Archive for the ‘seo news’ Category
Monday, June 12th, 2023
TikTok has launched a free AI tool that can create scripts in a matter of seconds. The feature, called Script Generator, is available to all TikTok Creative Center users with a desktop TikTok for Business account.
Why we care: The Script Generator will make life easier for advertisers by generating scripts for them. And the best part is, if digital marketers happen to hate the scripts generated, they have the option to run their enquiry again, as many times as they like, for no cost at all as the tool is completely free.
How it works: Advertisers will simply have to enter in some basic information about the services or products they’re offering (e.g., the product name, item description, relevant keywords) and then choose whether they would like a 15-30 second or 31-60 second clip.
After inputting all the information, you can simply click Generate scripts. This will produce various video scripts with hooks, scenes, calls to action and visual/audio cues.
Is there a catch? As with all AI-generated content, there is a risk of inaccurate information being published. Advertisers who rely solely on this method may also find their content becomes generic with no originality as AI content is created using existing trends, which could be bad for branding. This could also potentially result in a drop in engagement.
What has TikTok said? The company has warned digital marketers that they shouldn’t rely solely on AI-generated scripts as there is a risk of inaccuracies. It explained in a statement:
“TikTok does not make any promises or guarantees regarding the content generated by Script Generator. It is solely your decision whether to utilize and/or publish content created using the Script Generator in any ad or other material. You are solely responsible for any content created using Script Generator, including ensuring that such content is accurate and complies with applicable laws and regulations, and this content is not endorsed, sponsored, or approved by TikTok.”
However, Anton Reyniers, Google’s Head of Creative Partnerships APAC, praised the new tool, stating:
- “TikTok are streets ahead in their genuine understanding of creative’s importance.”
Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmMedium” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmCampaign” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmSource” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmContent” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”pageLink” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”ipAddress” value=”“>
The big picture: While AI-generated content can be a great PPC tool (see: A Google Ads script that uses GPT to write RSAs), AI auto-generated content is not always accurate (as stressed by TikTok). So it could potentially be risky to rely solely on this method so humans remain a necessity in PPC.
The post TikTok launches new AI ad script generator appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, June 12th, 2023
The product feed is the single most essential element when it comes to listing shopping inventory on Google. However, feeds can be notoriously low-quality and heavily neglected.
Shopping feeds work on multiple levels to help promote retail businesses, with paid and free listings. This, coupled with the emergence of more AI within Google Ads, propels the importance of the feeds to even higher levels.
Providing Google’s algorithms with high-quality and accurate product data is crucial. You can enhance your product data in various ways, including back-end website changes, plugins and feed optimization tools. However, each of these comes with a cost.
This is where Google’s feed rules, supplementary feeds and product edits directly within Merchant Center come in. These valuable tools can optimize your product data and enhance your product listings at no cost.
This guide tackles how to use feed rules to overcome a low-quality feed.
What are feed rules?
Feed rules in Google Merchant Center allow you to adjust and manipulate your base feed. You can use feed rules to help you resolve errors so that your feed adheres to Google’s policies and improves the overall quality.
You can use the rules to adjust any of your feed attributes and create new attributes not yet submitted. With the rules, you can set an attribute to a specific value, extract values from other attributes in the feed or modify the data.
Understanding what attributes to optimize
The title is the most important element of a product feed. When deciding whether your product is relevant to a search, Google uses this as its first reference point. The more complete and comprehensive your feed, the better your odds of success in the ad auction.
To understand the state of your feed in the first instance, you can review product data in Merchant Center or download available data from the products tab. If you are using an XML feed, you can also use tools like XML converters to extract your feed into a readable Excel spreadsheet.
Once you have your products in a format you can analyze, you can identify gaps in your feed where attributes are missing. You can also analyze title length, aiming for at least 30 characters but ideally 75-100.
How to create a feed rule
The first thing to know about feed rules is that they are added at an individual feed level. So if you have multiple product feeds or feed labels, you must apply the rules to each one.
To add a new feed rule, you must first ensure your product feed has been submitted. Once submitted, you are ready to start modifying your product data.
To create your first rule:
- Log in to your Merchant Center account.
- On the left-hand navigation, select Products and then Feeds.
