E-commerce highlights from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report

As usual, this year’s Mary Meeker report from Kleiner Perkins takes a far-reaching look at internet trends and statistics. A large chunk of the nearly 300-page report is devoted to e-commerce, offering insight into a variety of online retail trends, from growth and product search to online retail advertising and the role of social platforms driving online sales.

According to Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trends report, e-commerce is showing no signs of slowing down. Online sales are up and growing faster than in the previous year. More people are using their phones to shop online. Amazon is taking a wider slice of the e-commerce pie (and product search), and social platforms are driving more product discoveries and purchases.

Here is a breakdown of the report’s e-commerce highlights, along with the stats:

E-commerce continues to grow

E-commerce sales reached upward of $450 billion, a 16 percent year-over-year lift. The e-commerce growth rate is up compared to the 14 percent year-over-year increase reported in 2017.

As e-commerce grows, it is taking a bigger bite of retail sales overall. According to the report, e-commerce represented a 13 percent share of all retail spend (both online and physical retail sales) in 2017. As e-commerce continues to grow, physical retail sales growth is trending toward deceleration, with less than 3 percent year-over-year growth.

Mobile shopping is also on the rise, with mobile shopping app sessions growing 54 percent year over year. In fact, mobile shopping represented the fastest-growing app session, ahead of music/media/entertainment (up 43 percent year over year), business/finance (up 33 percent year over year), utilities/productivity (up 20 percent year over year) and news/magazines (also up 20 percent year over year).

E-commerce ad revenue: Google, Amazon and Facebook

The report also included e-commerce-related advertising revenue trends for Google, Amazon and Facebook. Google saw a three-time increase in engagement for top mobile PLAs. Meanwhile, Amazon ad revenue reached $4 billion — a 42 percent year-over-year increase in ad revenue. And Facebook’s small business Pages were up 23 percent year over year. Facebook also saw e-commerce click-through rates (CTRs) at 3 percent during Q1 2018, up from 1 percent CTRs during the same period two years ago.

Using data pulled from Salesforce’s Digital Advertising 2020 report, customer lifetime value (CLV) ranked as the most important ad spending optimization metric — ahead of impressions and web traffic, brand recognition and lift, closed-won business, last-click attribution and multitouch attribution.

Amazon’s e-commerce share

In 2013, the Mary Meeker report showed Amazon owned $52 billion of e-commerce gross merchandise value (GMV), representing a 20 percent share. In 2017, that share grew to 28 percent, with Amazon owning $129 billion of GMV.

Not only is Amazon’s e-commerce share growing, the e-commerce site is the first place most people go to search for a product. Pulling data from a Survata survey of 2,000 US consumers, 49 percent of product searches start on Amazon, with only 36 percent starting on search engines (15 percent of product searches were attributed to “other”).

Social media’s role in e-commerce

Social platforms are gaining traction in product discovery and online purchasing. Based on data from Curalate’s 2017 consumer survey, 55 percent of the people polled bought a product online after discovering it on social (44 percent bought the product online later, and 11 percent bought it immediately).

When looking at which social platforms drove the largest share of product discovery, Facebook led, with 78 percent of respondents discovering products on the platform. Instagram and Pinterest saw a nearly even split, with 59 percent of respondents reporting they had discovered products on the image-centric platforms, followed by Twitter at 34 percent and Snapchat at 22 percent.

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About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Amy Gesenhues

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Bing Ads rolls out In-Market Audiences to all US advertisers

Bing Ads announced the availability of in-market audiences in the US on Tuesday, after piloting the audience targeting feature since last summer.

In-market audiences are groups of users determined to be actively in the market for a particular product or service category. In building in-market audiences, Bing Ads takes into account user purchase intent signals from Bing, MSN and other Microsoft properties.

There are now more than 170 in-market audiences to choose from — up from 14 when the pilot kicked off — across several industries including retail, travel, and financial services.

Bing says pilot participants saw up to 28 percent higher click-through rates (CTR) and up to 48 percent higher conversion rates, compared to ads without in-market audiences in July 2017.

From the Audiences tab in the Bing Ads UI, click the “Create association” button to get started. From there you’ll select an ad group and then “in-market audiences” from the ad group targeting drop-down. Advertisers can drill down into the categories to get more granular. For example, “game consoles” and “GPS & navigation” are among the options nestled under Consumer Electronics. Bing shows list sizes for each main and subcategory (all of which are bigger than in the screen shot provided below).

Advertisers choose to bid only or target and bid on the audiences. In-market audiences can also be used in combination with other audience targeting options like remarketing lists in Search and custom audiences.

[This article originally appeared on Search Engine Land.]

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About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Associate Editor, assisting with the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Ginny Marvin

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Getting Started with Programmatic Advertising

May 31, 2018

Programmatic has continued to be a big display advertising buzz word across the paid media space for almost a decade, but it still isn’t widely adopted by managers or businesses because there seems to be a disconnect between what it is, how to get started, and what happens after deciding to dive into programmatic advertising.

Today, I want to help you jump start your programmatic journey. There are a lot of resources out there to help, but I’ve narrowed it down to make it easy for you. So, there are 3 key tools and resources you need to get started:

• A Programmatic Definition
• 4 questions to ask before getting started with programmatic
• 3 resources that will guide your next programmatic steps

Programmatic Defined

To get a baseline, we need to have a rough outline of what we are defining as programmatic advertising:

Programmatic is typically a display ad buy that uses a proprietary tool or platform by a vendor or solution. That platform then uses persona and behavioral insights, along with real-time data and machine learning to produce the intended result.

