Equipping marketing leaders with the skills, tools and data they need to prove ROI is like setting out to sea on a fishing expedition.
Rather than distributing equal bait to each rod of a marketing campaign despite not knowing which will produce the most bites, marketing attribution teaches marketers to assemble the best combination of bait before casting its line into a sea of prospects.
Starting from March 29, 2023, the Google Ads API v11 will no longer be available. Developers still using v11 after this date will notice API requests failing.
Depreciation and sunset timetable. Typically, major versions are supported for approximately 12 months, while minor versions have a support lifespan of 10 months.
Migrate asap. To migrate to the newest version, visit the Google Ads API documentation here.
Dig deeper. Read the announcement from Google here.
Why we care. New API updates directly affect the functionality and performance of advertising campaigns. Once a version is sunset, all API requests using that version will fail, potentially causing disruptions to campaign management and optimization. By staying up-to-date with the latest version of the API, advertisers and developers can access new features and improvements, ensuring your campaigns are running efficiently and effectively.
Microsoft Bing will upgrade Bing Webmaster Tools to add reporting and tools around the new Bing Chat feature and a new index coverage report. This was announced by Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, this morning in a keynote given at PubCon Austin.
Bing Chat in Webmaster Tools. Bing Webmaster Tools should be adding Bing chat integration to allow publishers, content creators and site owners to see how much traffic the chat feature is sending their sites. It will be part of the Bing performance report and show impressions, clicks, click through rate and more.
Here is a photo of this report from Jennifer Slegg on Twitter:
Index coverage report. In addition, Fabrice also announced a new index coverage report coming to Bing Webmaster Tools. This report will show how your pages on your site are being indexed by Bing Search. If pages are being excluded or if pages are having issues being indexed.
Here is a photo of this report from Patrick Stox on Twitter:
Why we care. With all the concern, confusion and stress around these new chat AI features, having a report that shows how many people see our links, click on our links and visit our sites will be helpful to publishers, content creators and site owners. In addition, the new index coverage report can help site owners understand which pages are not being indexed, so they can work on improving indexing through IndexNow, sitemaps or other means.
That’s a lot of cheddar. But there’s only one problem…
Nobody uses Bing.
Seriously, no matter how you slice or dice the data, they have less than 10% of the market to Google’s ~80-90%+.
So will AI help? Sure. I mean, it can’t hurt! It was already a ghost town to begin with.
I’m not (just) being flippant. I’m making a point.
Google has already been disrupting SERPs – for years! – with a proliferation of featured snippet and knowledge graphs, and instant answers that give you exactly what you’re looking for… without requiring a single click.
That means U cAn GeT yUr DrInK oN without ever clicking on poor liquor.com below (and giving them some “ad cents.” (Get it?)
2. Spend more time on MOFU and BOFU content (i.e., the less disruptable stuff)
Despite Google SERPs + AI already cannibalizing your top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content, it’s less destructive for middle or bottom-of-the-funnel (MOFU/BOFU) stuff.
You know, the kind that actually compels people to do something – click, opt-in, add to cart, start a trial, create an account, or just hit the Buy button.
AI content will be similar for the foreseeable time, because the underlying technology relies exclusively on pretrained models.
It’s why machine can often beat Grand Masters at chess. They can scan and store information (read: patterns and moves) and then make decisions based on that data faster.
Like “garbage in, garbage out,” it associates data points that often show up together, then spits it back out again when called upon – without actually understanding what it’s saying.
So while AI content can do a passable job at a simple, black-and-white query like “What is Advil?” and similar, it’s less useful for figuring out if you need Advil or if you should go to the ER.
Which brings us to the next subplot:
AI content is notoriously wrong. Not, like, some of the time – but, like, all of the time.
3. Great content is often written by subject-matter experts, with quotes and nuance to add color to a topic or angle
The world we live in is not black and white. It’s all shades of kinky, messy, sweaty grey.
Plus, it’s easy to spot, like the nerdiest game of whack a mole. A new version of ChatGPT is released, a few weeks later, Turnitin can spot it with 97% accuracy.
Take even the title of this article. It was initially going to be a straightforward “how-to,” but I knew turning it into a Top 10 listicle would get more attention.
Knowledge of the audience should even inform the content structure.
