Google has made it possible to add sitelinks to ads at the account level. This is designed to save time by allowing advertisers to create sitelinks that can be displayed with any ad in their account.
This is in the process of being rolled out, meaning not all advertisers have access at the moment but they soon will. If you’re not currently utilizing sitelinks at a campaign or ad group level, then any future sitelinks added will be automatically created at the account level.
Using Account-Level Sitelink Extensions
When adding sitelinks at an account level you will be asked to provide the link text that will display in search results, and the URLs being linked to.
There will also be cases when Google decides to automatically use information in your AdWords account associated with individual sitelinks — such as other ads in your account that link to the same URLs.
When sitelink extensions are served on a computer or tablet, between 2 to 6 links can be displayed. When served on a mobile device up to 4 links will be displayed. Ads both at the top and bottom of Google search results can display sitelink extensions.
Sitelinks are free to add regardless of how many you create. You only pay for sitelinks when people click on them. The cost-per-click of a sitelink is the same as the cost of clicking the display URL of the same ad. However, you’ll never get charged for more than two clicks per ad impression. If someone were to quickly click multiple links on an ad, it will be treated as a duplicate or invalid click
For more information about sitelink extensions, see Google’s support document.
Publishers can now opt-in to having their content featured in the new Search live coverage carousel, a pilot project from Google. Participating in the project will allow publishers to expedite the process of having their content surfaced by Google. The live coverage carousel will feature content such as live blogs, full length articles, videos, and more.
In addition to opting in to the pilot project via the form found here, there are several requirements that your content needs to meet before it’s eligible to be featured in the new live coverage carousel.
Requirements for Being Featured in Google’s Search Live Coverage Carousel
AMP Content Only Only content published using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) will be considered for inclusion in the carousel. For more information about AMP, including how to use it for your WordPress content, please see this article.
Structured Data Markup Content published using AMP must also include structured data markup, which helps Google understand the context around a piece of content. This will allow Google to display an accurate preview in the carousel. For more information about how to implement structured data markup, please see help guide.
Push Content With an Atom XML Feed Sending content to Google’s live coverage carousel requires the use of an HTTP POST request in an Atom XML feed. This will allow Google to index the content as soon as it hits the web. Google has been recommending Atom XML feeds for optimal crawling since October 2014.
If your content meets the above requirements, you can express interest in having your content featured in the live carousel using this form.
How quickly your mobile site takes to load will soon impact whether people will see your Facebook ads, the social network announced.
As Facebook put it, they will consider “website performance and a person’s network connection in our ad auction and delivery system.”
Could that mean advertisers will pay more if they have slow-loading websites? That isn’t clear yet, but it will be worth watching over the coming months to see if advertisers with slow load times have to pay higher costs than advertisers with speedy sites.
To help advertisers provide faster experiences, Facebook is introducing prefetching.
How Does Prefetching Work on Facebook?
This means Facebook will download mobile content (both organic and advertising) in advance.
“Today, we’re introducing prefetching – pre-loading mobile content in the Facebook in-app browser before a link is tapped,” Facebook said. “This can shorten mobile site load time by 29 percent or 8.5 seconds, improving the experience and decreasing the risk of site abandonment.”
“For each News Feed mobile ad, Facebook attempts to predict how likely a person is to click on an ad. If the prediction score meets the requirements, we prefetch the initial HTML page when the story first appears on a person’s screen. This content is cached locally on the person’s device for a short amount of time. If the person clicks on the ad, Facebook loads the initial page from the cache. The initial page then makes regular web requests to the publisher’s server to load the remainder of the page. We currently only cache the initial HTML page. Keep in mind that the CSS, Javascript or images on the website are not cached.”
The Benefits of Prefetching?
Prefetching will help advertisers in two ways, according to Facebook. It will
Reduce mobile site load time. More people are on mobile devices and they want fast sites.
Reduce the number of people who abandon your site before it fully loads. Facebook noted that 40 percent of people will abandon a site that doesn’t load in 3 seconds.
The big goal here is increasing ad performance and engagement. If you have an ad that takes users to a slow-loading site, that ad will most likely underperform in terms of engagement, which means you’ll pay more.
How Else Can Advertisers Optimize For Mobile?
Facebook also offered five bits of advice for businesses on how to optimize their sites:
Minimize landing page redirects, plugins and link shorteners
Compress files to decrease mobile rendering time
Improve server response time by utilizing multi-region hosting
Use a high-quality Content Delivery Network to reach audiences quickly
Remove render-blocking JavaScript
Much like Google, Facebook has been trying to make the overall mobile experience faster. On the organic side, Facebook introduced Instant Articles to provide users with articles that load super fast.
Google has now made it possible to search within apps on Android phones. In Apps search allows Android users to look for content within their installed apps using the Google app.
Currently, the new In Apps search mode is fairly limited in what it’s able to search for. You can search for contacts and messages in GMail, find a favorite song in Spotify, or look up a video in YouTube. In the coming months, integration with the following apps will be added: Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Evernote, Glide, Todoist and Google Keep. You will also have the option in the Settings menu to choose which apps appear in In Apps search.
Since In Apps search is performed entirely on one’s phone, it is said to work even without a WiFi or cellular connection. The first handset to get the new In Apps search mode is LG V20, which is also the first phone to ship with Google’s latest mobile operating system, Android 7.0 Nougat. The LG V20 will sport a home screen shortcut to allow access to In Apps search with a single tap.
