Google Business Profile guidelines updated to include products
Written on August 31, 2022 at 7:08 am, by admin
Retail businesses can now add in-store products to their Google Business Profile listings.
How it works. When customers search for a Business Profile they can find a products carousel (on the Maps mobile app), or a carousel and “Products” tab if they’re using Google Search.
With the “Products” tab, customers can:
- Click a featured product card to view the product details.
- Click a product category to view an overview.
- Click a product within a product category to view the product details.
- Chat or call you to find out more, or click on the button leading to your website to order online.
- Provide feedback in case there are copyright or legal issues.
How to add products. There are two ways to add products to your Business Profile.
- Manually with the Product Editor
- Use Pointy app with your Point of Sale (POS) system
To preview how products will appear to customers on Google Search, managers can click See it on Google about a minute or two after uploading.
Required guidelines. retailers and advertisers who want to add products to their Business Profiles must follow Shopping Ads policies.
Additionally, Google does not allow regulated products such as:
- Alcohol
- Tobacco
- Gambling
- Financial services
- Pharmaceuticals
- Unapproved supplements
- Health & medical devices
Read more. The new Products section was spotted on Twitter by Stefan Somborac. You can learn more about setting up products on your Google Business Profile here.
Google updated the Guidelines for Business Profiles with a new section: Products.
Google wants you to add product information to your Business Profiles!
Either:
1.) Manually add products with Product Editor (in your Business Profile)
– OR –
2.) Add products using Pointy1/3
— Stefan Somborac (@StefanSomborac) August 30, 2022
Why we care. Allowing shoppers to browse items and prices before walking into a store can help increase visits and sales from both new and returning customers. With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, retailers and advertisers who can add products to their Google Business Profiles, and want increased visibility, should do so as soon as possible.
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How to optimize PPC reporting for ad creatives
Written on August 30, 2022 at 3:57 am, by admin
Automation has stepped in to take over many of the levers we’ve had in digital advertising. Consequently, we need to shift our attention to optimizing the things we can still control.
Right now, one of the essential tools in our kit is the ability to create and fine-tune our ad creatives.
Having the right creatives in the right places helps brands break through the clutter. It also empowers us to qualify audiences by assessing the proper messaging and combinations of creative elements to target audiences and drive results effectively.
However, simply designing and testing creative pieces is not enough. To squeeze the most value out of each piece, you must:
- Effectively report on the performance of more granular creative elements.
- Analyze what’s working to communicate results.
- Continuously optimize ads for maximum efficiency.
Here’s how to develop a creative reporting strategy for PPC to wow your clients and enable your creative team to do their best work.
1. Identify key creative elements to compare results
Aside from finding out the effectiveness of a single creative piece, stakeholders want to know why something is – or isn’t – working.
Finding these answers requires breaking down different elements of the creative piece and measuring each component’s efficacy.
Some examples of creative elements you might want to consider measuring include:
- Ad type: How are your static ads performing versus video, HTML or other ad formats?
- Primary color: Is your audience more responsive to a specific background?
- Messaging: Does the overarching message of the ad resonate with your audience?
- Product: Are you offering a variety of products across your creative pieces?
- Placement: Where is your creative being shown?
Generally, being able to identify and analyze five to six elements is the sweet spot. Anything more than that, you can run the risk of analysis paralysis and data overload. But, fewer than that won’t tell you much of a story or give you actionable insight.
These elements are not necessarily static or required. For example, if you find that analyzing color doesn’t make much difference to overall performance, consider removing it from your analysis and looking at something else.
2. Analyze performance across elements
To take ad creatives to the next level, brands and marketers must prioritize the cross-analysis of creative elements against each other.
For example, you may find that one of your product offerings is underperforming against the others overall. However, it may be overperforming when combined with a specific product or color scheme.
Digging deeper into this data and gaining these insights is extremely valuable to marketers. It will enable you to communicate what is working and allow the creative team to focus on providing new content that aligns best with what is driving results.
Before you launch your creative initiatives, ensure that you have clearly defined your measurement and performance goals beforehand. This will vary depending on your campaign strategy and platform.
