Gary Illyes from Google confirmed yesterday that GoogleBot does not support HTTP pipelining. The truth is, most modern browsers don’t support it either by default. Here is Gary’s tweet on the subject:
TIL that Googlebot doesn’t support HTTP pipelining.
HTTP pipelining is a technique in which multiple HTTP requests are sent on a single TCP (transmission control protocol) connection without waiting for the corresponding responses.
This concept is supported in HTTP/2, the specific technique was superseded by multiplexing via HTTP/2, which is supported by most modern browsers and is likely supported by GoogleBot.
So if your site is over HTTP/2, it can benefit from this technique but the old version of HTTP pipelining is not supported by GoogleBot.
We all know Facebook campaigns with Conversion objectives. The idea is to define a standard or custom event tracked by Pixel as a conversion action so Facebook Algorithm can optimize the ad delivery by showing ads to users who are more likely to complete that action. This can be visits to a “thank you” page, e-book download confirmation or in more complex cases we get to set a Custom Conversion for events such as button clicks, time spent on a page, scroll depth, etc. We have a blog post on that, in case you’re interested.
But, what if our desired conversion is something not online and therefore not trackable by Pixel? Here are a few examples:
A business that runs lead generation campaigns and follows up with leads over the phone to qualify them. They would like to optimize the delivery towards gettings SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads)
A chain business that runs store traffic or coupon download campaigns, but the final transaction (conversion) happens in the physical store and on a POS (Point of Sales) machine. They would like to optimize the delivery of their Facebook Ads for customers with the highest Lifetime Value.
A client who promotes events on Facebook but would like to measure and optimize for event attendance and not just online registrations.
This is where Facebook Offline Events feature shines. Let’s see what it is and how it works.
As you can see in all of the above examples the conversion is an offline event. Offline Conversion tracking allows us to close the tracking and optimization loop by feeding offline data back to the Facebook algorithm and tie our digital efforts to real-world outcomes. As a result, we will be able to answer questions like:
Which Campaign / Ad set / Creative generated the most successful phone calls?
What Age group / Geo / Gender / Placement performed the best in terms of generating SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads)?
What Campaign / Ad set / Creative has generated the highest amount of in-store sales?
Excited? Let’s see how we can activate and use this powerhouse!
The first thing we need is an Offline Event Set. Facebook creates one by default that you can use to associate your ads with. You also have the option to create one from scratch. To do so, go to Events Manager > Add New Data Source > Offline Event Set.
Offline Event Set can be associated to Ads under Tracking settings. If you have created new event set(s), make sure to pick the right one in the Ad level.
There are two main ways to add transaction/conversion data to Offline Event Set:
Syncing it with a CRM through Offline Event Set API: They have several integrations for popular CRM, Call Tracking, and Sales platforms. Check out here for a complete list of all available integrations.
Uploading a spreadsheet: Sounds tedious but in many scenarios, this is the quickest way to get started with Offline Conversions and test its effectiveness. You can export transaction data out of a system that doesn’t support the API and manually upload it to your Offline Event Set. The process is very similar to uploading a customer list to Facebook. The best practice is to upload your data in the shortest intervals possible. Facebook recommends biweekly, but the shorter the merrier!
There are 3 types of information that you can upload to an Offline Event Set:
Customer Data: Information like First/Last Name, Gender, Age, Phone Number, E-mail address, Zip Code, City, State, Date of Birth, Year of Birth or Mobile Advertiser ID
Event Time: The time that the offline transaction has occurred. You can upload events for the last 2 years if you have them available.
Event Details: This includes information such as: Order Value, Currency, Item Number, Event Name
Once the data is uploaded, Facebook tries to match the column headers of the CSV file to a supported field. Always make sure to review the mapping and correct it if necessary.
So now that we are familiar with creating an Offline Event Set and uploading data to it let’s take a look at a few interesting things that we can do with it.
Offline Attribution
As we said at the beginning of this post, the main purpose of creating an Offline Event Set is to get cross-channel insight into your Facebook campaigns and evaluate the performance based on the attribution for offline outcomes. There is even a column preset in Ad Manager for this. For example, you can tell what audience converted better offline.