But that isn’t all.
The very definition of “content” continues to evolve as more and more stuff shows up in today’s SERPs.
4. Better structure content types around the Query + SERP layout
Google “HubSpot tutorial” and here’s what you won’t see first:
PPC Ads.
HubSpot.com.
People Also Ask questions.
Traditional organic listings.
Knowledge Graph.
Give up?
Videos!
C’mon, OpenAI. Where’s your vlogging game at?
This is a perfect segue (if I do say so myself) because the one thing that video often has over plain text is personality.
The delivery of the content in video is arguably just as (if not more) important than the actual content.
But. That shouldn’t necessarily be the case.
It just is. Because most writing on the web suuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkkssss.
Take the obnoxious-as-hell introduction of this article.
I’ve worked with hundreds of brands in the past decade. And I can only count on one hand the number that would let us usually get away with something like that.
Most want to play it safe. Water it down. Make it more generic. Make sure the Oxford comma is just so.
You know, because customers really care how you format em dashes. (Wait. No, they don’t.)
Get 10+ writers to drone on and on and on like the same nameless, faceless, Company, Inc. that’s been the content strategy over the past few years.
Yet, over the next few, it will die an excruciatingly-violent, Squid Games-esque death.
‘Cause AI content is already the faceless master of the universe.
5. Think more recurring columns from individuals with personalities vs. lots of generic writing that all sounds the same
“If you are easily offended by direct aspersions on your lineage, the circumstances of your birth, your sexuality, your appearance, the mention of your parents possibly commingling with livestock, then the world of professional cooking is not for you.”
From the thought-provoking:
“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.”
To simple quips:
“When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.”
What do you call that? Journalism? Satire?
No clue. I just call it endlessly readable. Can’t-take-my-eyes-off-it watchable. Literally-LOL listenable.
That's why showing people what something looks like will always, unarguably, be better than walls of text.
You might as well be dropping 300 words of Lorem Ipsum when an image comes into view, like so:
Mixed media helps break up content, actually encouraging more scanning and scrolling, which your crack fiend-like audience is already accustomed to online.
This should include everything from:
Featured images.
Charts and graphs.
Visualizing a process or explanation.
CTAs.
Even graphics that could be repurposed for social channels, video thumbnails, and more.
And it means anytime you explain some visual process, show it!
It's better to show people exactly how to "add a strikethrough in Google Docs," as an example, than to ramble on and on and on and bury the good stuff in walls of text around it.
7. Create long, in-depth content that can easily be repurposed into more audio and visual mediums
You don't need another statistic to explain video's importance to marketing. No one does.
So let's skip the foreplay and focus on the important point:
The very same long, in-depth, nuanced, interesting content that AI can't do also lends itself really well to another human-friendly element: audio and video.
A basic element is to take in-depth content and create audio summaries. Or, simply include thematically related discussion-style podcasts into related articles. The Economist does both.
But you can and should do the same with video, especially as YouTube continues to eat away at traditional television + streaming time while also eating away at organic SERP placements, too. (See point #4 above.)
So take your top content, or most competitive "head" terms, and create everything from product-focused walkthroughs to in-depth reviews or even motion graphics.
Just remember that we're shooting for what AI can't do = which often means more human inclusion with some talking-head elements, too.
8. Illustrate stories with interactive content and data visualization
The theme over the last few tips here is to focus less on the actual content itself and more on how you deliver it.
Specifically, make it more interactive so it is easier to grasp and more interesting to focus on for a few minutes.
Data visualization is the natural extension, then. Again, take a cue from top publishers like The Economist, which has recently been churning out interactive content pieces like this overview of worldwide weather systems.
9. Lean into nuance and subjectivity by comparing alternative solutions for different audiences
AI doesn't waffle. It can't, by definition. It's programmed to spit out facts like that supremely-annoying know-it-all in your office. (Err, Slack Watercooler.)
The good news is that this dovetails nicely with the fact that online audiences are also becoming savvier. Meaning: if you just spew BS, they'll see right through it.
Nowhere is this clearer than affiliate-related SERPs. Sure, you can still pull the wool of the eyes of rubes in the "make money online" space.
But generally speaking, people are smart enough to know that there is no #1 right answer 100% of the time.
