This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Pinterest Redesign of Business Profile
Pinterest aims to give brands more control over the content they highlight. The newly designed business profile pages will include more customization options and a monthly viewer count that will show the total number of people who have seen the company’s pins during the last 30 days. The monthly viewer count will be displayed under a business’s name on its page. The new customization includes a “dynamic” cover image, the ability to showcase a company’s latest Pins and choosing a specific board to highlight. This will be rolling out in the coming months. Source: Marketing Land
YouTube No Longer Supporting Third-Party Ads in EU Next Month
Just ahead of the EU’s privacy regulations taking effect next month, YouTube will be closing off access to third-party ad servicing and pixel tracking. If an advertiser is not using DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) to host videos they will be asked to “retraffic their ads.” This will need to be done by May 21st if an advertiser wants to “avoid any downtime in delivery.” Source: MARTECHToday
Google Job Listings
Google has updated its guidelines to warn users that failure to remove expired job postings from a site’s job schema may results in a manual action penalty. The job pages don’t have to be removed when they expire. They can be noindexed or have the schema removed from the page so that it no longer triggers the markup in the search results. It’s not clear if this action is under the current schema spam manual action, but that could mean that a site would lose all of their markup in the search results and not just the job-related ones. Is there is no deadline indicated on a job posting, Google would presumably have to rely on searchers to report expired postings. Source: The SEM Post
Snapchat Launches Shopping Ads using AR Lenses
Currently being piloted by brands like Adidas, Clairol, STX movie studio, and the Candy Crush developer, Snapchat has implemented a new time of Shopping Ad that utilizes Augmented Reality lenses. If a Snapchat user adds the Shoppable AR lenses to either their photos or videos a button will appear at the bottom that can lead to an app install page, product page, or any other URL of the advertiser’s choice. These new Shopping Ads are sold through Snapchat’s self-serve ad platform through a bidding process that starts at $100/day. Source: Search Engine Journal
Senators introduce Consent Act
The Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-provider Network Transgressions (CONSENT) Act would require the FTC to establish privacy protections for customers of online edge providers like Facebook and Google. A provider will be required to give consumers the right to opt-out and keep their information private by disabling data tracking, provide users greater access to their data, have control over it and ensure that users have the ability to see what information about them has already been collected and shared. If this act is passed, it will play into the other changes over the Internet like GDPR regulations and the end of net neutrality. Source: Marketing Land
Analysis
What to Do When Competitors Bid on Your Brand Terms
Sam Martin-Ross has some helpful tips to fight the frustration of competitors bidding on your brand terms. First and most obvious is to make sure you have coverage and are bidding exactly to position 1 on all branded terms – you should be able to instantly claim the #1 spot with the difference in quality score. Another interesting tip the author points out is to actually reach out to the competitors and asking them to remove their ads. It may not always work, but Martin-Ross states the worst outcome from reaching out is that they simply ignore your e-mail or say no. One final tactic is to fight fire with fire and start bidding on all of your competitors terms. Martin-Ross recommends this one if your initial outreach e-mail is ignored. He also states you can reach out again after this with evidence as to why it is worth both parties stopping. Source: Sam Martin-Ross, Search Engine Watch
Schema Markup Opportunities
Structured data helps improve the crawling of your site’s content. Organization schema markup is one of the elements Google uses as a reference for brand information. If your brand name is often searched with different variations, this schema is a good way to help Google ensures your knowledge panel appears for the variations. Highlighting a customer service number and email address in the organization schema can also make them more likely to appear in the knowledge panel. ImageGallery schema can be used to mark up all images within a gallery for product pages on ecommerce sites. And, person markup for employee profiles can help your site to get knowledge graph results for employees. Source: Search Engine Land