Not many more details are known about the LG V20 at this point; more information is scheduled to be announced on Tuesday, September 6th, at an event in San Francisco. In Apps search is a feature that’s exclusive to Nougat, so presumably other handsets that have been able to upgrade to the latest Android OS will be getting the new search mode as well.
We will be following the LG V20 event next week and will report back with more details about In Apps search if more become available.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google real time carousel, In Apps search & AdWords sitelinks appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Pinterest is introducing engagement retargeting to let you target users who have engaged with your pins, and adding a new tag for better retargeting.
Here are the three big changes to Pinterest advertising the company has announced.
1. Engagement Retargeting
People who know and like your brand are more likely to buy from you. That’s why remarketing it so powerful on ad platforms like AdWords and Facebook – you’re biasing companies in your favor.
Taking that same idea, Pinterest has introduced Engagement Retargeting, which lets you target people who have engaged with your pins (e.g., saving or clicking on it).
“When someone engages with a Pin, they are demonstrating an intent to spend in the future, and they are 2.2x more likely to make a purchase in the next 30 days than those who don’t engage,” Pinterest noted. “For example, if someone saved your after school snack ideas, you can retarget them in the future with birthday party treats.”
2. New Pinterest Tag
Want to track how many people signed up for your newsletter or bought from you? Pinterest’s new tag will provide you with conversion reporting on nine types of activities users take.
For example, if someone adds an item to a cart, but leaves before purchasing, you can retarget them on Pinterest to try and convince them to buy that item from you. Or you could target someone who has bought from you with related items.
Here are all the events you can track with Pinterest’s new tag:
Page Visits: People who have visited one of your primary pages (e.g., a product page or article).
View Category: People who have visited your category pages.
Search: People who have searched on your website for products or store locations.
Add to Cart: People who have added items to your shopping cart.
Checkout: People who have completed a purchase.
Watch Video: People who have watched your videos.
Signup: People who have signed up for your product or service.
Lead: People who have shown interest in your product or service.
Custom: A special event you want to include in your conversion reporting.
In addition, Pinterest lets you create a Partner-defined Event, which is a special event you can design for the purpose of audience targeting. However, this won’t appear in your conversion reporting.
Although the new events for visitor retargeting aren’t available right now, you can implement the tag today so you’ll be ready when it does become available in the next few weeks.
Actalike Audiences are the new Lookalike Audiences. The change happened because, as Pinterest put it: “the audiences you target on Pinterest don’t just look similar, they act similar too.”
Because people are showing intent to buy, Actalike Audiences are a way for advertisers to reach specific types of audiences. When Pinterest launched Lookalike Audiences in June, the company reported that CTR increased by as much as 63 percent and boosted reach by as much as 30x.
In June, we published a large statistical study on how Google’s local algorithm works. The study data suggested that citations did not appear to correlate with good local rankings.
Seems like just yesterday Moz local guru David Mihm called out that local citations were in fact the new link. The TL;DR was that Google was likely using mentions of a business’s information on “local documents,” which Google’s patents defined as documents that are:
associated with a particular geographic area […]. A document that relates to a business listing, for example, can be considered a local document because it is associated with the particular address of the business. […] A document … may mention a business at the location, the address of the business, and/or a telephone number associated with the business.
In the early days of Google Places/+Local/My Business, it was likely helpful for Google to use local citations as a partial proxy for links, as most local businesses had few or no backlinks. This started a gold rush for local citation work with lots of competitors. Here is but a partial list of the likely thousands of companies that offer local citation-related services (in alpha order):
Advice Local (Full disclosure: The CEO bought me drinks once.)
Brandify (So did these guys.)
BrightLocal (No drinks but plenty of RTs.)
Location3 (You don’t want to know what the CEO bought me.)
Milestone (A former LSG client — Hi Benu!)
MozLocal (We actually pay these guys money.)
SIMPartners (We trade snark at conferences.)
SweetIQ (Sweet guys. Canadian.)
RioSEO (I watched an hour or two of the Olympics.)
WhiteSpark (Another Canadian. Nuff said.)
Yext (A current client.)
Hell, even that guy at Local SEO Guide got in on the game.
And on and on and on. The business is booming. I imagine, as an industry, every month there are thousands of hours and millions of dollars spent by Local marketer types (along with several entire villages in the Philippines) just doing citation work.
There’s clearly a lot of money at stake. For example, check out this Google Instant Answer (though it’s worth noting that Yext does more than just citations):
Yext likely manages something like only one percent of all US local businesses alone. So the market is YUGE.
That said, competition has come into play. We are definitely seeing pricing vary all over the map, but it is generally heading in the downward direction. Of course, it’s hard to compare pricing across vendors because each has a different way of doing things and a different set of services.
For example, Yext has a fully automated solution to control citations in its network of 60 or so big and small local search sites; MozLocal focuses on automatically getting your data into the aggregators and several of the big local search sites and reporting. Advice Local takes a manual approach to updating, claiming and fixing citations on hundreds of big and small local listings sites in combination with using publisher APIs where available. And so on.
But is all of this money and activity actually worth it?
In the early days of Local SEO, local citations worked almost like magic. In areas with low local competition, like the Australian outback, they still do. But in competitive markets, our study showed that citations may be less effective than previously believed. So are local citations dead? Maybe not.