Definitions are great, but only to get the ball rolling. The next step is to start asking questions to figure out if programmatic is the right next step for you.

Top 4 Questions to Ask

There are a few questions that you can ask yourself or the brand(s) you work with to give you a roadmap to getting started. These same questions can also be turned to ask a potential vendor if they might fit your needs, but we will discuss that in the resources section.

Here are what I consider to be the top questions to ask:

• What is my budget?
  • Make sure you have enough budget or can get extra budget to start a new platform like programmatic. Some vendors require spend minimums or contract lengths. Also, budget can determine data significance; so, can you get enough data out of your budget to make the campaign worthwhile.
• Do I value attribution?
  • If you are not currently looking at any sort of attribution and only looking at last touch or some sort of direct correlation, you may need to reconsider how you look at indirect value, as programmatic is usually a higher-funnel option that can help produce more results down the funnel, but does not always create instant value.
• Do I have outside data that I can use to inform my targeting?
  • Having CRM data, persona insights, and other helpful data can help inform the system to build up better results.
• Have a large product offering?
  • If you have a lot of products that target different personas, programmatic can be used to drill down to micro-personas and target the exact customer type that matches with that product. Then, show hyper relevant ads based on the product and persona.

If you are able to answer yes to one, some, or all of these questions, then naturally, Programmatic might be a great next step to test out. But, before you do, there are still some questions to be answered and guides to explore, that will help you navigate the world of programmatic.

Programmatic Resources

Hanapin’s resident programmatic expert, Bryan Gaynor has written several great guides and posts that will help you determine exactly how to use programmatic.

Choosing a Vendor

Now that we’ve answered our own checklist of questions to determine if Programmatic is the right strategy, we then need to choose a programmatic vendor.

This guide delivers a checklist to help evaluate partners and find the right solution for your needs.

How to Choose a Programmatic Vendor

Taking Programmatic to the next level

So, now you’ve found a vendor, started a campaign and want more. Don’t fear,

“Here are 5 tips that will help increase the quality of your overall strategy and improve efficiency.”

5 Tips to take Programmatic Advertising to the Next Level

The Full Guide

There’s always more to learn and having a comprehensive guide can make it even better. Here’s the definitive programmatic guide for PPC Managers. This guide will walk you through 6 areas to give you the knowledge to get started with Programmatic.

• A full programmatic definition
• Why Programmatic is different than typical display
• Tips for Testing
• Issues in Programmatic
• What’s next in Programmatic

Get The Definitive Programmatic Guide for PPC Managers

Final thoughts

Programmatic is really part of the next wave in the industry that will continue to grow and adapt. Not only in display, but other areas as well. We are already seeing expansion into audio, video and tv, and even billboards. Also, now with the continued expansion of attribution modeling, the touchpoints are becoming easier to understand and optimize for results.

I highly encourage you to read the above resources and start your programmatic journey.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Michael Knight

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Google Asks For Photo Of Business Hours

Ben Fisher noticed and posted on Twitter that if you try to edit a business’s hours in Google search under the local knowledge panel, it will ask you to submit a photo or scan of the business hours. Google asks you to “take a close-up photo that clearly shows the hours for Google to scan.” Google said that adding “a photo to help us verify your suggestion.” Google also said the the photos can be used publicly under your name.

Here is a screen shot, again, this only shows when you edit a listing through Google search, not in Google My Business:

In Google My Business, since you are verified, you do not need to upload any photo evidence:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Google: Crawl Budget Optimization Is Overrated

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that he believes that crawl budget optimization is overrated in his mind. He said for most sites, it doesn’t make a difference and that it only can help really massive sites.

John wrote “IMO crawl-budget is over-rated.” “Most sites never need to worry about this. It’s an interesting topic, and if you’re crawling the web or running a multi-billion-URL site, it’s important, but for the average site owner less so,” he added.

In fact, Google told us that for their own properties, they don’t care about crawl budget. So this comes as no surprise.

Here is John’s tweet:

IMO crawl-budget is over-rated. Most sites never need to worry about this. It’s an interesting topic, and if you’re crawling the web or running a multi-billion-URL site, it’s important, but for the average site owner less so.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) May 30, 2018

This statement may have put a dagger through some SEOs hearts.

Here is more from John on this topic:

I think it’s worth being clear about it all though. Removing 25 useless pages is great for a leaner site, and can help users from getting lost there, but it’s not a crawl-budget question. Would people only do it for a SEO bonus? How can we help you to help them?

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) May 30, 2018

Ultimately y’all are the experienced experts, you’ve seen what works & what doesn’t. I trust you to recognize when fixing 5 small things is critical vs when it’s just busy-work.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) May 30, 2018

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Recapping The Say Something Nice About An SEO/SEM Series

In October, I thought it would be nice to say something nice about the folks in our industry and I started a daily post about how specific individuals in our SEO/SEM industry deserved to be honored and called out as being special to the industry. The purpose was to make sure some of the people in our industry knows during their lifetime that they are appreciated and mean a tremendous amount to a lot of people in our space.

