This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
New Display Tab with Summary Feature Now in AdWords
Recently launched by Google is a new display tab in AdWords. This new tab called “Summary” features several interactive graphs. Clicking on performance data points will switch around the data in the graphs and charts on the page. The page will summarize target criteria including display keywords, placements, topics, and a demographics breakdown. In this tab, you can find summaries for the account, campaign, and ad group levels. Source: The SEM Post
IT Security Firm Sophos Detects Link Spam in Cloaked PDFs
Sophos, an IT security company, has informed Google that their SERPs have a spam issue in the form of “hundreds of thousands” of cloaked PDFs. To Google, these cloaked PDFs appeared to be legitimate and relevant content, but ultimately, they redirected searches to irrelevant and potentially dangerous spam sites. Source: Search Engine Land
Google Introduces New Changes to Closing Mobile Adds
Google has recently announced some changes to mobile ads, that would reduce chances that people would “fat finger” an ad on accident when trying to close it. After attempting to close a mobile ad that appears, users are given a few options: one to stop seeing the ad and one to report the ad by saying that it “covers the page.” It’s speculated that Google is making this change to weed out apps where accidentally clicking an ad is seemingly part of an apps design. Source: The SEM Post
Bing Suggesting Brands for Unbranded Search Queries
Bing is now showing (or at least testing) a panel in its search results that suggests brands when an unbranded search query is conducted. Interestingly, it doesn’t appear that a brand’s ranking on the results page has any effect on whether it shows up in this new panel. Also of note, after clicking on a suggested brand, Bing redirects the user to a SERP for that specific brand – not the brand’s website. This means that Bing is potentially getting two opportunities for ad revenue instead of one. Source: The SEM Post
Category Based Product Listing Ads Being Tested by Google
Recently, Google has been testing a new product listing ad unit, where products from a specific brand broken down into categories are being shown, rather than listing particular products. This new style allows for a more generic approach to advertising in shopping ads, but also allows more flexibility to advertise certain product lines or categories. This new type of PLA could be useful for companies who have a lot of similar products with slightly different model numbers. Source: The SEM Post
Solution to Referral Spam in the Works for Google Analytics
Adam Singer of Google Analytics acknowledged at Mozcon this week that referral spam has been an issue and that they are working towards a solution. This fix from Google will happen on a universal level – meaning that Analytics will be able to keep up as referral spammers add new URLs to their arsenal. Source: The SEM Post
Bing Ads Shopping Campaigns No Longer in Beta
Announced Tuesday, shopping campaigns are now available to all US customers for Bing Ads. Now, shopping campaigns will be the default campaign type for running product ads through Bing, with the older version discontinuing in the fall. To go along with this release, support for shopping campaigns in Bing Ads Editor will also be released soon. Shopping Campaigns will also roll out internationally, but no ETA was given. Source: Search Engine Land
Google Trying Out Four-Line Description Snippets
As of this week, Google has begun testing four-line description snippets in its search results. However, this test apparently has not been applied to all search results as some have remained at the standard two-line length. This test is also affecting mobile results as some descriptions have gotten as long as 6 or 7 lines. Source: The SEM Post
Additional Commentary
5 Tips to Improve PPC Efficiency on Mobile
Benjamin Vigneron of Search Engine Land covers 5 tips on how to not “miss the boat” with mobile searches. He covers testing your site for mobile friendliness, aligning your mobile goals with meaningful mobile actions, leveraging AdWords’ estimated conversion data, using mobile-specific ads and sitelinks, and mobile bid adjustments & trade-offs across devices. Benjamin also states that you will need to rely on raw intuition and workarounds to see the full picture and take mobile searches to the next level. Analysis: Benjamin Vigneron, Search Engine Land
The Psychology of Search – 5 Ways to Optimize for User Demand
Author Jim Yu’s article discusses the role of psychology in SEO as it has gone from blackhat, algorithm-focused tactics to focusing more on what the searcher wants. Yu says that the best ways to ensure your content gets attention is to understand consumers and personas, create content that resonates, optimize the content for search, understand how and why people share content, and understand conversion optimization and people’s propensity to buy. Analysis: Jim Yu, Search Engine Watch