- Under primary feeds, select the feed you would like to create a rule by clicking on the feed name underlined and in blue.
- Select the rules tab in the top navigation.
- Click on the blue plus button to create a new rule and select the attribute you want to edit.
- Configure your data source.
- Apply any modifications.
- Review the preview on the right-hand panel.
- Select Save as Draft.
- You will now see an option to test the changes of your draft rule before they are applied to your live product data.
- Once satisfied with the changes, click Apply to save them and push live. If you are not happy, you can discard and remove the draft.
Important considerations for feed rules
When creating feed rules, always consider these points to ensure your rules work as expected.
- Each attribute within a feed can only have one rule associated with it, so any amends have to be contained with that one rule.
- Feed rules work in a cascading nature, meaning the rules layer on top of one another. Google will apply the first line of the rule, followed by the second and so on.
- When you first access feed rules, you will see a default rule in place. Google applies this automatically to each account. It is instructions to take the value for each attribute from either a supplementary or a primary feed.
- When appending text, the text will appear exactly as entered. This includes spaces and periods. So if you want to append a brand name, for example, rather than just entering “Nike,” I recommend entering “ – Nike” or similar.
- Feed rules are not designed for individual product optimizations and are there to make changes in bulk.
Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmMedium” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmCampaign” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmSource” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmContent” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”pageLink” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”ipAddress” value=”“>
Your data source options
When configuring your feed rules, you need to select your data source. This configuration identifies where the base data for the chosen attribute should come from.
You are given options on retrieving your data source through filters to apply conditions and operations that need to be met.
The operations allow you to “Set to,” “Extract” or “Take latest.”
- “Set to” allows you to give a simple command to populate your chosen attribute with incoming data from your primary or supplementary feed or assign it a custom static value.
- “Extract” allows you to search for specific terms within your base data and use these within the chosen attribute.
- “Take latest” allows you to command Google to take the latest value submitted through a specific source.
You can use simple data source selections to carry out universal feed tweaks across your feed. For example, you could use the “Set to” function to combine your existing product title attribute with your brand attribute.
Your feed modification options
The options available to modify your feed attributes will depend on the attribute you are trying to change.
For example, numeric-based attributes will have different options to text-based ones. There are basic options, such as append, or more advanced options, such as calculate.
Depending on what you want to achieve, you must select the modification that will allow you to achieve this.
- Append: Add new values to the end of the attribute.
- Prepend: Add new values to the start of the attribute.
- Find and replace: Search within the selected attribute for a specific value and replace it with another.
- Calculate: Available for numerical attributes only. You can add, subtract, multiply or divide with other attributes or custom values.
- Split and choose: Select one or more values from an attribute with a common period separating them (such as commas, arrows, etc.). You can then select the element to break out and use it as part of your attribute.
- Clear: Remove all of the values submitted for an attribute field.
- Add repeated field: Applicable only when multiple values can be submitted for an attribute. This allows you to add an additional value to fields such as additional image links.
- Optimize URL: This function allows you to edit or remove URL aspects. This can be used to add parameters to your URLs.
- Standardize: This can be used when an attribute accepts set values. For example, where there are errors in the original data in fields such as condition.
Using feed rules to overcome low-quality feeds
You can use feed rules for many alterations and modifications, but below are some of my top rules. They aim to reduce errors within the feed and improve its relevance and performance.
Remove errors in product titles
With product titles, there are certain policies they must adhere to. For example, your titles should not be used to promote free delivery or promotional codes.
In some instances, however, such elements can pull in automatically from your website. You can use feed rules to remove or replace such elements to ensure your titles are error-free.
To use feed rules, set the data source you wish to edit. In most instances, this will be your primary feed. If you have a supplementary feed containing titles, you should select the supplementary feed.
Once you have selected your data source, add a modification specifically to find and replace, then add a rule. When selected, a command box will pop up, allowing you to select an attribute or type in an entry. You will want to type in an entry manually.
You should type in the text you wish to remove from your product titles. You can see in the image example we are removing two elements. In the Replace with field, you should leave this blank if you just want to remove the element.
When happy with your rule, click OK at the bottom. You should see previews populate on the right-hand panel. The panel will show how the rules build on top of each other.