I started writing these on November 27, 2017 and wrote one every work day for the past 185 days or just over 6 months! And what is amazing is that there are dozens and dozens of people who were nominated that said they do not want the recognition and asked me not to post about them here. There are also another hundred or so I tried to reach out to several times but never heard back from, so I was unable to post on them. Finally, there were some folks who were nominated but I found very little public SEM related content around their names and thus couldn’t post about them.

Here is a recap of those folks we covered here:

Here is a list of those who we reached out to but didn’t post about because of the reasons listed above, but keep in mind, many of these people were nominated multiple times but I was unable to get information back from the individual to post about them:

• Alicia Anderson
• Ram Babu
• Andy Beal
• Kevin Bland
• Alessandro Bogliari
• Kitten Boheme
• Niels Bosma
• Jessica Bowman
• Steve Brownlie
• Bonnie Burns
• Alexandra Cerbu
• Patryk Ciechanowski-Mirek
• James Clemens
• Dave Collins
• Ben Cook
• Dean Cruddace
• Matt Cutts
• Glen Dimaandal
• Garrett French
• Syed Furqan Ali
• Glenn Gabe
• Alina Ghost
• Chris Green
• Dylan Grigorov
• Brian Harnish
• Doug Heil
• Jon Henshaw
• Anders Hjorth
• Cody Jerry
• Ratan Jha
• Ryan Jones
• Stuart Jones
• George Karapalidis
• Michael King
• Awadh Kishore
• Annmarie Knutson
• Sanjay Kumar
• Pramod Kumar
• Brian Lafrance
• Mark Lamy
• Jennifer Lopez
• Paul Madden
• Ankit Manocha
• Perry Marshall
• Mark Martin
• Matt Mason
• Oliver Mason
• Debra Mastaler
• Glenn May
• Sam Michelson
• John Mueller
• Jim Munro
• Lisa Myers
• Kelvin Newman
• Fersu Oktem
• Dave Oremland
• Hardik Oza
• Viral Panchal
• Piyush Parmar
• Neil Patel
• Jd Prater
• Dilip Rajpurohit
• Dan Ray
• Don Rhoades
• Mike Rhodes
• Sylvain Richard
• Shawn Rosko
• Richart Ruddie
• John S. Britsios
• Barry Schwartz
• Yasir Siddiqui
• Marshall Simmonds
• Sanjay Singhal
• Indira Sir
• Gerrid Smith
• Ann Stanley
• Greg Sterling
• Jessie Stricchiola
• Danny Sullivan
• Stacy Sutton-Williams
• Dan Thies
• Lino Urunuela
• Serdar Usta
• Matt Van Wagner
• Jarno Van Driel
• Michael Vandemar
• Juan Venegas
• Anthony Verre
• Daniel Vollgraaf
• Aaron Wall
• Deacyde
• Suzanneh

Finally, like i said before, there was a nice number of people who did not want to be mentioned at all.

I’d like to say that I am sorry if you are on this list and I did not cover you, I did really try to reach out but I did not hear back. We all deeply appreciate everything you all have done for our industry.

I hope this made series made at least one person smile and feel just a bit better about themselves. I may do this again in the future, but for now, I am closing this series up and giving the deepest and most respectful thank you to everyone in our industry for making it such an awesome space to be in.

Forum discussion at Google+.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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What data do you need to find, pitch and win new SEO clients?

For SEO agencies and independent consultants looking for new business, a two-step strategy might be all you need to demonstrate your efficacy and separate from competitors. First, identify prospective clients that are well-suited to your offering. Second, send them a pitch that unequivocally communicates the potential results they can achieve from your services. The key to both is data and, conveniently, the same data that you use to recognize great potential clients in the first step can also be used to make a powerful case as to what your services can deliver for them.

Identifying your ideal SEO clients

The businesses you probably want to approach are those that are tuned in to how SEO works and have already invested in it, but that still have a veritable need for your services in order to achieve their full SEO potential. Naturally, a brand that has already climbed to the top of the most relevant search engine results pages (SERPs) isn’t a great candidate because they simply don’t need the help. Nor is a business with no SEO experience and no real SERP presence; they might require a particularly hefty effort to be brought up to speed, and perhaps won’t be as likely to invest in – and commit to – an ongoing SEO engagement.

While investigating potential business opportunities within this desired Goldilocks Zone of current SEO success, you might also be looking to target companies in the industries that your agency has previously done well in – both to leverage those past successes and demonstrate relevance to prospective clients with an adjacent audience. This makes it easy for prospects to see themselves in the shoes of those clients you’ve already helped, and for you to apply and repeat your tried-and-tested techniques.

Putting this advice together, you can begin the client search process by looking at keywords important to industries you’re familiar with. You will probably want to explore companies within the mid-range SERPs (ranks 10–30) that could contend for the top spots if they had better professional assistance. You can then perform an analysis of these sites to determine their potential for SEO improvement. For example, a potential client that derives a great deal of its traffic from a keyword in which it still has room to grow and move up in the SERPs is ideal.

Use data to make your pitches irrefutable

While a slick email pitch can go a long way toward winning over new clients, it’s hard to beat the power of data-driven evidence (of course, your pitch can succeed on both style and substance). Be sure to use specific insights about the client’s SEO performance in your pitch – adding visuals will help make your case more clear and digestible. Also, consider using an SEO case study focused on your success in an overlapping space to offer an example of the results they could expect. Your pitch should culminate with a call-to-action for the potential client to get in touch to go deeper into the data and discuss how to proceed.

