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How GA4, data modeling and Google Ads work together

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

There’s a lot going on in the world of Google Analytics 4 right now, as July 1 continues to get closer.

Earlier this month, Google introduced a new, more flexible tag built to work seamlessly with GA4 and Google’s suite of ad platforms, including Google Ads.

Google might have indirectly acknowledged that advertisers have a lot to process when it recently announced that cookies will have a longer shelf life on Chrome than previously reported. 

This article will break down how paid search marketers need to approach the analytics shift:

• The philosophy.
• The differences and how to adjust.
• The timing for migrating.
• And a reporting workaround to replace some insights you’d otherwise lose in moving from UA to GA4.

A new age of marketing analytics

iOS14, CCPA, GDPR – all of these acronyms have put fear in the hearts of marketers over the past few years.

Collectively, they’ve moved the marketing world into an age of user privacy by severely reducing things like automatic cookie tracking and in-app activity tracking in marketers’ data portfolios.

To make up for losing reliable data collection mechanics and tying actions back to specific users, Google is moving quickly to a future of data modeling. 

Essentially, the search engine uses AI to fill in data gaps left by privacy regulations, browser limitations and obscured cross-device behavior. 

Data modeling in GA4 doesn’t include any offsite data unless you take the effort to implement it (more on that in a bit), but it does include all sources of traffic and engagement, not just Google sources.

One attribute of Google’s analytics shift is that it’s designed to be flexible and should be relatively easy to adapt depending on how the landscape shifts. 

GA4 relies heavily on first-party data, which is something you own and will always be able to access.

It’s a more flexible, customizable reporting setup than UA (which is both good and bad in that you need more resources to set it up, but it’s got a lot more potential for rich insights).

Combine that with the new tag, which doesn’t require nearly as much code or customization, and you can see that Google is setting up a future where marketers will be able to self-serve to get all kinds of data that can help them optimize their campaigns.

One big data difference: Events vs. Goals

If you’re making Google Ads decisions based on data like sessions and pageviews, it’s time to shift your strategy. 

GA4 is replacing those with Events, which means secondary metrics like bounce rate (as we know it), time on site, and pages per session won’t be available to you for much longer.

Instead, GA4 is introducing new metrics including “Engaged sessions”, which at this point can mean anything from a session longer than 10 seconds to a session that ended in a conversion to a session where the user bounced back and forth between screens. 

As I see it, that can be directionally useful in determining whether a channel has a relatively high or low proportion of engaged users. 

Another new metric, which I consider about as significant, is “User engagement,” which Google describes as “the average length of time that the app was in the foreground or the website focused on the browser.”

Other differences in data

When you’re preparing to migrate your audiences from UA to GA4, know that not all dimensions will translate. 

For instance, “session”-related dimensions like next page path won’t port over because GA4 is measuring sessions differently. 

That said, GA4 is built to let you customize the dimensions you find important, so you’ll be able to recreate those insights on your own.

One more change to note, while we’re on the topic of audiences, is that GA4 is limiting each property to 100 audiences, a huge reduction from UA’s cap of 2,000. 

I’ve personally never pulled more than 200 audiences per property, but if you have, say, a ton of remarketing audiences built around GA metrics, you may have to consider paying for GA360. (If I had to guess, I’d say this won’t be a widespread issue, or Google wouldn’t have been so aggressive about curtailing the limit.)

Next steps: 3 things paid search marketers can do now

1. Decide on a full data picture

Overall, marketers should be orienting their analytics around business outcomes, not just a conversion firing on a page. 

It’s smart to start measuring in terms of things like revenue and how much you can attribute to advertising.

For that, no matter how good your setup in either GA4 or Google Ads, you need to integrate offline conversion data and make sure your CRM data is part of the puzzle. 

I’m currently setting up testing how effective it is to import offline conversion data into GA4 via device ID or user ID.

My suspicion is that it won’t be perfect yet, and there will be data gaps, but the exercise of setting up the different data sources will pay off over time as the data modeling improves.

2. Get your migration on 

Marketers don’t like change any more than the average bear, but there’s no sense in putting off the inevitable.

The sooner you set up GA4, the sooner you’ll be able to get a relatively clean year-over-year comparison in 2023. 

The issue won’t rear its head immediately. You want to set it up now so you won’t have a data gap for Q4 2023. 

You could still compare GA4 to UA data next year if you really found yourself in a pickle, but you’d have to do a lot of work in Data Studio, and it wouldn’t be apples to apples.

So set it up now to get all the Q4 data for YoY’s sake.

3. Set up new reporting

One benefit of digging into GA4 now is that you’ll be able to scope out the reports you need to re-build. 