In 2014, we did a test where we fixed citation issues of around 1,300 locations of a national chain and saw fairly remarkable results: Local pack rankings increased more than 20 percent! But how do we square the results of one study that shows fixing citations works and one that shows they don’t seem to matter?
The answer is that in our 1,300-location test, we found that if a location was already ranking in the local pack for a keyword, fixing its citations had no demonstrable effect on changing the location’s pack rankings.
This suggested to us that citations are a foundational part of a local SEO program — if your citations are borked, it may be affecting your ability to compete in local packs. But citation work is not a competitive advantage in competitive markets. This makes sense, as pretty much every business out there should have a bunch of citations. So fix your citations fast and move on to higher-value work, like getting links.
Over the years, Google’s definition of a “local document” has most certainly evolved. And as usual, local SEO practitioners will have to continue to track that evolution so they can focus on what’s most important for their clients’ success.
Given how complicated and screwed-up local data can be, until Skynet puts local brands out of their misery, there will be plenty of work for those who choose to tangle with the local citation hairball. Long live local citations!
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Andrew Shotland is the proprietor of Local SEO Guide, a leading local search engine optimization blog and consultancy.
We’re now seeing many of the changes AdWords announced in May rolling out to all accounts. This is great news in terms of enabling new opportunities, but it’s bad news if you thought your account was perfectly structured.
While each new feature will work just fine with your current account structure, your setup may no longer be the most efficient — so now may be a great time to revisit the AdWords account structure debate. I’ll cover how each of the new features may change your opinion on the right structure for an AdWords account.
Expanded text ads (ETAs)
All accounts now have the capability to create ETAs. Because results have been mixed, as reported by Andy Taylor and Ginny Marvin, I recommend not removing legacy ads — for now, at least. While Google has announced a firm date when it will no longer be possible to create legacy ads (October 26, 2016), they have not announced when legacy ads will no longer be served. So, if legacy ads sometimes outperform your new ads, there’s no rush to make the switch.
When determining which ad to keep, you’ll obviously want to look beyond just the click-through rate (CTR). Google has been touting the CTR improvements in some of their case studies, but we really should be evaluating the new ads’ impact on metrics like “conversions per impression,” which combines CTR and conversion rate.
In this illustration from our own Optmyzr account, you can see an example where the legacy ads and expanded ads are in a dead heat when it comes to CTR, but the legacy ad is converting much better.
Expanded Text Ads and account structure considerations
The reason ETAs have an impact on account structure is that there is no support for mobile-preferred ads. In other words, the same ETA will be shown on all device types.
If in the past you found that different messages worked better on mobile devices, you were able to indicate to Google that you preferred a different ad to be used for searches on those devices. That is no longer possible, and after October 26, any new ad you create will run on all devices.
Knowing Google, I am confident that the ads quality system will know which ad variant performs best on a certain device and that they will show that ad. This means that you should have at least two ad variations per ad group, but that’s nothing new; we should all be testing multiple ad variations already.
Of course, Google’s way of evaluating the best ad is normally based on CTR, so you may still not get the benefit of showing the ad that nets you the most conversions. This is where the new “perfect structure” comes into play. To gain back the control that was lost in this launch, you may want to have separate ad groups for different devices.
Legacy ads have the option to specify a mobile-preferred option so one ad group can easily cover all devices. Expanded Text Ads don’t have a mobile-preferred option, so if you want to show different ads on different devices, you need separate ad groups.
The structure above is now possible thanks to the new way device bid modifiers work. I’ll explain those in the next section.
Device bid modifiers
It is now becoming possible to set bid modifiers for all device types. In the old desktop-first world, you could only set bid modifiers for mobile devices, meaning that ads would always run on desktop, and mobile could be enabled with a bid modifier greater than -100%. It was not possible to run ads only on mobile devices (not counting some workarounds like setting a really low CPC and a very high mobile bid modifier.)
Now you can set device bid modifiers for all three device types, making it possible to run different ad groups for each device.
The ability to set modifiers for all devices is currently in the process of rolling out gradually to all accounts. Once your account has this new capability, you can once again run separate campaigns for each device, just like before the controversial launch of “Enhanced Campaigns” in 2013.
So, is Google realizing it made a mistake with Enhanced Campaigns, and that’s why they’re re-introducing this capability now? I don’t believe so; in fact, I think they’ve achieved what they wanted: to get advertisers to wake up and notice that mobile was quickly becoming the dominant device on which users were searching. By forcing all advertisers to show ads on mobile devices by default, Google was able to bring the masses along. Now that they’ve made sure all advertisers are set up to be successful in a world where mobile dominates, they’re pushing capabilities for a mobile-first world even further by making it possible for advertisers to opt out of advertising on desktops. While this isn’t for everyone, I have certainly heard several examples of advertisers who don’t care much for having their ads appear on desktop searches.
How device bid modifiers impact the perfect account structure
The implications for the “perfect structure” of this change should be pretty obvious. More control can be gained by running separate campaigns for computers, tablets and high-end mobile devices.
One interesting little nuance is that device bid modifiers can be set at the ad group level, so, whereas advertisers may have run device-specific campaigns before 2013, now they can do this or run device-specific ad groups. Here are a few of the benefits of each option.
Benefits of running device-specific campaigns:
Maintain different budgets for each device.
Use different geo settings like targets or bid modifiers for each device (more on that later).
Use different RLSA modifiers per device.