There are a number of approaches to framing your pitch. Here are four examples of different appeals you can use:

• Show how you can increase the client’s share of voice for a high value keyword
• Tell the business about keywords they’re missing out on
• Show where the client could (and should) be building backlinks
• Explain technical SEO issues the client has and how to fix them.

Show how you can increase the client’s share of voice for a high value keyword

In SERPs, holding a top ranking is often exponentially superior. For example, it’s not unusual to see the top result capture 30% of all traffic (or ‘share of voice’) for a given keyword, while the tenth result receives a mere 1%.

Craft a pitch that pairs a result like this with data on how much traffic the keyword actually delivers to the company’s site, and the vast potential to multiply that traffic by improving their share of voice for that keyword becomes clear.

Tell the business about keywords they’re missing out on

Where a client has gaps in their keyword strategy, demonstrating your ability to fill them and deliver traffic the prospect didn’t realize they could be earning goes a long way towards proving your agency’s expertise and value. These keywords can be found by examining sites that share an audience overlap with the potential client, and then studying the keywords they rank highly on. This investigation may yield unexpected results, reinforcing that your agency can drive results in areas the client never would have thought of without your expertise.

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Show where the client could (and should) be building backlinks

Discover gaps where a potential client’s competitors are outmaneuvering and outperforming them when it comes to establishing links from other sites – and then report these within the framework of a strategy that will close these gaps at every level. If a client clearly isn’t pursuing this strategy (i.e. if the average competitor has multiple times their backlinks), be sure to communicate the value of competing on this front.

Explain technical SEO issues the client has and how to fix them

To use this approach, perform an audit of the potential client’s site to identify opportunities to improve its SEO practices. This is especially important if your firm specializes in these services.

Providing specific tips and guidance serves as a substantial upfront gesture, and clearly demonstrates the value of an ongoing relationship.

Conclusions

Conveying the specific remedies and additions that you would pursue to optimize a client’s site and search strategy serves as a strong introduction and major first step toward becoming indispensable to the client as the one hired to execute a winning SEO game plan. Be sure to personalize your pitches as much as possible to stand out from competitors, while ensuring that compelling data makes up the crux of your appeal and the proof that you’re the firm to help that business achieve its full SEO potential.

Kim Kosaka is the Director of Marketing at Alexa.com, which provides insights that agencies can use to help clients win their audience and accelerate growth.

Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?

Get top insights and news from our search experts.

Related reading

Good SEO practice is the difference between getting your site ranked as high up the search results and possible, and reducing the chance of a click through to your site. It can be frustrating to spend a great deal of time and effort on SEO and not see the results. Pius Boachie shares some tips you can quickly implement to make a difference.

Search engines are playing an increasingly important role in the future of the internet, and it’s important for web designers as well as SEOs to be able to keep up. Amanda DiSilvestro shares 10 aspects of SEO to master as a starting point.

Tracking your keywords on mobile and desktop is absolutely essential for both reporting accuracy and for supporting SEO strategies. Jessie Moore explains why you should separate your keyword strategies for each device, and shares quick tips for consideration

The visual search ecosystem is growing rapidly, with innovations from Google, Amazon, eBay, AliExpress and Wayfair. And 1 year on from the launch of ASOS’ Style Match tool, Andrew Charlton reviews how to prepare for an visual-search future.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Kim Kosaka

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How brands can find and keep customers without third-party data

If you come back in the next world as a kind of data, try to avoid coming back as third-party data.

That’s because third-party data — collected in almost every way except a direct contact between a brand and its customers — is rapidly falling out of favor. It’s battling the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), restrictions from Apple’s and Google’s browsers, and a general sense among brands that third-party data isn’t the highest quality.

As we head into what is apparently a new era for customer data, in fact, a common refrain among some data providers, particularly Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), is that first-party data — directly collected by a brand about its customers or visitors — is the kind that brands should focus on.

But can brands live on first-party data alone?

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

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About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Barry Levine

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Stop Whining. Start Winning. Swiftly Navigating the New AdWords UI

May 30, 2018

The new AdWords interface is here, and everyone has an opinion about the new layout. This blog is not an opinion piece. You won’t find me crying into my pillow about the AdWords interface updating by the end of 2018, scrapping our old AdWords dashboard navigation for good.

This blog will teach you the more technical side of actually navigating the interface, for those of us who have been slamming the “Return to previous AdWords” button shamelessly for months. You’ll also learn features that Google has built into the new interface that will make your life easier and help you to save time, and the bottom of this post includes a cheat sheet, highlighting those fresh features available in the new interface by the type of marketer you are and the type of feature offered exclusively in the new experience.

If you’re an “old timer” like me, you may find the new layout difficult to navigate technically. I first encountered the AdWords interface in 2007 when it looked like this and started using the AdWords UI in earnest at my first PPC job in 2012. And here I am, sitting in trainings with the new kids at Hanapin Marketing and they reel back when I open up the old UI. “Wait, what is this dashboard? I’ve never seen this before…” Get with the picture, granny.