I noticed pretty quickly, for instance, that you can’t create rules in GA4 to remove non-Google UTM tracking (like HubSpot parameters), so you need to get Data Studio involved to clean up a landing page report so you’re not muddling through thousands of rows (each unique parameter breaks out a page).

GA4 won’t let you strip tracking info from URLs and then calculate CVR, whether based on users or views. But doing this cleanup allows you to see top-converting LPs, for paid traffic or all traffic.

So instead of this legacy view:

…you get something a lot more useful:

To create the clean landing page view:

1. Select Add Dimension > Create Field.
2. RegEx and enter REGEXP_REPLACE(Page path + query string,'\\?.+', '') in the formula field.
3. Pull in Views and Conversions.
4. Create a calculated field for your conversion rate. I used Views and Conversions (Conversions/Views).

I guarantee that’s the tip of the iceberg… the more we play around, the more we’ll realize we’re either missing or have the opportunity to improve in GA4.

The saga continues…

As you can tell, we’re still learning about the full capability of GA4 and how to reflect it in Google Ads campaigns. 

Over the coming months, as the July 1, 2023 deadline approaches and more marketers muster up the courage to start the transition to GA4, I expect more best practices to circulate. 

The post How GA4, data modeling and Google Ads work together appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Cookieless case studies: How brands are seeing a 9X lift in CTR

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

The cookieless future is here (despite what Google says). If you haven’t found an identity solution, it’s time.

We’re doing our part at Lotame, to ensure marketers, agencies and publishers are prepared and ready to conquer the cookieless future. With hundreds of campaigns launched across the globe, Lotame’s identity solution, Panorama ID, is proving that advertising on the open web is sustainable, profitable, and privacy safe.

“We’ve done our due diligence and trust Lotame Panorama ID. The predictive cookieless solution is delivering fantastic results for our leading brand portfolio in terms of scale across the open web and cost-efficiency. We’re well-positioned to grab the cookieless future by the horns — in fact, we already are!” – Miles Pritchard, managing partner, OMD – EMEA.

See the results for yourself in this collection of cookieless case studies. Access it now to see the success stories of marketers and agencies around the world including how:

• Banana Boat achieved 94% VCR in first cookieless video vampaign
• Luxury car brand saw 2X more cost-efficient engagement
• Dr. Martens sees 9X increase in CTR

Access the collection of Cookieless Case Studies Around the World now!

The post Cookieless case studies: How brands are seeing a 9X lift in CTR appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google’s helpful content update: What should we expect?

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

The new helpful content update sounds like a big deal.

Google has given us a list of questions to consider to determine whether our sites are designed to help people, or rather, created to do well on search engines.

If the latter is the case, you may find yourself hit with a sitewide signal that makes it difficult to rank.

If this update has a strong impact, which I believe it will, we may be in for another shakeup in the world of SEO like we had following the launch of Penguin 10 years ago. 

If you have focused more on SEO efforts than creating content for humans to benefit from, this could strongly affect your site. It still remains to be seen how powerful this ranking signal is.

Does it affect all sites that use SEO? 

Google was careful to note in their blog post that this update does not invalidate following SEO best practices.

They say, “SEO is a helpful activity when it’s applied to people-first content” and link to their SEO starter guide. Google is not against search engine optimization.

This update is geared toward sites that have gamed the system, creating content that isn’t super helpful to people but still ranking well because of SEO rather than on the merit of the content on the site.

Is it a penalty?

Google is careful in its wording regarding whether this is a penalty. 

It’s not a manual action. You won’t see it listed in Google Search Console. It’s not a spam action. 

We are to call it a “signal”. This is one of the many ranking signals Google describes in their documentation on How Search Works.

If that signal is applied to your site, it likely will feel like a penalty.

The good news is that you can get this classification removed from your site if you can improve your content. 

The part of Google’s algorithm that classifies sites for this update will be running continuously. 

If the algorithms see that your site’s content has shifted to be helpful to searchers, the strength of the signal may be reduced, or even lifted completely.

This announcement reminds me of the early days of Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithms.

Today these algorithms are baked into the core algorithm, but initially, they were filters that were applied to affected sites. 

Sites with unnatural links (Penguin) or low-quality content (Panda) would have a filter applied that suppressed ranking.

If those sites cleaned up their link profile or improved the quality of their content then they had a chance at seeing recovery the next time Google ran a Penguin or Panda update.

It sounds like the helpful content classifier will have a similar effect in that sites affected will suffer some degree of sitewide ranking suppression and eventually can have that suppression lifted. But there are some significant differences:

• The helpful content classifier runs in real-time, continually. This means that new sites created just for SEO should have the signal applied right from the start. Also, existing sites can be affected when the amount of content created for SEO purposes exceeds a threshold.
• Sites will be impacted over the course of a few months and to different degrees depending on the amount of unhelpful content found. Google won’t run specific updates during which sites recover. Rather, if the classifier determines that content has changed to now be deemed helpful to searchers and has remained that way for a few months, the weight of the deranking signal will be reduced or even lifted.

