Details: Lead form extensions (which are currently active in search) now extend to Youtube and Discovery campaigns.
Impact: Google has become increasingly B2B friendly over the past couple of years. The success of Lead Forms in other platforms has created pressure for Google to provide a suitable offering. The expansion of this option into new platforms provides opportunities for marketers in both volume and efficiency.
Details: With Zapier, there would no longer be a need to manually upload, sort, or remove contacts from a list. The integration would automate this process through your customer relationship management system.
Impact: Those that opt-in would benefit from more accurate audience representations thanks to up-to-date Customer Match Audiences and the targeting that seeds directly from them(similar audiences).
Details: Google has added the “shopping_ads_excluded_country” attribute to allow advertisers to avoid showing their product in certain countries their campaign may be targeting.
Impact: Advertisers will no longer need to create unique feeds for countries with differing product availability/offerings.
Details: Currently, App campaigns accept more than 30 sizes and dimensions. Later this year, Google will shift from size-based to ratio-based image specifications. Only three aspect ratios will be needed.
Impact: Simplified specs will improve things for all members. For advertisers, creative testing is simplified. For creative departments, the scale of requests is diminished.
Details: Upgrades to Performance Planner include support for shared budgets, the ability to share plans for viewing or editing, and projections that factor in conversion delay.
Impact: Whether it’s through a platform tool, manual analysis, or proprietary tech, projections are often more like guesstimates. Google’s Performance Planner now makes it easier to collaborate on plans through the sharing feature, while getting a boost in accuracy due to support of shared budget and conversion delay.
Details: The billing-only role allows access to be granted to those that only need transparency into the financials of an account.
Impact: This access level would limit campaign viewing and editing, meaning it’s likely a perfect match for the finance department. Google continues to overhaul many of its access levels in order to maintain a combination of flexibility and security for advertisers.
Details: Recommendations were announced last year and are globally available in the online interface. These will now be shared in the Editor as well. These include tidbits such as campaigns limited by budget, ad groups without ads, keyword expansion ideas, and more. Additionally, campaign-level audience targeting is now available within the Editor.
Impact: For recommendations, the “spot-check” value of these suggestions is now taken offline as well. Meanwhile, campaign-level audience associations create cohesion with Google and remove the need to select at every individual ad group level.
Details: Much like Google (as always), Bing is rolling out free Product Listings within its shopping tab. No action is required to opt-in, however, there are opt-out options if desired.
Impact: The jury is still out on what volume these free listings will make-up on Bing, and what strategy is required to maximize your impressions.
Details: Facebook will combine audiences in Certain cases in which advertisers rarely use minor targeting criterion variations. For example, Facebook combined several options representing military bases or regiments given the specific interests were rarely used. Other examples include cleaning up duplicates by removing ‘Key West’, which mimics ‘Key West, Florida’ that would remain.
Impact: Given the data indicates low usage, chances are if advertisers discover their audience has been retired there should be a suitable and similar replacement.
Details: Facebook will no longer collect IDFA on their own apps. Additionally, Facebook will remind users they have a choice about how their information is used on Facebook and about their Off-Facebook activity feature. Lastly, a new SDK will be released to provide support for Apple’s SKAdNetwork API.
Impact: If you work in the App space, chances are you’ve spent much of the last month prepping for this change. Adjustments will likely be ongoing for all platforms including Facebook once iOS 14 is released.
This is the first interview I did after New York went on lock due to COVID in March – hence the lack of the haircut. Kevin Lee came to my home to do an outside vlog interview, socially distant, to discuss SEO and SEM. Kevin Lee is the CEO is the Executive Chairman and Founder of DidIt, a digital marketing company founded in 1996 – yes, pre-Google. He has founded and acquired numerous companies over the years, and has given a tremendous amount of his time to the industry through publishing books, presenting at hundreds of conferences, helping industry groups and so much more.
Kevin Lee explained how digital PR, public relations, helps you accomplish PR goals and SEO goals at the same time. Some call it barnacle SEO, but he loves to dominate the search results – he calls it SERP domination. The strategy of creating articles and PR with or without links, with nofollow or dofollows, in order to dominate the search results is something Kevin is passionate about. It is not too far off from the strategies used by reputation management companies but it is much broader than those tactics.
You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don’t miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don’t want to miss – and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.
Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at PubCon that he would consider content accuracy a ranking factor. He said because of YMYL, he would consider the accuracy of content a ranking factor. This comes a month after Danny Sullivan from Google said Google cannot determine the accuracy of content.