You can also use the advanced section to shore up your rule, to specify case sensitivity or matching regular expression, amongst other commands.
Append text in product titles
Another great way to use feed rules for titles is to append text based on set criteria. This is a simple way to add relevancy based on core keywords.
This rule allows you to improve the feed quality to increase the match rate to more relevant searches for your products. This approach could also be applied to product descriptions.
If you are using more than one rule for titles, remember to layer them in the correct order. You can use the preview to accomplish this.
Build titles with product attributes
If your product titles lack key attributes such as color or size, but these are submitted attributes in your feed, you can draw on these.
You can also use this approach for attributes such as brand to help incorporate these details into your product titles.
Apply custom labels
A quick and easy way to group products based on set criteria is through custom labels. An example of this would be if you wanted to identify all products that were currently on sale.
In this example, I use other submitted attributes to build the criteria. We know that a sale price should be submitted with the primary feed for sale items. We can call on this element and tag all products with a sale price with a custom label.
Using a rule based on this criteria, the value becomes dynamic as products come in and out of sale. You can then use this label to build your campaign structure, optimize, or report on.
Because we aren’t amending a value but creating one, there are no modifications to add underneath this.
Add promotion IDs
If you are running promotions but need to narrow down to specific products only, you can use feed rules to apply a promotion ID. For example, if the offer was only available for specific brands.
As with the other rules, you can only have one rule per attribute. So for each new promotion, you must replace the rule conditions.
Populate missing attributes
In some instances, your feed may underperform due to missing attributes. While these attributes may only be recommended, they can help increase feed quality or support in campaign structure.
Attributes you could build out with feed rules include product types and colors. To build these attributes out, the data needs to be available elsewhere in your feed, for example, within a title or description.
This way, your feed rule becomes “If title contains black set color to black.”
Remove errors in standardized fields
Within your shopping feed, there are several attributes that have standardized values you can submit, for example:
Building product types from URLs
The product types attribute is often among the messiest and hardest attributes to amend successfully.
While product type is only a recommended attribute and does not factor directly into ad delivery, it is a vital attribute for account structuring. Ultimately your account structure can make or break your performance, so it becomes an important attribute.
Depending on your site structure, feed rules can help to navigate this. With the use of split and choose, you can use the breadcrumb structure of your URLs to build out product types.
To build out your product types, you can follow the steps below:
- First, add your data source as your primary feed and select “Set to.”
- You will want to set the value to “Link.”
- You will then want to add your modification and select “Split and choose.”
- You will want to split your attribute by a slash (“/”).
- Finally, you need to select the split attributes you want to use. For example, https:// will be 1 and your domain will be 2, so the best practice would be to start your selection at 3. You will also want to consider how deep into your URL path to go as not to include the product string itself
Overcoming low-quality feeds with feed rules
Many edits and improvements can be made to your product feed using feed rules. They are a great place to start if you have edits that span across all or a high volume of products.
The post How to set up feed rules in Google Merchant Center and ensure quality product data appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, June 12th, 2023
A lot of what impacts SEO success is ultimately out of the hands of search professionals.
We can have elaborate and robust SEO strategies in place. We can demonstrate substantial traffic growth. Our organic conversions can be higher than ever.
All it takes is an errant noindex tag to decimate our success overnight.
There are a few ways to protect against this happening – including building processes, checks and balances and QA systems.
But ultimately, the most important method is training those teams on how their actions can improve or destroy SEO progress.
1. Invest in company-wide education
SEO seems like a mystical dark art to many people. Either that, or they reckon it’s just keywords and meta. As search professionals, we know that there are many facets to SEO.
Depending on the industry and website, SEO strategies might have a wide focus. You may have international sites with local SEO and language handling considerations.
Perhaps yours is a marketplace and you need to deal with out-of-stock items frequently. Perhaps you manage a network of sites and have to consider syndication and links more than most.
Why it’s advantageous to upskill colleagues
One of the biggest advantages you can give yourself in SEO is educating your company or departments who deal with the website/s.
This doesn’t mean in-depth training for every single person who has an impact on SEO. It can be as little as a general introduction to SEO carried out in your all-hands meeting or a guide you write and share internally.