What is people-first content? 

This is what Google wants us to focus on. But what is it?

I’ll share my thoughts on each of the questions they say to ask ourselves about our content.

“Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?”

Something I’ve often said to clients when trying to explain content quality is, “Would this content still exist if it wasn’t for search engines?” 

A local business would still want to educate its customers on their services. 

The National Kidney Foundation would still publish content to educate patients and doctors.

Would you still create the content you are creating if search hits from Google did not exist? 

“Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?”

This should not be new to us!

Google’s blog post on what site owners should know about core updates has a whole section of questions to ask ourselves in regards to expertise.

Knowing your topic is important. 

I feel Google has started to promote first-hand expertise with recent product review updates.

Many that were affected by the July 2022 product review update were sites that lacked legitimate first-hand expertise in using the products they were recommending.

For the majority (if not all) of the sites I reviewed that were affected by this update, there was a sitewide demotion. 

“Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?”

The search quality evaluator guidelines teach Google’s quality raters that it is important to determine a page’s purpose. 

Is it designed to share information? Or to sell products? Or perhaps to entertain?

Why does your site exist? How are you trying to help people?  

It is important that the purpose of your content’s existence is clear.

I think that many people who have created sites that are created with SEO efforts foremost in mind will rationalize that their content is created to inform people. 

If you’re unsure, I encourage you to review the next two questions:

• After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
• Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?

Google wants to present searchers with information that fully meets their needs. 

How do I know if my content is built for search engines first?

Once again, Google has given us some questions to ask.

When I read these, it feels to me that this update could have a large impact on what we see in the search results. 

If these questions apply to your content, you may find that your site is classified sitewide as being created primarily for search engines.

“Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?”

I expect some content may lie on a spectrum. Google says the signal is weighted and that “[s]ites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect.” 

Super spammy sites with little actual benefit to searchers should be hit strongly. 

Sites with some content created primarily with SEO in mind that also have content that is helpful will be impacted, but not as strongly.

It is important to remember that the sitewide effect means the good content on your site will also be affected by this update if Google deems you worthy of the classification.

“Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?”

Many of the sites affected by the July 2022 product reviews update were review sites that reviewed almost any product out there. There was little focus other than “we review products.”

I expect we’ll see declines in many sites because they are writing on as many topics as they can rather than focusing on what is important to their users.

“Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?”

I wonder whether this line is geared toward sites writing their content mostly with AI content-generating tools.

AI-generated content can often rank well because it contains many of the words search engines use to determine relevancy. 

But a person can usually tell when content is AI-written and not created by an actual human. If you are creating content by automated means, you may find yourself on Google’s radar. 

“Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value?”

This makes me think about review sites that aggregate Amazon listings and slightly re-word them. It will be interesting to see if other types of aggregator sites are hit as well.

“Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?”

I do think that it is still acceptable to write on trending topics provided they are what your audience wants to read. 

But if the focus of your site is simply to capitalize on new trends, I expect you may be affected. 

“Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?”

The quality rater guidelines instruct the raters to determine to what extent content meets a searcher’s needs:

It is becoming increasingly more important to determine what your readers’ intent is when they come to your site. 

And are you fully satisfying their needs? Would they need to go elsewhere for more information after reading your content?

“Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).”

I have seen blog posts that advise that content below a certain word count will be considered thin by Google which is not the case. Sometimes short content actually helps the searcher more. 

I suppose this question is written to dissuade sites from writing massive articles covering everything there is to know about a topic on one single page (unless it is meeting the need of searchers who want to read a thorough essay on a subject). 

This may seem like it contradicts Google’s advice to fully meet the needs of a searcher. 

If tasked with creating content on buying a lawn mower, many SEOs are conditioned to produce the most thorough article on lawn mowers possible.

Let’s say a searcher typed, “best lawn mower.”

Do they really need an article that explains “What is a lawn mower?,” “Types of lawn mowers” and also “How to start a lawn mower”?

Having those words on the page historically has helped search engines understand that the page is relevant to lawn mowers. 

However, the searcher’s intent, in this case, is to get help in deciding which mower to buy, not to learn everything there is to know on the subject. 

A shorter article may be what is more helpful to a searcher in this situation.

“Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?”

I’ve seen a real rise lately in discussions about operating “niche sites.” 

I do think some of these will survive, provided the writer really is passionate about the niche and can write on relevant topics from a point of personal experience. 

But if you’ve picked a niche primarily based on your ability to rank for that content, rather than out of a passion for covering that topic, you may find Google does not reward you.

“Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?”

This seems like a specific question and is pretty straightforward.