Instead, you often compare different options for different people based on a wide range of factors.
For instance, what's the best dive watch you can buy right now?
The answer is entirely dependent on budget!
What's "nice" at $100 isn't at $1,000, $10,000, or even $100,000. (Much to my bank account + wife's chagrin.)
But the point is that you can and should lean more into subject-style content.
At the very least, take a more balanced and nuanced approach to the kind of searches that might realistically work for multiple parties.
Once again, you can up the ante here by using better design, presentation, and even development to highlight these subjective differences clearly.
Think: comparison charts and graphics. Showcase pros vs. cons or which alternative is better depending on their budget, goals, and preferences.
10. Demonstrate how things works, not just what they're capable of
You should always strive to go the extra mile.
Sounds trite. But it's true.
If the competing content has zero images, you should have five. If they have 10 stock images, you should have 10 custom ones.
Your content will need a competitive "moat," made up of all these elements we're talking about today, to "future-proof" your content as much as possible.
My last favorite example includes calculators, tools, quizzes, and other embeddable elements.
Let's literally and figuratively go that extra mile now. Say you have two ways of determining your expected finish time in a marathon.
You can:
Painstakingly look up your mile time on the leftmost column of a huge chart, using both fingers to draw lines between that and your distance time…
Or, you could punch in two numbers and get an instant answer:
(Hmmm. That latter example even kinda sounds like what AI is doing, anyway? )
Remember that "content" doesn't always mean "text."
Yes. You will often need text to start. A script is the nucleus of a video.
But the actual presentation, format, delivery, or interaction will continue to matter more and more over the next decade.
Double down on what AI can't do
The cat is out of the bag.
AI will only continue getting better and better and better.
Pretty soon, we'll have no choice but to build digital pyramids in the metaverse in its honor.
Thankfully, that day isn't today. Or tomorrow. Probably not five years from now, either.
Compete on those latter things. On the things that aren't easily reproducible and aren't likely to change anytime soon. Especially the human bits that are already hardwired into our internal hard drives.
Machines might be able to beat you at chess. But they won't ever at intangibles like instincts or intuition.
Or any other "i" word to complete the cheap alliteration joke that confirms there's a living, breathing human typing this after all.
As an advertiser or SEO professional, it’s essential to recognize that with the growing popularity of online shopping, customers’ safety and security have become a top priority for e-commerce platforms. In response to this, Google has implemented three ways to help customers shop safely and ensure that merchants’ stores meet these standards.
Vetting stores through automation
Store badges
Automated and human merchant and listing reviews
Automatically vetting product merchants. Before a product or merchant can list on Google, they must undergo a thorough safety review to ensure they meet standards. With the help of the Shopping Graph, a vast database of products and sellers, the systems can quickly evaluate the legitimacy of a business, ensure that the product information is accurate, and verify that the content adheres to Google policies.
These policies cover all products displayed in shopping results, including those obtained from web crawling. By following these policies, Google will ensure that the products you see meet standards and that you won’t come across items that violate the rules, such as violent weapons, merchants misrepresenting their businesses, or hateful content.
In January alone, Google prevented about 100 million product offers from being displayed and rejected nearly 300,000 accounts for quality issues or policy violations.
Store badges. Google offers store badges to businesses that are known to provide a positive shopping experience. The badges are awarded to stores that meet criteria for fast shipping, easy returns, high-quality websites, and excellent user ratings.
Google also displays ratings for both products and their various sellers, allowing you to learn from other shoppers’ experiences with those products and businesses. Additionally, the product listings link you directly to the merchant’s website, providing you with the opportunity to conduct further research about the store and its policies. This is so you can make informed decisions about your purchases and ensures that you are shopping with confidence.
Automated and human reviews for merchants and listings.
“Our automated systems are always monitoring for violating activity, and our team of human reviewers is on standby to review issues that might need a more nuanced perspective.”
Google
Once merchants have been onboarded, Google will continue to monitor listings to ensure that nothing has changed in a suspicious or problematic manner since their initial inclusion on Google. For example, if a merchant met country-specific requirements for selling alcohol during onboarding, they periodically verify that those qualifications are still being met.