Educating your colleagues means creating SEO-aware champions in each key department.
It’s always better to have someone ask, “Does this matter to SEO?” than not. Without raising their awareness of what SEO involves, they may not know to ask.
If your colleagues outside of the marketing department consider SEO to just be keywords and backlinks, they may not know to involve you in site architecture or branding decisions.
They may not consult you at the beginning of a site redesign or when considering re-platforming. You might not be looped in on the international expansion plans or the campaigns to create microsites for new products.
Opening the wider company’s eyes to the complexities of SEO can aid them in realizing when they need to involve you in their decision-making or quality assurance.
2. Keep SEO in the public eye
Once you have given your company an overview of what SEO entails, keeping them aware of what you are working on and how it’s performing is a great idea.
Keeping SEO in front of them will remind your key stakeholders that they need to be consulting with you. Showing the impact of your work demonstrates the benefits of SEO to them.
Training your colleagues or agency clients on the latest changes with search engines or approaches to SEO can remind stakeholders of the complexity and nuances involved in Search.
Share the experiments you run and what you’ve learned from them company-wide. You can demonstrate that SEO doesn’t always have a straightforward answer.
The classic “it depends” answer can wear pretty thin with stakeholders. Demonstrating how much SEO is experimental and iterative can help reinforce that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy.
3. Identify who needs more bespoke training
There will be colleagues who need more than the basic overview of SEO for their work to complement and not hinder yours.
The key to identifying who could do with a deeper education in SEO is looking at who you communicate with daily.
Brand-side
Chances are that the teams you interact with each day are the ones who will be able to impact SEO success. Audit your meetings and emails over the course of a week.
- Who are you messaging the most?
- Who are you in meetings with?
Alongside people who can help or hinder SEO through their work, consider key stakeholders.
- Who holds the keys to your budget?
- Who is involved in prioritizing developer time?
These people are the ones who can help your SEO strategy get implemented. It is prudent to help them to understand the importance of SEO.
Clients
If you are working as a consultant or for an agency, the process of identifying training needs will differ. After all, you may only have one key contact at your client’s organization. Consider asking your contact for an overview of their organizational structure.
An organizational chart or department overview will help you know who might need SEO upskilling. Look for the teams that have an impact on the website. For example, this might be developers, project managers, or marketing teams.
Alternatively, speak with your contact and ask them to identify who might benefit from SEO education. Explain that your training will ultimately help gain buy-in for SEO activity. They will likely have a list of who would benefit from that.
4. Determine the SEO skills needed for each stakeholder
Once you have a list of people who may benefit from training, split them into three groups:
Needs to be able to carry out SEO-informed activities
These people could use SEO skills in their work to help improve search performance.
For example, copywriters benefit from keyword research training and front-end developers from understanding how hreflang tags work.
They will likely need an overview of SEO and how their work impacts it. They will need training on specific activities and the tools needed to accomplish them.
Don’t get caught up in trying to teach them the entirety of SEO. It will probably make it harder to remember what they actually need to know.
Give them sufficient SEO context to understand why the activity is important. This enables them to figure out better processes because you have equipped them with the knowledge to do so themselves rather than just training them by rote.
Needs to understand the context of SEO
These people will benefit from understanding where their work, or the work of the people they manage, can impact SEO. They might be your UX designers, project managers, or PPC managers.
For this group, consider what they need to know to understand their impact on your work. Consider training stakeholders on when to involve SEO professionals in their decision-making.
This can be very important for team members who make changes to the website.
For example, your UX team might advise including pop-up boxes to encourage email sign-up. They will need to understand the implications of using interstitials and that it would likely need an SEO’s input to ensure it is implemented in a search-engine-friendly manner.
They may not need in-depth training on rectifying the issues you are highlighting or which decisions they make could cause them.
Needs to understand the importance of SEO
These are your colleagues or client stakeholders who don’t directly impact SEO but indirectly do through prioritization and budget-holding.
These are your marketing directors, chief operating officers and finance managers. The people who need to understand the remit of SEO to sign off on the resources needed for your strategy.
Your focus for training for this group is to show SEO’s impact on their bottom line. This might be operational efficiency, revenue or other KPIs important to your senior leadership team.
