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Twitter has created 2 new video features

Written on September 29, 2022 at 3:36 pm, by admin

Twitter has just launched two new video products to help users watch and discover new content in the app.

1. Immersive viewing and easy discovery

This new feature expands videos to full screen by simply clicking on the video in the Twitter app. When the video is in full-screen mode, users can scroll up to browse additional video content.

This feature will be available on iOS and Android in select countries in English.

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2. Showing more videos in Explore

A new video carousel makes it easier to find more videos you’re interested in next to Tweets and Trends that might interest you. You can access these videos by opening the Explore tab.

This feature will be available on iOS and Android in select countries in English.

How Twitter uses Signals to show you more content. Twitter announced the usage of Signals to show users more content that’s relevant. Twitter uses Signals and shows you that content based on your past likes, comments, and followers.

Dig deeper. Read the announcement from Twitter here.

Why we care. Twitter is following in Instagram’s footsteps by adopting a TikTok-like aesthetic. Brands who use Twitter should optimize their video content for the new placements and full-screen feature. They should also ensure that their content is relevant, timely, and accurate.

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Webinar: How to avoid digital pollution and focus on your audience

Written on September 29, 2022 at 3:36 pm, by admin

Has content become a dirty word? Join Ed Breault, CMO of Aprimo, to talk about the ultimate necessity of content operations to deal with digital pollution both at the macro and the micro levels so your organizations can rethink how you plan, create, manage and deliver remarkable customer experiences that scale.

Register today for “Has ‘Content’ Become a Dirty Word?” presented by Aprimo.

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4 new useful LinkedIn Ads features

Written on September 29, 2022 at 3:36 pm, by admin

LinkedIn has rolled out 4 new features for marketers advertising through the B2B platform. It’s is great to see B2B getting some attention, given that Google’s Search On 22 inundated us with 9 new shopping updates.

Let’s dive in.

1. Offline Conversions

Offline Conversions allow you to connect the conversions you track in other tools directly to LinkedIn. Advertisers will be able to manually upload CSV files to the Campaign Manager. New supported CRM partners include Adverity, Hub Spot, LeadsBridge, LiveRamp, and Make.

Offline data will automatically be incorporated into your aggregate reporting on conversions and will provide a more holistic understanding of your marketing impact on lower-funnel outcomes.

2. Audience insights

Free audience insights are now in Campaign Manager. These can help advertisers pinpoint who their audiences are, what they’re interested in, and how they’re engaging with other content and topics.

Audience insights are available for both Matched and saved audiences. It generates aggregated insights based on topics and content they’ve engaged in, but also job titles, years of experience, seniority, location, company name, industry, and more. Insights can also be used to discover new audiences.

3. Document ads

Document Ads allow you to promote long-format content directly into members’ feeds where they can read and download whitepapers, case studies, and reports without leaving the platform. You can also use a Lead Gen Form to collect leads if you decide to gate your documents.

4. Media Library

The new LinkedIn Media Library allows you to create ads more easily by storing all of your images and videos in one central location. Advertisers can now create up to five ads at once by selecting the video or image from the media library, each then becoming its own ad. This feature seems to make ad creation easier, faster, and collaborative.

Dig deeper. You can read the announcement from LinkedIn here.

Why we care. With the holidays coming up, B2B gets forgotten as it seems all we’ve been hearing about lately is platforms launching new shopping features and updates. These new features, though nothing groundbreaking, could be worth testing out if you’re currently or considering advertising on LinkedIn

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30+ brands suspend their Twitter marketing campaigns after finding their ads next to child-pornography accounts

Written on September 29, 2022 at 3:36 pm, by admin

Some popular brands have paused their Twitter marketing campaigns after discovering that their ads had appeared alongside child pornography accounts.

Affected brands. There were reportedly more than 30 brands that appeared on the profile pages of Twitter accounts peddling links to the exploitative material. Among those brands are a children’s hospital and PBS Kids. Other verified brands include:

• Dyson
• Mazda
• Forbes
• Walt Disney
• NBC Universal
• Coca-Cola
• Cole Haan

What happened. Twitter hasn’t given any answers as to what may have happened to cause the issue. But a Reuters review found that some tweets include keywords related to “rape” and “teens,” which appeared alongside promoted tweets from corporate advertisers. In one example, a promoted tweet for shoe and accessories brand Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet in which a user said they were “trading teen/child” content.