Offline Optimization
Another wonderful thing we get to do with Offline Conversions is to optimize ad delivery for an offline outcome. You can use the fields uploaded as parameters to define a Custom Conversion that makes the most sense for your campaigns. Examples:
Loyal Customers: Customers who visit and shop at your store frequently and their order values exceed a certain threshold.
Qualified Leads: Leads who answered the follow-up phone call from your sales team and accepted to attend a live demo meeting.
Offline Custom Audiences
Use your Offline Conversion information in your retargeting campaigns. Target customers who have shopped with you before but probably need to be reminded for a revisit. Or, leads who have been sent a quote but you never heard back from them.
Creating Lookalikes
And my favorite usage of Offline Conversion is using them as lookalike seed to reach people who are similar to those who have already completed the offline transaction. Create lookalikes based on your most loyal customers, most engaged leads or highest value subscribers.
Offline Conversions is an underutilized feature or Facebook Ads platform. It can open up numerous opportunities for businesses that part of the customer journey happens in the offline world. It may sound complex to set up but it’s really easy to maintain after the initial setup and the value you can get totally justifies the time you invest in it.
Google got the median time to render for GoogleBot down to 5 seconds, which is super impressive. Google added a method to preview your recipes on smart displays like Google Home Hubs. Google added product result filters to Search Console. And Google updated the video structured data help documents in a big way.
The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is pretty calm, it was a slow Thanksgiving weekend.
Here are the more important Google webmaster stories over the past month but if you missed the month prior, see here.
Google Algorithms & Updates:
Google SEO:
Google Links:
Google Search Console:
Google Local, Maps & GMB:
Google User Interface Tests:
Google Misc:
Today is the 16th anniversary of this website, the Search Engine Roundtable., and thus my sweet 16 for writing about search, SEO and of course Google. It is hard to imagine I’ve been writing about this topic for so long and still, every day, find a handful of things to cover and share with the devoted and valued readers here.
Video Summary:
16 Years Of Passion:
I try incredibly hard to be consistent with my coverage, despite my travels or religious obligations. Yes, sometimes it gets tiring but honestly, this is a passion project of mine and I absolutely love writing and sharing tidbits about Google search, SEO and SEM topics. I started this site as a way to keep my notes on what the SEM/SEO community is talking about and that remains true to-date. Some of the forums may have come and gone, some new channels of where the community is may have been created over the years, but I try to highlight some of those discussions and bring them to a wider audience through this web site.
This year, I started a new series, a vlog – video blog. This is where I sit down, one-on-one, with real practitioners within the SEO and SEM industry and talk to them about what they do and how they do it and share it with you all. I’ve learned it not only helps those watching the videos, but it also helps a lot of those I interview find new clients, get new job opportunities and hopefully build their company and personal brands. So if you haven’t, sign up to be interviewed, and when I hit your town, I will reach out. It is kind of similar to what I did with the thank an SEO series in 2018 but way cooler.
I still continue to publish several stories here a day and on Search Engine Land. I still produce my weekly video recaps, which I have been working on improving a lot lately. Don’t forget about the fun daily photos and big monthly Google webmaster reports. These are all aimed to save you time, while catching you up on new topics and making you smile at the same time.
You can read last year’s 15 year recap if you’d like.
Our Growth & Analytics:
I’ll be honest, I am shocked – we are up 24% in traffic year-over-year according to Google Analytics. Specifically 23.99% up in users, 24.37% up in sessions and 22.40% in pageviews year-over-year. I didn’t expect that and no, I really don’t look at this stuff – I do look at real time analytics because I am curious what is going on after I publish something. I should note, last year I was up about 15%. Shocks me that more and more people are interested…
The channels sending me traffic changed; I am up 42% from last year with organic search traffic. referral traffic is up 21%, social only up 4%, but my direct traffic was down 3%. The other channels, like email and others are not significant. If you drill into organic search, I was up 45% with Google but down 42% with Bing and down 27% with Yahoo – what is wrong Bing!!!