Here are the tweets covering what Gary Illyes from Google said on stage:
RT: Q: is content accuracy a ranking factor?
A: YMYL it is#Pubcon
Q: Is content accuracy a ranking factor?
A: “YMYL so yes. We go to great lengths to surface reputable and trustworthy sources, so yes.”@methode@jenstar#Pubcon
Machines can’t tell the “accuracy” of content. Our systems rely instead on signals we find align with relevancy of topic and authority. See: https://t.co/O65v1PTehr and https://t.co/cTveD8XNxp
If you search for [is Google down], Google will show you an answer, like it does often with other answer based queries, to tell you “no.” I guess if Google is able to give you an answer here, by definition Google is not down.
Here is a screen shot of this in action:
I spotted this via a retweet from @JeffDean of Google but from:
If your websites are like most, they include a fair amount of extra “stuff” in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating boilerplate text that appears across multiple pages.
Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?
To be fair, most sites do.
Alternatively, could it help your SEO to actually include less information in your titles? (Or at least in specific circumstances?)
We know from a handful of studies that titles of a certain length tend to perform better. A now-famous study from the engineers at Etsy showed how shorter titles performed better than longer ones. SEOs speculate that this could be because shorter titles can have more focused relevancy (by focusing on core keywords), might earn higher click-through rates, or some other reason we can’t imagine.
When choosing which part of a title to shorten, brand names and boilerplate text are obvious choices. But how do you determine if this is something you should consider for your own SEO?
Here’s an example of a brand’s site name at the end of every title:
We’ve all seen sites like this. Heck, most of us do this on our own sites. The question is, does having our brand/site name at the end of every title actually help, or hurt?
But first, we also have to consider other types of boilerplate.
What is boilerplate? Boilerplate simply means standardized, non-unique pieces of text that are used over and over again. This often includes things like categories, product categories, author tags, and taglines.
In this example below, the boilerplate text on every title includes “Tomatoes – Vegetable Seeds – Shop.”
Sometimes boilerplate material can become quite long. The comic book review site Major Spoilers (awesome name!) often includes the same 65-character boilerplate on many pages:
“Major Spoilers – Comic Book Reviews, News, Previews, and Podcasts”
Of course, at this length, it’s so long that Google truncates every single title:
The problems that boilerplate can cause your SEO are threefold:
Relevancy: Unnecessary words can make your title less relevant, both to search engines and users. For search engines, this could mean lower rankings. For users, this could result in fewer clicks.
Uniqueness: Titles that share the same repeating text, and only vary from one another by a word or two, aren’t very unique. While this isn’t necessarily a problem, it goes against most SEO best practices, where uniqueness is key.
Length: Boilerplate means you have less room to display other words in your title, and Google will often cut these off if they go beyond a certain length.
Experiment #1: Remove category from title
We decided to run a couple of boilerplate experiments here at Moz, to see if we could increase our rankings and traffic by removing some of the repeating parts of our titles.
We started with our Whiteboard Friday blog posts. Every time Moz publishes a new Whiteboard Friday, we traditionally include “Whiteboard Friday” in the title.
What would happen if we removed this from the titles?
Using an A/B split test methodology — where we rolled the test out on 50% of the titles and used the other 50% as a control — we saw an amazing 20% uplift from this experiment.
This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.
Honestly, the results surprised us. Whiteboard Friday is a popular brand (so we thought) but removing this boilerplate from our titles produced a significant uplift in traffic to those pages.
At this point, we got cocky…
Experiment #2: Remove brand from title
If removing the category name from Whiteboard Friday posts produced such a significant uplift, what if we removed our brand name from all titles?
For this A/B experiment, we did exactly that—removing the word “Moz” from 50% of our titles and measuring the results.
Crazy, right? If it worked by removing “Whiteboard Friday” would we see the same uplift by removing “Moz?”
Sadly, Google had other plans:
While this A/B test never reached full statistical significance, we actually saw a 4% decline in traffic by removing our brand from our title tags.
Boo!
So why did this test not produce the same gains? To be honest, I’ve removed the brand name from other site’s titles and seen as much as a 20% uplift.
It turns out that whether or not removing brand/boilerplate will be beneficial to your SEO depends on a few key factors, which you can gauge in advance.