Soon, use different demographic settings per device (I am assuming these will be at the campaign level, though I have not confirmed this).
Run different ads per device.
Target different keywords and maintain device-specific negative keyword lists.
Benefits of running device-specific ad groups:
Simpler account structure, while still benefiting from device level bids.
Run different ads per device.
Target different keywords and maintain device-specific negative keyword lists.
Benefits of using bid modifiers and not splitting current ad groups:
Keep the account structure much simpler.
Maintain different bids per device.
I do NOT recommend jumping on this new capability and duplicating all your campaigns or ad groups and splitting them out by device. Doing so adds a significant amount of complexity to your account. New keywords have to be added in multiple places, changes to promotions in ad text have to be made in multiple places, how you handle reporting will probably change and so on.
I do recommend taking a close look at your most important keywords and understanding if there are differences in performance across devices that warrant a change that goes beyond setting different bids. If so, then consider using a new account structure for just these keywords.
How bid management changes with device bid modifiers
The new device bid modifier capabilities raised an interesting possibility in my mind for a way to simplify bid management.
Bid management in AdWords can be simple thanks to Portfolio Bid Strategies, but it can also get immensely complex for those who manage bids manually. Working with a lot of agencies and having seen plenty of bid management companies falter because producing great results with a black-box system is hard, I personally prefer bidding methods that allow for some human oversight while still taking advantage of machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation, something like Enhanced CPC bids.
The complexity of bid management is mostly because there are two layers — CPCs and modifiers — and they control different things. The max CPC up until now was used to set the bid for ads shown on computers. Bid modifiers were used to transform that bid into a bid for mobile devices. This meant that an advertiser who recalculated her bids based on changes in performance on computers would immediately need to recalculate the mobile modifier to make sure that those bids also remained correct. The interconnectedness of bids makes mistakes more likely, in my opinion.
Google in its announcement about the new device bid modifiers uses the term “anchoring bids,” so let me try to explain this concept by combining boating and PPC. I hear both can get wildly expensive if you don’t do it right.
In this illustration, the dark gray line at the bottom represents the ocean floor, as well as our max CPC bid for computers. Our bids are “anchored” here, so the chain between the yacht and the floor represents our mobile bid modifier. The right modifier is the one that keeps the chain tight, so the yacht stays where it needs to.
The complexity sets in when the conditions change, like when the yacht moves to a new harbor where the water is a different depth. (Fun fact: Did you know that the water levels of the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean are not the same? Weird, right?) If the captain keeps the chain on the anchor at the same length, his yacht won’t stay in place very well.
In the PPC world, a change in conditions on computer-based searches impacts what you need to do with your bid modifiers for mobile devices. This can get confusing, and sometimes advertisers simply overlook the connection and end up with bad bids. In fact, advertisers may even calculate their anchor CPC bids using data from all devices, when the correct way to calculate bids is to use data segmented for each device.
All of this gets even more confusing when you layer in geo bid modifiers, time of week bid modifiers, RLSA bid modifiers, and starting September 19, demographic modifiers for search ads. I wrote a free script that helps advertisers better understand how much they’re really bidding after all modifiers are layered in, and the outliers can be shocking.
So all of this got me thinking about how to remove some of that complexity. Here’s one method my team and I came up with: Set an artificial fixed CPC, and use all three devices’ modifiers to dial in the correct bids for each device.
As you can see, now bids for one device are no longer dependent on those of other devices, and it’s much easier to know how much you’re bidding. Unfortunately, though, because device modifiers can only be set down to the ad group level, this method only works well if you use single-keyword ad groups, so that the ad group modifier is effectively also the keyword bid modifier. In the great AdWords structure debate, this is another vote for SKAGs (single keyword ad groups).
Geo modifiers
While there hasn’t been any change in how geographic bid modifiers work, I had an interesting insight during a recent #ppcchat session on Twitter. A lot of advertisers reported that they add bid targets to their campaigns to make it easier to set bid adjustments later. Adding all the locations is a lot of initial setup work, and it’s not actually necessary to do because AdWords reports location data in the Dimensions tab.
So if an ad is targeting Canada, it will by default appear to users in Vancouver. Even if you don’t specifically add the city of Vancouver to your targeting list, you can still get a report of the ad’s performance in Vancouver from AdWords. Then, when you find that there are significant differences in performance, you can add a bid modifier for this city. The same works for all the other geo targeting levels like regions and ZIP codes.
The problem I see with advertisers adding regions as targets and then only modifying bids for these locations is that they can easily overlook opportunities from more narrowly defined locations like cities or postal codes. We have a good optimization in Optmyzr (my tool) that handles this, but with a bit of spreadsheet wizardry, it’s easy for anyone to do this themselves.
Demographic modifiers
Starting on September 19, 2016, it will become possible to add demographic bid modifiers to search campaigns. You will be able to target by age range and gender. Based on the post, it seems this will be a campaign-level setting, so if you find big differences in demographic performance across ad groups in the same campaign, it may be beneficial to split out these ad groups into separate campaigns. It’s another new reason why a more granular structure may be the right choice.
Conclusion
There have always been good reasons to split up campaigns more granularly. Now, with the loss of mobile-preferred ads and the arrival of device bid modifiers for all devices, it may be a great time to re-evaluate if your account structure is still the best one to get you amazing results.
Ultimately, the answer will be different for each advertiser, and even for each ad group and will also depend on whether the cost of the labor or the tools needed to manage a more complex account structure is lower than the performance gains achieved from this structure.