In another example, a user tweeted searching for content of “Yung girls ONLY, NO Boys,” which was immediately followed by a promoted tweet for Texas-based Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital. 

How brands are reacting. “We’re horrified. Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we’ll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads.” David Maddocks, brand president at Cole Haan, told Reuters.

“Twitter needs to fix this problem ASAP, and until they do, we are going to cease any further paid activity on Twitter,” said a spokesperson for Forbes.

“There is no place for this type of content online,” a spokesperson for carmaker Mazda USA said in a statement to Reuters, adding that in response, the company is now prohibiting its ads from appearing on Twitter profile pages.

A Disney spokesperson called the content “reprehensible” and said they are “doubling-down on our efforts to ensure that the digital platforms on which we advertise, and the media buyers we use, strengthen their efforts to prevent such errors from recurring.”

Twitter’s response. In a statement, Twitter spokesperson Celeste Carswell said the company “has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation” and is investing more resources dedicated to child safety, including hiring for new positions to write policy and implement solutions. She added that the matter is being investigated.

An ongoing issue. A cybersecurity group called Ghost Data identified more than 500 accounts that have openly shared or requested child sexual abuse material over a 20-day period. Twitter failed to remove 70% of them. After Reuters shared a sample of explicit accounts with Twitter. Twitter then removed 300 additional accounts but left more than 100 active.

Twitter’s transparency reports on its website show it suspended more than 1 million accounts last year for child sexual exploitation.

What Twitter is, and isn’t doing. A team of Twitter employees concluded in a report last year saying that the company needed more time to identify and remove child exploitation material at scale. The report noted that the company had a backlog of cases to review for possible reporting to law enforcement.

Traffickers often use code words such as “cp” for child pornography and are “intentionally as vague as possible,” to avoid detection. The more that Twitter cracks down on certain keywords, the more that users are nudged to use obfuscated text, which “tend to be harder for Twitter to automate against,” the report said.

Ghost Data said that such tricks would complicate efforts to hunt down the materials, but noted that his small team of five researchers and no access to Twitter’s internal resources was able to find hundreds of accounts within 20 days.

Not just a Twitter problem. The problem isn’t isolated to just Twitter. Child safety advocates say predators are using Facebook and Instagram to groom victims and exchange explicit images. Predators instruct victims to reach out to them on Telegram and Discord to complete payment and receive materials. The files are then usually stored on cloud services like Dropbox.

Why we care. Child pornography and explicit accounts on social media are everyone’s problem. Since offenders are continually trying to deceive the algorithms using code words or slang, we can never be 100% sure that our ads aren’t appearing where they shouldn’t be. If you’re advertising on Twitter, be sure to review your placements as thoroughly as possible.

But Twitter’s response seems to be lacking. If a watchdog group like Ghost Data can find these accounts without accessing Twitter’s internal data, then it seems pretty reasonable to assume that a child can, as well. Why isn’t Twitter removing all of these accounts? What additional data are they looking for to justify a suspension?

Like a game of Whac-A-Mole, for every account that is removed, several more pop up, and suspended users will likely go on to create new accounts, masking their IP addresses. So is this an automation issue? Is there a problem with getting local law enforcement agencies to react? Twitter spokesperson Carswell said that the information in recent reports “… is not an accurate reflection of where we are today.” This is likely an accurate statement as the issue seems to have gotten worse.

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Meta has just announced 5 new call ad updates

Written on September 28, 2022 at 12:29 pm, by admin

Meta just announced 5 new updates to their call ads. The new updates are intended to help businesses build better customer relationships, find more quality leads, and reach more potential customers to grow their business, they stated in a blog post.

1. Get a callback

This feature is currently being tested and gives customers the option to request a callback from a business.

2. Call Ads in Sales Objective

Businesses will now have the option to include call ads as a format under the Sales/Conversions objective in Ads Manager.

3. 60s call in Lead Gen, Traffic, and Sales objectives

Meta has a added a 60-second call optimization option in lead generation, traffic and to-be-released sales ad objectives to allow businesses to optimize their ads to reach people who are most likely to engage in a longer conversation.

4. Pre-call business feature in Ads Manager

Businesses can provide additional context in ads to help educate potential customers to help them make informed decisions before they make a call.

