This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Related Search History Card with Google
Google helps users remember what they saw on Google in their past searches and web site visits with a new feature named “your related activity.” This lets signed in Google users on mobile devices pick up on previous searches they’ve done related to the query they just added. It will show links to pages you’ve visited in the past and will show the searches that led you to those pages. You will be able to mark a page to read or reference back to later in your Collections. This may lead to more repeat visits to your website. Source: Search Engine Land
Google Ad Updates On Connected TVs
Google’s efforts to expand advertising to TV screens led to an 80% increase in impressions in 2018. To build on this momentum, Google has announced that they will continue to partner with industry leaders in broadcasting and entertainment to serve ads on their platforms. Most recently, Google has expanded its partnership with The Walt Disney Company, but other TV partners include Univision, CheddarTV, Major League Baseball, and National Hockey League. Google’s TV partners can utilize Ad Manager to deliver advertising on live, linear, or on-demand content. Source: Search Engine Journal
Google Adds New “From the Manufacturer” to Shopping
A new “From the Manufacturer” section in Google Shopping product pages allows product makers to be able to provide more information about their products to appear in this new section. Rich product information can include images, YouTube videos and more. If you have a Manufacturer Center account, you can provide rich content via the feature_description attribute. There are also new metrics and insights available in the Manufacturer Center to include top search terms, top price changes and trending product groups. Source: Search Engine Land
Amazon Targeted Product Sampling
Amazon’s latest ad test goes beyond traditional display, video and product search advertising to delivering product samples directly to customers. The sponsored sampling program, first reported Tuesday, and is not yet available in Amazon’s self-service advertising platform. Amazon plans to drive product adoption with machine learning and hopes to see an increase in conversion rates over display ads. Source: Marketing Land
Analysis:
Considerations Before Major Site Changes
Changing your CMS, joining domains or migrating to a new domain can result in dramatic ranking changes. To avoid upsetting good rankings, try to maintain current site architecture. Check for broken internal links and 404 pages by crawling the site using the original site map, and create 1 to 1 301 redirects. Also use canonical tags to let search engines know which are the main pages. Test your site to find errors and fix them before rolling out changing on a staging site. Source: Search Engine Journal
3 Tips for Surviving Automated Testing
- Assemble Your Technology Stack – while automation is helpful, you need to decide which tools are best for you. Determine what problems you’re trying to solve and what return you’re looking for on investment to build the best set of tools for your position.
- Teach the Machine – before machine learning can be implemented, campaigns must be manually built. Use this opportunity to create a logical build-out, leverage what you’ve learned from previous campaigns to set the correct settings, and track conversions right away so you have the most accurate historical data.
- Monitor the Automation – automation can make adjustments to changes quicker, but things can also go wrong quicker so it is important to set up consistent monitoring for all campaigns.