For example, top-of-funnel tactics may measure success by impressions and eyeballs. But, the magic happens when you get performance data from your client that shows which ads and, ultimately, which creatives best drive their lower-funnel metric performance.
3. Develop a clear feedback process for the creative team
With any reporting, the goal of building out creative reporting is to be meaningful and actionable.
Whether the creative team is in-house for your client or you are working with a third-party agency, it is critical to convey your analysis to that team so they can focus on providing new content that aligns best with driving results.
A feedback cycle might look like this:
- Setting up a bi-weekly cadence to review performance.
- Providing the creative team with direct access to your reporting.
- Teaching them how to derive the information they need.
The key to optimizing ad creatives reporting is conveying your intentions to your client and creative partners. You need to show the value of having buy-in for a properly defined feedback and communication process. When a creative reporting strategy is fine-tuned, the results will always speak for themselves.
4. Consider creative fatigue as a factor
One crucial aspect to consider when analyzing and communicating creative results is the ability to identify when creative fatigue is setting in.
What this looks like is up to marketers to quantify. But generally, if something that was performing starts to take a noticeable dip, this can indicate that it’s time to switch things up and provide fresh messaging.
By regularly monitoring your creative performance, you can quickly notice an otherwise unexplained drop in performance week over week and ensure you don’t continue spending valuable budget on stale creative.
The takeaway
With the ever-shifting landscape of the digital advertising world, we need to continually find fresh ways to redefine our roles and demonstrate our utility as marketers.
The ability to dive into the numbers, analyze creative performance and offer robust, concise reporting will ensure you continue to provide tangible value to clients and stay ahead of the competition.
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YouTube is testing a new “Promotions” Tab
Written on August 30, 2022 at 3:57 am, by admin
YouTube has added a Promotions Tab to let creators promote their channels and videos without needing to go through the Google Ads Manager.
The new Promotions Tab is within YouTube Studio and is a way to make buying ads easier, versus going through the traditional Google Ads Manager route. If creators have access to the new tool, they’ll find the tab within the Promotions section on the Content Page of Studio.
What YouTube says. YouTube thinks the new Promotions Tab will get a lot more channel managers running quick promotions for their content.
“We’ve heard that creators want more tools to help grow their channel and reach a wider audience, so we are testing a simpler end-to-end workflow in Studio instead of through Google Ads. If you’re in this experiment, you’ll see a new “Promotions” tab in the Content page of Studio.”
Read the announcement. You can read the announcement from YouTube here.
Why we care. The new feature allows channel creators and advertisers to grow their channels without having to deal with Google Ads. However, it’s also a way for YouTube to bring in more ad revenue. Channel creators who didn’t have the knowledge to run channel or video promotions through a complicated platform such as Google Ads can now do so more easily. But creators who are new to the platform should exercise caution, learn Google Ads best practices, and test their Promotions with a small budget before scaling.
Experienced advertisers can also use the Promotions Tab. Though most would likely opt out and stick to the traditional Google Ads method.
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Google tests Quick Read, 5 Min. Read labels in search results
Written on August 30, 2022 at 3:57 am, by admin
Google is testing two new labels in search results:
- Quick Read
- 5 Min. Read.
What it looks like. The labels were shared on Twitter. Here are screenshot of both types, via @Ozaemotion and @lilyraynyc:


Short content can be helpful content. For nearly a decade, skyscraper content and 10x content have been popular concepts. In short, the idea behind both was that “length is strength.”
Some SEO correlation studies appeared to back up the idea because Page 1 of Google is full of articles at 1,000+ words.
However, word count is not a ranking signal. And searchers have been growing tired of clicking on articles that discuss the entire history of a topic before finding the answer to their question buried somewhere in a 2,000+ word blog post.
Axios has built an entire news strategy around smart brevity.
Does that mean all long-form content is bad? No. In some industries, longer content is good, necessary and acceptable.
There is also no need to revisit your content strategy at this point. Don’t edit or break up all your stories so they have a reading time of 5 minutes or less.
