Marketing Google

It’s Friday, and time for our weekly round-up of the week’s news in search marketing. Today we have the most expensive AdWords keywords, a new site testing tool from Google, and a look at whether Google factors in anchor text in internal links.Google’s next mobile update will factor in page speedMobile page speed isn’t currently used as a ranking factor by Google, but that will change with the next mobile friendly update.Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed this at a recent Search Marketing Summit in Sydney. Though he wasn’t giving dates away, it appears this update is a matter of months away.What are the most expensive keywords in the US?Our columnist Chris Lake has compiled a list of the most expensive AdWords keywords in the US. (We have the same list from the UK too).What have we learnt? Well, the US keywords are much more expensive than those in the UK. The top US keyword is upwards of four times more expensive than the equivalent across the Atlantic.Also, whereas gambling terms domina…

Email is one of the best ways for candidates to raise funds throughout the 2016 election cycle. However, inboxes are more crowded than ever, and email providers are making it even harder for relevant emails to rise above the clutter.Additionally, most political campaigners don’t use email correctly.As a political sender, it’s crucial to have successful email campaigns to help support your candidate of choice and create meaningful relationships with voters. Below are some words of advice for candidates using email for their presidential campaigns.Building trustworthy relationshipsIn 2016, political senders depend more on their recipients than typical marketing or retail senders. While sales do increase for retail marketers via email engagement, they don’t have as short a window of time where they need full commitment and involvement from the recipient in order to stay relevant.To gain the recipient’s trust, provide general knowledge and genuine thought leadership in your email versus j…

This week saw the publication of Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report, packed full of data and insights into the development of the internet and digital technology across the globe.Particularly of interest to us here at Search Engine Watch is a 21-page section on the evolution of voice and natural language as a computing interface, titled ‘Re-Imagining Voice = A New Paradigm in Human-Computer Interaction’.It looks at trends in recognition accuracy, voice assistants, voice search and sales of devices like the Amazon Echo to build up an accurate picture of how voice interface has progressed over the past few years, and is likely to progress in the future.So what do we learn from the report and Meeker’s data about the role of voice in internet trends for 2016?Voice search is growing exponentiallyWe know that voice is a fast-rising trend in search, as the proliferation of digital assistants and the advances in interpreting natural language queries make voice searching easier and mo…

If anything typifies the ambitions of modern marketers, it’s the “O” word — omnichannel. We give much lip service to this common goal of engaging customers in seamless and timely experiences across touch points. But, in reality, it’s not so easy to enable these types of ubiquitous experiences across a large marketing technology stack, much less enhance it.What’s required is a sophisticated use of data that reveals the attributes of real people along with the ability to take action on behaviors in real time. If you’re still focused solely on cookies or visitors, you are missing the larger opportunity to connect with customers and deliver the most relevant interactions.Forrester forecasts that cross-channel sales will reach $1.8 trillion by 2018. Yet, under 40 percent of companies surveyed in another study (registration required) by Forrester and Ensighten (my employer) said they could link “the majority” of their email data to customer activity in other channels — “and the situation de…

Conversion tracking can be the bane of a PPC professional’s existence. And that’s because there are so many variables.Every business has a different website and CMS, a different thing they want to track, a different web development team with different proficiencies. All these different variations make this part of PPC one of the hardest parts to implement.Though tricky, conversion tracking is essential. Because AdWords tracking gives you the data you need to be able to make smarter decisions about where you’re spending your advertising dollars, and when to optimize your PPC account.In this post, I’ll outline seven steps you can take to audit the status of your PPC conversions …1. Find out what the business is already trackingThe first thing you can do is find out what the business is tracking today.Go to your AdWords dashboard > Tools > Conversion actions, where you can see conversion status.2. Check your conversion actionsCheck that the web pages jive with the conversion set up…

A little more than a year after Twitter began testing carousel ads that could include multiple app install ads, the company will now start experimenting with carousels that can include normal tweets, including possibly yours.Twitter’s latest carousel ad format lines up an array of tweets –text, photos or videos — into a horizontal slideshow, not unlike Facebook’s, Instagram’s and Google’s versions of the format. Brands can include up to 20 tweets in a carousel, but Twitter recommends they limit themselves to around 5 or 7.Brands can pick one of their own tweets, including their ads, to appear in a carousel, but they’re not limited to their own content. They can also pull in tweets from creators who are part of Twitter-owned Niche’s influencer program. And if they get a regular user’s permission, they can include that person’s tweets as well.It’s up to the brand to figure out how to get a person’s permission, such as by direct messaging the person on Twitter. There’s no way for Twitter…