Is recovery possible?

If your site is classified as being built primarily for search engines, you will likely see a significant decline in search traffic over the next few months. 

Google says that sites that are affected will indeed be able to work to get the classifier removed and possibly recover their rankings.

It is important to remember that if Google sees enough SEO content on your site, the sitewide signal will also impact the remainder of the content on your site as well. 

As such, you will need to identify where the problems are and work aggressively to repair them if you want to rank at all.

Here is what I will be recommending to sites that come to us for help after being affected by this update although we’ll adapt our advice as more information becomes available:

• Identify which content on the site could be construed as being created for search engines rather than humans.
• Determine whether that content can be improved upon to Google’s satisfaction, or whether it should be noindexed/removed from the site.
• Find ways to produce content that goes above and beyond when it comes to being helpful to searchers. This may include adding more user-generated content, first-hand photos or videos, etc.
• Compare competitor pages that continue to rank well to see if we can understand what content Google is rewarding as inspiration on how to improve our content. 
• Work on improving E-A-T for the site to help make it more obvious to Google’s algorithms that the site has and also is known for having expertise on the topics it covers.
• Clarify what the purpose or focus of each page is (and ensure that this purpose is first and foremost meant to help people).
• In some cases, know when to cut losses and move on. I believe that some sites that are hit by this update may not be able to recover without extensive and possibly unattainable changes.

Conclusions

Prior to the launch of this update, Google reached out to several SEOs, myself included, to discuss its release. They wanted to make it clear that this is not an attack on SEO.

Good SEO can help people-first content perform even better.

It sounds to me like there is the potential for this update to have a strong impact on many sites that have invested heavily in SEO.

I am looking forward to participating in and watching the discussions on changes that the SEO community is seeing once this update is live. I hope you fare well!

The post Google’s helpful content update: What should we expect? appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google Search Console’s video indexing report now live for all

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

In May, Google teased a new video indexing report in Google Search Console, then in July the report started to roll out to some properties, the search company announced. Now, the report is fully live for all properties where Google can detect video on the site, the company just announced on Twitter.

What is the video indexing report. The video indexing report shows how many indexed pages on your site contain one or more videos, and how many of those pages a video could be indexed. Google said the report can help you understand the performance of your videos on Google, and identify possible areas of improvement.

What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this report for one of my sites in Google Search Console:

Google’s announcement. Here is the tweet where Google announced this:

When the report shows. Google said if Google detects videos on your site, the Video indexing report will appear on the left navigation bar in the coverage section. If Google has not detected a video on your website, you will not see the report.

What it tells you. The report shows the status of video indexing on your site. It helps you answer the following questions:

• In how many pages has Google identified a video?
• Which videos were indexed successfully?
• What are the issues preventing videos from being indexed?

In addition, if you fix an existing issue, you can use the report to validate the fix and track how your fixed video pages are updated in the Google index, Google explained.

URL Inspection tool for video pages. Google also also enhanced the URL Inspection tool to allow you to check the video indexing status of a specific page. When inspecting a page, if Google detected a video in it, you will see the following in the results:

• Details such as the video URL and the thumbnail URL.
• The page status showing whether the video was indexed or not.
• List of issues preventing the video from being indexed.

Why we care. If you host videos on your site or embed videos on your site, you will want to check out this report to see if there are ways to improve those videos or help other videos to show up in Google Search. Videos are an important aspect of search traffic and visibility in Google Search.

There are a lot more details on this new report in this Google help document.

The post Google Search Console’s video indexing report now live for all appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

What is helpful content, according to Google

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

Google’s new helpful content update is meant to reward content that is written for humans. 

So how exactly does Googe define “helpful content”?

In short, according to Google, helpful content:

• Is created for a specific audience.
• Features expertise.
• Is trustworthy and credible.
• Meets the want(s) or need(s) of the searcher.

This is important to know because your definition of “helpful content” is likely different from Google’s.

Here’s everything we know about what Google considers helpful content. 

What is helpful content?

What follows is all the guidance and questions Google has provided to assess whether your content is helpful, around the helpful content (HCU), product review (PRU), core (CU) and Panda updates (PU).