5. In-app calling

Meta is testing a platform calling solution to enable businesses to connect with customers wherever they are browsing and allow them to continue that same experience within the app after the call is complete. Meta says that no call information is captured.

Dig deeper. You can read the blog post from Meta here.

Why we care. Advertisers and brands on Meta such as stores, restaurants, or service-based businesses should make sure their phone numbers, business hours, and answering messages are up to date so they can be reached by potential customers utilizing these new features.

There’s no indication that these new features will increase the number of leads a brand is receiving. As with every new feature, test the optimization and reporting options to ensure they support your goals and conversion objectives.

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10 biggest announcements from Google Search On 22

Written on September 28, 2022 at 12:29 pm, by admin

At the Search On 22 event today, Google announced a number of new features across Google Search, Google News, Google Shopping, and beyond. Let’s go through some of the features that Google spoke about today.

One note: unlike the Search On events we had in the past, it seemed like this event was more focused on maybe more minor features versus Google announcing some major breakthrough in search. Such as with the past announcements with BERT, MUM, and other AI-based advancements in Google Search.

1. Multisearch expanding

Google is expanding multisearch to 70 new languages in the coming months. Google launched multisearch last year for English and U.S.-based queries.

What is Google multisearch. Google multisearch lets you use your camera’s phone to search by an image, powered by Google Lens, and then add an additional text query on top of the image search. Google will then use both the image and the text query to show you visual search results.

How Google multisearch works. Open the Google app on Android or iOS, click on the Google Lens camera icon on the right side of the search box. Then point the camera at something nearby or use a photo in your camera or even take a picture of something on your screen. Then you swipe up on the results to bring it up, and tap the “+ Add to your search” button. In this box you can add text to your photo query.

You can learn more about this feature here.

2. Multisearch near me coming soon

Last year, Google previews multisearch near me at Google I/O. Well, Google is going to launch that feature in the English and U.S. search results in the coming months. Google technically said it will launch late fall of 2022.

What is near me multisearch. The near me aspect lets you zoom in on those image and text queries by looking for products or anything via your camera but also to find local results. So if you want to find a restaurant that has a specific dish, you can do so.

3. Google Lens translated text now cleaner

Google Lens is so much fun and it lets you point your camera at text in almost any setting so you can translate that text. Now, Google Lens is going to present that translated text in a cleaner and more blended approach. This is launching later this year.

Google is using generative adversarial networks, also known as GAN models, to present the translated text better. It is the same technology Google uses in the Pixel devices as the “Magix Eraser” feature on photos.

Here is a sample showing how Google Lens is overlaying the translation in an easier way for searchers to comprehend:

4. Google iOS App shortcuts

Today, the Google Search app for iOS will add shortcuts to make it easier for searchers to search, translate, use voice search, translate, upload screenshots, and more. Here is a screenhot of some of those shortcuts in action:

While this is launching today in the US for iOS users, it will be coming to Android later this year.

5. New Search refinements

Google is also rolling out new search refinements and aids for when you search in autocomplete and within the search results. Now as you type your query, Google will present tappable words to build your query on the fly. This is a form of a query builder, by simply just tapping on words.

Here is a GIF of it in action:

You will also see richer information show up in the autocomplete results as you type.

Google also has the ability to refine your query after you search by letting you add or remove topics you want to zoom into or out of. It helps you drill down into what you are looking for by adapting the top search bar to be more dynamically driven.

Here is a screenshot of that top bar with refinements:

6. More visual information

Google is showing for some queries a more visually designed approach to the search results. This allows you to explore more information about topics around travel, people, animals, plants and so on.

Google will show you visual stories, short videos, tips, things to do and more, depending on the query. Google will also visually highlight the more relevant information in this UX.

7. Explore as you scroll

As you scroll through the Google Search results, sometimes the more you scroll, the less relevant the results get. I mean, that makes sense, Google should be ranking the most relevant information at the top.

So Google has added a new explore feature to give searchers inspiration around their query but not something that exactly matches their query.

Searchers can use this new explore feature to learn topics beyond their original query.

This is launching for English and U.S. results in the coming months.

8. Discussion and forums

Google Search today may show a section for “discussions and forums,” today for U.S. English results. This is to help people find first-hand experiences from people on the topic in various online discussion forums, including Reddit but beyond just a single forum platform.

