Friday, 28 April 2017
Google: 1,653 Search Launches With 9,800 Live Experiments & 130,336 Search Quality Tests
We all know Google does a lot of testing, in fact, I probably only cover less than 5% of the tests people email or send me that Google is running. I see tons and tons of UI tests, feature tests, color changes, ranking changes and more. So when Google sends things are constantly changing in search – they are not lying.
The issue is defining what are UI and feature changes versus core algorithm changes. I like to cover the ranking changes and then Google comes back and says we make thousands of changes to search every year. Of course they do, but what percentage of those changes are ranking specific? A much smaller number.
Anyway, on the new how search works site that Google just revamped, Google documented the raw number of those changes to the search results.
Glenn Gabe pulled the metrics from the page and posted them on Twitter. The page that has this is over here. In summary:
- Google quality raters conducted 130,336 search quality tests this past year
- Google ran 18,015 side-by-side experiments in search
- Google tried 9,800 live traffic experiments which hit about 1% of the searchers
- Google ultimately launched only 1,653 of them based on all those tests
Year, only 1,653 launched fully but again. those are both UI, features, search rankings and more.
Here is a GIF screen capturing these metrics so we have it for when/if Google changes these metrics for next time:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)
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Google Quickly Fixed The AMP Analytics Bug
Yesterday, those publishers and webmasters who deployed AMP on their sites were freaking out that Google stopped sending traffic to AMP pages. They soon quickly figured out it was a Google Analytics bug in how it was capturing AMP pages.
The reports began coming in yesterday morning on Twitter, Reddit, WebmasterWorld and more and more places.
Google’s Paul Bakaus from the AMP team quickly responded to the issue saying they are working on a fix:
@brentwilson85 @fighto @rBigSEO @FrankieVSEO @badams @jeffreypreston We’re on it. Forwarded to Google Search and Analytics teams. Definitely not intended, update coming soon.
— Paul Bakaus (@pbakaus) April 27, 2017
Then by 2:30pm or so yesterday, Google fixed the issue:
Update: The issue has been confirmed and a fix is being rolled out. You should see things returning to normal. https://t.co/JiGYqvl1ed
— AMP Project (@AMPhtml) April 27, 2017
It seems the fix would only be a retroactive fix but it is fixed going forward.
Here is a chart from one who was impacted showing the AMP page traffic returning after the bug was fixed:
@rustybrick Hello Barry, amp traffic it back…. after 18 hours of backout. For me was a bug. pic.twitter.com/iXvWqjAvRU
— il Turista Viaggi (@ilturista_info) April 28, 2017
So all should be good now.
Forum discussion at Twitter, Reddit, WebmasterWorld.
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Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)
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Google Hamburg Office With Airplane Seats
The Google Hamburg office has a meeting room that looks like the inside of an airplane. It has the airplane seats, the windows you’d see on an airplane and the overall look and feel. I do hope Google never double books the room, that might lead to serious issues.
Jo Dethlefs posted this impact on Instagram and wrote “And this is? Exactly. A Phonebooth. This is where crewmembers at @google’s Hamburg office sit down for calls or videochats.”
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
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Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)
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Paid Search: A Focus on Profitability With Maddie Cary [PODCAST] by @brentcsutoras
Podcast: Download
Are your paid search efforts going nowhere? Read on to find out how to get bigger and better payoffs from paid search in this Search Engine Nerds episode.
Maddie Cary, Director of Paid Search at Point It Digital Marketing, joins SEJ Chief Social Media Strategist Brent Csutoras to discuss the profitability of paid search and how to ensure your campaigns result in a good ROI. Cary also talks about how brand awareness affects paid search and identifies areas that could have a significant impact on paid search profitability.
What exactly is impression share?
Maddie Cary: Impression share is a look at all the available impression volume you’re targeting within your paid search campaign. It’s capturing how much of the traffic demand you’re going after.
Where it’s tricky is when search engines like Google give you those kind of impression share metrics, they are not a true measurement in the simplest of forms. For example, if you are running a paid search campaign and it’s telling you that you’re capturing 100 percent impression share, what that really means is the impressions that Google thinks you’re eligible to have gotten. So what it thinks you realistically would get based on what keywords you’re targeting, your quality scores, a lot of different factors — you captured 100 percent of those. That doesn’t mean that all the impressions you’re going after, you’re getting every single one, but what Google thinks you’re eligible or able to get, that’s what you’re capturing.
