This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
New Automated AdWords Extensions
New ad extensions have been spotted on the Google search results page which the PPC community believes to be another form of automated extensions. Matt Umbro shared on Twitter an image of an “email reply time 3 hours” pulling below the ad copy of an ad. Other experts noticed that there was a very similar extension for “average delivery time” appearing in the same spot. Both of these extensions are believed to be completely automated by Google.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google Has Published a Comprehensive Guide on Featured Snippets
Google is working to improve featured snippets through search result testing. For near-matches in search results, Google may show a featured snippet that is similar to the search query with a “more results” button to show more snippets of similar queries. They also want to add refinement tags to some snippets while other search results would show two snippets, one after another.
Source: Google Blog
BingAds Implementing New Audience Segmentation Feature
Bing will be launching Audience Segmentation reporting which gives advertisers insights on how their search audiences are performing. In addition, this report gives users the ability to compare audiences against non-targeted users. As an example, advertisers that are targeting In-Market audiences can see how each of their audiences performs using benchmark data on users who aren’t currently being targeted in an audience segment. According to Bing, all users should have access to this feature in early February.
Source: Search Engine Land
Google Tests a White Interface for Local Knowledge Panel
Google is testing a variation of the local knowledge panel to make the background color white instead of blue for the headline bar. This would show the entire listing in a white background with black font. It will also include a new image carousel, list the open and close times in the header, a new “copy link” button to replace the “save” button, and introduce an About tab. Google is still deciding how it will look with its new Q & A feature.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Call Bid Adjustments Available in New AdWords UI
Serving as a reminder for advertisers who want to drive more high-value call conversions, a call bid adjustment feature is available in the New AdWords UI. The bid adjustment range for calls is -90 percent to +900 percent and they also inform how often call information appears in mobile search ads. Call bid adjustments can be found in the “advanced bid adjustment” section of the new UI.
Source: Search Engine Land
A New Button Added to Beta Search Console
If you log into the new Search Console and click on any of your verified profiles, you may see a new button called “coming soon”. This button takes you to this page explains why some of the reports in the old Search Console are not yet available. It will ask you to vote on which reports you are missing that you want Google to migrate over to the new version. Most likely, the reports that you are looking for, or some version of it, will be in the new Search Console. Not every report will be migrated over in the exact same way if Google has found a better way to present the data. Some of the data may be included as part of a flow instead of a top-level report.
Source: Search Engine Land
Analysis
New Bing Ads Features You Should Check Out
Danielle Gonzales at PPC Hero shares the exciting new features in Bing Ads that are all worth looking into. First of which are new automated bidding strategies including maximize conversions and target CPA which you can use if you like to let machine learning take over as you focus more on strategy. Custom Audiences allow you to market to highly segmented audiences with hyper relevant messaging using data collected from a client’s CRM. Gonzales’ favorite new feature is In-Market Audiences for Search. She notes the ease of being able to layer these audiences in without having to wait for the 1,000 cookie minimum in addition to being able to target users whose online behavior has shown that they are ready to convert.
Source: Danielle Gonzales, PPC Hero
Getting Credit for all of your Google My Business Clicks can be Difficult
Greg Gifford from Search Engine Land shares a solution to the GMB attribution problem. When someone clicks on your Google My Business link from a mobile device, it is likely the click will show as direct traffic instead of organic. Adding a UTM to force the source to show as “organic” lets you take the credit. You can attach a UTM code to a custom URL and track the promoted content. Simply add: “?utm_source=GMBlisting&utm_medium=organic” to the end of your website link in your Google My Business dashboard, and you’re good to go! If you are using Google Posts you will have to add UTM tracking there as well. The best practice here would be to use the “utm_campaign” variable to give each Google Post a unique link, with the source set to “GooglePost” and the medium still set to “organic.” The new Google Search Console allows you to filter clicks to show only pages using UTM variables. Click Search Traffic – Search Analytics then click “the radio button next to “pages” and enter “UTM” into the field.
Source: Search Engine Land