Work with them to find out what metrics they really care about and show them how SEO can impact them.
Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmMedium” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmCampaign” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmSource” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmContent” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”pageLink” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”ipAddress” value=”“>
5. Choose the best methods of training them
Workshops
As identified above, some of your colleagues or client stakeholders will need in-depth training. They may benefit from workshops to help them understand the processes they must follow.
Give them the full context of why the SEO skills you are teaching them are important. Walk them through examples and allow them to practice with you assisting. This will allow them to ask you questions as they learn new skills.
You may also consider follow-up sessions or refreshers when relevant new people join the company. This can act as a refresher for those you have previously trained.
Written updates
Sometimes the best course of action is to write up training guides and notes. This way, a permanent resource will be available for colleagues and clients to refer to.
If it is a document that allows tracked changes, you can also request that they ask any questions about it within it. This creates an FAQ within the guide to clarify anything where you accidentally omitted important foundational concepts or specific actions.
Videos
Sometimes showing people will be the best way to teach them.
Creating a quick video of you carrying out a specific SEO activity, such as a crawl or keyword research, could be the key to helping instruct many people quickly.
You are not requiring them to be present in a workshop but giving them a resource they can use when they are carrying out the task.
6. Consider what needs to be provided externally
You might decide that you would feel more confident in an external trainer helping educate your stakeholders, especially on specific aspects like technical SEO training for your development team or E-E-A-T guidance for your content creation team.
No SEO is an expert in every aspect of the discipline, so if you want to provide training but feel uncomfortable carrying it out yourself, employ an external consultant to help.
You may have been banging the same drum about an issue for a long time. Sometimes, having an external consultant provide the training on that issue can reinforce what you’ve been saying.
As frustrating as it might be, sometimes stakeholders respond better to hearing recommendations from external sources they have brought in for that specific project.
7. Assess outdated knowledge
One of the biggest struggles SEOs face is correcting wrong or obsolete SEO knowledge. Many of the stakeholders you identified as needing some SEO education have probably worked with SEOs in the past.
Some may even have been responsible for SEO despite not being specialists. As such, they will possibly have a level of understanding of SEO already.
This can be a great head-start for getting buy-in for your recommendations. However, it can also mean starting right at the beginning and helping to unpick wrong thinking.
A quick way to see if any pre-existing SEO knowledge needs to be corrected is by creating a survey or quiz.
You can intentionally choose fairly common SEO myths like duplicate content penalties and PPC budgets to help organic search performance. It should give you an understanding of where to pitch your training.
Some stakeholders might already be very well informed and you don’t need to spend much more of their or your time training them. You can keep them updated on changes in the industry relevant to what they are working on.
Others may have had SEO training a decade ago and need to be updated on how modern SEO differs.
8. Teach to encourage processes
Through the SEO upskilling of your stakeholders, you can encourage the adoption of SEO-beneficial processes.
For example, if you train copywriters to conduct keyword research, use those keywords in their copy, and write engaging page titles, they may add their current sign-off process.
The key to ensuring SEO considerations are adopted into relevant processes is educating the process owners. These are typically the senior members of teams.
They are the ones who decide if changes will impact efficiency and to whom you’ll need to highlight the benefits of considering SEO.
Allowing the SEO team to sign off on changes to the website can save a lot of headaches down the line. Unfortunately, it’s not often something that gets built into the QA process for many teams.
By training your colleagues and stakeholders, you will likely highlight the risks of not considering SEO impact in their work. This training can help to encourage them to build SEO into their sign-off processes.
9. Develop a self-serve curriculum
Creating a self-serve curriculum is the most efficient way of encouraging SEO upskilling.
Create a page on your intranet that houses all of the guides, videos and workshop presentations the SEO team has made. Tag them by department, project involvement or skill set to help your colleagues find training they might be interested in.
You can keep adding to the training over time and ask them to request their own resource from within that platform.
You can set out a roadmap based on training pathways, for example, “Training for Engineers” or “SEO training for Project [X].”
10. Get buy-in for your training
If you are asking entire teams to give up their time to attend an SEO workshop or asking for a half-hour slot in your next town hall meeting, you’ll probably need to demonstrate the benefits.