At the very least, we should all understand how the recent changes in AdWords have changed the arguments for the perfect account structure. Hopefully, by reading this, you have that better understanding now.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Frederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as the Google AdWords Evangelist.
Today he is the Cofounder of
, an AdWords tool company focused on unique data insights, One-Click Optimizations™, advanced reporting to make account management more efficient, and Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords. He stays up-to-speed with best practices through his work with
, a search marketing agency focused on turning clicks into revenue. He is a frequent guest speaker at events where he inspires organizations to be more innovative and become better online marketers.
Google’s share of the US desktop search market is not just stagnating, it is now on the decline. However, that shouldn’t necessarily be a cause for concern because the company’s overall share of the of the US search market, across all devices, is growing. This is according to August 2016 data from StatCounter.
Month-Over-Month US Desktop Search Share
Here is a comparison of August 2016 vs. July 2016, with the previous month’s numbers in parentheses:
Google: 79.88% (79.17%)
Bing: 9.9% (10%)
Yahoo!: 8.34% (8.87%)
AOL: 0.84% (0.88%)
DuckDuckGo: 0.41% (0.43%)
Other: 0.62% (0.65%)
As you can see, desktop search market share is down across the board. Meaning US searchers are generally conducting fewer searches on desktop, regardless of their search engine of choice.
Now let’s take a look at overall search market share, including desktop, mobile, tablet, and console.
Month-Over-Month Combined US Search Share
Here is a comparison of August 2016 vs. July 2016, with the previous month’s numbers in parentheses:
Google: 85.82% (85.38%)
Yahoo!: 6.58% (6.99%)
Bing: 6.39% (6.39%)
AOL: 0.46% (0.46%)
DuckDuckGo: 0.35% (0.37%)
Other: 0.4% (0.42%)
As you can see, Google’s overall share of the US search market is growing incrementally. However, the same cannot be said for its two closest rivals, Yahoo and Bing, which are declining and flatlining respectively.
So where exactly is Google gaining in search market share? The answer is mobile. Here’s one more comparison, illustrating Google’s gains in mobile search.
Month-Over-Month US Mobile Search Share
Here is a comparison of August 2016 vs. July 2016, with the previous month’s numbers in parentheses:
Google: 94.53% (94.02%)
Yahoo!: 4.07% (4.48%)
Bing: 1.01% (1.08%)
DuckDuckGo: 0.23% (0.24%)
Baidu: 0.04% (0.05%)
Other: 0.13% (0.13%)
It’s clear that Google is again the only search engine gaining marketing share in this category, while mobile searches on competing search engines are either declining or staying flat.
Does that mean Google is growing in mobile search volume at the expense of its rivals? That’s just speculation at this point, but the numbers sure paint an interesting picture.
Soon you can set sitelink extensions at the account level in AdWords. Google announced the release of account-level sitelinks in a tweet on Tuesday.
The feature is still rolling out, so you may not see it in your accounts, yet. When it becomes available, you’ll be able to add or edit sitelinks at the account level from All campaigns, according to the support page. When adding a new sitelink extension from the Ad extensions tab, there will be an option to choose Account instead of just Campaign .
While there are many cases for using campaign- and even ad group-level sitelink extensions, many advertisers will find the ability to set them at the account level very helpful. For example, smaller sites that are already using the same sitelink extensions across all campaigns and advertisers that want to streamline offers and other messaging in sitelinks across an account will no longer have to remember to associate those extensions with every campaign.
About The Author
As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, 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 provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.
Maintaining a blog takes more than just writing a bunch of blog posts. You should develop a strategy and planning for your content (especially if you are writing with multiple authors). Also, you should interact with your audience and respond to their comments. In this post, I’ll explain the importance of content planning and give some practical tips on how to effortlessly plan your blog posts.
Blog Post Planning: Create a Plan!
If you are serious about blogging, you should make a plan for your content. If you have a personal blog, planning your content will be relatively easy. Planning becomes much harder if you are working with multiple authors writing about different topics, or invite guest bloggers. I’ll give you five important pointers that will help you to create a plan:
1. Create an Editorial Calendar
A plan starts with a calendar. You should create an editorial calendar in which you plot out all the posts that you (and your co-workers) are going to write. This could just be an excel sheet, but you could also use a plugin or service for this, for instance, Trello or MeisterTask.
2. Sit Down and Brainstorm
If you want to create an editorial calendar, you could start by brainstorming. Invite all your blog authors and sit together. Ask everyone what their ideas are and which posts they would like to write in the near future. Make a list of these ideas and wishes, and then plot them out on a calendar. Make sure your authors finish their blogs a few days before the post date so you can proofread, edit if needed, and find or create accompanying illustrations or photos.
3. Use News and Current Events
When planning content, you should take a look at your calendar as well! Are there any major events coming up which are worth mentioning in your blog post? Or should you write some seasonal posts? Make sure to mix these ‘current-events posts’ with the other posts you have lined up.
4. Blog Regularly
You should blog regularly. Giving exact numbers is hard. For a company blog, a daily post will be totally acceptable. For a personal blog, this will probably not be doable at all. Try to establish some frequency and stick to it. Your readers will appreciate a reliable schedule. Once you know you can commit to your chosen schedule, make sure to communicate it to your audience somehow, so they know what to expect.