Google’s guidance around helpful content generally breaks down into four areas. Helpful content:

1. Is created for a specific audience

• Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you? (HCU)
• Does your site have a primary purpose or focus? (HCU)
• Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans? (HCU)
• Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results? (HCU)
• Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics? (HCU)
• Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines? (CU)
• Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience? (HCU)
• Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t). (HCU)
• Evaluate the product from a user’s perspective. (PRU)

2. Features expertise

• Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well? (CU)
• Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)? (HCU)
• Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? (CU)
• ​​If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality? (CU)
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care? (CU)
• Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? (CU)
• Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value? (HCU)
• Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic? (HCU)
• Demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about the products reviewed – show you are an expert. (PRU)
• Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a particular product, based on your own original research. (PRU)
• Describe how a product has evolved from previous models or releases to provide improvements, address issues, or otherwise help users in making a purchase decision. (PRU)
• Identify key decision-making factors for the product’s category and how the product performs in those areas (for example, a car review might determine that fuel economy, safety, and handling are key decision-making factors and rate performance in those areas). (PRU)
• Describe key choices in how a product has been designed and their effect on the users beyond what the manufacturer says. (PRU)
• When recommending a product as the best overall or the best for a certain purpose, include why you consider that product the best, with first-hand supporting evidence. (PRU)

3. Is trustworthy and credible

• Would you trust the information presented in this article? (PU)
• Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page? (CU)
• If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely-recognized as an authority on its topic?
• Does the content have any easily-verified factual errors? (CU)
• Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life? (CU)
• Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis? (CU)

• Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic? (CU)
• Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content? (CU)
• Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature? (CU)
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? (CU)
• Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book? (CU)
• Does the content have any spelling or stylistic issues? (CU)
• Was the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced? (CU)
• Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content? (CU)
• Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review. (PRU)
• Share quantitative measurements about how a product measures up in various categories of performance. (PRU)
• Explain what sets a product apart from its competitors. (PRU)
• Cover comparable products to consider, or explain which products might be best for certain uses or circumstances. (PRU)
• Include links to other useful resources (your own or from other sites) to help a reader make a decision. (PRU)
• Consider including links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice. (PRU)

4. Meets the want(s) or need(s) of the searcher

• After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal? (HCU)
• Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience? (HCU)
• Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources? (HCU)
• Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed? (HCU)
• Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them? (CU)
• Ensure there is enough useful content in your ranked lists for them to stand on their own, even if you choose to write separate in-depth single product reviews for each recommended product. (PRU)
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site? (PU)

Digging deeper into intent

There are the classic search intents you likely know (informational, navigational, transactional), but also several micro-intents you should think about when creating content. 

Google has broken down search behavior into four “moments” in the past:

• I want to know. People searching for information or inspiration.
• I want to go. People searching for a product or service in their area.
• I want to do. People searching for how-tos.
• I want to buy. People who are ready to make a purchase 

The QRG breaks down user intent into these categories:

• Know query: To find information on a topic. Some of which are Know Simple queries (i.e., queries that have a specific answer, like a fact, diagram, etc.)
• Do query: When the user is trying to accomplish a goal or engage in an activity.
• Website query: When the user is looking for a specific website or webpage 
• Visit-in-person query: Some of which are looking for a specific business or organization, some of which are looking for a category of businesses.

Additionally, search behavior is driven by six needs, according to a 2019 Think With Google article:

• Surprise Me: Search is fun and entertaining. It is extensive with many unique iterations.
• Thrill Me: Search is a quick adventure to find new things. It is brief, with just a few words and minimal back-button use.
• Impress Me: Search is about influencing and winning. It is laser-focused, using specific phrases.
• Educate Me: Search is about competence and control. It is thorough: reviews, ratings, comparisons, etc.
• Reassure Me: Search is about simplicity, comfort, and trust. It is uncomplicated and more likely to include questions.
• Help Me: Search is about connecting and practicality. It is to-the-point, and more likely to mention family or location. 

One final way to think about audience intent is Avinash Kaushik’s See, Think, Do, Care framework. Though it’s not “official” Google advice specific to an algorithm update, Kaushik was Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist when he wrote this.

Google highlights ‘helpful content’ in featured snippets

The term “helpful content” rarely shows up on Google’s documentation. But it does show up on Google’s How Search Works page, in reference to Featured Snippets:

“Featured snippets are where we prominently display a page’s description — what we call a snippet. We use this format when our systems determine it might help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description and when they click on the link to read the page itself. It’s especially helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice.”

Google wants to help searchers find the answer or information they are looking for as quickly as possible – sometimes without ever leaving the search results page. 

Your content should be the best answer that someone is searching for. 

In short: helpful content should be the best answer – and provide that answer as quickly as possible.

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Google Helpful Content Update

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

Courtesy of SEO Book.com

A 3-phased approach to proactive online reputation management

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

I’ve helped several brands with their online reputation management (ORM) during my digital marketing career. 

Unfortunately, most of this work involved trying to help the brands recover from a crisis.

Even more unfortunate was that the damage to their reputations could have been greatly mitigated with some proactive effort.

What follows is a basic, three-pronged approach to a proactive ORM strategy.

1. Own your name

Often, what looks like a reputation problem is more of an SEO problem related to entity optimization. Because the search engines seek to understand brands as entities, it’s important to amplify the signals that help them know who you are and what you do.