It’s a good metric to help get a sense of what exactly you’re targeting, how much of that are you capturing and consistently capturing over time.
What’s a good number to target and when does it really make a difference in what we do?
MC: I think that’s the balancing act we do as search marketers. It’s an interesting channel to be in because our audience by nature is coming to us and telling us what they want, compared to what you can target within social or even outside of just direct search like demand and display or email. People are coming to a search engine and using queries to indicate what they’re looking for.
I think there is a tendency for particularly newer search marketers to feel that, “Oh, we have this demand. It’s valuable, it’s indicating what people are looking for. I should try to capture all of it.” That’s where we have to remember as digital marketers that there is still data and measure things from a cost per conversion or even an ROI standpoint. Is actually maximizing all of it the right move? Is that going to help you in your profitability?
When I work with clients I generally start by looking at what we’re doing in brand. Brand is a highly valuable demand stream for any advertiser.
Folks who are searching on your brand have not only an association with your brand but likely a positive one. They’re actively searching for you.
Depending on what brand you are, it can be less competitive with lower CPCs. So it’s basically a low-cost investment for high value, oftentimes with highly profitable conversions.
Brent Csutoras: When you say brand, you mean people searching on the brand?
MC: Yeah, so things that specifically contain the company brand in the query. For example, if Amazon was running paid search ads, it would be Amazon or Amazon Prime.
For those terms, there is a lot of value there. If your competition isn’t incredibly intense, so your competitors aren’t bidding on your own brand really aggressively, then it does make sense to maximize impression share. How can you capture the majority of that demand in a way that somewhat “belongs” to you, that is highly relevant to the searchers who are searching on those brand queries?
There can be a lot of value in figuring out how to maximize that, and that might not necessarily be 100 percent, but it could be 90 percent, 95 percent. Also, once you get over the 95 percent mark, you’re essentially at 100 percent. You’re really at the top of what you can maximize. That’s definitely a place where it is worthwhile to consider optimizing to a higher impression share.
If you’re bidding on terms that do not contain your brand name — what we would call the non-brand bucket — or if you’re going after your competitors’ keywords, obviously there’s a lot more folks investing in those spaces. They’re all going after pieces of the same pie. There aren’t necessarily going to be those lower CPCs.
The investment is going to be much higher, and if you’re not careful you can quickly hit a point of diminishing returns where you’re just spending excessively for not much gain. That’s where it’s important to be more fine-tuned. If you are taking an impression share approach to how you’re bidding on those terms, make sure you are being smart about it and not just bidding up to 100 percent for the sake of trying to capture it all.
How do you balance the high brand SERP results you have with the impression share you want?
MC: I always suggest to clients that opting out of brand for paid search can be detrimental not just to your paid search growth but also to what you’re doing organically. There have been a lot of different studies that measure what the impact is when you have both a paid listing and an organic listing shown on the SERP. The most infamous one is what Google put together a couple years ago that demonstrated doing so added a 50% incremental click lift for advertisers who had both showing, and even demonstrated that if your organic listing is not in the very top spot but is in positions two and three, paid search adds an 80 percent incremental lift.
The two play really well together. On top of that, there’s additional benefits that sometimes are a little harder to measure. Having both listings show definitely represents a feeling of authority and at times trust with people searching, that not only do you have a presence organically, but you have one in paid. Those paid results can add a lot of additional bells and whistles that can’t quite be utilized in an organic listing.
Those little things — reviews, phone numbers, click to call, snippets and site links that are specific to search, even different kinds of extensions that help the ad stand out — create some of that authority as well as hopefully optimize the experience you’ve set up in what’s showing in your organic listing.
How can negative keywords lead to massive results in saving money?
MC: The part that pains me the most is when you’ve found a client who cannot figure out how to grow their account, or they know they should be doing something different but they’re not sure what it is, or they’re struggling with profitability, or CPAs are too high, or return is really poor, and you go and look in their negative keywords and you look at their search query reports and you discover that negative keyword management is just not happening on a regular basis, which is the easiest way to cut out inefficient costs.
You have to look at what queries you’re matching to and tell your campaigns what to no longer match to, what’s not relevant, or what’s not cost-effective. The flip side is discovering that some queries they’re matching to is burning through 40-50 percent of their spend so they can’t actually fund the things that are working.