As it is likely senior stakeholders, you must consider what metrics they use to define success. Work backward to identify how SEO-related mistakes may have impacted those metrics.
For example, if a code deployment caused a crawling issue on the site, leading to rankings drops, demonstrate the link to the recent drop in organic leads and revenue.
Give examples of how training relevant people could prevent similar issues in the future.
Using SEO education for stakeholder management
Whatever level of training you can give your stakeholders, the more buy-in to your ideas and processes you’ll get.
The time you invest now will save future time, stress and discouragement when pitching ideas.
The post How to use SEO education for stakeholder management appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Sunday, June 11th, 2023
Google has begun the rollout of the new perspectives filter in the mobile search results this weekend. This feature was announced at Google I/O and we have seen previews and tests from Google over the past months related to this feature and now it is live.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of the feature, you can see it by searching on mobile and sliding the search bar filters until you see a “perspectives” option. Click on the “perspectives” option to load those results:
More about perspectives. Searchers can filter their search results to show results to see videos, blogs and forums. These results aim to show people a more “lived experience” to their search queries, Liz Reid, VP of Search at Google, told Search Engine Land at Google I/O. These searchers are able to see answers from people who are sharing their own personal perspectives and these answers are provided in a user interface that is more friendly and consumable to the younger searcher.
When you tap on the perspectives filter, you will see more long and short-form videos, images, and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites, and social media platforms, Google explained.
We saw Google testing perspectives early on, but those two examples are different from what we covered here. I spotted this in early May.
Hat tip to Kumarpal Shah for spotting this on Saturday.
Why we care. Here is a new way to see content within forums, videos, blogs and other formats where people are giving their view and perspectives on a specific topic.
The filter is deep inside the search filter bar, so it is not clear how many people will use it but it is rolling out now and some of you may be able to play with it to see if your content shows up for some queries.
The post Google launches perspectives filter in mobile search results appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Saturday, June 10th, 2023
TikTok is reportedly planning to quadruple its global ecommerce operations, with the goal of selling $20 billion in merchandise.
The ByteDance-owned social media app will rely heavily on rapid growth in Southeast Asia to reach its optimistic target. TikTok also hopes to also boost sales in the U.S. and Europe, Bloomberg reported.
Why we care: TikTok had the highest app store spend across the U.S., UK, France, Germany and Indonesia in the first quarter of 2023, according to Data.ai. Teaming up with the social media giant could not only help advertisers reach a huge audience on the most addictive social app in the world, but also a consumer base who are more likely to spend, which could result in higher conversions.
How does it work? TikTok Shop shows ads to users on its main social media app while they scroll through a never-ending feed of short video clips and livestreams. The business model, which combines entertainment with impulse buying, has already helped Douyin (TikTok’s sister app) establish itself as a major ecommerce player in China, competing against the likes of Amazon and Shopee – an achievement it hopes to repeat in the U.S.
Why now. Revenue from TikTok’s advertising business, which has historically been its primary source of income, is reportedly falling due to a worldwide slowdown in ad sales. So the app is now focusing its efforts on making the $17 trillion online ecommerce arena its main revenue driver instead.
Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmMedium” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmCampaign” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmSource” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmContent” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”pageLink” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”ipAddress” value=”“>
Is TikTok banned in the U.S.? The state of Montana is imposing a ban on TikTok downloads from next year. Lawmakers in other states have also proposed similar bills for a nationwide ban across the U.S. – but a final decision is yet to be made by President Joe Biden.
TikTok fighting a potential U.S. ban. TikTok has 150 million U.S. users and is actively taking steps to prevent the ban, including introducing a range of security measures to address national security concerns raised by American politicians. It is giving partners like Oracle Corp. the right to review its technology and cordoning off American TikTokers’ data.
What TikTok has said. TikTok has declined to comment on its ecommerce plans. However, the social media did release a statement about its future in the U.S.:
- “A US ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide. We’re disappointed to see this rushed piece of legislation move forward, despite its considerable negative impact on the free speech rights of millions of Americans who use and love TikTok.”
The post TikTok targets $20 billion in ecommerce sales appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Saturday, June 10th, 2023
Google and Microsoft are placing ads into AI experiments without giving brands the choice to opt out. Advertisers are now concerned that their products and services could be promoted next to inappropriate content.