Let’s cut through the strategy and get right to the heart of what’s in the interface, how you can use it more efficiently right now. Like, right this moment.

1. Problem: Everything moves too slowly, and the flip-out menus are driving me nuts.

Solution: There are shortcuts, so please use them! You can show or hide the navigation panel with a quick stroke of Shift+W. Blow it away to focus on the task at hand. This feature is especially useful when using a narrow screen.

You can find the shortcuts by pushing the ? button while in the new interface. Here is a list:

You can also click the “Expand table” button.

Here’s a gif of the little button in action. I could swear I heard angles sing the first time I clicked it:

The “Show less space” row narrowing button right next to the “Expand table” button allows you to see more rows without scrolling as well.

2. Problem: The filters and column selections are all in different places. I’m not used to weeding through my choices in this layout.

Solution: We’ve all been clicking the cute little filter icon and the striped column icon to break down our data properly. But once it’s clicked, you have to hunt and peck for exactly what you want. Well, actually you don’t. Do you know that you can type your desired filters now in the filter bar? Stop scrolling through filters trying to find the perfect one. Say you want to filter by campaign name. Just type in what you’re looking for and it Google will auto fill your choices:

As a bonus, Google remembers the filters you used recently so you can pull them up again. They’re shown just above the auto-fill options when you’re typing.

You can similarly type a search for columns, but this system is much more clunky. The search bar re-sets every time you select a new column choice. I’d recommend using the “Save your column set” feature more than ever in the new interface, to avoid ripping your hair out in frustration.

3. Problem: They took away the dimensions in the new UI.

Solution: Yes, they did. But dimensions came back! They’re now called “Predefined Reports” and be found under reporting.

4. Problem: Selecting dates in the new UI is awkward. 

Solution: Flip between dates easily with the backward and forward buttons. For example, looking at the last 30 days:

Click the backward button and you can thread back in time.

Admittedly, I continue to find the date comparison selection tool a bit janky, especially when I’m trying to compare to the previous period and the interface doesn’t want to compare to an entire previous month. At times, typing dates can be easier than playing with the little blue and yellow highlighter in the calendar, which I’ve been wont to do until I simply give up and just type the dates into the custom date view.

Bonus! Cheat Sheets:

If you ever feel unsure about new features, these pages are a great place to start. Bookmark these pages and refer back to them when you can’t find something. It will be your translation key in the coming months before October hits.

Changes that may put a hitch in your giddy up:

• Most automated rules will easily pass over from one interface to the other, but there are some exceptions you may want to check – notably, if you have a rule that is dependent on a retired AdWords column – listed here – you’ll want to update accordingly.
• I recall my old peers drilling into me the wisdom of using “Target and Bid” when choosing display audiences, to ensure only the selected audience is targeted. This terminology has now been retired and the new settings are called:
  • “Target and Bid” = Targeting
  • “Bid Only” = Observations
• Ad Extensions now have a fresh associations view that may confuse the seasoned PPC marketer, since the view is more designed to look at performance of the same extension across multiple associations. One can change the associations by ticking the boxes and clicking Add or Edit. But you can schedule extensions now – nifty! You can also get a quick rundown in a pop-up menu from Google stating, “This extension is associated with the account, 6 campaigns, and 17 ad groups.” It’s a nice summary for auditing extensions. Also the sitelink URL shows in the pop-up menu as well, eliminating the need to click in to every single extension to check destinations!

Can’t-Miss ad features for e-commerce and retail marketers:

• Promotion Extensions integrate promotion dates, occasions (select holidays), promo codes, and more into your ads – and you can schedule them in advance.
• Showcase ads for those of us with the recommended 1,000+ products in our feed. This ad type allows a variety of products to be shown in a storefront format.
• Household Income targeting has been available for a while now in the new UI.
• Import in-store sales into the interface for additional reporting clout if you have physical store locations.

Bid changes for call-focused marketers:

• Call bid adjustments (for call only campaigns and call extensions) are now available in the menu under Advanced bid adj. – I’m excited to see if and when this feature is extended beyond call bidding!

New reports and targeting for all marketers:

• In general, reporting download options in the new UI is rad. You can compress the file, select whether or not you want title and date range or summary rows. It’ll make your job easier when you’re crunching numbers and pivoting in Excel.
• We’ve all heard about the new opportunities and recommendations tab, the at-a-glance reporting, and n-grams. These features are at the top right and featured front and center when you log in to your account.
• The ad version history report can be accessed on an ad-by-ad basis. Marketers can now see the ad performance for previous versions of an ad in the new interface.
• Landing page performance reports where you can test mobile friendliness and see which landing pages drive the most sales.
• The Audience page and display network campaigns have been updated so you can get a top level insights and a view of which audiences are showing across all campaigns, or those you filter. And speaking of audiences, you can now target In-Market Audiences on search!
• Drafts and Experiments got a facelift. Notice that you can split test bits and pieces of your ad copy now, using Ad Variations.

New optional settings for all marketers:

• The Global Insight Tag will track all things seamlessly across multiple Google products. But never fear! If you are using the AdWords tag it will not be retired in October. If have a preexisting global site tag on all pages of your website, you can configure your existing tag to send data to multiple AdWords or Google Analytics accounts, which is pretty sweet.