How to know if removing boilerplate may succeed
Over 10 years of experience and literally millions of title tags, I’ve found that there are basically four factors that influence whether or not removing boilerplate from your titles might be beneficial:
Brand Strength: Popular brand names in titles almost always perform better than unknown brands, even when people aren’t searching for your brand specifically. Amazon’s brand recognition, for example, likely gives a significant boost to including “Amazon” in every title, even when people aren’t specifically searching Amazon. Less recognizable brands, however, don’t always get the same boost, and can actually lead to fewer visits based on relevancy, length, and clickability (described next.)
Relevancy: Are your boilerplate/brand keywords relevant to what your users search for? For example, if you’re site is about television repair, then boilerplate titles that say “Brad’s TV Repair” are going to be much more relevant than boilerplate that simply say “Brads.” (We’ll explore a way to determine your boilerplate’s brand strength and relevancy in the next section.)
Length: In general, long boilerplate has the potential to do more harm than short boilerplate/brand words. Long boilerplate can dilute the relevance of your titles. So if you include “Buy Brad’s TVs, Television Repair, High Definition Servicing, Audio and Visual Equipment for Sale in Houston Texas and Surrounding Areas” – you may want to rethink your boilerplate.
Clickability: Sometimes, boilerplate can make your titles more clickable, even if they aren’t terribly relevant. Words like “Sale”, “Solved”, “Free”, “2020”, “New”, and many others can lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTR.) Sometimes you can’t tell until you test, but in many cases even adding clickable elements to your boilerplate can lead to significant gains.
Simple technique for determining your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy
This simple technique will also show why removing “Whiteboard Friday” led to an increase in traffic while removing “Moz” from titles did not.
Here’s what you want to do: for each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.
Simply enter your boilerplate/brand as a query filter (you may need to break it into chunks for longer boilerplate) and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.
When we filter for keywords that contain our “moz” brand name, we find thousands of ranking URLs.
People are searching for things like:
Moz DA Checker
Moz Pro
Moz SEO
Moz Blog
Etc., etc.
As our brand name is part of so many queries and leads to visits across thousands of pages, this tells us that “Moz” is a very strong brand, and we’d likely be smart to include it as part of our title tags.
“Moz” is also very short at only 3 characters, which doesn’t hurt either.
So what happens when we try this same technique with “Whiteboard Friday” — the boilerplate that led to a 20% uplift when we removed it? We see a very different result:
In this case, almost all the traffic for “Whiteboard Friday” search terms goes to only one or two pages.
For most Whiteboard Friday posts, the term is simply irrelevant. It’s not what people are searching for, and the brand isn’t strong enough to produce additional uplift.
Also, at 17 characters long, this boilerplate added significant length to each of our titles, in addition to possibly diluting the relevancy for what the posts were ranking for.
Final thoughts + bonus free title tag webinar
These tips can’t tell you definitively whether you should or shouldn’t include boilerplate or brand in your title tags, but they should give you a pretty good idea of when you should test things out.
Remember: Always test and evaluate before making any SEO change permanent. At least know the impact of the change you are making.
Also, please don’t be under the impression that you should always remove boilerplate from your titles. In some instances, actually adding boilerplate can produce an uplift, particularly when the boilerplate is:
Recognizable: For example a strong brand
Relevant: The right keywords
Clickable: Encourages a high CTR
Succinct: Not overly long
If you found value in the tips, and want to learn even more ways to optimize your title tags, we’ve made available a free webinar for you: SEO Master Class: Advanced Title Tag Optimization (For Any Site).
If you’ve got 40 minutes, it’s definitely worth a watch.
Google Display Network, with more than two million websites and six hundred fifty thousand apps, is one of the most influential and profitable digital marketing channels that the majority of Fashion & Lifestyle companies underutilize. It can be a goldmine of targeted, quality traffic at a lower cost.
This article will cover essential knowledge for fashion vertical such as:
Reasons why fashion & lifestyle companies should readjust their digital strategies and invest more in GDN.
Key research findings of audience demographics for both advertisers and publishers.
Valuable information on topics similarity for both advertisers and publishers.
Explanations of why advertisers prefer two particular ad sizes while publishers use almost an equal amount of all sizes and mix them up.
Which ads are more preferred – images or responsive.
The list of top publishers to look at.
And finally, the list of tips for creating a better advertisement for using on top publishers sites.
Google Display Network’s (GDN), ROI-based traffic is priceless for both acquisition and retention if campaigns are executed correctly.
Smaller merchants, in particular, try to avoid display advertisement at any cost because they have limited budgets & resources as well as narrow knowledge accompanied by a lack of strategic directions.
