This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) Will No Longer Be Used in Google Search
Previously, the country of service was indicated by a country code in the domain (ccTLD). To make searches more relevant and to improve the search experience, Google now will automatically populate results from the country where the user is searching, even while traveling. Users will no longer be able to type the country code into the domain directly but can easily change their country service in settings. Source: Googles Blog
Google Announces In-Store Product Ad Unit
A new announcement by Google has introduced plans to show local display ads for highlighting in-store products and sales. These ads are used to display ads promoting products that can be found at brick and mortar locations with the obvious goal of driving more foot traffic rather than online traffic. To be able to run these ads you will need to reach out to your Google account team to get whitelisted for the pilot program. Source: Search Engine Journal
New “Did You Mean…” Search Design Testing for Mobile
According to Paul Shapiro, there may a new design for searches that that result in the “did you mean” feature. The new feature may show recommended results in the form of a box that explains other possible variations of the query. This feature has been seen by other mobile users but webmaster believe this is just a test for now. Source: SERoundtable
Clicks From a Google Employee Cost Nothing
Gary Illyes announced an interesting bit of information at SMX East recently, saying he always clicks on paid ads on the SERP, but his click along with anyone at Google will cost advertisers nothing. This brought up an interesting topic among industry experts who were wondering if they could target a specific set of keywords that only Google engineers would search to see if they would truly get that traffic to their site for free. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Google Knowledge Panel Displays Images of Brick and Mortar Locations
The new knowledge panel feature now displays “Inside this Place” images of the interior of brick and mortar stores. This feature is similar to the “from the menu” photo feature in the restaurant knowledge panel. This is especially great for restaurants as they will be able to display both types of images. As of now, the new feature may be restricted to certain industries and is currently only in mobile searches. Source: Sergey Alakov
Analysis
Importance of the Days to Conversions Report in AdWords
Carrie Albright covers the insights she has gained from the new Days to Conversions report and how they have enhanced her PPC efforts. The initial gains she has obtained from this report include better frequency capping insights, as the number of days it takes for users to convert gave her a better picture of the window to purchase. This, in turn, gave her great suggestions for which Remarketing windows to test. The author also found it helpful that she was able to run this report all the way down to the keyword level, but found that this segmentation feature is not available on the ad or ad extension level. Source: Carrie Albright, PPC Hero
Apple Announces Siri and Safari Updates
Siri will now pull answers from the Googles search results page rather than Bings. Apple made the change to better match the Google search results that Safari populates. Apple also announced that with its new update to Safari, third-party cookies will no longer be able to be tracked for more than 24 hours. Both changes will have considerable effects on how webmasters and advertisers are reporting and tracking. The move to Google search results will undoubtedly bring an increase of mobile and voice queries to Google emphasizing the importance to answering the user intent versus keyword matching. Source: Search Engine Land