Google will also take various actions when they detect suspicious behavior, including removing suspicious listings that violate policies or banning a merchant from listing on Google.
Why we care. These efforts can directly impact advertisers ability to reach potential customers through Google’s advertising platforms and search results.
When customers feel secure shopping on Google, they are more likely to make purchases and interact with the merchants and products advertised on the platform. Advertisers and SEOs can take advantage of this trust by ensuring that their advertising and product listings meet Google’s policies and requirements. By adhering to these standards, they can earn store badges, improve their visibility, and increase the chances of attracting new customers.
By complying with Google’s policies and guidelines, advertisers and SEOs can avoid having their products or listings removed or being banned from the platform altogether. This would undoubtedly harm their ability to reach customers and affect their overall business goals. Therefore, it is essential for advertisers and SEOs to stay up-to-date with Google’s policies and make sure that their advertising and listings adhere to these standards.
Microsoft released version 96 of the Bing AI chat feature earlier this morning. This new update brings quality improvements such as a higher response rate to chats and also fewer “hallucinations,” Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Bing, wrote on Twitter.
What is new. Mikhail said the two main improvements to Bing AI chat include:
Significant reduction in cases where Bing refuses to reply for no apparent reason
Reduction of instances of hallucination in answers
Here are those tweets:
Main two improvements you should see are:
– Significant reduction in cases where Bing refuses to reply for no apparent reason
– Reduced instances of hallucination in answers
Tone not live. Yesterday, Mike Davidson, Corporate Vice President, Design & Research at Microsoft, on Twitter said the ability to pick a tone for Bing Chat was live for some, but Mikhail said not just yet. It might launch in the coming days, he said.
To clarify, since some people asked: we have been testing different versions of the Bing Chat Mode selector (the tri-toggle) for the last few days. We have decided on the final version, which we expect to ship in the next couple of days.
Why we care. Again, it’s fascinating to follow all these rapid changes from Microsoft on its new Bing AI Chat. Keeping an eye on what Microsoft is doing to improve the quality of the results, how it responds to criticism, and more is something that is not just fun and exciting to stay on top of, but may teach us about how we can leverage these features to garner more traffic to our sites.
I wonder if anyone will pick up on these quality improvements but the speed of these updates to Bing Chat is so much fun to see.
In 2017, DMOZ – The Open Directory Project that used human editors to organize websites — announced it was closing as of March 14.
By this time, DMOZ had been mostly forgotten as a resource. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that it took so long.
DMOZ was born in June 1998 as “GnuHoo,” then quickly changed to “NewHoo,” a rival to the Yahoo Directory at the time. It was acquired by Netscape in November 1998 and renamed the Netscape Open Directory. Later that month, AOL acquired Netscape, giving AOL control of The Open Directory.
2019: Would Google give us a clear statement that outright said it does not currently use CTR directly in their core search ranking algorithm? Of course not.
2019: Google launched the Business Redressal Complaint Form to allow searchers and users to report fraudulent activity relating to businesses Google Maps.
2018: Multifaceted featured snippets would be surfaced for queries that were sufficiently broad enough to allow for more than one interpretation of what was submitted.
2017: Tips from Google’s John Mueller on what to do if you needed to turn off your website for a period of time and worried your Google rankings will drop.
2014: Dan Barker did a search for [what is a scraper site], which brought up Google’s own web definition at the top of the results, which technically outranked the original source of the content.
2014: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2013: A proposed German copyright law wouldn’t require search engines like Google to pay to show short summaries of news content. But uncertainty remained about how much might be “too much” and require a license.
2011: Nearly 60% of cases that ended in a purchase begin with search – and social media played an increasingly important role during consideration and especially after a purchase is made.
2008: Rather than log into your Webmaster Tools account, you could add the Webmaster Tools gadget to your iGoogle page and access information from there.
2008: Google said it would not sell any personal consumer information. However, pages that weren’t part of the consumer health profile would potentially feature ads.
2007: Google started a two-day sales event aimed at the U.S. government that reportedly brought in “200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members.”
2007: Google was looking to hire a head of national TV sales in New York and dive into their TV ad play with “scatter inventory,” ads that weren’t sold well in advance.
2007: At Google for four years, Patrick Keane was “responsible for developing and managing the strategic plans and relationships critical to growing Google’s advertising customer base.”
