This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Anchor Text Plays a Large Role in Google’s Page Title Rewriting
In a recent English/Hindi webmaster chat, Google’s Aaseesh Marina informed the participants that when Google rewrites a page’s title for the search results, anchor text plays a key role in determining the new page title. Marina explains, “if we see anchor text from website A linking to website B … we pick the anchor text that links from A to B as the title for that particular result.” Source: The SEM Post
New Shopping Remarketing Lists in AdWords
Google has announced new remarketing lists for RLSA campaigns to reach beyond text ads to PLAs. Now, advertisers can create shopping bids for users to abandon their purchase at the cart menu, loyal customers, or nearby shoppers. This new addition arrives just in time for the holiday season and is now available for all AdWords advertisers. Source: Search Engine Land
Google’s Desktop Market Share Falls, While Search Volume Rises
Data firm comScore has released its September 2015 search engine rankings for the US market. In this report, comScore revealed that Google’s share of the desktop search market is just under 64%, which is over 3% lower than last year’s number. Although their share is down, the overall volume of searches taking place on Google is increasing, so there is no reason for Google to panic just yet. One theory for this loss is that the recent agreement between Firefox and Yahoo to make Yahoo its default search engine is stealing away a small amount of market share from Google. Source: Search Engine Land
Q3 Click and Ad Spend Growth For Shopping Campaigns Outpacing Text Ads
According to a recent digital marketing report by Merkle RKG, Google AdWords and Bing Ads Shopping campaigns saw an increase in ad clicks by 47 percent, with a rise in ad spend by 39 percent across all devices. Specifically, Bing product ad clicks had more than a three times percentage increase, about 332 percent year-over-year. AdWords PLA clicks increased by about 166 percent year-over-year specifically on smart phones. Source: Search Engine Land
Evidence Points to Google Reaching Another Stage of its Panda Algorithm Roll-Out
Over the last week or so, rumblings from the webmaster and SEO community have suggested that Google is rolling-out another stage of its Panda algorithm. While Google has yet to confirm anything, significant ranking changes on October 14th and 15th along with additional movement on October 20th and 21st strongly suggest that there has been an adjustment to the algorithms. Source: Search Engine Land
Additional Commentary
The Pros of Automation in a PPC Account
Kayla Kurtz explores the upsides of using automation to run your PPC account. One big factor is that automation allows for a 24/7 touch. Unfortunately, humans require sleep and cannot manage their PPC account all day and night. During those hours, anything could happen to your account, but automated rules will have your back. According to Kurtz, automation also allows for more ease when managing multiple accounts and creating reports. It also works to shorten time and brainpower to keep things running in your account. Analysis: Kayla Kurtz, PPC Hero
Google’s AMP Project: What Will be the Impact on Publishers?
Last week, Google revealed its plans to roll out its own framework for displaying content in its mobile search results. Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP allows publishers to display their content in a way that is both fast and well-organized for searchers. In this article, Kenny Chung of Search Engine Watch hashes out what he thinks will be the most significant impacts of AMP. Among those impacts that Chung predicts are disruption of the search results (because AMP content will be above the fold) and the potential for additional paid search impressions. Analysis: Kenny Chung, Search Engine Watch