In simple words, smaller guys don’t always know how to do display ads right and some are intimidated to give it a try because they are scared to lose money. Those retailers (and wholesalers as well) try to manage it themselves because agency management and minimum spend are still unachievable for them, and in-house talent is too expensive. So often, after the first failure, they stop campaigns and never come back. Unfortunately, this is a reality.
Larger companies tend to give away PPC management power to third-party agencies who make their own decisions on how and where to run ads. If they had a positive experience in the past and believe in this channel, they would use it.
So, utilizing GDN for those companies is up to account executives and hands-on PPC agency professionals. Not every agency is equipped with the best talent or care enough to spend additional time on clients testing all their campaigns to the full potential, especially smaller ones.
What We Did to Help You
To help advertising specialists make data-driven decisions for their upcoming GDN campaigns, SEMrush gathered data from more 40 million impressions from the top GDN Fashion & Lifestyle advertisers and publishers across almost all English speaking countries like the US, UK, India, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. All of this data was pulled from the Display Advertising tool, and it is all fresh, as it was sourced within the last three months.
Research Methodology
SEMrush compiled a list of the top 61,462 GDN advertisers and 63,823 top publishers, and then divided them up by industry. With the help of the Display Advertising tool, SEMrush collected relevant data from the past three months and then rated each individual domain on a scale from 1 to 100. This score was based on internal algorithms, which defined how closely each domain related to the industry at hand.
Reasons Why Fashion & Lifestyle Companies Should Readjust Their Digital Strategies and Invest More in GDN
You may already have well-performing digital marketing strategies and tactics, but you should also test new waters and continually educate yourself and your team.
Several years ago, some display advertisements might not have been entirely relevant for websites, and advertisers could not control their audiences, but that it is not an issue anymore. With the right set of knowledge and tools, display ads can take a Fashion & Lifestyle businesses to the next level.
So, there are reasons why I like using GDN for my clients and my business. Let’s look at a few of them.
Remarketing for Fashion & Beauty Verticals
Remarketing is a must for the Fashion & Beauty verticals; it is a proven way to increase conversions while being much less expensive than Shopping Feed or Search Ads.
It is also a great way to re-activate and re-engage website visitors that your search campaigns brought to the website. Those visitors won’t be lost leads, but active buyers instead.
Fashion & Lifestyle customers are the most visual shoppers on the internet. Because possibilities to touch and try on products are not options during online shopping (there are brick & mortar locations for that), quality imagery and graphics became the number one selling tool. GDN gives you the opportunity to use visuals (unlike the regular PPC ads).
Reaching more customers with the Google Display Network is another benefit that can take any retail or wholesale business in the Fashion & Beauty verticals to the next level. You can work with any budget and never spend more than is in your plan.
You can set up ads targeting, and in conjunction with daily spend, your company can reach more potential customers.
There are thousands of amazing brands that nobody knows. With lots of smaller clothing and accessories companies putting more money into product development instead of marketing, display advertisements can increase reach at a fraction of the regular search cost.
Key Research Findings
Audience Demographics
Advertisers intend to reach 64.1% of women and 35.9% of men; that is why the knowledge and understanding of how men and women shop online are essential.
Women represent the largest segment of online shoppers. Therefore, images, text copy, and calls to action should be appealing to them. Men care more about the simplicity of finding what they need at the right price and the ease of getting their purchases.
Women have completely different shopping patterns. While men in most cases enjoy the result (a purchase), women enjoy the whole process and shopping journey itself (which includes education, information, entertainment, and interaction). When women go shopping (online or offline), they want a positive, fun experience because they have enough of work-related and personal life stress in everyday life. So, women wish to see free interesting info, self-assuring imagery, and everything else that can add positivity and joy to their lives.
It applies to everything they see — from Social Networks to a chat with friends to the advertisement on websites they browse.
Fashion, Beauty, and any other Lifestyle shoppers want to see models who look like them or a little better versions of themselves (not someone they will never become). They also want to read words that show the benefits of products and explain how those products can improve something in their lives.
Age Range Targeting
The leading segment of beauty and fitness websites is 25-34, following by the second major segment, 35-44. Therefore, I recommend designing ads based on your target demographics for a particular niche and sub-niche.
Beauty and fitness websites have overlapping demographics with fashion. Ads’ text and images provided to am advertiser should feature models styled for particular demographics.