Here is what that looks like:

9. Translated local and international news

Google will be launching early next year a way to find translated news coverage for both local and international news stories. Using machine translation, Google Search will show you translated headlines for news results from publishers in other languages.

This will give you “authoritative reporting from journalists” directly from the country that is touched by that specific news story.

Here is a screenshot showing “translated by Google” near the headlines:

10. About this result displays personalization

Google is also expanding the About this result feature to show if personalization is taken into account.

Google will now show you if the search results are personalized in any way. Plus, Google will give you the ability to turn off personalization or change them.

So if you say you prefer a specific department or brand, within the new shopping features, Google will let you configure that here.

Here is the about this result that says this has been “personalized for you.”

And here is the personalization feature for the shopping results, which we covered in more detail here.

That is most of what Google announced at Search On today related to Search, and here is our coverage on the Google Shopping side.

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9 new Google search features and tools for shopping

Written on September 28, 2022 at 12:29 pm, by admin

With the holidays fast approaching, Google decided it was a good time to announce nine new shopping tools and features. During the announcement, Google said the intent was to drive a more immersive, personalized experience. Let’s dive in.

1. Search with the word “shop”

In the US, when you search for the word “shop” followed by the item you’re looking for, you’ll access the visual feed of products, tools, and inventory for that product. The shoppable search experience is also being expanded beyond apparel to electronics, beauty, and more, to additional regions for both mobile and desktop.

2. Shop the look

This new tool will allow you to see options of where to buy the products you see in search. The “shop the look” feature show links to the exact product you’re searching for, plus complementary pieces and where to buy them.

This feature was first announced in 2016.

3. See what’s trending

A new feature in Search, trending products shows you products that are popular right now in a specific category. U.S. shoppers will be able to use the new feature later this fall, but no specific date has been provided.

4. Shop in 3D

Google says people engage with 3D images almost 50% more than static ones. 3D visuals of home goods were launched earlier this year, and soon you’ll be able to see 3D visuals of shoes, starting with sneakers.

To give merchants and advertisers better access to 3D visuals, Google also launched a new automated 360-degree spin feature that can be accessed by using a “handful” of static photos. The new technology will become available in the coming months.

5. Get help with complex purchases

A new buying guide will share helpful insights about a category from a wide range of trusted resources. If you’re purchasing a large or expensive item, the buying guide may show you specs about weight, materials, features, sizes, and more.

The new buying guide recently launched in the U.S. and new insight categories are “coming soon.”

6. See what other shoppers think

A new feature in the Google app gives you helpful context about a webpage you’re on or a product you’re searching like pros and cons, and star ratings, all in one view.

Page insights will launch in the U.S. in the coming months.

7. Get personalized results

You’ll soon see more personalized results based on your previous shopping habits. You’ll also have the option to set your preferences and turn off personalized controls.

When you’re shopping on Google you can make your selections on preferred stores and brands to see more of those in the future. If you no longer want to see those personalized results, or your preferences change, you can adjust that feature or even turn it off completely.

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8. Shop your way with new filters

Whole page shopping filters on Search are now dynamic and adapt based o real-time Search trends. For example, if you’re searching for jeans, you could see filters for “wide-leg” and “bootcut” because they’re popular, but even those could change over time.

Dynamic filters are available in the US, Japan, and India, and will be launched to more regions in the future.

9. Inspiration beyond the Search box

Using Discover in the Google app, you’ll see suggested styles based on what you’ve been shopping for, and what others have searched for too.

Dig deeper. You can read the full announcement from Google here.

Why we care. Advertisers gearing up for the holiday season should ensure that their ads, images, merchant accounts, and stores are ready for these new features. Shoppers will have more choices, styles, and stores to choose from, so retailers will need to step up their game if they want to stand out.

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SEO is math

Written on September 28, 2022 at 12:29 pm, by admin

SEO often doesn’t get a fair seat at the table when marketing budgets are determined. 

Even though SEO is marketing.

As we’re approaching a time when many companies are having meetings in their conference rooms to determine budget allocations for the upcoming year, I want to help further the case as to why SEO should have a voice in the room (and budget in your marketing plans).

But first, let me address a bit more why I feel SEO doesn’t get its fair shake.

Proving the value of SEO is complicated

SEO can be a challenge for some in marketing departments to wrap their heads around. There are many moving parts and it’s not as easy as PPC when you understand exactly how that works. 