5. Add Variation
If you often write about similar topics, make sure to mix things up a little. Don’t write articles about nearly identical topics one after the other. Of course, you can still write blog series but try to vary between subjects as much as possible. You could also make variations in the form of your content. A video post for example spices things up!
Conclusion
If you take your blog serious, you should create a calendar. It’s a must-have if you are working with multiple authors. Creating an editorial calendar doesn’t have to be hard at all. Good luck!
This post originally appeared on Yoast, and is re-published with permission.
Every smart marketer on the planet gets just how important data is in marketing.
But answer me these questions, and answer them honestly: Do you know how to analyze your marketing data? Do you know how to use your analyses to improve your results?
During his presentation at Call To Action Conference, co-founder of Orbit Media, Andy Crestodina, revealed that many data-driven marketers are not getting any value from their analytics. They tend to admire data charts rather than analyze the data and act on it. Unfortunately…
Pretty charts don’t actually do anything for you unless you take action.
Crap. Who else thought that looking at a few neat graphs in Google Analytics was enough?
Analyzing Data can be as Easy as 1, 2, 3
To increase traffic and conversions, marketers need to know how to interpret their own data and turn data insights into action. Andy debunked the myth that you’ve got to be Einstein to analyze your data. This is jolly good news for those of us who break out in cold sweats at the mere thought of number crunching.
He laid out a fool-proof three-step approach to help marketers analyze their own data and turn their analyses into action. It involves using the ever-trendy (but actually invaluable when you know how to use them) Google Analytics reports: Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion.
Let’s dig in.
1. Turn Ideas Into Questions
What do you want to find out?
2. Find Answers
Look for a report that can help you validate or reject the idea.
3. Take Action
Take what you’ve learned and use it to optimize your marketing results.
By using these simple but effective steps, you can find the answers in Google Analytics to some of your most pressing marketing questions. You’re going to learn how to decrease bounce rate, rank higher in Google, boost reader engagement and increase conversions. Trust me, this is game-changing stuff.
Make sure you’re logged into Google Analytics and on the Reporting page. Let’s do this!
Audience Reports
Google Analytics Audience reports don’t just tell you who your users are; they also show you how sticky your website is. If you want to find out how well your website is working across various devices and browsers, this report is your new best friend.
Example: How to decrease your bounce rate using Audience reports
Sometimes bouncier can mean better, but this is not the case in marketing. If you have a high bounce rate (whether on your website or blog), then it’s likely that your content isn’t very relevant or user-friendly.
For smart marketers, the aim of the game should be to get bounce rates as low as humanly possible.
Using Google Analytics Audience reports, Andy shows us how to find out our website’s bounce rate across different browsers.
1. Ask a Question
“Is your website working well in every browser?”
2. Find the Answer
Click on Audience reports > Technology > Browser & OS. This will give you an overview of the bounce rates for users of every browser.
Select “Avg. time on page” from the drop-down list in the third column. This shows you which blog posts your readers are engaging with most compared to the site average.
Look for similarities between the most engaging posts. Do they talk about the same subject? Are they the same type of post (e.g., a how-to or a guide)? In the example, the posts with the highest engagement all cover Google Analytics. Hey, what a marvelous topic for a blog article!
3. Take Action
The actions are pretty obvious. Once you know which posts your readers dig, you need to deliver more of the good stuff. Invest some time in promoting these posts. Create and publish more content on the same or related subjects.
Conversion Reports
If a marketer’s ultimate goal isn’t to convert, then what is? Conversion reports give you valuable insights into which of your website pages or posts push people to convert. It may not be rocket science. But it certainly is pure 24 karat marketing gold.
Example: How to increase conversions using conversion reports
Go to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path. This shows you which pages your converters were looking at before they completed an action, or goal.
Select the goal from the “All goals” drop-down list. In the example, Andy selects “Newsletter subscribers”.
This shows you which pages people were on before subscribing to the newsletter. Now click on “advanced” to add a filter.
Voilà ! A list of the blog posts your visitors were reading before subscribing to your newsletter.
3. Take Action
With this valuable info under your belt, you can now focus your efforts on driving traffic to the posts that convert the most visitors. Andy recommends promoting these posts using social media, email or even showcasing them on your website’s homepage. You could also publish more content on your highest converting topics.
From Passive Marketing to Active Marketing
There we have it. A whole host of great examples — based on asking questions, finding answers and taking action — that we can all use to perform our very own analyses and improve the results of our marketing efforts.
Andy taught us that analyzing our own marketing data is fundamental to improving our marketing results and that anyone — dataphile or dataphobe — can do their own seriously valuable data analysis. All you need is a Google Analytics account and a no-nonsense approach.
As for the most valuable takeaway of them all? Inspiring marketers to not only act on their data, but also to adopt a culture of analysis, reflection, and experimentation. Now you’ve got the tools you need to become an active data-driven marketer; the rest is down to you.
This post originally appeared on Unbounce, and is republished with permission.
Google published on the developer site information about the search live coverage carousel, which lets publishers feed Google breaking content in real-time that is related to live sports, elections, and breaking news.
This does seem directly related to the real time indexing API announcement made at Google I/O in May by Richard Gingras.
This “search live coverage carousel” is a “pilot” that Google is opening up to select publishers. Publishers can apply by filling out this form over here. It allows Google to “surface content more quickly than is currently possible with a standard crawl on your website.” Google said content that make sense for this live coverage carousel includes “live sports, elections, and breaking news” and “can include live blogs, full length articles, videos and more,” Google added.
