This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Search Console Consolidates to Canonical URL
Google announced that starting at the end of March, Search Console Performance reports will transition to the canonical URL for reporting. Changes already started happening in January. Google will give you a few weeks to view both the old and new methodology so that you can see the difference. This give you the ability to see a full picture about a specific piece of content in one property, your mobile or AMP pages will show as one property and it will improve AMP and mobile-friendly reporting by showing more data. AMP property traffic will drop to zero in most cases. You will still be able to filter data by search appearance like AMP. The URL inspection tool will show you which URL Google is using as the canonical. Source: Search Engine Land
Facebook Updates Budget Settings
In September 2019, all Facebook campaigns will be migrated to campaign budget optimization. This means advertisers will have to set one central campaign budget across all ad sets. Facebook will automatically distribute the budget to top performing ad sets, which is said to generate the best results for a campaign. According to Facebook, campaign budget optimization saves significant time as an automated process that eliminates the need to manually shift budgets between ad sets. Source: Search Engine Journal
*Image provided by Facebook
New Bing URL Submission Tool
Instead of Bing waiting to crawl your site, you can now submit up to 10,000 URLs through Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing will continue to crawl at the scale it is now, but may ultimately reduce the effort and resources put into crawling the web. If you submit a new page to crawl, Bing will also crawl page links if they are new to the index, but it will not recrawl URLs already in the index unless they are submitted as updated. To try to avoid spam, there are quotas in place for how long your site has been verified through Bing Webmaster Tools. In an update currently planned for the end of March, we’ll allow users connect their sites to MyYoast, a customer portal which will include live indexing, which means every time you publish, update or delete a post, it will be reflected almost instantly in Bing and Google. You will not need to connect with Bing Webmaster Tools to do this. Source: Yoast and Search Engine Land
Facebook Shows Who Is Involved in Custom Audience Targeting
Later this month, Facebook will begin showing users who are targeted with ads via Custom Audiences which companies had a hand in their seeing those ads.
Starting February 27, the “Why am I seeing this?” info boxes available from ads using Custom Audience targeting may show:
- The name of the business that uploaded the customer file with the user’s information included
- Any Custom Audience sharing between businesses such as the agency, Facebook Marketing Partner (FMP) or other partner.
- The type of information such as email address or phone number uploaded in the Custom Audience file and matched to the user.
Source: Marketing Land
Analysis:
Unavailable Products and Seasonality Best Practices
When your eCommerce site has out-of-stock products, here are strategies to manage your indexed pages and turn a customer into a sale.
- If there are no products equivalent that generates traffic and conversions, create 301 redirects to the similar products.
- If there are no equivalent products, redirect the removed page to the category where the product was.
- Exclude the unavailable products from category pages and give them noindex attributes if no available equivalents to redirect to
Seasonal category pages:
- Change seasonal product pages into informational copy so they can continue to build visibility in results, then swap the content to selling products when they are available. You could also remove these pages from the menu’s structure.
Source: Search Engine Land
Tips to Reboot Your Ad Copy
- Focus on the elements that matter most – the 3rd headline and 2nd description of your ads won’t always show, so make sure you add in things like value propositions, keyword variety and differentiation from competitors in the first 2 headlines and description.
- Write strong, independent elements in your ads – the first two headlines should make sense and be complete on their own. The third headline can be dependent since it only shows up with the first two headlines.
- Write your new fields for who will actually see them – depending on the length of each field, certain elements of the ad may be truncated or not even show at all on individual devices or screen sizes. Make sure your ad copy is mobile friendly and has the most important information first.
- Use the ad space to provide helpful content – avoid blatant keyword stuffing and repetition. Repetition may limit the visibility of your ad. Think of what value you are offering and make sure the ad copy reflects that.
Source: Joe Martinez, Search Engine Land