With PPC it’s generally a matter of:

• Choose keywords.
• Write/ place ads.
• Pay when someone clicks.
• Send that click to a landing page of your choosing.
• Report on results (sales/leads).

It’s true. SEO is more complex than this. And, because of its complexity, I will often instruct prospects to think carefully about not just when to invest in SEO, but whether SEO is even a really viable investment in the first place. Often, the answer to these questions is “it depends.” 

Remember, an investment in SEO doesn’t just revolve around hiring an agency or an individual in-house to oversee and drive the strategy.

Unlike PPC, there are many other considerations, including:

• Web design and development that may be required, such as:
  • Creating a new architecture / navigational structure.
  • Creating new page templates to better support SEO.
  • Creating a blog/resource section on your website (if you don’t already have one).
• Content, such as:
  • Page content.
  • Resourceful content.
  • Thought leadership, white papers or webinars.
• PR and legal reviews:
  • Ensuring that content meets with company compliance needs (especially for medical/pharma/legal/insurance industries and other highly regulated industries).

Case in point: My agency has a client who’s engaged us to aid in the re-structuring of their website (including an audit of their existing presence versus that of a competitor).

The work coming out of this audit resulted in 130 hours worth of web development requirements this client needs to see through to completion in order for the investment that they’ve made with us to be substantiated. 

I highly recommend that you consult with a trusted friend/partner who has experience in SEO to help you to make this determination. Many SEOs (the nice ones ) would be happy to provide a free analysis/opportunity assessment. Take advantage of the advice.

Today, I’m going to assume that we’ve determined that there is an opportunity for SEO to provide value for your business. Undoubtedly, if you’re in the conference room trying to determine what – if anything – to budget for SEO, you will want to better understand:

• The size of the opportunity.
• The size of the investment needed to get you there. 

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Size of the opportunity

When determining the “value” of an SEO effort, there are two sides to the coin. 

One easy metric is to consider “replacement cost” of the traffic. If you were to buy this same traffic via PPC (that you’re considering targeting via SEO) what would it have cost? Semrush makes this available via their “Traffic Cost” metric:

This can sometimes be a big number, as we see for Search Engine Land. You may find that many of your competitors are realizing this kind of value, yet you aren’t. 

That may be as far as you need to go to make your case to the board that SEO is “worth the investment.” That’s one way to measure it. 

Understanding the traffic potential of SEO efforts

But if you’re a mature marketer, you will try to move beyond just “click value” to something more meaningful. 

• Tangible value.
• Sales.
• Leads.
• Downloads of white papers. 
• Sign-ups for webinars.

How you measure this will depend upon whether your business is ecommerce or B2B/lead gen. For both verticals, you’ll need to do two things:

• Identify the possible keywords that you’ll want to target.
• Determine what it might take to compete (i.e., site structure/link acquisition).

Since I’m assuming that you’re a marketing head and perhaps not an SEO, here’s how I would quickly suggest you conduct this type of assessment. 

Using Semrush (subscription required), navigate your way to the Organic Research section. Here, you can enter the domains/website addresses for direct competitors who you believe are doing well with their organic presence. 

Once you’ve found a competitor who appears to have a significant organic presence, click into the Top Organic Keywords section and click View all organic keywords.

You will now see a complete list of your competitors’ keywords. But this will also include your competitors’ “brand” keywords (their company name, etc.). You need to filter this:

Still, though, this data isn’t great. It’s showing us any keywords that our competitor is ranking for within Google’s top 100 results.

Let’s make this more meaningful/useful by reducing that number down to rankings “which matter” (that’s a subjective metric). In this case, I’m going to only concern myself with the top 20 ranking keywords:

Now I have a workable list of keywords that I know are driving significant organic search traffic to my competitor(s):

This shows me that:

• There are 19,029 keywords ranking in Google’s top 20.
• The “local guide program” is driving a large share of traffic to my competitor.
• The “seo” keyword would have cost me approximately $6.20 cost per click if I were to buy that traffic via Google Ads. 

And, as mentioned previously, we can see the “value” of this competitors’ non-brand organic traffic, based on the “replacement cost” (”Traffic Cost”):

If you’re highly ambitious, this is the next step that you can take. Download the Top 20 Rankings list into a spreadsheet. 

Create columns into your spreadsheet to make some assumptions (i.e., Ranking Top 3; Ranking 4-7; Ranking 8-10; or you may want to get as detailed as to estimate each top 10 position). 