Mobile traffic is now 45% of all my traffic, which is up about 5 points from last year. My US based traffic was up only 5%, but placed like India, UK, Canada, Germany, France and other regions were up a tremendous amount.
There are now over 28,500 stories on this site, of which, I wrote over 25,750 of them. I posted about 1,850 stories this year, just like last year – so I didn’t write much more than last year. There are over 12,000 new comments on this site, ones I didn’t delete or get caught by spam filters – which is up by about 1,000 comments compared to last year. I continue to try to make an effort to have clean comments that do not cross the line here.
With YouTube, my channel – please subscribe has over 2,500 new subscribers. I’ve been obviously making an effort to grow that channel. I have over 6 million views on those videos, with over 37,000 hours of watch time. Oh, and I made just under $900 in YouTube ad revenue in the past year, which is more than double of last year’s revenue. Cha ching!
Most Important Stories In Past 12 Months:
Looking back at the year, I suspect Google and Bing would say its BERT integrations were the biggest deals. But for the SEO industry, they were not that big of a deal. It is hard to isolate one Google update that was massive, so check out the Google updates category, because we covered a lot of them. Google has been trying to be more transparent about updates, including core updates, freshness, original reporting and diversity. Evergreen GoogleBot and BingBot are here, but Bing is trying to get publishers to push it content, which is interesting.
There is a lot, I tried to go through the past year and share the most important stories (I am sure I missed things):
Here are the most viewed stories in the past 12 months of 2019 based on Google Analytics. I should note that my analytics does not combine AMP URLs with the canonical non AMP URL:
I am still gung-ho about voice search, it is super exciting to see the advancements there. Also the smart displays, that is going to be a lot of fun. Watching search in embedded devices from voice appliances and smart displays but even more, in your cars, refrigerators, ovens, as your clock or speakers, etc. Heck, integrating all of that with your light switches and IoT devices, it is super exciting to watch. Looking back at how much easier it is to do voice queries, how my kids even do it, talking to phones and machines – it is becoming so natural for people. We are at the verge of this really exploding and it has grown so much so fast already.
Also we have video features in YouTube and beyond, audio features with podcasts and even image features with 3D and AR images – all really interesting stuff. Bing’s move to get publishers to push content and to see if Google will expand their indexing API.
So in summary, how search has come so far with understanding natural queries via voice and what search can do in 2020 to show those search results anywhere and anytime – I am looking forward to that.
Thank you:
As I said last year, I deeply appreciate and thank you all so much for reading every day, commenting (or ignoring the comments) and for sharing the stories here. Keep up the chatter and let’s build an even better search community this coming year.
So we just covered that Google said the best approach is to force your syndication partners to use the rel=canonical attribute to point to the content they distributed from your site. But Glenn Gabe said on Twitter he has seen Google not honoring that.
First, here is the Google statement – note that Google did say “it doesn’t guarantee only one version is shown though.”
For syndication, using rel=canonical is the best approach (it doesn’t guarantee only one version is shown though). For internationalization, use hreflang instead.
Another warning if you are syndicating content. Analyzing a site hit by the 11/8 update & found many syndicated articles CORRECTLY USING REL CANONICAL that were still indexed. Yep, Google is ignoring rel canonical… Bad for the site & bad for the partners. Site is addressing now pic.twitter.com/hlLfEH6LRc
That’s not right. Google can absolutely ignore rel canonical if the content isn’t the same, but this is the exact same article word for word. Cross domain canonical is the recommended solution for handling syndicated content (beyond just noindexing the content). So this is wrong.
So while Google says you should make the syndication partner use the rel=canonical – Google admits it might not just list your content, but might list the partner and here is Glenn Gabe showing Google ignoring the rel=canonical tag completely anyway?
By next year, comScore expects that 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches. And of course, it won’t stop there. A decade from now, it’s not unreasonable to think that nine out of 10 searches will be via voice, and at that point, a lot about what we know about best practices in digital marketing will have shifted.
After all, in the world of voice search, simply getting onto the search engine results page becomes insufficient. What brands need is to find their way into what’s become known as the “zero position”—that singular best response generated by a voice assistant in regards to a natural language query.