Why we care. Any change Google makes to its SERPs can impact which sites get clicks and traffic, which makes this test one to watch. If this test becomes a feature, it could have a major impact on recipe searches, for example, which are notoriously overstuffed. It also makes sense in places where you’d expect a short answer or definition instead of a novella full of anecdotes and tangents.
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Microsoft Ads (again) extends RSA migration to Feb. 2023
Written on August 30, 2022 at 3:57 am, by admin
Advertisers now have five additional months to migrate their expanded text ads to RSAs.
The new extended deadline. In April we reported that Microsoft was extending the original June 30 deadline to August 29. Today Microsoft announced that they were once again, extending that deadline to February 1, 2023. Microsoft says the extension is in response to advertisers need for more time.
Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) will continue to serve with RSAs but advertisers will no longer be able to create new or edit existing ETAs.
What Microsoft says. Microsoft says that advertisers who have switched from ETAs to RSAs see an average of 7% conversion rate improvement in their performance.
You can read the announcement here.
RSA best practices. If you’re still migrating your ads, Microsoft suggests the following best practices:
- Ensure all your ad groups have at least one RSA
- Use the Recommendations tab to add AI generated RSAs based on your existing ETA assets.
- Use auto-apply recommendations to help automate implementations
- Use the Google import tool to mirror Google ad campaigns
Why we care. Advertisers who haven’t migrated their campaigns yet have a few more months to get it done. Microsoft won’t support ETAs after February, so migrating as soon as possible will help prevent your ads from being auto-updated, or dropping in performance.
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Google adds 3 new content guidelines for Education Q&A structured data
Written on August 25, 2022 at 3:39 pm, by admin
Google has added a new Content Guidelines section to its help document on Education Q&A structured data.
The new guidelines. Here are the new guidelines Google has added:
- Education Q&A pages must follow the same content guidelines for Q&A pages.
- Your page must contain education related questions and answers. There must be at least one question and answer pairing on your page, and the answer must be related to and answer the user’s question.
- You are responsible for the accuracy and quality of your education Q&A pages through this feature. If a certain amount of your content is found to be inaccurate based on quality and pedagogical review processes, then all or a subset of your Q&A pages may not be eligible for this feature until you resolve the issues.
Why Google added this. Google said these guidelines were created to “ensure that our users are connected with learning resources that are relevant.”
Failure to comply. If Google finds you are violating the guidelines, Google could either:
- Take manual action on your site.
- Not display your content as a rich result.
What is this page? Google released the Education Q&A structured data help document in May. This help document provides guidance on how to add Quiz structured data to flashcard and single Q&A pages so it appears in Google’s Education Q&A carousel, Google Assistant and Google Lens results.
Why we care. If you have site related to education, the Education Q&A structured data could help improve your visibility in Google results and also potentially increase click-throughs. Make sure to follow Google’s specific guidance here around relevancy, accuracy and quality so you maintain eligibility for this feature and avoid possible manual action.
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Webinar: Why digital changes drive SEO growth
Written on August 25, 2022 at 3:39 pm, by admin
Effective digital transformation can accelerate organic marketing growth—and maintain that growth despite future economic or regulatory challenges.
Join search experts from Conductor in an upcoming webinar and learn:
- The crucial role organic and SEO play in enterprise digital transformation.
- The importance of diversifying marketing efforts and what that looks like.
- How to apply data-driven insights to elevate the customer experience.
Register today for “Beyond the Buzzword: Transform Digitally to Drive Organic & SEO Growth,” presented by Conductor.
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Google out-of-home ads available for Display and 360
Written on August 25, 2022 at 3:39 pm, by admin
Google has just announced digital out-of-home ads for Display & 360. The new ad formats help to engage shoppers when they’re “out in the real world” in front of screens in public places such as stadiums, airports, bus stops, shopping centers, elevators, taxis, and more.
How they work. With digital out-of-home ads in Display and 360, brands can harness the same power of traditional advertising with placements on public screens, all in one dashboard where they can control strategy, reporting, and optimization.