Since we have the estimated monthly search volume for each keyword, you can now multiply those numbers by the potential click-through rate of each potential/future rankings. 

Thanks to Backlinko’s work on average CTR in the Google SERP, we have some estimates:

SEO is an imperfect science. But this at least gives you some visibility into the traffic potential that exists for an investment. In short, it puts some math into the projections. 

Assessing SEO opportunities in ecommerce and B2B/lead gen

Now that you have at least an idea of the traffic potential, we need to break out the tasks for determining what potential “real” value might exist, in terms of things that are more tangible (sales/leads, etc.). 

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be focused on either an ecommerce website or a B2B/lead gen website.

Ecommerce opportunity assessment

If you’re an ecommerce website, you should have a general sense of:

•  Conversion rate into a sale.
• Average (net) value of a sale. 

Knowing these things, you can run some estimates on how much you might make based upon varying degrees of traffic increases. 

For instance:

• 10,000 visits per month x 1.5% conversion rate into a sale = 150 sales. 
• 150 sales x $300 average net value of a sale = $45,000 per month. 

Knowing this potential real value, you can then assess if the investment that you believe will be required in an SEO effort is “worth it.” 

B2B/lead gen opportunity assessment

If you’re B2B/lead gen, you should have a sense of conversion rate into a lead (and hopefully you’re tracking form submissions, phone calls, chat/messaging apps and other “leads”/conversion types). 

Working with this and your internal data on conversion rates from lead to qualified lead and qualified lead to sale, you should be able to calculate the potential ROI. 

Taking the same traffic potential above (10,000), here’s what that calculation might look like:

• 10,000 visitors x 5% conversion rate into a lead = 500 leads. 
• Let’s say that ½ of those leads are qualified (500 x .5 = 250). 
• Then, let’s say that we convert 40% of our qualified leads into a sale (250 x .4 = 100). 
• So, we have 100 potential sales from the SEO investment. 

What’s our average net value of a sale? 

Every business is different. We have a client whose average net value of a sale is $400,000. That makes the ROI argument pretty easy to make. 

But let’s say that your average net value of a sale is $400. With 100 sales x $400, that’s $40,000 in net value from your SEO investment.

Knowing this, you can determine how much you can profitably invest into an SEO effort.

Putting the math in SEO

These formulas are far from perfect. But they provide an opportunity to put math behind what you’re asking for in an investment into an SEO effort. 

You should also caution those involved that SEO is not a quick fix. It may very well be that you’ll spend the first months of the effort in deep research before big changes occur. 

As mentioned above, other hard (internal) costs could be involved, such as a restructuring of your website, content additions, page additions and PR/thought Leadership items. Do your best to account for these things.

While there are certainly times when I have strongly recommended against a company investing in an SEO effort, it’s more often that you’ll know me as a champion of the channel. 

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Google September 2022 product reviews update rollout complete

Written on September 27, 2022 at 9:29 am, by admin

Google’s September 2022 product reviews update is now fully rolled out. Google said this update only applied to English-language product reviews.

It took six days to complete, beginning Sept. 20 and concluding Sept. 26.

This marks the end of a flurry of Google algorithm updates that started with the helpful content update (Aug. 25 to Sept. 9), continued with the September 2022 core update (and Sept. 12 to 26) and concluded with the fifth version of the product reviews update.

Rollout complete. According to Google’s search ranking update page, “The rollout was complete as of September 26, 2022.”

Google’s July 2022 product reviews update also took six days to fully roll out.

There has been some discussion within the SEO community about the September product review update. Barry Schwartz covered that in What We’re Seeing From The Google Product Reviews Update #5 over Search Engine Roundtable.

About Google’s product review updates. These algorithm updates are meant to reward high-quality product reviews (in the form of insightful analysis and original research). Google said it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings.

In short, if you were impacted, that means you probably need to put more effort into improving your product review content. Figure out how to make it unique so it stands out from the competition.

Why we care. Staying on top of Google’s multiple algorithm updates is important. This is a bit unique because Google rolled out overlapping updates this month – product reviews and a core update. Google says the product review update should only impact product review content. But having overlapping algorithm updates could complicate things – especially if you’re trying to diagnose ranking or visibility changes (positive or negative).