Most marketers are watching the ascent of voice search with obvious interest, but few are sure exactly what they should be doing as this brave new world unfolds before their eyes. The good news is that there are very concrete steps that can be taken right now to better position brands for the voice-dominated future. If you focus on the following three fundamentals today, you’re going to be in strong shape tomorrow.
Optimize according to Schema
Schema represents a foundational means of ensuring your online content can be found and understood by web crawlers and properly ingested by the major search engines’ algorithms. This is true today, and it will be true tomorrow. Unfortunately, given the ever-increasing complexity of the marketing technology landscape these days, too many marketers have lost site of this important priority. To succeed—or even survive—in the world of voice search, the schema need to be a top digital marketing priority.
Whitepaper
In the most basic sense, schema is an agreed-upon structure for how online content should be organized in order to best be understood by search engines. The major search players of the world have codified the best practices of engagement via Schema.org, a joint effort focused on creating and maintaining schemas for structuring online data. These days, optimizing web pages with schema is a critical first step to succeeding in organic search.
The beauty of Schema.org is that it’s supported by all of the major search engines, and these are precisely the companies that are currently writing the future of voice search. We can expect to see similar structures dictating voice search results as we do in the currently established schema. Thus, best practices for site optimization today will remain the best practices for the future. However, neglecting these best practices in a world where the zero position can make or break a brand will become all the more vital.
Focus on featured snippets
Google’s Featured Snippets aren’t new, but they’re far more important in the world of voice search than in traditional web SEO. Featured snippets are designed to help people answer questions quickly in a way that naturally aligns with how people search with their voices. In other words, it rewards content that presents information in an obvious Q&A format versus being optimized for keyword searches.
To improve your chances of reaching the zero position for a given query, structure your content for featured snippets. In a blog post, for example, this might mean asking a question in the opening paragraph and ensuring it is answered in that same paragraph in 50 words or fewer.
Sure, the blog post can go on to discuss the subject in much more detail. But what a voice search engine will care about is being able to answer a user’s question in a succinct, straightforward way. Give them the questions and answers they crave.
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Get your profiles under control
In preparing your brand and its digital assets for a voice-driven world, don’t forget about your third-party digital profiles. Again, this is a best practice in the search world today, but it’s going to become even more necessary for survival in a future dominated by voice search. After all, when people search for information relevant to your business, there’s a good chance the first place the search engine turns won’t be your website.
It will be a third-party profile that succinctly describes your business and, in particular, the details of nearby locations. After all, voice assistants powered by companies like Google also have their own business listings for your locations—and they’re highly likely to turn to those first when providing information back to users.
If your business information is inaccurate or outdated in your third-party profiles, reaching the zero position in a voice search with that information could be more harmful to your brand than not being found at all. So as you think through your digital strategy for a voice-driven world, be sure to get back to basics. Structure your content correctly. Give vs the answers they want. And above all, make sure your information is updated and accurate anywhere the algorithms might find it.
Bart Bartolozzi is Director of Product Marketing at Synup, a location intelligence tool that helps businesses with their local marketing, discovery, and engagement.
Whitepapers
Related reading
While Google is an obvious “horse to bet on,” ubiquity, UX and utility will dominate the voice-search innovation race in 2020 and beyond.
A new analysis of 73,000 business listings found that 96% of all business locations fail to list their business information correctly.
A study by HigherVisibility on voice search over the past few years has revealed some interesting trends in the industry.
Google’s official webmaster channel on Twitter responded to a question about the ads.txt file. Someone asked if you need it for SEO or search because he sees GoogleBot trying to access it. The answer is no, you don’t need it for Google Search or SEO.
It is somewhat needed for Google AdSense but not Google Search.
Here is what Google said on Twitter, “The ads.txt file appears to be related to @AdSense – it’s not required for Google Search.”
The folks at AdSense are pushing you ad this file but again, this is specific to AdSense and it is a “IAB initiative that helps ensure that your digital ad inventory is only sold through sellers (such as AdSense) who you’ve identified as authorized.”
But again, it is not required for SEO or search and if you don’t have AdSense or other IAB related ads on your site – it is not needed at all.