Digital out-of-home ads also allow brands to run multiple versions of their message and can be based on location and time of day.
Google’s programmatic partners. “Display & Video 360 already partners with exchanges Hivestack, Magnite, PlaceExchange, Ströer SSP, VIOOH and Vistar Media. These exchanges give access to large media owners around the world like ClearChannel, Intersection, JCDecaux, Lamar and Ströer. All of this inventory can be secured via programmatic deals.”
Limited targeting and personalization. Google says that digital out-of-home ads are not personalized and no unique identifiers are used, as well as no user location data. However, advertisers are able to reach people based solely on contextual information such as the screen location.
For example, Google says a fast food business can quickly advertise on a billboard in a busy spot during lunch hour. Later that day the same billboard can promote a concert or event.
Early testing. Retailer ASOS used digital billboards in heavy footfall areas to generate awareness for their brand and drive passersby to visit their online store. Their marketing team arranged Programmatic Guaranteed deals with leading publishers like Intersection in the U.S. and JCDecaux in the U.K. and booked hundreds of digital billboards, generating 22 million viewed impressions across the two countries.

Learn more about digital out-of-home ads. You can read Google’s announcement here. If you’re interested in purchasing out-of-home inventory you can visit the Display & 360 help documentation.
Why we care. Digital out-of-home-ads are similar to traditional billboards, but instead of paying to have your ad shown in one location, all the time, you can elect to have your ad shown at certain times, in multiple locations.
These new ad types may work well for national or global brands like ASOS, Nike, Mcdonald’s, or Facebook, but small and local businesses may have a tougher time justifying their use. If you can’t specify the audience you’re targeting, and can only adjust their location or screen type, it’s likely not a solution for brands hyper-targeting a certain demographic or audience. But if you have the budget, it may be worth it to test a few cities where you operate.
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5 ecommerce SEO trends to know for the 2022 holidays
Written on August 25, 2022 at 3:39 pm, by admin
The all-important Q4 holiday shopping season is nearly here. SEO will once again be a critical channel for brands to increase their visibility and sales.
Ahead of the 2022 holidays, enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge has shared its latest research with Search Engine Land on what retailers, brands and publishers should know.
The insights are based on tracking 6,000 ecommerce keywords in 10 categories, which the company has been doing for the past three years.
Here’s what to know:
1. Brands and publishers are big competition for retailers. Retailers are no longer just competing for visibility with other retailers. Now they’re competing with brands that have adopted direct-to-consumer models. Plus, publishers that provide reviews and product overviews have made significant gains in Google’s search results.
For top ecommerce keywords:
- Retailers own 57%, down from 70% in 2020.
- Brands occupy 23%, up from 18% in 2020.
- Publishers have 11%, up from 4% in 2020.
Ecommerce visibility: retailers, brands, publishers and more, 2020-2022, BrightEdge data
2. Content-driven ecommerce. While it remains to be seen how impactful Google’s helpful content update will be, one thing is clear, according to BrightEdge: the time is now for retailers to differentiate their content so it will rank in search results. In other words, offer more than a product description.
Retailers that ultimately will win are those that will provide better content experiences. How? By:
- Focusing on content and context about the product.
- Organizing categories in ways that make it easy for the user to shop across multiple related products.
3. Blue links matter. There’s been a lot of discussion in the past decade or so about how Google is much more than 10 blue links. For key ecommerce terms, however, 70% of all clicks are going to those classic blue links, according to BrightEdge’s data.
It’s still common to find the local three-pack for ecommerce search terms on Google. However, the prominence of local packs has declined from 25% to 19% in the past two years. Also in decline: videos and image carousels. Meanwhile, People Also Ask has grown slightly.
Ecommerce Organic Real Estate, 2020-2022, BrightEdge data
4. Schema usage is growing. Schema is more aligned with shopping than ever this year. Brands, retailers and publishers are increasingly adopting various schema types to markup their content around shopping experiences, such as.
