on their Yelp search activity.

Video and image. YouTube ad creation became simpler for SMBs this year — in June, the company announced a new workflow, enabling advertisers to launch a campaign by adding a video, selecting the audiences they want to reach and designating a budget.

Google also added the ability for brands to show browsable product images below their video ads for campaigns that have “Product and brand consideration” or “Brand awareness and reach” set as the goal. Prior to this update, Video action campaigns were the only campaign type that could be linked to product feeds from Google Merchant Center.

In Q3 2021, YouTube ads were the breakout star of Google’s earnings report, bringing in $7.2 billion in revenue, an increase of 43% quarter-over-quarter. With that kind of success, the company may decide to release more video-oriented features and products for advertisers in 2022.

In other video advertising news, Google transitioned to parallel tracking for Video ads on April 30. The company also announced that TrueView for action campaigns is set to be transitioned into Video action campaigns beginning in early 2022.

And, Microsoft Advertising rolled out Video Extensions, which can be used to highlight a video right in the search results. Google rolled out image extensions for desktop devices as well.

Safety for advertisers and users

With privacy constantly making headlines over the last year, Instagram disabled interest and activity-based targeting of underage users in August 2021. At about the same, Google made a similar move, blocking targeting based on age, gender or interests of users under 18 years old.

Brand safety continued to be a concern for advertisers and platforms responded by introducing exclusion controls: Facebook expanded its test of topic exclusion controls, claiming that advertisers were able to avoid appearing next to excluded categories 94-99% of the time. And, Google began rolling out dynamic exclusion lists around April 2021.

Advertising and law

Google was at the center of a number of accusations and regulatory predicaments this year, which is typical in just about any given year. However, this year started out with an event unlike any other — the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A week after the attack, Google paused all political ads through to the inauguration. Interestingly, five months later, researchers from the University of Michigan School of Information published a study that found that Google serves 48% of all ad traffic on “fake” news sites.

Related: Halting campaigns shouldn’t be your only brand safety precaution

For ads served in India and Italy, Google passed on digital service taxes (levied on it by regulatory entities) to advertisers. It was already doing this to advertisers for ads served in Austria, Turkey, the UK, France and Spain. In March, Maryland became the first state to impose a tax on digital advertising — legislatures in other states, like New York, Connecticut, Washington, West Virginia, Montana, Nebraska and the District of Columbia are also considering imposing their own taxes on digitals ads or the sale of data. It’s not clear how this will pan out domestically, but advertisers should look to their European counterparts to learn how to deal with it (if the time comes).

In June, Google agreed to adjust its ad technology to provide more flexibility and transparency as well as improve the way its Ad Manager services works with rival ad servers and sales platforms, in addition to paying a $268 million fine to French regulators — the French Competition Authority claimed that Google Ad Manager provided AdX (where publishers sell space to advertisers in real-time) with exclusive data to improve its own chances.

And, details from “Jedi Blue,” an alleged arrangement between Facebook and Google in which the latter would charge the former lower fees and give Facebook other advantages in header bidding auctions in exchange for the social media platform’s support on Google’s header bidding alternative, were made public throughout the year.

The collusion aspect may carry heavy consequences for both entities, but it will be a long time before there’s a conclusion to this story. When asked about Jedi Blue, the marketers that spoke to us seemed indifferent, citing the lack of viable Google alternatives for advertising.

Looking ahead to 2022

We’re certain to hear more about FLoC and the deprecation of third-party cookies as we make our way through 2022 — timelines may shift as they have in years passed. While third-party cookies aren’t going away until 2023, ETAs will be sunsetted in July 2022, so advertisers should test out RSAs before they have no choice but to use them.

On February 1, 2022, Google will remove historical query data collected prior to September 1, 2020, so advertisers should export that data to reference later before that deadline. Smart Shopping and Local campaigns are also changing sometime in 2022 — they’ll be rolled into Performance Max campaigns.

And, agencies participating in the Google Partner Program should also mark their calendars for February 2022, when the program’s requirements are set to change.

The post PPC 2021 in review: Privacy and automation force advertisers to adapt appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Social media marketing is a great way for mortgage brokers to connect with prospective clients and generate quality leads. Paid social media advertising is particularly useful.

However, launching a paid social campaign without a good strategy can produce underwhelming results. To make matters worse, a misguided advertising plan can waste hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Fortunately, you can avoid these pitfalls by using a few simple best practices for paid social media advertising. If you are a loan officer who wants to capitalize on the benefits of paid ads on top social media platforms, this guide is for you!