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5 Google Ads examples with relevant and quality ad copy

Written on September 27, 2022 at 9:29 am, by admin

Relevance is often discussed in digital marketing. It’s an important topic because not only is it good for consumers, but it is also good for advertisers since the inception of quality score. 

Advertisers with higher quality scores and relevance are typically rewarded with more traffic and lower CPCs. 

The following data (indexed to allow multiple verticals and clients to be merged) proves this point. As ad relevance scores go up, CPCs go down and CTR goes up. 

Based on our data, an above-average ad relevance score vs. a below-average ad relevance score can decrease CPCs by 40%. 

One of the most critical elements in relevance is the ad copy. In this article, I will break down several ad copy examples and identify what helps make them quality. 

The elements of a relevant PPC ad

To start, we should set the ground rules.

Recently, Google has taken more control of ad optimization. With responsive search ads being the default ad type, Google has the power to choose the headline and the description it deems will perform best. 

Yes, you can pin some elements down to override this auto-optimize feature, but Google’s leaning more and more on its machine learning capabilities to create the most relevant ad. 

The other key is ad extensions which have just been rebranded as assets. Extensions have blossomed over the past few years, and there are now 19 different types in Google Ads:

• 8 of them are dynamic (e.g., rating, location extensions, structure snippet).
• 11 are manually set up (e.g., price, location, lead form). 

When used effectively, all these elements can boost your performance. Remember the data about ad relevance. A more relevant ad can improve your CTR and decrease your CPC. The right information helps reduce friction for customers.  

With that in mind, let’s look at some examples of relevant and high-quality PPC ads. 

Example 1: Car insurance

Car insurance is one of the most competitive categories and high-spend verticals. 

The ad I pulled is an interesting mix of a Top 3 big insurer, Progressive, and other lead generation sites. Notice which ad has bolded keywords that tie to the search term “auto insurance.”

It’s interesting to note that Progressive doesn’t have the term “auto insurance” in the description, instead focusing on consumer-proof claims (4 of 5). 

They also used call extensions. When ads contain phone numbers, you instantly give the consumer the choice to call or interact online. That consumer choice is vital. 

The other extensions are ratings and deals, which are used well to give consumers a sense of additional information to help make a decision. 

Example 2: Concert tickets

I’m a music fan and started looking for examples for various artists and tickets to shows I might like to see. I found the below example in a search for “My Chemical Romance tickets.” 

Seatgeek did a good job laying out two things:

• Calling out that the claim that it’s the lowest possible price.
• I didn’t specify which show I wanted to see, and the listings of various upcoming shows were broken out well in the extensions. This helps me choose a show and go specifically to those listings.

Example 3: Electricity rates

A similar use of the extensions in a different category was for “electricity rates.”  

The use of copy and these extensions provide the right mix of options, while still focusing on performance/conversions (“Get a Quote”).

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Example 4: Noise cancelling headphones

Let’s not forget that Google is not just showing text ads. Shopping ads are prevalent and frequently show for retail searches.

Below is a result for the search “noise canceling headphones.” 

This is an interesting example because of the broad mix of pricing. 

It looks like the JBL headphones are the cheapest at Target. Target also includes the “In store” note, plus the price markdown and ratings on the product. The combination of price and the robust listings is compelling. 

Most brands don’t consider the price point of competitors as a reason why their conversion rates are high or low when doing optimizations. 

While it’s a different topic, know that competitive research is a critical input needed to understand your performance. 

Example 5: iPhone 14

Let’s look at the hottest consumer product right now, the iPhone 14. The example below is some of the biggest players in the game. 

The approach for AT&T and Verizon are similar, “Get the iPhone on Us.” What is different is the use of extensions and site links. They each have a different approach. 

Which ad would you click on? Why? 

I personally find the AT&T ad compelling enough in the first position, and the sitelinks let me click on the specific model. 

Optimizing your Google Ads campaigns

When we talk to clients, we talk about the “search experience.” This includes the keyword, ad and landing page – three important elements of a PPC campaign. 

Here, we focused on ads and as you’ve seen, different brands have different approaches – various extensions, copy and price points, among others. All of these will result in different outcomes for their advertisers. 

The data shows there is real business value in delivering high ad relevance. Having the right elements to run tests and optimize is key. Be on the lookout for new elements that Google rolls out and keep testing. 

The post 5 Google Ads examples with relevant and quality ad copy appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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