- Product
- ImageObject
- ItemList
Most common schema types for winning e-commerce rankings, 2022, BrightEdge data
5. Article and category pages dominate ecommerce. Category pages have the highest click-through rate 70% of the time. Also of note: articles about products have higher click-through rates than product pages themselves, according to BrightEdge.
Ecommerce click-through rate by keywords, BrightEdge data
Why we care. Google search – and the way people search – are always evolving. In ecommerce SEO, it’s critical to monitor what’s happening and understand what you can influence now for the upcoming holiday season, while always evolving your SEO strategy to provide the types of content and user experiences Google is likely to reward in the future.
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How to audit your Google Ads account like a pro
Written on August 24, 2022 at 12:31 pm, by admin
Brad Geddes is no stranger to paid search. And as one of the co-founders of Adalysis, he’s done his fair share of audits. In this SMX Advanced 2022 session, he provides a framework for how to audit your own accounts, or perform audits for client proposals. Let’s dive in.
Why perform an audit. There are a few reasons why you’d perform a Google Ads audit:
- Someone is unhappy with performance. Their conversions have decreased and spend has gone up. Something has gone wrong.
- The account owner wants to make sure they are following best practices and nothing is wrong.
- The account owner is happy with what they are getting, but they want more.
- The agency is performing an audit as part of a proposal and they need to know what the products are, how they sell, what their funnel is, and if part of that funnel is being ignored.
Asking the right questions. When you’re performing an account audit there are several pieces of information you need to know. Geddes addresses some of the questions you need to ask yourself or the client.
- What is the goal of your Google ads account?
- What do you want out of it?
- What do you consider a successful account?
Diving into the account. The audit.
The account overview
One of the first things you should look at is the scope. How big is the account? Is it two campaigns or 30? What is the ad spend? Are there search and display campaigns, or just search?
The second thing you want to look at is the sophistication level of the account. Is the account manager new? Will you have to educate that person? If they are a professional then you can address them in a different way than if they’d only been working in Google Ads for a few months.
Next, what are you not seeing? What is not being tracked or only used in certain campaigns? Geddes says that the most common conversions not being tracked are phone calls, downloads, and mailto links. Geddes suggests using Google’s conversion action sets and adding different conversions together and applying different activities to different campaigns. This way you can use interaction goals for top of funnel and CPA goals for bottom of funnel.
Account settings
Once you’re happy with the conversions or know what needs to be fixed, Geddes suggests looking at campaign settings. What you’re looking for is consistency in the setup process.
Some things to look for are:
- Are all of the campaign targeting the same locations?
- Are they creating ads by device?
- Are they using bid adjustments?
- How are they bidding?
Who is managing the account
Is someone actively managing the account? Geddes brings up the point that sometimes an account is spending millions of dollars per month and if it has five changes over the last 30 days, it’s likely that nobody is managing it. Other times it may have a huge number of changes but it’s all done by API, meaning that nobody is overlooking the data. And other times someone is really into the account, actively managing it and you’ll see a ton of changes and what is being worked on.
This should give you an idea of how active the management is and what is being used to make changes. Is it API, third-party scripts, a human, or something else?
Trends
Once you have the base level audit complete, Geddes suggests looking at trends. Instead of looking at month-to-month trends, look at year over year. Consider how last March did compared to this year instead of looking at February vs. March.
Ask the client if they can provide a few time frames when they were happy with the account for reference. This way you can look at date ranges, compare the visual data, and analyze whether search volume has dropped significantly. If search volume dropped, did someone remove keywords? Is impression share going up? Quality score issues could also be present as well as problems with extensions. Was a new landing page launched?
Knowing these factors can help you chase down what happened and isolate areas of change.
Looking at the big picture
Geddes makes the point that in a traditional audit, you don’t have time to look at every detail. Instead, you look into what the problem areas are.
Impression share
How often are those ads showing or not showing? Are you losing impression share due to budget? How about ad ranks? If impression share is high and the client still isn’t happy, can you add new targeting with some different display or keywords?