For most businesses, using Organization schema is a significant first step in letting the search engines know who you are. 

This simple tagging system hides in the source code of a page on your website and acts as a data feed to show information about your brand or business. 

At a minimum, the following information should be tagged:

• Name.
• Address.
• Link to your logo.
• Links to official active social media sites (and to Wikipedia if you already have a page).

Another aspect is to claim your business name on major social media sites. Even if you don’t use a channel, it’s a good idea to grab your brand to keep someone else from trying to impersonate you.

If your brand is big enough, it would be beneficial to ensure your Wikipedia page is correct and up-to-date or, to have one created if there isn’t one already.

Directly making and editing pages by brand representatives is frowned upon and problematic, so hiring an agency specializing in this type of work would be best.

If you are part of a brand with well-known leaders, claiming domain names and social media sites under their names should also be considered. 

Politicians, especially, seem to forget this step and often have to contend with parody and impersonator sites set up by their opponents.

Lastly, owning your main website’s .com, .net and .org versions is a great idea.

Global brands may wish to extend this to ccTLDs where the business operates or may operate in the future. 

For even more insurance, it is helpful to buy domains with negative messaging like:

• ihatebrand.com or i-hate-brand.com
• boycottbrand.com or boycott-brand.com

You may think those last examples are a bit extreme, but I’ve seen brand detractors go to great lengths and spend much of their own money to set up hater websites on domains like these.

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2. Own your story

In SEO, we say, “content is king.” This concept is also true in ORM. 

Owning your story often means creating content on your website that will potentially outrank any negative content that others may post online. 

The more content you can rank in branded searches on owned and controlled channels like your website or social media accounts, the more you can push negative content off Page 1 of search results and out of view of most searchers. 

As the old joke goes, the best place to hide a dead body is on Page 2 of Google search results because no one will find it there.

In extreme cases, it might become necessary to create content to hit on a specific topic around which a brand detractor has generated a lot of content.

When this happens, bringing in an ORM and SEO expert would be helpful if you don’t have that expertise in-house.

What looks entirely innocuous for the casual website visitor is a targeted volley against negative content. For example, don’t strike back directly if a hater created content around alleged food poisoning targets your restaurant. 

Create content on your website highlighting the brand’s commitment to food safety and the number of passed inspections conducted by health officials.

3. Own your reviews

Some businesses revolve around reviews. For them, this can be life or death. 

I’ve worked with many brands that had trouble recruiting. The reason? Too many negative reviews on Indeed and Glassdoor. 

If you think your company doesn’t live and die by reviews, I recommend you take heed anyway.

One primary key to reviews is to respond to each one. Respond to positive reviews with a quick “thank you” and move on. Negative reviews take a bit more work.

Many negative reviews are the result of missed expectations. You can often diffuse the negativity of the review by how you respond. A simple apology, an offer to make things right, and an invitation to give you another chance can mitigate the hit of a negative review. 

It’s important not to be too defensive or shift the blame for the problem back onto the complainant. This will nearly always backfire. 

Hint: Don’t respond when you’re angry!

Some businesses, especially those in regulated industries, must be careful how they respond. 

Thus, a response guide is critical to help everyone stay within guidelines while responding effectively to reviews. An invitation to contact a customer support rep via phone or secure message would be appropriate.

Prepare for a crisis

Another critical process in proactive ORM work is to prepare for a crisis before it begins. 

Set up documented procedures to guide the entire company when a situation occurs. At a minimum, the plan should include:

• Who will monitor for potential crises?
• Who needs to be informed when one comes up?
• Who will do what during the crisis?
  • Monitoring
  • Reporting
  • Responding

If you can also include potential scenarios that might come up, all the better.

The more you prepare, the easier it is to walk through a challenging time.

Already in a crisis? Please don’t panic

A vital part of any ORM strategy must include reviews of all content written about the brand. This information can be an invaluable part of a business. 

Your customers are the best focus group you can get. They don’t have to pay for them to tell you about your business.

You can do this efficiently by setting up Google Alerts to notify you anytime your brand or key people are mentioned by name.  

Taking criticism and plowing it back into product and service improvements can help ensure your reputation stays positive. 

According to speaker and author Jay Baer, some brands even reward their detractors because of the valuable information they provide.

A great resource to help you get started in a proactive ORM program is Repped: 30 Days to a Better Online Reputation by Andy Beal. Considered by many to be the “godfather” of online reputation management, Beal’s book is filled with great information and helpful tips to get your business moving in the right direction.

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TikTok announces three new shopping ad features

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

Just one month after TikTok supposedly abandoned plans to bring shopping ads into the US, the social media video platform announced that it’s launching a new commerce ad suite called Shopping Ads. They will be testing three new ad formats including Video Shopping Ads, Catalog LIsting Ads, and LIVE Shopping Ads. 