We see it on the Google Display Network, too — display network campaigns that have no negative placements. Those things just aren’t being updated regularly, so it’s one of the easiest wins you can have.
I always equate the search space to putting a net out into a river and hoping to catch fish, but there’s water, rocks and leaves, whatever flowing through. If you don’t check the net regularly, you’re going to pull it out of the water and discover that there’s a giant hole in it. It’s just been completely blown through. That’s our jobs, to check the net.
We’re capturing that demand at the bottom of the funnel via those queries and if you don’t check the net, then you’re not really fishing. You’re not really doing anything effectively.
What other areas could impact profitability?
MC: I think the first thing anyone should do is identify what I call your cash cow. Figure out what are the keywords driving the lion’s share of your conversions, or your revenue if you’re in the e-commerce space. Look at that first and figure out if you’re doing that effectively.
- Are there any opportunities for you to target a different audience on those terms?
- Do testing from copy and landing page perspectives help with click-through rate or conversion rate?
- Is there anything that’s really ineffective cost-wise that you’re doing there? Maybe they’re driving a lot of conversions, but you’re actually not managing your costs in those terms well.
Starting there is the first step that people neglect or they don’t want to touch what isn’t broken. Oftentimes, I suggest having a testing plan and a hypothesis around some of those things. If the results aren’t as good as they were before, then you can revert back to what you were doing before.
The other way to improve profitability is to have regular account health tasks and management — what you’re doing in your account, whether that’s negative keyword mining on a weekly basis or looking at placement targeting and making adjustments there, not doing set-it-and-forget-it bidding. If you have enough conversion volume, leverage AdWords, flexible bid strategies, or even ECPC strategies to drive more conversions at better CPAs.
To listen to this Search Engine Nerds Podcast with Maddie Cary:
Think you have what it takes to be a Search Engine Nerd? If so, message Loren Baker on Twitter, or email him at loren [at] searchenginejournal.com. You can also email Brent Csutoras at brent [at] alphabrandmedia.com.
Visit our Search Engine Nerds archive to listen to other Search Engine Nerds podcasts!
Image Credits
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita
In-post Images: DepositPhotos
Podcast: Download
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Author: Brent Csutoras
For more SEO, PPC & online marketing news visit https://news.scott.services
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Pop-Ups, Overlays, Modals, Interstitials, and How They Interact with SEO – Whiteboard Friday
Have you thought about what your pop-ups might be doing to your SEO? There are plenty of considerations, from their timing and how they affect your engagement rates, all the way to Google’s official guidelines on the matter. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over all the reasons why you ought to carefully consider how your overlays and modals work and whether the gains are worth the sacrifice.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about pop-ups, overlays, modals, interstitials, and all things like them. They have specific kinds of interactions with SEO. In addition to Google having some guidelines around them, they also can change how people interact with your website, and that can adversely or positively affect you accomplishing your goals, SEO and otherwise.
Types
So let’s walk through what these elements, these design and UX elements do, how they work, and best practices for how we should be thinking about them and how they might interfere with our SEO efforts.
Pop-ups
So, first up, let’s talk specifically about what each element is. A pop-up now, okay, there are a few kinds. There are pop-ups that happen in new windows. New window pop-ups are, basically, new window, no good. Google hates those. They are fundamentally against them. Many browsers will stop them automatically. Chrome does. Firefox does. In fact, users despise these as well. There are still some spammy and sketchy sites out there that use them, but, generally speaking, bad news.
Overlays
When we’re talking about a pop-up that happens in the same browser window, essentially it’s just a visual element, that’s often also referred to as an overlay. So, for the purposes of this Whiteboard Friday, we’ll call that an overlay. An overlay is basically like this, where you have the page’s content and there’s some smaller element, a piece, a box, a window, a visual of some kind that comes up and that essentially says, maybe it says, “Sign up for my email newsletter,” and then there’s a place to enter your email, or, “Get my book now,” and you click that and get the book. Those types of overlays are pretty common on the web, and they do not create quite the same problems that pop-ups do, at least from Google’s perspective. However, we’ll talk about those later, there are some issues around them, especially with mobile.