For those of us looking to get into video:

The new user interface has had a rough start, but I’m actually starting to like it, thanks to some of these shortcuts and navigation tricks. Be sure to print out the shortcut menu and slap it on your wall. And remember what Alan Watts said:

“No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.” – Alan Watts

So create a little space, give yourself a lot of time to learn, and have fun with the new AdWords interface. Make lots of fits and starts, and eventually you’ll get into the groove of things. And thanks to Google, the new UI is improving every day. If you see something that keeps tripping you up, be sure to Tweet at Google support or submit feedback through the “?” icon next to the bell in your AdWords account, so the Google team can continue to improve the new interface.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Mary Hartman

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Google On GDPR Pop Ups Notices With Search & SEO

Last Friday GDPR touched down and I am sure over the past week, you received hundreds of GDPR related emails mostly from companies updating their privacy policies. But you probably also have been running into web sites that show notices about their new privacy policies and GDPR compliance changes when you first visit the site. Sometimes those notices are small banners at the top or side or footer of their web site and sometimes those notices are pop ups or something more intrusive.

How would these impact SEO and your Google search rankings? Well, Google doesn’t have any exception for the intrusive mobile interstitial penalty for GDPR requirements. You do not need to use an intrusive interstitial to notify your web site visitors about any GDPR changes to your site.

John Mueller from Google answered the question on yesterday’s Google webmaster hangout at the 37:55 mark into the video. He basically said you can use pop ups but make sure they are not intrusive, make sure the content is still visible to GoogleBot and make sure to test it with the mobile-friendly testing tool. Here is what John said:

A question about GDPR pop-ups. How will they affect SEO and usability?

I don’t. They are sometimes quite annoying, these pop-ups but they are how they are.

So in general, if the the pop-up is on top of the content itself, so if the content loads within HTML and you’re using Javascript to show a pop-up on top of that, then we’ll still have that normal content behind the pop-up to to index normally. So that part usually works fairly well.

What doesn’t work on our side is if you replace all of the content with just an interstitial or if you redirect to an interstitial and Googlebot has to click a button to actually get to the content itself then that’s not going to happen. Then what will happen there is will index the interstitial content because that’s only thing we have on this page and we won’t know that you can actually like click a button and get a little bit more information there. Googlebot also doesn’t keep a cookie. So it wouldn’t be able to say well I’ll click accept now and the next time I crawl your website you just show me your content normally. Googlebot wouldn’t be able to to kind of return that cookie to you and say I agree with your your kind of Terms of Service.

So those are kind of the two extremes that we’ve seen.

For the most part sites get this fairly right. And you can test it of course, you see it fairly quickly in search, if your site doesn’t show up at all and the search results for normal content and probably we can’t pick that up anymore. So for the most part I think that’s working well.

You can test this on a technical level with things like the mobile-friendly test. Where you can render the page as a mobile Googlebot and then look at the HTML that is generated. So within the mobile-friendly test you can now look at the HTML after rendering and you can double check in he HTML that we can actually find your normal content and not just the interstitial.

Here is the video embed at the start time:

Forum discussion at YouTube.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Google: PDFs Are Not Mobile Friendly

Well, this is one of those no-brainer posts, but hey – I’ll say it anyway, PDF documents are simply not mobile-friendly. They require you to pinch and zoom to really see the content and images in the PDF and thus, are not optimized for mobile devices. So thus, Google does not mark PDF documents in their search results as mobile friendly.

Michael Stebbins shared a screen shot on Twitter of Google marking a PDF on his site as not being mobile-friendly and asked John Mueller of Google why. Here is that screen shot:

John said because PDFs are not mobile friendly. He said he will double check for sure, but he doesn’t think Google labels any PDFs as being mobile friendly.

What’s a mobile friendly PDF? Would love to learn more!

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) May 29, 2018

I’m pretty sure we don’t flag any PDF as mobile-friendly, but I’ll double-check with the team. Mobile-first indexing is independent of whether something is mobile-friendly, so that wouldn’t play a role either.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) May 29, 2018

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Is The Google Related Search Box Replacing Top Carousel?

I saw several tweets in the past 24-hours or so from people about a new Google search feature, well, not new, but maybe a new treatment, where the related searches show in a box, with icons, towards the bottom of the search results page. Previously, at least based on my tests, I see that top carousel slider showing that content across the top of the search results.

So for example, a search on [adobe programs] returns the carousel at the top, which is not new:

But what folks like @MordyOberstein, @i_praveensharma and @ramesh_s_bisht see is the box towards the bottom:

Getting related search from past few days. Is Google testing again?
CC @i_praveensharma @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/pwyy8hw0Ir

— Ramesh Singh (@ramesh_s_bisht) May 30, 2018

Has anyone seen this ‘Related Search’ carousel at the bottom of the search results page on Google?#SEO #SERP
cc: @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/AowxLQy3oH

— Praveen Sharma (@i_praveensharma) May 29, 2018

For all of these, I see the carousel at the top of the page.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Steve Morgan – The Search Community Honors You

This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series – feel free to nominate someone over here.

Steve Morgan 32 years old, lives in Cardiff, South Wales, United Kingdom with his wife Emma, who works in insurance and their two young boys. He also wanted to thank his parents, Bernard & Marilyn, who he said “supported me massively over the years, especially since going self-employed (as they’re self-employed themselves, and so helped me out with a lot of advice in the early days).”