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Google’s Search Ads Week kicked off with two new tools to help advertisers deliver faster creatives and better performance.
Create new assets with Google’s AI
New customer acquisition goals
A couple of Search Week product updates: Automatically created assets are now available to all advertisers in English as an open beta & the new customer acquisition goal is now fully rolled out for Search campaigns:
Create new assets with Google’s AI. Google’s goal is to help advertisers deliver effective ads to their target audience by having a variety of relevant creative assets available. To achieve this, they now offer a setting called “automatically created assets” which generates new ad components based on an advertiser’s existing assets and landing page. This setting allows responsive search ads to show potential customers the best combination of assets.
Now, the open beta for automatically generated assets is available to all advertisers in English. Early adopters who have used this feature for headlines and descriptions have seen an average increase of 2% in conversions, with a similar cost per conversion, for ad groups that use responsive search ads.
New improvements coming to assets. As part of this update, the following improvements will roll out in the coming weeks:
Ad Strength will take into account both automatically created assets and your existing assets when determining your rating.
Automatically created assets will use inputs you’ve provided such as your keywords to customize your headlines and improve their relevance to the query when it’s predicted to improve performance.
You’ll also be able to remove any automatically created assets that you’d prefer not to include in your ads.
Additional languages for automatically created assets will be launched later this year.
Connect with new customers on Search. A new customer acquisition goal for Search campaigns has been launched globally. This goal utilizes Smart Bidding and first-party data to optimize campaigns and attract new customers during peak periods. By combining the new customer acquisition goal with bidding strategies like Maximize conversion value with a target ROAS, advertisers can prioritize and target high-value customers.
Early adopters. Numerous businesses have already utilized this goal to reach out to potential new customers. Baltic Born, a fashion retailer, is an example of one such business with an ambitious revenue growth target. To expand their customer base beyond repeat customers in a highly competitive market, Baltic Born implemented the new customer acquisition goal for Search along with a target ROAS value-based bid strategy. As a result, they were able to achieve a 73% increase in new customers and a 36% rise in revenue.
The new customer acquisition goal has two modes that help you to reach your campaign goals:
Value New Customer: Bid higher for new customers than for existing customers.
New Customers Only: Bid for new customers only.
Dig deeper. You can read more about the new tools on the Google Ads Help website. You can also register for Search Ads Week here.
Why we care. The new tools make it easier for advertisers to expand your customer base and grow your business by connecting with potential new customers. The goal utilizes Smart Bidding and first-party data to optimize campaigns during peak periods, making it easier for businesses to prioritize and find high-value customers.
In 2012, Google confirmed the Panda Update 3.3 as well as a noteworthy change to local search rankings.
Panda 3.3 was a refresh of the Panda system, meaning none of the signals Panda looked at were new or had changed.
While Google Panda got the headlines at the time, there was some other noteworthy news about improvements to local search results, which Google referred to as “Venice”:
Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
And also this:
Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
This turned out to be a significant local search update.
Google’s algorithm would essentially localize a user’s search results on broad queries that had local intent. This was entirely different from pre-Venice. Put more simply:
Where in the past a search such as ‘seo’ or ‘jacket’ would have simply returned Google’s non-local result set, now Google will include results specific to your location (whether you have actively set your location or not: Google will locate you based on your IP address).
2019: This consolidated your http, https, www, non-www, m-dot, etc into a single property to get an aggregate view of your site’s performance and errors/warnings in a single property.
2017: Searching for nearby GPs and hospitals on Bing UK would surface information pulled from the country’s publicly-funded national healthcare system.
2015: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2014: Without promising a fix, the tool asked people to share their original content URL, the URL of the content taken from them and the search results that triggered the outranking.
2014: A user took advantage of Map Maker to create fake FBI and Secret Service office listings using his own phone number, and even managed to intercept calls to both agencies.
2013: The idea was that if you do a search, you’ll see matching information from your calendar showing within Google’s search results, when it was relevant.
2009: Google said it would be conducting “visual experiments early next month” that would start with the link: queries and focus on “blogroll detectors” in the matching algorithm.
2009: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2008: The major search engines announced that site owners could store their XML Sitemap files in any location – even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap.
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
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