Tag Archives: Search Engine Land

Years of economic growth have been wiped out by COVID-19. However, the story for e-commerce has been the opposite: an acceleration of growth that otherwise might have taken years. Approaching 20% of retail. The U.S. Commerce Department reported new retail sales data (.pdf) earlier this week. It shows a huge spike in second-quarter e-commerce spending as a percentage of total retail, growing from 11.8% in Q1 to 16.1% in Q2. Some analysts and outlets exclude categories such as restaurants, bars, automobile dealers and gas stations to tell a stronger growth story. Using that formula, which is a bit of a cheat, e-commerce is now closer to 21%. To put all […]

Microsoft Advertising Editor users now have access to AI-powered recommendations and campaign-level associations, the company announced Wednesday. The new features are designed to help advertisers optimize campaign performance and make bulk campaign management easier. Recommendations as they appear in Microsoft Advertising Editor. Source: Microsoft. AI-powered recommendations. Recommendations, which were released as a closed beta in November, are now available globally. Denoted with a lightbulb icon, recommendations can include suggestions for bid optimizations, new keywords to add, and fixes for ad groups that are missing ads or keywords. Advertisers can implement recommendations directly from Microsoft Advertising Editor’s error pane or review recommendations and their estimated impact before applying them. Campaign-level audience […]

Google has extended the functionality of its related activity cards with respect to shopping, job and recipe-related searches, the company announced Tuesday. The new features are designed to make it easier for users to take the next step in their journey; in this case, making a purchase, finding a job or preparing a meal. The shopping activity card. Google search will now show products that a user has been researching, even if the product was featured in an article the user was reading. The shopping activity card featuring products associated with a user’s activity. Source: Google. Price ranges and star ratings make it easier for users to compare the products […]

Yelp introduced “Request a Quote” business messaging in 2016. In the interim, the company added capabilities and is now reintroducing it as a more full-featured lead-generation and business matching tool with appointment booking. Yelp is also launching “Nearby Jobs” for local services businesses, which gives them the ability to access a flow of local leads a part of a $240 monthly subscription. Businesses can proactively reach out to interested consumers based on a feed of local projects and service requests. On track to 100 business categories. More than 60 business categories now offer Request a Quote, featuring a newly revamped lead-gen questionnaire. That will grow to 100 in the near […]

Google announced that Search Console has been upgraded to support reporting on issues around AMP and signed exchanges. Signed exchanges (SXG) can be used with AMP to show your real publisher URL and not the Google AMP cache URL when serving your AMP articles. Google’s URL inspection tool and the AMP enhancement report within Search Console can both now report on issues around signed exchanges and AMP. With these updates, “sites implementing SXG for their AMP pages will be able to understand if there are any issues preventing Google from serving the SXG version of their page using the Google AMP Cache,” Google said. URL inspection tool. The URL inspection […]

Google and Mozilla’s Firefox need one another. That was recently reaffirmed in the decision to extend their 2017 search partnership, which was set to expire this year. Mozilla gets most of its revenue from search partnerships, the most important of which is Google — the latter is the default search engine for Firefox in North America. Google needs Firefox as a competitor in the browser segment, which it dominates globally. Google’s browser is under antitrust scrutiny in both Europe and the U.S. Existential time for Mozilla. Failure to extend the search deal with Google could have been a potentially existential blow to Mozilla, which has laid off 320 employees since […]

Google has added three new features to Performance Planner, its ad campaign forecasting tool, the company announced Monday. Performance Planner can now account for conversion delay and supports shared budgets across search campaigns as well as campaign plans that can be viewed and edited by other stakeholders. A screenshot of Performance Planner’s new sharing feature. Source: Google. Why we care Being able to account for the lag between when a user clicks on an ad and when they perform a conversion action can help advertisers get more accurate campaign projections. Shared budget projections may also make the Performance Planner tool more useful for advertisers managing their campaigns that way. And, […]

Acquiring search data is not a terribly hard part of an SEO’s job. From the platform-based tools that give marketers the ability to see how their site rankings perform to a range of third-party tools that dig deeper into the data to understand intent and customer lifecycle, there are many ways marketers gather data on how their customers are behaving. “But how can we then take information that we’ve acquired and then apply it to our strategies from an SEO strategy standpoint as well as from a marketing standpoint?” said Leslie Ramey, SEO Solutions Consultant at Botify. One approach she advocates for is breaking the approaches down into one bucket […]

After being under the radar for a couple of months, Google has confirmed the new Google Search Console Insights. Search Console Insights is a new view of your data specifically “tailored for content creators and publishers,” Google said. It can help content creators understand how audiences discover their site’s content and what resonates with their audiences. Search Console Insights uses both Search Console and Google Analytics data in one view. Google announced the beta today on Twitter, saying, “Today we’re starting to roll out a new experience to beta testers: Search Console Insights. It’s a way to provide content creators with the data they need to make informed decisions and […]

Facebook wants to help small businesses (SMBs) survive the COVID crisis — and make money. A few months ago, the company announced $100M in cash grants and ad credits for SMBs. It later introduced Facebook Shops to help SMBs sell online. And today it announced a new product to monetize classes and online events called, matter-of-factly, “paid online events.” Potentially powerful new channel. Paid online events is currently a free product that enables “businesses, creators, educators and media publishers” to set up paid events or classes online and keep 100% the revenue themselves — except on iOS, where event hosts must give up the 30% “App-Store tax,” as Facebook called […]