Steve is probably most well known for the Cardiff SEO Meet, where is organizes SEO meetups in Cardiff, South Wales with a member base of almost 500 people. They host a nice number of meetups throughout the year in that region. Steve also has his own blog, where has has produced tons of SEO content over the years. He is very active in sharing on social media and works hard to make improvements not to his own SEO skillset but always is trying to help others get better.

He was nominated anonymously:

He was one of the people who helped me build my own agency a long time ago, as well as being a great guy he organises Cardiff SEO Meet in the UK which is a fast growing meet-up to help people in the Cardiff scene learn SEO and increase their ROI through smart digital marketing. Overall a great and very kind guy that although never wanted to build a large agency is a very highly technical and smart SEO consultant.

Steve Morgan Bio: Steve Morgan is a freelance SEO consultant based in Cardiff, South Wales, UK. Having been working in SEO for nearly 10 years, he’s been freelancing – under the name Morgan Online Marketing – since 2013. He also launched Cardiff SEO Meet back in 2016, which has just run its 7th event.

Favorite thing about the SEM community? Its generosity. There’s such a willingness to share with others, so that we can learn from one another. And at events and conferences like brightonSEO, everyone is so friendly with one another (even rival companies and agencies). I love it.

One piece of advice to the SEMs out there? Don’t just work on your employer’s or clients’ sites – start a blog or site of your own. I learnt so much more about SEO after setting up my own blog and playing around with that. Create and work on side-projects in your own time if you can.

Favorite things in general? Color – Green (although the teenager in me wants to say black, haha!)

Food – It’s a tie between Chinese takeaway and BBQ ribs

Drink – Coffee in the day, red wine in the evening

Thing to do – At the moment it’s going on epic walks while playing Pokémon GO (yep, I’m still playing it…!)

Music – Rock music! Bands like The Wildhearts, Rocket From The Crypt, The National, etc. etc.

Video Game – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and anything from the Final Fantasy series

TV show – Attack on Titan

What you want to be known for in the SEM space? Ooo that’s a tough one… I’ve always been a bit of an SEO all-rounder, and these days I blog less about the intricacies of SEO and more about freelancing/self-employment, running events, etc. One thing I like doing is creating big impact but low-budget content marketing campaigns for clients. I gave a talk at brightonSEO a few years back about one that I did. I love trying lots of different types and formats of content, and seeing what works well and what doesn’t – whether that’s its performance on organic search, social media, as a link building asset, and so on.

To learn more about Steve, check out his blog or his freelance site and connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series – feel free to nominate someone over here.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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DoubleClick Bid Manager opens up digital audio ad buying globally

As investment in digital audio advertising continues to grow, Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager is rolling out support globally for buying audio ads programmatically across a handful of streaming services. The company announced Wednesday that advertisers can now buy ad inventory programmatically from Google Play Music, Spotify, SoundCloud and TuneIn, and soon Pandora.

In the US last year, digital audio ad revenues topped $1.6, according to the IAB, an increase of 39 percent over 2016. Mobile accounted for roughly 75 percent of digital audio ad revenues in 2017.

“We are thrilled to see DoubleClick embracing programmatic audio. This launch makes it possible for Bid Manager customers to reach Spotify’s highly engaged audience across video, display and audio formats,” said Zuzanna Gierlinska, head of programmatic, Europe at Spotify in a statement.

The supported exchanges for audio ads are DoubleClick’s own Ad Exchange and Rubicon. DoubleClick Ad Exchange is the inventory provider for Google Play Music.

Advertisers can upload .mp3 audio spots in a variety of lengths, including 15- and 30-seconds and an optional companion image or HTML5 asset to display around the publisher’s audio player.

DBM uses the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) standard to serve audio ads. Advertisers are not able to use third-party VAST tags, but can include a registered Universal Ad ID in VAST tags.

Reporting metrics include audio completion rates, listen rates by quartile, mute and pause rates, Audio Media Cost eCPCA (media cost/completes), impressions and clicks on the companion creative and more.

In terms of pricing expectations, “Rates for audio placements are significantly higher than the rates for standard display impressions. We recommend setting CPM rates for audio with the same strategy you’d use for video inventory,” says Google in its support pages.

Programmatic firm MightyHive tested digital audio ad buying through DBM to extend the reach of a CPG client’s radio campaign aimed at driving awareness. Ads were targeted by DMA and age group. MightyHive says the test flight yielded 7.5 million impressions and over 7,500 clicks across mobile web, desktop and app with completion rates above 95 percent and a CTR on companion creative of .11 percent. If that CTR doesn’t sound impressive, consider it’s about twice the rate of the typical banner campaign.

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About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Associate Editor, assisting with the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Ginny Marvin

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Where we’re going, we won’t need websites

As voice becomes the dominant force in search and people spend more time consuming content via social media, the future for the humble home page looks very bleak.

If comScore is correct and half of all searches by 2020 are made via voice, a crucial question arises: will we still need websites?

Even if the research is over-egged and the tipping point is reached a year or two later, the question still remains.

As consumers increasingly get used to asking Alexa, Siri or Google for the news headlines, a dinner recipe or flight options for a weekend away, answers will not be provided by ten blue SEO links. Rather, the options will be weighed up by an algorithm before what is considered to be the best answer is read out.