Why we care: Brands could potentially be at risk of damage to their reputation should their products or services be advertised next to unsuitable content. Digital marketers are calling on Google and Microsoft to give them the chance to opt out of their ad placement experiments in response.
What is happening? Google announced last month that it was planning to use existing search ads in experiments with its new Search Generative Experience. The search engine also said that advertisers would not have the choice to opt out, however, it would be closely monitoring the performance of ad placements during the experimental phase.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is experimenting with ads in its Bing AI chatbot. Advertisers once again are not being given the choice to opt out. However, despite their concerns, the new Bing chatbot has so far received positive feedback from searchers, with 71% giving it the thumbs up in its launch week.
Have Google or Microsoft responded to concerns? Both tech giants have said that they are listening to issues raised by advertisers and are actively working on addressing their feedback. However, as these ad placement experiments are still in the very early stages of testing, marketers still will not be given the choice to opt out.
Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmMedium” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmCampaign” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmSource” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmContent” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”pageLink” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”ipAddress” value=”“>
How have advertisers responded? Digital marketers are concerned about the content their brands could potentially be associated with and are eager to take back control over where their ads appear online. Some businesses have temporarily pulled their ad spending in response to such restrictions, according to Reuters. Others have described the practices as “not industry standard”.
What have Google and Microsoft said? We’ve asked Google and Microsoft to comment on our story and will update if we hear back.
The post Google, Microsoft generative AI experiments concern advertisers appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Saturday, June 10th, 2023
Reddit launched two new ad products today – Contextual Keyword Targeting and Product Ads. The new features have been rolled out to help advertisers reach higher-value customers and to simplify the Reddit Ads Manager tool.
Why we care. Advertisers will be able to reach their target audience more easily and accurately, which could lead to increased conversions.
What’s new? Reddit’s new ad products enable brands to better connect with consumers already in research mode with the intention of making a purchase. These are:
Contextual Keyword Targeting. This new feature will help you reach consumers in active conversations on Reddit by choosing specific keywords you want their brand to be associated with. You will also be able to align keywords with creative ad copy for increased relevance.
As Reddit threads often become evergreen sources of information, Contextual Keyword Targeting will also provide long-term advertising opportunities.
Product Ads. This new ad format will let you target consumers already in the midst of their shopping journey. It will display information such as product descriptions and pricing (in local currency).
Product Ads will also feature call-to-action buttons that will direct users to a brand’s product page. Also, you will also be able to create ads directly from existing catalogs, quickly and easily with no need for additional resources.
In addition, if you are simultaneously activating ad campaigns on competitor platforms, you will be able to easily import the same catalogs to the Reddit Ads Manager.
What Product Ads look like. Here’s an example of a Reddit Product Ad:
Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmMedium” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmCampaign” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmSource” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”utmContent” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”pageLink” value=”“>
<input type=”hidden” name=”ipAddress” value=”“>
What has Reddit said? Reddit Chief Revenue Officer, Harold Klaje, told Search Engine Land:
- “These updates will uplevel the search-and-discover experience for both brands and our users by tapping into our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation.”
- “Our approach to this next phase of our Ads Product offering is to help brands help people make informed decisions, find answers to their questions, and discover products they care about – while in the process enabling advertisers to build connections with new and valuable new audiences,” Klaje added.
Interesting stats:
- Redditors make 2x more category purchases than other online customers.
- Redditors spend 2.5x more per purchase.
- Redditors are more than 56% more likely to talk about a brand online positively.
- Redditors are more than 46% more likely to trust a brand that advertises on Reddit.
Redit’s announcement: Investing in what makes Reddit unique: Introducing Contextual Keyword Targeting and Product Ads.
The post Reddit launches new ad products to boost conversions appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Saturday, June 10th, 2023
Bing Chat now supports voice chat from the desktop version of the interface. That means you can click on the microphone icon in the input box and speak your question to Bing Chat.
What it looks like. Here is a GIF of this in action, as provided by the Bing Blog.
Supported languages. This feature works in the following languages:
- English
- Japanese
- French
- German
- Mandarin
Microsoft said more languages will be supported in the future.