Don’t Overstretch Yourself

Perhaps the biggest mistake that mortgage brokers make when creating a paid social media ad campaign is overstretching themselves. Many loan officers believe that “more is better” when it comes to marketing on social media. Because of this, they often attempt to run campaigns across multiple platforms.

While you can certainly diversify your marketing, we recommend starting small, especially if you are new to the world of paid advertising. Select one or two social media platforms that you want to advertise on and create a custom campaign. Facebook and Instagram are great options.

Identify the Ideal Audience

After you have selected the platforms that you want to advertise on, it is time to identify your ideal audience. As you’re creating your paid advertising campaign, you will have the opportunity to set custom targeting parameters. You can direct your ads at prospective clients based on factors such as:

• Age
• Location
• Occupation
• Gender
• Income

Be specific when you’re designing your campaign. This will help you to connect with the right consumers and acquire more high-quality leads.

Set Specific Goals

Speaking of being specific, it is essential to set a precise goal for each campaign. Setting goals ensures that your content delivers a clear message.  Every piece of advertising content should be designed for a unique purpose.

For instance, if your goal is to expand your mailing list, then you should launch a campaign that encourages users to provide you with a name and email address.

Find Your Voice

Do you want your brand to be casual and friendly? Would you prefer for ads to appear serious and professional? Do you want to strike a perfect balance between the two?

Once you settle on a tone and voice for your brand, be consistent. Whether you are launching a paid marketing campaign or you’re posting organic content, the tone of the materials you use should be very similar.

Use Visuals

Social media users love visual content, especially when it comes to paid ads. A powerful image or intriguing video can set your ad apart from the otherwise boring content on a user’s news feed. 

If you can catch attention with a strong visual, potential customers will likely stick around long enough to hear the rest of your message.

On the other hand, if you fail to capture their interest quickly, people will quickly brush past your ad and keep scrolling.

Innovative Tools from BNTouch

These best practices are a great place to start when designing your paid social media advertising campaign. But setting up your ads can still be a bit challenging.

Fortunately, BNTouch can help. Our cutting-edge CRM software was designed with mortgage brokers in mind. It includes a variety of resources that you can incorporate into your social media marketing campaigns. 

With customized video content, curated social media ad materials, and pre-built marketing campaigns, you can make the most of your advertising budget..

Schedule your free demo today to learn more.

The post Best Practices for Loan Officers to Utilize Paid Social Media Advertising appeared first on .

Messy SEO is a column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study.

This installment of “Messy SEO” details my process of working with our marketing, content and development teams to further clean up the search engine results pages for MarTech. In Part 4, we discussed the issues arising from Google’s title changes and the tactics taken to address them.

RELATED: Non-stop updates: SEOs share the impact on their day-to-day, work-life balance and career outlook

SERP title change fallout and improvements

Google’s SERP title changes from August did a number on our MarTech mission page, pulling in irrelevant alt text from our site header logo, making the title link read “Martech is Marketing Logo.”

We tried many tactics to combat this change: resubmitting the page via Google Search Console, adding contextual internal links and updating the title tag every few days to see if anything changed. And, after months of edits and monitoring the SERPs, Google finally updated the MarTech title tag to reflect our chosen version (shown below).

Our original chosen page title tag read “What is MarTech? …This is MarTech.” We believed Google’s algorithm felt this tag wasn’t clear enough for searchers, so we tweaked it a bit to better highlight the main topic of the page. In a sense, we answered the question we posed in the same tag, inviting searchers to view the page to learn more.

We were thrilled to see Google update this important page’s title in the SERPs. But, after digging into the original change’s effects on MarTech search performance, we saw the true impact of Google’s SERP title alteration.

After Google’s edit to our title in early November, we saw a major drop in organic clicks to the page (shown above). We compared the period when we first noticed the change to when we saw it reflect our updated title tag (all rough estimates). We found that total clicks to the page decreased by 41% and the CTR dropped from 3.1% to 1.7% when compared to the previous period (shown below).

Fortunately, the search numbers appear to look much better following Google’s decision to display our new title. But with so little data to go on right now, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Issues of site structure

The change to major page titles wasn’t the only issue we noticed affecting MarTech’s SERP display. Yet another consequence of our consolidation of Marketing Land and MarTech Today came in the form of Google’s chosen sitelinks for the MarTech domain (shown below).

