Bing – Page 2 – Connect | Marketing Services

Category: Bing

Auto Added by WPeMatico

BingBing SEOChannel: ContentGoogleGoogle AdsMicrosoftMicrosoft Advertising

Second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing: Nominations open

Search marketing has a diversity problem. Older data from the American Marketing Association shows that most marketing leadership is still majority white, hetero, and male. Meanwhile, the audiences we’re marketing to are more diverse and inclusive than ever. It’s a topic we’ve covered multiple times at Search Engine Land:

But it’s not one and done. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are ongoing efforts and something we need to commit to every day. This is why we’re excited to announce the second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing to celebrate those individuals or organizations who are affecting real change.

We’re elated to announce that this year’s awards will include a guest judge, last year’s winner Areej AbuAli, a pillar in the SEO community and the founder of Women in Tech SEO.

You may nominate as many organizations or individuals as you feel deserve the recognition. We ask that you highlight specific initiatives conducted by the nominee and that in the nomination form you include the contact of someone who can “second” that nomination.

Nominate a person or organization now.

The post Second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing: Nominations open appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Jason September 10, 2021 0 Comments

BingBing SEOChannel: SEOGoogleGoogle Ads

Now you can speed up your site indexing in Bing; Tuesday’s daily brief

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 welcome back.

I hope my US friends had a good holiday yesterday. Labor Day was created as a tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers. Essentially: y’all do great work; here’s a day off.

In that vein, a Labor Day break feels especially needed after the past year and a half of lockdown, at-home school, and constant vigilance. Plus, as search marketers, this past summer was relentless in terms of algorithm updates, big SERP changes, and automation announcements. Now we’re in the final stretch before the holiday season ramps up.

Take what’s left in September to take stock, count your wins, make your lists, and gird your loins for the final push before we can chill. (I hope I didn’t just jinx 2022).

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Bing’s content submission API is now available to everyone

Microsoft has opened up its Bing content submission API after over two and half years of it being in a private beta. The content submission API is different from the Bing URL submission API, in that the content submission API lets you submit not just your URLs but also your content, images, HTML and more directly to Bing’s index. “The API provides the ability for webmasters to notify Bing directly about the changes in their site content in real-time,” Microsoft said.

Why we care. This solution not only helps expedite indexing for your new or updated URLs like the Content Submission API offered, but it also bypasses the crawling of that content and lets you submit content directly to the search engine. This solution might be something you want to test out on your sites or client sites and see if it makes a big difference on indexing and your server resources.

Read more here.

ETA and RSA Q&A

Last week in our newsletter we included Twitter conversations about pinning in RSAs to mimic ETAs after Google Ads sunsets the latter. On Friday, Brad Geddes continued the conversation by asking Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin, “Since Google recommends 2 ETAs & 1 RSA and has never recommended more than 1 RSA per ad group. Will the number of ads per ad group become restricted with this change? Will we be allowed to run 2-3 RSAs in an ad group?”

“It’s recommended to have at least one responsive search ad in every ad group in your Search campaigns by June 30, 2022. There’s a limit of 3 enabled responsive search ads per ad group,” Marvin replied. She added that there won’t be plans to restrict the number of RSAs to only one per ad group upon clarification by Geddes.

Later Geddes tweeted screenshots of reporting showing why advertisers want more control with RSAs (a callback to the pinning tweets last week). “This is an RSA with ‘excellent’ ad strength. When it was paused, this ad group’s conversions almost doubled due to G serving the highest CTR ad the most and not the one that converts the best. I have 1000s of these examples,” he wrote.

“Sooo important. I open quite a few accounts these days where the only ad that’s in there is a single Responsive Search Ad. There are so many holes in that approach. Just because Google is ‘testing’ your ad assets for you, it doesn’t mean you should only run one ad,” added Andrew Lolk, founder of Savvy Revenue.

Why we care. The conversations that Ads experts are continuing to have present thoughtful questions (and answers) to how advertisers will have to change and adjust. We’ll have to think outside the box in some aspects of the shift away from ETAs, and these are all things PPC marketers can test in the coming months to prepare their clients for the major change that’s headed our way.

Search Shorts: Skip the ads on Bing, turn off personalized ads on iOS

Bing Search tests a “Skip To Web Results” button. Microsoft Bing is testing a feature to let searchers skip down to the web results, past the ads, past the knowledge panels and direct answers and people also ask boxes and just see those web results.

Apple has launched a new pop-up in iOS 15 to allow users to turn on or off personalized ads within the App Store and other Apple apps. “Personalized ads in Apple apps such as the App Store and Apple News help you discover apps, products, and services that are relevant to you,” says the pop up. “We protect your privacy by using device-generated identifiers and not linking advertising information to your Apple ID.”

MarTech Replacement Survey finds marketing transformation is accelerating

This year’s edition of the MarTech Replacement Survey is free to download and requires no registration.

The first MarTech Replacement Survey in 2019 showed just how frequently marketing organizations replaced technology. The survey found homegrown platforms were often displaced by commercial, out-of-the-box applications. This had a direct effect on hiring, as most respondents said they had recruited new teams to run the platforms they were installing.

Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has gripped the world, forcing us more closely to embrace digital operations. We know that many digital-first businesses thrived during the pandemic, but questions remained about how the disruption of the past year-and-a-half affected marketing technology decisions.

This year’s report, the result of a survey fielded through April and May of 2021, answers several of those questions.

Of the 374 marketers who answered our survey, 252 told us they replaced a marketing technology application in the past year, representing 67% of respondents. For the most part, organizations were upgrading from one commercial solution to another — and the upgraded solutions were exactly the kinds of technologies you’d expect given how digital transformation picked up during the pandemic.

Read more here.

What We’re Reading: When your biggest clients don’t heed your warnings

Banksy’s web administrators were warned about a security issue in the site — and then a few days later hackers scammed a buyer out of $336,000.

“On Tuesday a piece of art was advertised on Banksy’s official website as the world-renowned graffiti artist’s first NFT (non-fungible token). A British collector won the auction to buy it, before realising it was a fake. A cyber-security expert warned Banksy that the website could be hacked, but was ignored,” said Joe Tidy for the BBC.

This seems to be an age-old issue with development and marketing. Marketers make critical recommendations to our clients and stakeholders. We tell them what could happen if they do nothing. Only some (or none!) of the recommendations are implemented. And what we said would happen… happens.

The hope is that they take heed before something bad happens, but if not, that we can get them on board and help them fix it afterward, at a minimum. But if you’re feeling frustrated, just know that even Banksy doesn’t take every recommendation.

The post Now you can speed up your site indexing in Bing; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Jason September 7, 2021 0 Comments

BingBing SEOChannel: SEO

Meet Make Every feature Binary: Bing’s sparse neural network for improved search relevance

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.

The post Meet Make Every feature Binary: Bing’s sparse neural network for improved search relevance appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Jason August 4, 2021 0 Comments