With a whopping total of 70% audience between 18 and 44 years old who are usually glued to their phones and tablets, Google Display Network with 650 thousand apps is priceless. Beautiful responsive advertisements can bring more business to any company nowadays, and fashion companies of any size should understand this fact.
Smaller businesses (if adequately educated on the subject) just recently started to realize the beauty of advertising on the variety of niche sites that closely relate to their businesses. Large, top retailers have understood that for years and at least have tested all their GDN options at some scale.
Audience Demographics
Another great reason to utilize GDN for Fashion & Lifestyle is that often, publishers are shoppers themselves (for clothing, accessories, beauty, etc.), so their sites provide super related information for visitors. I am referring to bloggers and influencers here.
A display ad, surrounded with great content, will result in better click-through rates, conversions, and eventually continuous business.
While top fashion & lifestyle retailers can afford expensive agencies, smaller companies have continual issues with budgets, so they pretty much shoot at the dark with their lack of knowledge (and this is the pure reality of the industry, especially in the Los Angeles fashion district community). Therefore, having their ads on high quality, informational sites improve their performance and is another reason to invest more in GDN.
Topic Similarity
Nowadays, many lifestyle industries overlap because they have blended in many topics and naturally relate to each other (like health and fitness, apparel and beauty, etc.). With the high percentage of topic similarity, running your ad with relevant industries’ publishers, not only will increase results but will decrease risks of wasted budgets.
Some marketing managers are afraid that ads won’t be relevant to the website, or they won’t be able to fine-tune the target audience, or the number of fraud clicks from the competition will be high. I don’t think that those issues are significant if you know how to set up your ads and design creatives properly. It is all about continual learning, which I always highly encourage in all companies.
Important tip: always allocate test budgets, find out the main metrics, and watch for ROI. Use this information to optimize results, and then repeat it again and again. My teams always start slow and then expand the reach carefully.
Topic Similarity
Audiences who are interested in Beauty & Fitness will be involved in health because fitness is part of well-being and healthy lifestyles, so those topics are extremely related in a visitors’ mind. People who are interested in those topics love and take care of themselves, therefore shopping will be the logical extension of it as well. Nowadays, borders between different verticals are very undefined because they all belong under the one “lifestyle” umbrella.
Ad Sizes
Fashion advertisers’ preferred ad formats are 728×90 and 300×250 because they have more significant real estate. Images are one of the essential online selling tools, so the larger the space, the better for an advertiser (in thee advertisers’ minds, it give more chances). While other verticals can get away just with text copy ads, fashion merchants need to have a space to showcase their brands & products along with text and call to action.
Ad Sizes
While publishers still prefer larger ad sizes, their preferences are based strictly on ROI. For publishers, creative sizes don’t matter as much as persuasive sales copy and a proper call to action.
Usually, publishers run A/B testing to figure out which ads’ sizes are preferred better for particular brands. Then they run advertisements based on their conversions and other measurable results.
Ad Formats
Images vs. Responsive HTML
Another critical component to display advertisement for Fashion & Lifestyle is to make ads mobile-friendly and responsive.
Advertisers strongly prefer responsive ads because those ads increase their conversions.
Publishers, run almost equally both images and responsive formats. The reason they do it is because they know their visitors and demographics, and base their decision on proven performance.
Top Publishers to Look at
BigCartel.com and Lovetoknow.com are two top publishers for fashion brands because they are both one-of-a-kind, well promoted, fashionista-oriented sites that attract customers that are interested in fashion brands. While Big Сartel is a solution for artists and LoveToKnow is a lifestyle informational portal, their customers are people who are interested in stylish online shopping.
Big Cartel’s visitors are looking for unique merchandise made by artists. It means they will be willing to spend hours of their online shopping time to find something great in other places, as well. Those people are looking for products that will help them to stand apart from the crowd and look unique.
Makeupalley.com, the makeup review site, is delivering massive value for visitors. According to Statista, revenue in Beauty & Personal Care market is expected to grow annually by 2.6% up to 2023 in the USA.
Obviously, customers who are willing to spend money on makeup will also spend on fashion because while makeup is “salt & pepper,” outfits would be “bread & butter”.
Tips for Creating a Better Ad for Top Publishers’ Sites
Make your ads responsive.
Use your slogan along with the logo, so customers who are not familiar with your brand could easily understand what your company does.
Create your ad appealing to publishers’ sites from overlapping categories (verticals).
List at least one main benefit of choosing your product over competition, so visitors have a reason to click through your ad.