Modals
Modals tend to be windows of interaction, tend to be more elements of use. So lightboxes for images is a very popular modal. A modal is something where you are doing work inside that new box rather than in the content that’s underneath it. So a sign-in form that overlays, that pops up over the rest of the content, but that doesn’t allow you to engage with this content underneath it, that would be considered a modal. Generally, most of the time, these aren’t a problem, unless they are something like spam, or advertising, or something that’s taking you out of the user experience.
Interstitials
Then finally, interstitials are essentially, and many of these can also be called interstitial experiences, but a classic interstitial is something like what Forbes.com does. When you visit Forbes, an article for the first time, you get this, “Welcome. Our sponsor of the day is Brawndo. Brawndo, it has what plants need.” Then you can continue after a certain number of seconds. These really piss people off, myself included. I really hate the interstitial experience. I understand that it’s an advertising thing. But, yeah, Google hates them too. Not quite enough to kick Forbes out of their SERPs entirely yet, but, fingers crossed, it will happen sometime soon. They have certainly removed plenty of other folks who have gone with invasive or overly heavy interstitials over the years and made those pretty tough.
What are the factors that matter for SEO?
A) Timing
Well, it turns out timing is a big one. So when the element appears matters. Basically, if the element shows up initially upon page load, they will consider it differently than if it shows up after a few minutes. So, for example, if you have a “Sign Up Now” overlay that pops up the second you visit the page, that’s going to be treated differently than something that happens when you’re 80% or you’ve just finished scrolling through an entire blog post. That will get treated very differently. Or it may have no effect actually on how Google treats the SEO, and then it really comes down to how users do.
Then how long does it last as well. So interstitials, especially those advertising interstitials, there are some issues governing that with people like Forbes. There are also some issues around an overlay that can’t be closed and how long a window can pop up, especially if it shows advertising and those types of things. Generally speaking, obviously, shorter is better, but you can get into trouble even with very short ones.
B) Interaction
Can that element easily be closed, and does it interfere with the content or readability? So Google’s new mobile guidelines, I think as of just a few months ago, now state that if an overlay or a modal or something interferes with a visitor’s ability to read the actual content on the page, Google may penalize those or remove their mobile-friendly tags and remove any mobile-friendly benefit. That’s obviously quite concerning for SEO.
C) Content
So there’s an exception or an exclusion to a lot of Google’s rules around this, which is if you have an element that is essentially asking for the user’s age, or asking for some form of legal consent, or giving a warning about cookies, which is very popular in the EU, of course, and the UK because of the legal requirements around saying, “Hey, this website uses cookies,” and you have to agree to it, those kinds of things, that actually gets around Google’s issues. So Google will not give you a hard time if you have an overlay interstitial or modal that says, “Are you of legal drinking age in your country? Enter your birth date to continue.” They will not necessarily penalize those types of things.
Advertising, on the other hand, advertising could get you into more trouble, as we have discussed. If it’s a call to action for the website itself, again, that could go either way. If it’s part of the user experience, generally you are just fine there. Meaning something like a modal where you get to a website and then you say, “Hey, I want to leave a comment,” and so there’s a modal that makes you log in, that type of a modal. Or you click on an image and it shows you a larger version of that image in a modal, again, no problem. That’s part of the user experience.
D) Conditions
Conditions matter as well. So if it is triggered from SERP visits versus not, meaning that if you have an exclusionary protocol in your interstitial, your overlay, your modal that says, “Hey, if someone’s visiting from Google, don’t show this to them,” or “If someone’s visiting from Bing, someone’s visiting from DuckDuckGo, don’t show this to them,” that can change how the search engines perceive it as well.
It’s also the case that this can change if you only show to cookied or logged in or logged out types of users. Now, logged out types of users means that everyone from a search engine could or will get it. But for logged in users, for example, you can imagine that if you visit a page on a social media site and there’s a modal that includes or an overlay that includes some notification around activity that you’ve already been performing on the site, now that becomes more a part of the user experience. That’s not necessarily going to harm you.
Where it can hurt is the other way around, where you get visitors from search engines, they are logged out, and you require them to log in before seeing the content. Quora had a big issue with this for a long time, and they seem to have mostly resolved that through a variety of measures, and they’re fairly sophisticated about it. But you can see that Facebook still struggles with this, because a lot of their content, they demand that you log in before you can ever view or access it. That does keep some of their results out of Google, or certainly ranking lower.
