This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Google Adds Festivals to Maps
It’s festival season and Google added a new feature to local maps which displays where a festival is happening. Spotted over the weekend, the new feature doesn’t appear when searching specifically for the festival, but local maps displays the festival area in relation to nearby local map search results. Google appears to be updating this information in real time, once the festival is done, it no longer appears on the map. Source: TheSEMPost
Bing Ads Expanding Audience Targeting Capabilities
Bing has recently announced that they will be rolling out in-market and customer match audience targeting options for Bing Ads. With In-Market audience, Microsoft takes purchase intent signals from Bing, MSN and other Microsoft properties while Custom Audiences will allow advertisers to tailor their targeting, bidding, and messaging to their own lists of users. Source: Search Engine Land
Internal Politics Delaying Rich Snippet Data
Earlier in the year some webmasters could beta test rich snippet reporting in Search Console, but the testing ended and the data never become universally available. While at SMX advanced, Gary Illyes stated that Google has no plans to release the information, mostly because “the powers that be” don’t see how the information could be utilized to create better content. Perhaps if SEOs can prove their need of the data Google will reconsider? Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Vehicle Ad Carousels Now on Google Mobile SERPs
A new dynamic style of ad to be tested on the Google SERPs comes in the form of a large carousel style ad for the automotive vertical. The ads contain multiple images that can be swiped through in addition to sitelinks that can be scrolled through. So far, these ads have specifically only been seen for vehicles on the mobile search results, with no sightings on desktop as of yet. Source: The SEM Post
Google Launches Google My Business Website Builder
Websites, Google’s small business website builder launched world-wide this week. Linked with a Googly My Business listing, the page builder can create a one page site in about five minutes and will automatically update anytime the Google My Business does. Websites will have minimal opportunities for SEO optimization, but should be a good way for small business that only have a Facebook page to increase their presence in search results. Source: Blumenthals
Additional Commentary
Tips to Improve Paid Search ROI
PPC Hero Shannon Glass shares her top three tips to improve the ROAS of your PPC account. She kicks the article off with improving your account structure by making sure your ad groups have fluid themes and recommends potentially even breaking ad groups out by keyword match type. Next, the most quick and effective way to improve ROI is to, of course, reduce non-converting spend, but make sure you are paying attention to your click assisted conversions before pausing anything. Glass last recommendation is to utilize RLSA as you can bid up on users more likely to convert than the average Joe. Source: Shannon Glass, PPC Hero
5 Ways to Ensure your Analytics Data is Correct
Digital marketers depend heavily on Google Analytics to create strategies and evaluate traffic changes. With all the information Analytics delivers it is important to make sure the data is accurate. Donovan Ayon at Lunametrics has five things you should check to help maintain accurate data.
- How many views do you have set up, are they set up correctly and are they necessary?
- Check the Hostname report for any sites that do not belong.
- Set up additional views for subdomains and create a prepend hostname filter to view the data in one place.
- Use filters to account for Analytics case sensitivity.
- Use query parameters to prevent Google from lumping extra data rows into the “other” row.
Source: Lunametrics