Here is a screen shot of what this new search live coverage carousel looks like:
To participate in this pilot, you do need to use AMP HTML, the structured content markup and supply an Atom based feed. Here are the more detailed requirements:
Content must be published using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): By publishing your content with AMP, you’ll enable your pages to be loaded nearly instantly to users’ devices. Read about how to Use AMP HTML in the AMP public developer docs.
Your AMP pages must include structured data markup for the content itself: Structured data markup enables the preview for your live coverage article on the Search page and also helps Google better understand the context around a piece of content. Find out more in the Introduction to Structured Data.
Content must be pushed to Google using an Atom XML feed: When you send your content to Google, you should use an an HTTP POST request in an Atom XML feed that contains your AMP page content as soon as it is published on the web. This allows Google to more quickly index your content.
We asked Google if this is related to the real time indexing API announced at I/O, we believe so but we are trying to get official confirmation. When we hear back, we will update this story.
This morning, Google has removed the mobile friendly label from showing in their mobile search results. We knew it was coming, Google announced last week they were dropping the label, but it took some time for the label to go away.
Again, the removal of the mobile friendly label in no way means that the mobile friendly ranking signal is not being used – it is still being used. Google removed the label because they wanted to declutter the mobile search results and because “85% of all pages in the mobile search results” now are mobile-friendly by Google’s criteria.
Here is a screen shot of the mobile friendly label no longer showing up as of this morning:
Here is what it looked like last week with the mobile friendly label:
The RankRanger tool shows a significant and almost complete drop in the mobile friendly label from showing in the search results, which means it seems Google has mostly rolled out this change.
Ladies and gentlemen. We come together today to once again mourn the loss of Facebook organic reach, to share the grief all of us marketers feel. And perhaps, in that sharing, we can find the strength to look toward the future with some hope.
Yes, organic reach on Facebook is abysmal and getting worse, thanks to the latest announcement from the social network that’s visited by more than a billion users every day. Facebook will show more funny videos and baby pictures posted by family and friends instead of news and other marketing content from brands, businesses, and publishers.
Every once in a while, one of your posts might still get tons of organic engagement. But it’s fast becoming mission impossible.
Facebook: Unhackable.
Facebook’s algorithm is powered by machine learning. While I don’t know the secret formula Facebook uses, we know from a computer-science perspective that machine-learning algorithms learn by testing and figuring out how people react to those tests.
Bottom line: if people really love your content and engage with it, then they are more likely to see more of that type of content in the future. The reverse is also true – if you post garbage, and if people don’t engage with it, then those people are even less likely to see your stuff in the future.
More engagement (i.e., shares, comments, Likes) means more visibility in Facebook’s news feed. Facebook’s algorithm is more likely to give more visibility to posts that resonate well, to audition it in front of more people.
In fact, Facebook Ads, Google AdWords and even organic search work the same way.
So what’s the solution?
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to mitigate the loss from the latest Facebook newsfeed algorithm. You must increase your organic engagement rates.
Let’s meet your new weapons – the five crazy hacks that will help you do what’s said to be impossible: hack the Facebook newsfeed algorithm.
Note: Some of these hacks involve spending a little bit of money. Others are totally free. All of them are totally worth your time.
Listen up: Preferred audience targeting is a brand new Facebook feature that works just like ad targeting, but for your organic posts. That’s right; this new feature lets you target your organic updates as if they were ads, for free. Facebook lets you target your update so only the people who are most likely to be interested in your update will see it.
Here’s where the preferred audience targeting option can be found:
This feature is so powerful because not everyone who follows your Facebook page is going to care about every single update you publish. If you want to start increasing your organic reach, you need to stop broadcasting to all of your followers and focus on those people who are most likely to engage with specific updates.
Think about it. Why do people follow huge companies like IBM or GE? It could be for any number of reasons.
Facebook’s preferred audiences feature is pure genius for companies that have a variety of products and divisions, or that operate in multiple countries. You can narrow the targeting based on users’ interests and locations to reach the people you really want without bothering the rest of your followers.
This feature also has benefits for smaller companies and publishers. Take me for example. I post updates on a wide variety of topics, including online advertising, entrepreneurship, social media marketing, SEO, branding, and growth hacking.
Preferred audience targeting allows me to decide who sees my posts – or who won’t see my post, using audience restrictions:
Here’s another example. Let’s say you’re a French clothing retailer with locations in France, Poland, and Germany. You could make it so that only French-speaking millennial females who live near your locations will see your post announcing your latest deals.
Remember: everybody who likes your page isn’t your target market. Plenty of random people will like your page over time, but then never engage with your updates, visit your website, or buy from you.
If you can only reach 1 percent of your audience, you should more narrowly target the people who are truly interested in what you have to offer. Giving people what they’re interested is what great marketing is all about – and, in the process, it will help you raise your Facebook engagement rate significantly.
Facebook Newsfeed Hack #2: The Unicorn Detector Pyramid Scheme
The Unicorn Detector Pyramid Scheme is the process you can use to separate your content unicorns from the donkeys.
What is a content unicorn? Well, content becomes a unicorn when it is clearly among the top 1 to 2 percent of all of your content. These are your most rare and beautiful pieces of content that attract the most shares, engagement, and views.