E) Engagement impact
I think this is what Google’s ultimately trying to measure and what they’re trying to essentially say, “Hey, this is why we have these issues around this,” which is if you are hurting the click-through rate or you’re hurting pogo-sticking, meaning that more people are clicking onto your website from Google and then immediately clicking the Back button when one of these things appears, that is a sign to Google that you have provided a poor user experience, that people are not willing to jump through whatever hoop you’ve created for them to get access your content, and that suggests they don’t want to get there. So this is sort of the ultimate thing that you should be measuring. Some of these can still hurt you even if these are okay, but this is the big one.
Best practices
So some best practices around using all these types of elements on your website. I would strongly urge you to avoid elements that are significantly harming UX. If you’re willing to take a small sacrifice in user experience in exchange for a great deal of value because you capture people’s email addresses or you get more engagement of other different kinds, okay. But this would be something I’d watch.
There are three or four metrics that I’d urge you to check out to compare whether this is doing the right thing. Those are:
- Bounce rate
- Browse rate
- Return visitor rates, meaning the percentage of people who come back to your site again and again, and
- Time on site after the element appears
So those four will help tell you whether you are truly interfering badly with user experience.
On mobile, ensure that your crucial content is not covered up, that the reading experience, the browsing experience isn’t covered up by one of these elements. Please, whatever you do, make those elements easy and obvious to dismiss. This is part of Google’s guidelines around it, but it’s also a best practice, and it will certainly help your user experience metrics.
Only choose to keep one of these elements if you are finding that the sacrifice… and there’s almost always a sacrifice cost, like you will hurt bounce rate or browse rate or return visitor rate or time on site. You will hurt it. The question is, is it a slight enough hurt in exchange for enough gain, and that’s that trade-off that you need to decide whether it’s worth it. I think if you are hurting visitor interaction by a few seconds on average per visit, but you are getting 5% of your visitors to give you an email address, that’s probably worth it. If it’s more like 30 seconds and 1%, maybe not as good.
Consider removing the elements from triggering if the visit comes from search engines. So if you’re finding that this works fine and great, but you’re having issues around search guidelines, you could consider potentially just removing the element from any visit that comes directly from a search engine and instead placing that in the content itself or letting it happen on a second page load, assuming that your browse rate is decently high. That’s a fine way to go as well.
If you are trying to get the most effective value out of these types of elements, it tends to be the case that the less common and less well used the visual element is, the more interaction and engagement it’s going to get. But the other side of that coin is that it can create a more frustrating experience. So if people are not familiar with the overlay or modal or interstitial visual layout design that you’ve chosen, they may engage more with it. They might not dismiss it out of hand, because they’re not used to it yet, but they can also get more frustrated by it. So, again, return to looking at those metrics.
With that in mind, hopefully you will effectively, and not too harmfully to your SEO, be able to use these pop-ups, overlays, interstitials, modals, and all other forms of elements that interfere with user experience.
And we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Author: randfish
For more SEO, PPC & online marketing news visit https://news.scott.services
The post Pop-Ups, Overlays, Modals, Interstitials, and How They Interact with SEO – Whiteboard Friday appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.
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Thursday, 27 April 2017
Facebook pixels get upgrade to track actions & page data
The engine behind Facebook’s tracking and targeting just got an upgrade. The Facebook pixel helps track conversions, optimize ad spends and retarget users. An upgrade to the pixel was just rolled out that will now capture more information, including actions and page structure and data.
The biggest area that marketers should pay attention to is the ability to track actions based on site use. These actions include clicks like an “add to cart,” “click to call” or “purchase.” This should help advertisers gather more data on their site without having to implement custom events. The page metadata that will now be passed along includes Opengraph or Schema.org data included on the page.
According to the Facebook for Developers page, you can also turn off this new upgrade by implementing the following instructions:
If you’d like to configure the Facebook Pixel to not send this additional information, you can add the line fbq(‘set’, ‘autoConfig’, ‘false’, ‘FB_PIXEL_ID’) above the init call in the Facebook Pixel Base code and the Facebook Pixel will no longer send this additional information.
If your pixel was created before April 20, the new functionality will be go into effect on May 20. If the pixel was created after April 20, the functionality will be active now.
For more information, see the official Facebook update.
(Tip via Adweek.)
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Author: Greg Finn
For more SEO, PPC & online marketing news visit https://news.scott.services
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source https://news.scott.services/facebook-pixels-get-upgrade-to-track-actions-page-data/