While our mission page is certainly important (as evidenced by our work on its title tag), each of the other displayed links plays secondary roles for the site — with those toward the bottom being even more irrelevant. It looks like Google considers these pages more important than our designated top-level topic pages, which serve as relevant silos for all our content.

This shows that building your site using a horizontal structure isn’t always enough to help Google recognize your chosen hierarchy of pages. A site like MarTech contains many mixed signals from the years of publishing on Marketing Land and MarTech Today. Clearly, Google still thinks pages relating to them are important due to the signals built up over the years.

Sending site structure signals to Google

The only way to address these old site indicators is the ensure our new signals are conveying the correct information about our site layout. Here are some of the tactics we’re using to give Google a clearer view:

• Adding breadcrumbs to articles. While our MarTech pages already feature the top-level category, we decided more information was needed for crawlers. We’re rolling out breadcrumb links to each article to help Google and users gain a better understanding of our site structure.
• Fleshing out content on top-level pages. Our topic and category pages originally only featured the header text and the associated posts. Now, we’re adding relevant content blurbs to the tops of these pages to highlight their importance — and hopefully improve their rankings as well.
• Internal linking. We may sound like a broken record at this point, but internal linking is a critical factor for improving page rankings. Our breadcrumbs and menu links already point to many of these, but we want to link from the body text in article content as well to give more context.

Have you had continued title tag issues or site structure problems affecting the SERPs? How are you addressing them? Email me at cpatterson@thirddoormedia.com with the subject line “Messy SEO Part 5” to let me know.

More Messy SEO

Read more about our new MarTech domain’s SEO case study.

• Part 1: Navigating a site consolidation migration
• Part 2: The importance of canonicalization
• Part 3: How to find cached images and improve user experience
• Part 4: When Google’s title change goes wrong

The post Messy SEO: Fixing site structure while a Google title change sinks clickthroughs appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Knowing your audience and what they want has always been a cornerstone of marketing, but the standard for modern, successful campaigns has grown to include what your audience cares about as well.

Customers are no longer just voting for brands or products via their purchases. Now, they’re also voting for the future they would like to see the world move towards — a future in which climate change is being addressed, centuries of socioeconomic and racial injustices are being corrected and equality and inclusivity are available to all.

This means that brand values are now part of your unique selling point — and if you’re not promoting values that align with your audience, it’s likely that one of your competitors will. However, inclusive marketing isn’t just a tactic to pander to audiences. It’s here to underscore humanity and the common struggles we face while recognizing and celebrating our differences. 

It can also help propel your brand towards its business goals: More than two-thirds (67%) of respondents to an Edelman study said they bought from a brand for the first time because they agreed with its position on a controversial topic, while 65% said they wouldn’t buy from a brand when it remains silent on issues they care about. And, inclusive ads drove a 23-point lift in purchase intent among consumers belonging to Gen Z, whether the person experiencing the ad was represented or not, according to Microsoft, meaning that inclusive marketing can help drive your sales funnel as well.

To help further your understanding and strengthen your messaging, we’ve compiled a list of resources that can serve as the foundations for your brand’s inclusive marketing efforts.

Evaluate your own biases

Relying on your own judgment when auditing your implicit biases means that you’re the judge and jury, which can lead to a self-defeating exercise. Instead, try resources like Harvard’s Implicit Association Test (IAT).

The IAT can help you identify your implicit biases across many categories, like gender and career, skin tone, religion, disability, sexuality, weight, age and more. Once you’ve taken the IAT, share it with your team so that everyone can keep a watchful eye over how their own biases may make their way into your marketing campaigns.

Inclusive marketing resources from Search Engine Land

As the need for inclusive marketing has grown, we, the editors at Search Engine Land and the programming team behind SMX, have created a number of resources for brands to consider as they build inclusivity and diversity into their organizations and campaigns.

• 5 ways to promote inclusion in your marketing organization: A recap of Dr. Lauren Tucker’s 2021 SMX Next session, in which she shares her inclusion-first approach for promoting diversity within organizations.
• The cost of ignoring website accessibility: Non-compliant sites are vulnerable to lawsuits, but SEOs can help protect them by advocating for accessibility, which can serve both differently-abled audiences as well as your business goals.
• (Video) Addressing diversity, recruitment and retainment in agencies and marketing teams: A panel discussion featuring CJ Bland, Zenia Johnson and Jackie Leuing about why diversity is good for business, what intentional commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives looks like and how employees can initiate change in their companies.
• (Video) Microsoft’s “The Download” Episode 8: Search Engine Land Editor George Nguyen sits down with Microsoft’s Nora Xu for a conversation about the importance of inclusion in marketing after a surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Search Engine Land also presents an annual award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing to recognize the individuals and organizations that are driving positive change in the search community. The 2021 winners are Rejoice Ojaiku, for her work in founding B-Digital, “a digital marketing platform aimed at showcasing and inspiring Black talent,” and hasOptimization, a New Hampshire-based agency whose marketing efforts are complemented by their work for both inclusion and diversity across many areas of focus.