Video Shopping Ads

Video Shopping Ads will be placed in the For You page and allow advertisers to highlight products in their feed TikTok video ads. TikTok says Shopping Ads provide a dynamic experience based on the shoppers intent to purchase. Video Shopping Ads will automatically create a landing page and are available to select advertisers for testing. 

Catalog Listing Ads

Catalog Listing Ads allow advertisers to feature their product catalogs across the app and expand their reach. Advertisers can promote their products across shoppable surfaces such as “recommended” or “Related Products.” Catalog Listing Ads are being tested in the US. 

LIVE Shopping Ads

LIVE Shopping Ads enable advertisers to direct users from the For You page to their live event so they can join and buy products. LIVE Shopping Ads are being tested where TikTok Shop is available including the UK, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. 

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What TikTok says. TikTok says that 70% of the users it surveyed said it was easy to make purchases through shopping related ads. 56% of those said TikTok helped them discover new products and brands, and 48% of users expressed an interest in making a purchase through TikTok. 

TikTok partners. TikTok has partnered with Smartly.io as their ads & campaign partner. They have also partnered with Productsup for their catalog feed. For commerce, they currently integrate with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Ecwid. 

Why we care. There was no insight into why TikTok changed its mind about bringing shopping ads into the US. After the disastrous launch in the UK, we were convinced that it just wasn’t in the cards. But if you’re an advertiser interested in testing out these new features, check your account for eligibility.

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How to maximize insights from Performance Max

Saturday, August 20th, 2022

You’ve set up your Google Ads Performance Max campaigns for success.

Now you need insights into performance, keyword themes, where your dollars are being spent and more.

The problem?

Getting data and insights from Performance Max can be frustrating.

Here are some tips and tricks we’ve uncovered so far.

Insights: Performance trends

While more granular data is limited, take advantage of the Insights tab.

There is some useful info on overall trends.

You can view week-over-week or month-over-month data.

Insights: Keyword themes

Additionally, while you cannot see actual search terms, you can see keyword themes as well as basic performance data.

Listing groups vs display: Where are your dollars being spent?

Compare overall campaign spend in the Campaigns tab vs. overall spend of all Listing Groups

This will help you understand the spend breakdown between Video/Display and ad units created with the datafeed.

Note: If you find that Display/Video traffic is not converting as well as your datafeed, you can turn off URL expansion in the campaign settings.

You can also try running a Smart Shopping style Performance Max campaign:

Segment: Your data

In the campaigns tab, you can filter by campaign and segment by:

• Device
• Day/Time

Landing pages: What pages are getting traffic/conversions?

Note: This report is not available within a Performance Max campaign, you’ll need to access it from the All Campaigns tab and filter your PMax campaigns only.

All Campaigns > Landing Pages > Filter by Campaign

Locations: Where is the traffic and sales coming from?

In the Locations tab, you can drill down performance by:

• Country
• States
• ZIP/Postal Code
• County/DMA

Reports: Use custom reports to roll up your data

Go to the reports tab and build a custom table showcasing performance by:

• Placements (Display/Video/Datafeed)
• Brand (Datafeed)
• Category/Collection (Datafeed)
• Custom Labels (Datafeed)

Note: Placements can be excluded on the account level:

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Google’s new helpful content update targets sites creating content for search engines first

Thursday, August 18th, 2022

Google is about to launch a new and large search algorithm update, called the helpful content update.

The helpful content update will target websites that have a relatively high amount of unsatisfying or unhelpful content, where the content has been written for search engines rather than humans.

This update, which will start rolling out soon, will have a meaningful impact on the search results, Google told Search Engine Land.

What is Google’s helpful content update?

Google’s new helpful content update specifically targets “content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.”

The purpose of this algorithm update is to help searchers find “high-quality content,” Google told us. Google wants to reward better and more useful content that was written for humans and to help users.

Content written for the purpose of ranking in search engines – what you might call “search engine-first content” or “SEO content,” has been frequently written about lately and discussed across social media.

In short, searchers are getting frustrated when they land on unhelpful webpages that rank well in search because they were designed to rank well.

Google’s new algorithm aims to downgrade those types of websites while promoting more helpful websites, designed for humans, above search engines.

Google said this is an “ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier to find content that feels authentic and useful in search.”

When will Google’s helpful content update launch?

The update will start rolling out next week. The helpful content update will take up to two weeks to fully roll out, Google said.

We will post a new story when it begins rolling out and when it is completed here on Search Engine Land. Google will also post on its updates page when it launches and when it is done rolling out.

What types of content will the helpful content update impact?

While these algorithms do not specifically target any specific niche, Google said these types of content may be impacted the most:

• Online educational materials.
• Arts and entertainment.
• Shopping.
• Tech-related.

