This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Real Time Tweets Now Showing Up in Google’s Desktop SERPs
Last Friday, Google announced that it had officially expanded its desktop search results to include Tweets in real time. Tweets are currently showing up in search results for anything from brands and people to popular hashtags and news stories. At the moment, it is not clear how long tweets will continue to show up in search results after they have been deleted. Source: The SEM Post
Facebook Testing GIFs in Ads and Boosted Posts
Recently, Facebook has begun to allow business to post animated GIFs in ads and boosted pages, but the test is only being run on a small percentage of Facebook pages. So far, these GIFs are not going to be available in the sidebar ads, just boosted page posts. Facebook will be evaluating the experience the GIF ads give for users and advertisers and will decide on whether to keep testing them in the weeks to come. Source: The SEM Post
Google’s New Local 3-Pack Shows Up in the Top Spot in 93% of Searches
According to a study recently released by seoClarity, the traditional 7-pack of local results only showed up as the top result 25% of the time. Now, the new 3-pack format is showing up as the top result a whopping 93% of the time. seoClarity’s data was collected on 8/15, so the percentage could still be creeping closer to 100%. Source: Search Engine Land
New “Notify Me” Rule in Bing Ads
With the launch of automated rules for Bing Ads earlier this summer comes a new automated rule that allows users to set scheduled automated email alerts. These notifications can be set at the campaign, ad group, ad, and keyword level and will update users with what’s happening in their accounts. Rules can also be set for frequency and time frame. Once the rule is set, an email is sent when an event happens based on the set criteria. Source: Search Engine Land
Facebook Beating Google in Referral Traffic for News Sites
Traffic analytics firm Parse.ly has recently released a report that shows Facebook has pulled ahead of Google in referral traffic for top news websites. Parse.ly’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Andrew Montalenti, speculates that this trend is likely due to publishers focusing more on social media than on optimizing for Google. Source: Search Engine Watch
New AdWords Extension: Structured Snippet
A new extension was recently rolled out by Google called “Structured Snippets” which is a variation of the dynamic structured snippets, released earlier in the year. Advertisers can specify values like product types and brands and display them in a list in any order. They are similar to callout extensions, except Structured Snippets highlight certain aspects of products and services offered rather than highlighting what makes a product or service unique. Source: Search Engine Land
Google to Contact Third Party Sites to Assist with Unblocking CSS & JavaScript
Instead of waiting around for webmasters to unblock them from crawling CSS and JavaScript, Google will begin “reaching out to some of the bigger sites that have content that is embedded on other people’s sites,” according to John Mueller. This move could potentially be very beneficial for webmasters of smaller websites that have had trouble communicating with third party resources. Source: The SEM Post
Additional Commentary
Five Best Strategies for a Productive PPC Campaign
Diane Pease covers five strategies for increasing the productivity of your PPC campaign. According to Pease, the first step is reviewing what you have for campaigns and ad group structure. Second, you need to cut out the junk within your campaign followed by the third step: pushing your best performance terms. Once the cleanup is done comes the fourth step: using available tools to identify new opportunities. Finally, Pease recommends expanding on your list of negatives, no matter how strong you think your negatives currently are. Analysis: Diane Pease, PPC Hero
Is Responsive Design a Ranking Factor?
Over the past several years, various employees of Google have shot down the notion that having a responsive web design for mobile platforms has any effect on a site’s ranking. In this article, Clay Cazier attempts to find evidence to either prove or disprove this and ultimately comes to the conclusion that, without a thorough, causative study, the question is left unanswered. Cazier does, however, offer up a substantial list of indirect negative effects of websites choosing not to convert to a responsive design on mobile. Analysis: Clay Cazier, Search Engine Land