We’ll place a link here when we begin taking nominations for the next Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing award — it is free to nominate both individuals and organizations.

Inclusive marketing guides

Google and Bing, the search platforms that are at the center of many of our campaigns, have recognized the value and need for inclusive marketing by publishing their own resources on the subject.

• Microsoft’s Marketing with Purpose Playbook: Available as a free download, the Marketing with Purpose Playbook is one of the most comprehensive resources for inclusive marketing statistics (which can help you secure executive buy-in) and tips. The 101-page PDF is divided into three important areas for marketing (responsibility, values and inclusion) and covers a wide range of audiences.
• Google’s All In Inclusive Marketing Insights: Created from the lessons Google learned as it began its own inclusive marketing practices, this resource center has strategies for building teams, making inclusive creative choices, embedding inclusion into your strategy as well as audience insights to help eliminate stereotypes in your creative.

Inclusive language guides

Creating a welcoming environment for diverse audiences starts with the language in our messaging. Below is a list of language guides from various organizations that can help you ensure inclusivity in your creative assets and content.

• LinkedIn’s Inclusive Language for Marketers: This pocket guide provides a concise summary of inclusivity considerations for your messaging and brand identity.
• Google’s developer documentation word list: This style guide for developer documentation contains safe alternatives for biased wording, like the use of “slave,” “tribal wisdom” and more.
• Northwestern University’s Inclusive Language Guide: This general-purpose guide features explanations for why certain language is considered exclusionary or biased, as well as alternative phrases to use instead.
• GLAAD Media Reference Guide: Intended for use by journalists, GLAAD’s guide focuses on language as it pertains to the LGBTQ community.

Accessibility

Accessibility for differently-abled individuals or those that rely on assistive technologies is often considered by marketers to be “someone else’s job,” but inclusive organizations recognize that the responsibility is shared by all. Here are some resources that can help you evaluate and improve your site’s accessibility, while potentially opening up new audiences for your brand and protecting you from ADA-related lawsuits.

• The cost of ignoring website accessibility: An analysis of the potential consequences of overlooking website accessibility.
• 10 principles of digital accessibility for modern marketers: A list of key accessibility principles that should be relatively straightforward to implement.
• W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium with the goal of providing a single standard for web content accessibility, the WCAG explains how to make content easier to access for people with disabilities.

Inclusive marketing for your campaigns

Numerous platforms have added ways for businesses to showcase their diversity. Below are some articles covering features that you can use to immediately add an element of inclusivity to your advertising or online presence.

• Microsoft Advertising launches Marketing with Purpose Business attributes. The company later added Asian-, Latin-, Women-owned and Diabetic-friendly business attributes as well.
• Yelp introduces a searchable Asian-owned business profile attribute. The company also added an LGBTQ-owned attribute; both attributes join the pre-existing Women-owned, Black-owned and Latinx-owned profiles attributes.
• Google Business Profile adds “Women-led” icon and attribute to listings. The “veteran-led” and “Black-owned” attributes are also available for local listings.

This resource will be updated on an ongoing basis. If you have feedback, suggestions or resources to submit, please send an email to gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com.

The post Inclusive marketing resources to strengthen your brand’s messaging appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google, over the past few months, has been rolling out new icons within the Google Ads console. Those who spend their days inside the ad console are taking notice of the new icons.

Screenshot. Here is a screenshot of the new Google Ads navigational icons from Brett Bodofsky on Twitter:

Some saw these earlier. Some have said they saw these icons begin to show up months ago, so we assume Google is now more widely rolling the new icons out now.

Reaction. The reaction to the change of icons is not all positive but you’d expect that when Google makes any sort of change to any of its interfaces. ere are some of the responses to the new icons:

Why we care. This is not a huge change from the Google Ads team but it is a change that some PPC experts are taking notice of. Don’t be distracted by the change, the core functionality has not changed in Google Ads, this is just a user interface change that you might take some time to get use to.

The post Google Ads rolling out new icons more widely appeared first on Search Engine Land.