This is because content written in those areas has historically been written more for search engines than humans.

Based on Google’s analysis, those areas may be more impacted by this Google helpful content update than other areas.

I asked Google for a specific example of a search where the helpful content update would make an impact. Here’s what Google told me:

• “If you search for information about a new movie, you might have previously encountered articles that aggregated reviews from other sites without adding perspectives beyond what’s available elsewhere on the web. This isn’t very helpful if you’re expecting to read something new. With this update, you’ll see more results with unique information, so you’re more likely to read something you haven’t seen before.”

Google’s Search Liaison Danny Sullivan was asked on Twitter to elaborate more about what Google meant by “online education.” Sullivan’s response:

“Generally tutorial, things meant to teach something, not really formal courses. But again, it’s not focused on any particular area. That’s just one example where we see notable improvement but there are others and any query about any thing might benefit.”

Danny Sullivan tweet

Helpful content update is a sitewide algorithm

Unlike many Google algorithms that get applied on a page-by-page basis, this new helpful content update will be sitewide.

That means that if Google determines your site is producing a relatively high amount of unhelpful content, primarily written for ranking in search, then your whole site will be impacted.

This will not just impact individual pages or sections of your site, but rather, it will impact the whole site.

Google won’t say exactly what percentage of the pages on your site need to be helpful versus unhelpful to trigger this classifier but they did say it is sitewide and will impact the whole site, even if you have many pages that are helpful.

Again, if you have helpful pages but a relatively high amount of your content is unhelpful, even your helpful content or sections of your site will be hit by this update.

Google said “removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.”

How to build human-first content – Google’s advice

Google, like with previous updates, like the Panda update, core updates, and product reviews update, has provided a list of questions you can ask yourself about your content, in order to build content that is rewarded by the helpful content update.

Google shared these questions around building human-first content:

• Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you? 
• Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
• Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
• After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
• Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
• Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?

And when it comes to avoiding search-engine first content, Google laid out these questions:

• Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans? 
• Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
• Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?
• Are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value? 
• Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise for your existing audience?
• Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources?
• Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).
• Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
• Does your content promise to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed?

It could take months to recover

This algorithm will run automatically, Google said. The scores or classifiers will continue to update all the time.

But if a site gets hit by this helpful content update, it can take several months for the site to recover.

A site needs to prove itself over time that it no longer publishes content with the sole reason to rank in search engines, a search engine first content experience, and that takes time.

So it seems there will be some type of waiting period – maybe a validation period – that sites need to go through, to show Google’s algorithms that the site is providing helpful content to humans first.

This validation period is automated and while Google updates the scores for its classifiers on your site on an ongoing basis, making a change today, likely won’t be reflected in Google’s rankings for several months, Sullivan told Search Engine Land.

According to Google:

• “Sites identified by this update may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.”

Google is using machine learning to identify unhelpful content

Google is using a new machine learning algorithm that is able to evaluate and identify unhelpful content.

The algorithms should get better over time between the automated machine learning improvements and Google engineers tweaking and improving the overall algorithms on a regular basis.

Google said the helpful content update looks at a variety of signals about the page and site to determine the ranking of a page.

Google was not specific with us on exactly which signals are used, as you would imagine.

Quality raters validated

Google said the search company validated these new results with its quality raters and confirmed that using this system improves Google’s search quality. This is done for most, if not all, ranking and user experience improvements Google makes to search.

Again, the quality raters do not directly influence the rankings but rather help confirm to Google’s search engineers if the algorithms are making improvements to the overall search quality.

U.S. English searches only

This update will initially launch for English-language searches globally.

Google plans to expand to other languages in the future.

Search-only right now

Google told us this update targets only Google search right now. However, Google may look to cover additional products (e.g., Google Discover) in the coming months.

Will the helpful content update be as significant as Panda?

For many SEOs who lived through the Google Panda update of February 2012, it forever changed how SEOs recommended you write content going forward. Now Panda is built into the core update, so it is still being used today.

This update sounds a lot like the past Panda update.

I suspect, like with Panda, SEOs will look back at Google’s helpful content update and say it caused a fundamental shift in SEO content strategy. Time will tell, and we will see how large of an update this is over the course of the next few weeks.

Why we care

Google’s helpful content update will likely be a significant update that SEOs will look back at as the catalyst of change in terms of the advice SEOs gives clients when building content.

Granted, it is too soon to tell how large of an impact this update will have on Google’s search results, your site or your clients’ sites.

As the update rolls out, make sure to watch your analytics and, if necessary, reevaluate your content strategy around the advice Google has provided above.

We’ll continue to report on all the latest developments around the helpful content update.

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You can read Google’s official announcement, here: More content by people, for people in Search.

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