Remember Lycos and AltaVista?

New technology can always delight early adopters, but as it becomes more mainstream, seasoned observers know some huge names may become casualties as the public adopts new behaviors. Remember AltaVista, AskJeeves and Lycos, as well as when Yahoo! was a force in search? Read these names out loud and you may be less inclined to wonder whether voice will have an impact and shift focus to picking winners and losers.

Make no mistake, this is happening: a tide of disruption heading for search. Canalys estimates 56.3 million smart speakers will ship this year alone. The Amazon Echo has first-mover advantage and so has a 69% share. Google is in second spot with 25%.

However, given the core function of these speakers (beyond playing audio) is to perform voice searches, it would take a brave digital marketing executive to bet against Google closing the gap and even coming out on top – eventually.

Brands rush to the call of Alexa

To get an idea of how this impacts search, as well as consumers’ interaction with their favorite brands, one need only look at the early rush to set up Alexa skills.

In travel, Expedia and Kayak can find flights and trips via voice search; an Uber or Lyft ride can be hailed too. Capital One lets users check out their balance and Vitality has recipes and health advice available. If that sounds too healthy for a Friday night, both Pizza Hut and Domino’s are set up to receive an order via Alexa. On the other hand, Vitality allows users to find their own recipes and discover a workout to shift the calories.

Then, of course, there are the weather, travel and news travel updates that can be handled via voice rather than a visit to a website.

VR keyboard, anyone?

It isn’t just voice. Canalys is predicting that this is the year when VR headset sales will increase five-fold as the sector moves towards shipping almost 10 million units per year by 2021.

It’s hard to imagine VR users typing a search enquiry into a virtual keyboard in the air. Even harder to imagine that they will scan through a list of blue links to no doubt pick out a text-heavy page.

Results will be aggregated through a dominant source of information in the each vertical: taking a tour of your next house will likely be made possible by Zoopla, or a similar aggregator; picking out a hotel via a VR version of Expedia; test-driving your next car perhaps via something like AutoTrader. Content would be coming from multiple sources, but will likely be accessed through a single aggregator: no need to type in a query and certainly no blue links to choose which home page to visit.

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Is the home page already dying?

This is already starting to happen in news and media. Alarm bells no doubt started to ring when a chart for the New York Times showed how bad things had got with direct traffic.

Source: New York Times.

The dates are old, but that underlines how this trend for news sites to lose direct traffic has been developing for at least 5 years.

Look at the latest figures for two British newspapers, The Times and The Telegraph, and the trend seems very clear. Even though the sites are subscription-based (presumably giving users an impetus to get the most from their monthly fee and bookmark the home page), direct traffic accounts for one third and one fifth of all visitors respectively. This is dwarfed by search, with social bringing up the rear.

Source: SimilarWeb

If you then compare these paid-for sites with two free resources, The Mirror and Independent.co.uk, the trend becomes even more notable. When people have no need to validate paying a monthly fee to get their money’s worth, both sources of free news sink to just one in five visitors arriving direct. Here social is far closer to direct traffic in importance, with search still way out ahead as the number one source of visitors.

Source: SimilarWeb

Putting the data to one side and asking consumers where they get their news results in a huge spike in favor of social media. GlobalWebIndex results from 2017 revealed nearly half, or 44%, say they get news from social media while 37% said they go direct to a news website. This 37% is matched by those who reveal they get their news via referrals from ‘somewhere else’ and a news aggregator service. The overall percentage exceeds 100% because of mixed behaviors.

People say they access news mostly through social, but the traffic-monitoring data says mostly through search. Either way, going direct to the home page is a habit the majority of people no longer have.

The mobile factor

It’s also clear that mobile websites’ importance is beginning to fade. App usage has now overtaken the mobile web, suggesting that although people still use mobile sites, they have favorite apps for brands or key tasks.

It’s perfectly reasonable to assume this behavior will tap in to the trend for brands to make their content voice-friendly. If a consumer has a preference to book hotels on Expedia and dinner with Domino’s, they will likely ask Alexa or Google to look for a Paris weekend deal or a two-for-one pizza offer through these favored brands. No need for a home page, though the app might be required to give an order reference or calendar reminder for peace of mind.

No more home pages?

If you look at the direction of travel, the future of the home page appears bleak.

Within 2 years we’ll hit a tipping point in voice search and this year should see a spike in sales of VR headsets – the former having far more immediate effect on search than the latter.

Also, in a mobile-first world, consumers are steering towards apps where they already know which brand they want to interact with, or trust an aggregator to come up with the right offer.

I’d suggest this means the home page will still limp on for a few years, providing information to voice search algorithms, as well as being a resource for information and ecommerce.

Ultimately, the job of a search marketer is going to shift towards getting their clients’ products and services in front of consumers via voice, and perhaps VR. There is no need for a home page here and we’re already seeing, particularly in news, how home pages are increasingly not the first port of call.

Consumers are increasingly looking for the simplicity of using voice and brands must adapt to find the best ways to make their ‘skill’ used for those searches or to craft their data so it becomes the top answer.

This will mean websites will eventually fall into disuse and become redundant. Not so much a fall off a cliff, but a long march into obscurity.

Kevin Gibbons is Co-Founder and CEO of BlueGlass SEO and marketing agency

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This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Kevin Gibbons

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