If the issue is budget, can you manipulate the budget to get more? If you took the budget from another campaign, would you get more? Budget manipulation is likely the easiest way to gain additional conversions, says Geddes.
Is it an ad rank issue? If so, then you’ll want to dig into Quality Score. Is it ad relevance? Is it a landing page issue?Does the landing page match the keywords in the account? Did they launch a new website or page that caused the experience to be affected? Look at the trends and timeframes of when things changed. Have a conversation with the client and find out what happened.
Keywords
What keywords is the client using? What does their targeting look like? Look at their match type usage and trends. What is their conversion rate by match type? Do they have a lot of broad match keywords with conversions, but no exact match? Is anyone going through the query report and adding those keywords to the account?
Duplicate search terms also occur. So Geddes suggests adding a negative keyword to the lower performing ad group can often result in an increase in conversions. Controlled duplicates can often result in additional conversions.
Keyword conflicts can also occur if you are blocking your own keywords. However, he points out that Google doesn’t look at match types, campaign negative lists, or MCC negative lists, so you could be blocking keywords that don’t even show up in Google. Geddes points out that Microsoft does, so you can use that to find Google conflicts.
Geddes also goes over engrams, more with negative keyword lists, search term reports and queries, and more.
Ad group sizes
Geddes uses a simple pivot table to look at ad group sizes. How many keywords are by ad group and how many search terms exist by ad group? How are the ad groups being managed? Do the ad groups need to be broken down smaller?
Consider the top spending ad groups first. Is there is a large number of them? RSAs don’t cover everything, so Geddes suggests still using granular ad group organization – even with the new ad formats.
RSA performance and pinning
When you get an idea of how that client is managing RSAs, we want to know what’s their overall asset breakdown. What is your overall pinning usage? Are they pinning everything a little bit? Nothing pinned? What’s your ad strengths? And then finally, what’s that asset performance breakdown? So you want that high level of? Are these RSAs unique and are they doing well? How is the client thinking about it?
Looking at the overall asset report you can determine how many different ads an asset is in. Is it on purpose? Did multiple people create the pins? Are they consistent?
Geddes reminds us that pinning doesn’t conversion rate or CTR. You’ll likely see a lower ad strength because you’re controlling the message. But once you have an idea of how ad groups are broken down and how they are doing, you also need to know who you should be paying attention to.
The competitor analysis
Auction insight shows you who you’re competing against. What’s that overlap rate? How are different people addressing these search terms? Do we fit the same? Do all the ads look the same? How do we stand out in this crowd? Who are your top competitors? And then looking at how their ads are selling against you, you can devise your own sell against strategy.
Once you do that, you can still do ad testing just like you could before. You may have some ad groups with multiple ad types, and some ad groups that are just all RSAs. So when you’re doing RSA ad testing, you may do them by theme, like RSA one is about discounts, RSA two is about prices, etc..
Geddes notes that clients love insights. Multi ad-group testing is a great way to let clients know that they can increase clicks, conversions, or other metrics by doing X.
Bid methods
Geddes concludes by saying that there is a lot more that can be done than what he’s discussed here, but you only have so much time to complete the audit. The big methods to look into are:
- How are they bidding
- How are they using bid modifiers
- Target CPA is common, but it may not be the best option because it does not use device modifiers to adjust bid
Audiences
How are audiences being used across the account? Geddes says that audiences are are so useful and so much reporting and audience bid adjustments can be used with several types of automated bidding.
Google doesn’t use audience modifiers to change the bids.They use the audience modifiers to say “you want to show your ads more to this audience group, or less to this audience group.” So use your bid modifier in an ad serving way. But if someone has zero audiences or they have zero search audiences, or maybe they have some display ones for remarketing. But that’s often a place of improvement in accounts. Dig deep into audiences and the ways you can create custom audiences
Wrapping up
Geddes wraps up discussing ad extensions and closing out the audit. He discusses presenting the audit to the clients, and how some can be 10 pages or even 100 pages. He concludes by reminding us that not every client will read the audit who understands your level of knowledge. They simply want to know what to do. What are the important highlights and recommendations?
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