Speak back. Microsoft said it also supports speaking back the answers to you using text-to-speech answers. Bing chat “will respond to your questions in its own voice,” Microsoft said.
Why we care. Chat assistants and search engines are probably smarter at giving answers when the questions asked are more human-like and verbose. Speaking your query or questions will likely drive a more human-like and verbose type of question, which should help the AI provide a better response.
The post Bing Chat gains voice search on desktop interface appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Friday, June 9th, 2023
LinkedIn is testing generative AI and will soon give advertisers in-stream video ads, Conversation Ads and Thought Leader Ads.
Why we care. LinkedIn continues to test and roll out new tools and ad formats that could help advertisers more efficiently reach their target audience on the platform, improve ROI and increase revenue.
Testing Generative AI. LinkedIn is starting to test what it calls AI Copy Suggestions. It suggests headlines and text copy for ads based on your LinkedIn Page. Advertisers can select from five options, make edits and then apply the copy to a campaign.
Here’s what it looks like:
Only a limited number of North American advertisers have access to AI Copy Suggestions in LinkedIn Campaign Manager. But the company indicated it plans to roll out the feature to more languages and regions in the coming months.
LinkedIn joins Google Ads, Meta, Amazon and other platforms that now (or soon will) offer generative AI to advertisers.
In-Stream Video ads. LinkedIn is bringing pre- and mid-roll ads to its network of third-party publishers:
- “These ads, which will appear on mobile or desktop apps and sites, will play at the beginning (pre-roll) and middle (mid-roll) of long-form video content on trusted publisher sites across the LinkedIn Audience Network,” LinkedIn said.
Conversation Ads and Thought Leader Ads. These two new ad formats are not new, but they will become generally available starting in July.
- Conversation Ads let you set up multiple call-to-action buttons (for content or offers) and collect leads. Here’s an video showing how it works:
The announcement. You can LinkedIn announcement here.
The post LinkedIn Ads rolling out generative AI, new ad formats appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Friday, June 9th, 2023
Google Ads API version 14 has been rolled out with several major updates, including new features to support the move from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4.
Why we care. Version 14 of Google Ads API offers an improved user experience by enhancing both campaign management and performance.
What’s new? Here are just a few highlights of the 2023 update.
- Account-level negative keywords: This new feature will enable advertisers to retrieve, create and update account-level negative keywords. This means that users will be able to exclude specific keywords from targeting not just a single ad group or campaign, but a whole account.
- New recommendation types: This includes DynamicImageExtensionOptInRecommendation for advertisers whose accounts will benefit from enabling dynamic image extensions. It also includes LowerTargetRoasRecommendation and RaiseTargetCpaRecommendation, which will help users to tweak their return on ad spend.
- New conversion action types: These new features will help advertisers to identify conversions imported from Google Analytics and determine if a conversion is from a GA4 or Universal Analytics property. This is particularly important as GA4 is replacing Universal Analytics on July 1, and so these changes need to be reflected in Google Ads API v14.
- Offline conversion clients summaries: This is a brand new field in customer resources that offers information about the offline conversion process, such as how many conversions were uploaded successfully and how many failed when the offload jump was executed.
- Keyword planning space: Google Ads API V14 features a new method called GenerateForecastKeywordMetrics, to support keyword forecast metrics without needing to create a keyword plan first.
What Google said. Mattia Tommasone, Senior Developer Relations Engineer on the Google Ads API team, told Search Engine Land:
- “As you can see, there are many updates, changes, improvements and new ways to retrieve information from Google Ads API, version 14. The ones we have mentioned are just a few highlights. And we can’t wait to see you try out all of the new features in this version.”
Timeline:
- June 2023 – Google Ads API version 14 is released
- April 2023 – Google Ads API version 13.1 is released
- October 2022 – Google Ads API version 12 is released
- August 2022 – Google Ads API version 11.1 is released
- June 2022 – Google Ads API version 11 is released
- April 2022 – Google Ads API version 10.1 is released
- February 2022 – Google Ads API version 10 is released
Further reading: For the complete list of changes made to Google Ads API in version 14, read the full release notes.
The post Google Ads API v.14 is here, with 5 big updates appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