A content donkey, on the other hand, doesn’t stand out at all. At most, it’s average. Ninety-eight percent of your content will be donkeys that get average engagement – again, less than 1 percent is the average organic engagement on Facebook, which is insanely low, right?
To raise your organic engagement rates on Facebook, you need to post fewer, but better updates. You can test out your content organically on Twitter. Here’s how it works.
Post lots of stuff on Twitter – somewhere around 20 tweets per day. But imagine that every tweet has been infected with a virus, one that will ultimately kill them without the antidote within less than 24 hours.
The only cure for these infected tweets? They need to get a significant number of retweets, clicks, likes, and replies.
Examine your top tweets in Twitter Analytics. Those tweets with the most engagement – your top 5 or 10 percent – have survived!
Your content that got the most engagement on Twitter is also highly likely to generate similar engagement on Facebook.
Facebook Newsfeed Hack #3: Post-Engagement Ads
You can use Facebook’s Post Engagement Ads to give your posts a bit of a push. Yes, that means you’re spending a little money to “earn” some free reach in the news feed.
For example, let’s say I posted the above update only on my wall. The engagement is going to be pretty low. Maybe a few hundred people will see it.
So what happens if I spend just $20 to promote it? In this case, I paid for more than 4,400 impressions (clicks, follows, likes, etc.), but also got more than 1,000 organic engagements for free as a result.
How? Whenever someone shares your promoted post, it results in more people seeing it organically in their newsfeeds and engaging with it.
Facebook Newsfeed Hack #4: Add Engaged Followers
Did you know there’s a way you can selectively invite people who have recently engaged with one of your Facebook posts to like your page? This is a valuable but little-known feature available to some (but not all) pages.
You want people who engage with you to become part of your Facebook fan base. You know these people like you and are more likely to engage with your content because they’ve done so in the past.
Here’s how you do it: Click on the names of the people who reacted to your post (liked, loved, etc.). You’ll see three types of buttons (Invite, Liked, Invited). Clicking on that Invite button will send an invitation to people who engaged with one of your Facebook posts to like your business page.
Does it work? Yep. Between 15 to 20 percent of the people I invite to like my page are doing so.
Oh, and did I mention it’s totally free? You can read more about the these people like you.
If you want to further increase your Facebook following, you could run a remarketing and list-based Facebook Fan / Page Promotion campaign, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t think it’s a good investment unless you have a ridiculously low number of followers. You’re better off doing nothing.
Our goal is to increase engagement rates to increase earned organic engagement. Attracting the wrong types of fans could hurt, rather than help, your engagement rates.
Facebook Newsfeed Hack #5: Use Video Content
The decline of organic reach almost mirrors the rise of video on Facebook.
Users watch more than 8 billion videos every day on the social network. And these videos are generating lots of engagement.
Just look at this recent research from BuzzSumo, which examined the average total number of shares of Facebook videos.
Facebook is doing its best to try to kill YouTube as the top platform for video. If you haven’t yet, now is the time to jump on the bandwagon.
Stop sharing vanilla posts that get little to no engagement. Add some video into your marketing mix! That should help improve your organic engagement because engagement begets engagement.
Closing Thoughts on the Facebook Newsfeed Algorithm
Facebook organic reach is pretty terrible. That’s why you should start treating your organic Facebook posts more like a paid channel, where you have to pickier and optimize to maximize engagement, in the hopes of getting more earned organic engagement.
We’ll never get back the Facebook organic reach we’ve lost over the past few years. However, these five hacks will help dramatically increase your organic engagement and mitigate your losses from the latest Facebook news feed change.
This post originally appeared on WordStream, and is re-published with permission.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by WordStream. Used with permission. In-post Photos: All images by WordStream. Used with permission. All screenshots by Larry Kim. Taken July 2016.
Writing about search market share on the desktop is now a bit like writing about old cars. It’s sort of interesting but less and less relevant. For reasons that remain mysterious, comScore has neglected to provide a unified view of the search marketplace — despite the fact that likely between 55 and 60 percent of search queries now come from mobile devices.
For comparison, the following are the comScore numbers from July 2015:
Google Sites — 64.0%
Microsoft Sites — 20.4%
Yahoo Sites — 12.7%
Ask Network — 1.8%
AOL — 1.2%
Essentially all parties have lost incremental share except for Bing, which has gained 1.5 points. Depending on your perspective, this could be spun as trivial or part of Bing’s long slow climb to meaningful market share.
PC query volumes peaked on the desktop in 2013. However, in mobile, Google commands roughly 94 percent of the market according to StatCounter, which may not be entirely representative but certainly gives us a directional indication of the market.
Mobile search market share in US
Data: StatCounter
An interesting question then is what is Google’s total query volume, combining PC and mobile web? Operating under the assumption that 55 percent of Google’s queries are mobile — extrapolating from comScore desktop query figures — here’s what I estimate Google’s currently query distribution looks like:
Estimated US Google search queries: July 2016 (billions)
Data: StatCounter
Accordingly it’s safe to say that while PC search volumes are flat to declining, Google is seeing vastly more searches overall because of its dominance of the mobile search market. On a global basis, Google is processing something in excess of two trillion search queries per year.
About The Author
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,
, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on
Google has announced a new way to locate content within apps, for those using Android phones. “In Apps” is a new search tab that allows this, within Android’s Google app. Google shared the news on its Inside Search blog today, along with an illustration of how it works: The post...
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