Digitally connected brick-and-mortar retailers have gathered an enormous amount of data regarding their consumers’ preferences via Internet of Things (IoT) hardware such as mobile devices, cameras, smart lightbulbs and beacons, but this data often remains underutilized without driving questions.The key to achieving a truly connected overall marketing strategy lies in integrating the information acquired by a retailer’s omnichannel strategy with their mobile strategy, as well as their retail supply chain (i.e., inventory, in-store customer engagement strategies, and real-time mall activity).But how can these multiple layers of complex data be properly integrated, and how are retailers currently faring at this task?Tracking behavioral responsesMany retailers are overwhelmed by the amount of data they have collected regarding their consumers. To better engage potential customers, machine learning is being used on large amounts of data to identify patterns in shopper behavior.For example,…

This year, more than 45 advertisers put their brand front and center at Super Bowl 50. SunTrust Banks was one of those brands, entering game day as a first-time Super Bowl advertiser.Building a campaign around its OnUp.com Movement – SunTrust’s aim was to launch a national conversation around financial well-being.In addition to its 30-second “Hold Your Breath” spot that aired during the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter, SunTrust released a teaser ad on January 26, and a 60-seconded extended ad of its official spot the week of Super Bowl.The campaign resulted in more than 10-million social media impressions and 38,000 OnUp.com site-visits game day. Since the campaign’s launch, SunTrust says it has generated more than 530 earned media placements, and its site has had more than 500,000 unique visitors, with over 137,000 OnUp.com subscribers.For today’s CMO’s View column, SunTrust Bank’s Susan Somersille Johnson shares why her brand chose to launch its OnUp Movement at Super Bowl…

Last week was quite eventful for PPC marketers. Google announced a number of changes coming to AdWords and Analytics during the Google Performance Summit, with mobile being the huge focus.Google revealed several incredible mobile statistics. We were introduced to Expanded Text Ads. We got a sneak preview of the new Google AdWords interface. And so much more.Another big change was what Google described as “the next generation” of local search ads.So what exactly are these new Google maps ads? What’s changing?Here are answer to the top 10 questions you’re asking (or should be asking!) about the new Google Maps local search ads.1. How are Local Search Ads on Google Maps changing?The new Google Maps ads are designed to help businesses be more visible at moments when consumers are searching online (especially on a mobile device) for somewhere to eat or shop.In the coming weeks and months, Google will be revealing several new Maps ad formats and features that are designed to drive more foot…

Here’s our daily recap of what happened in marketing technology, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:Google has a new tool for small businesses to check how well their websites score
Jun 2, 2016 by Barry Schwartz
Google’s new tool not only scores your page speed but also gives you a score for how mobile-friendly your website is.Using data science to improve your enterprise paid search marketing results
Jun 2, 2016 by Travis Wright
As QuanticMind looks to move in on Marin Software’s territory, which platform is right for you? Columnist Travis Wright explains how data science can boost your campaigns and ad spend.Localytics pushes Places notifications as key to personalization, mobile engagement
Jun 1, 2016 by Greg Sterling
The range of use cases for location is much broader than most mobile marketers recognize.Facebook’s DeepText has “near-human” understanding of people’s posts
Jun 1, 2016 by Tim Peterson
Facebook’s DeepText uses artificial…

Announced on the Google Small Business blog yesterday: a new tool to test how your site works across different devices. It seems to be a combination of the mobile friendly and page speed tools, though it is useful to have these tests in one place.According to Google:On average, people check their phones more than 150 times a day, and more searches occur on mobile phones than computers.But if a potential customer is on a phone, and a site isn’t easy to use, they’re five times more likely to leave.To avoid losing out in these crucial moments, you need a site that loads quickly and is easy to use on mobile screens. The first step is seeing how your site is performing. We can help by scoring your site for mobile-friendliness, mobile speed, and desktop speed.It’s a simple tool to use. Just enter any URL and results are returned quickly. Here are the scores for this site. Could do better:In addition, Google will send a detailed report showing the reasons behind the scores and suggested fixe…

What does Google know about the places you’ve visited recently? What are your interests as determined by Google? Where does Google keep a list of every word that you’ve ever typed in the search box? Where can you get a list of Google ads that were of interest to you?The 10 Important Google LinksGoogle stores everything privately and here are the 10 important links (URLs) that will unlock everything Google knows about you. They are hidden somewhere deep inside your Google Account dashboard and they may reveal interesting details about you that are otherwise only known to Google. Let’s dive in.1. Google stores a list of usernames and passwords that you have typed in Google Chrome or Android for logging into various websites. They even have a website too where you can view all these passwords in plain text.passwords.google.com2. Google creates a profile of yourself based on the sites you visit, guessing your age, gender and interests and then use this data to serve you more relevant ads.…

We are living in the World where a lot of content is produced on every single day. And high-quality content is truly the kingSome content are good whereas some are not. People like good content and come back again and again to read.People don’t like to watch ads. Nowadays, people take information without the care of banners.So we can say that content marketing strategies are constantly evolving & changing .To stand out from the crowd, you need to have some decent content marketing strategies with you. Suppose you have written a well researched long article and nobody is interested to read it.How will you feel? I would definitely feel sad& I bet you too.There are many companies producing a good amount of content daily. To promote that content, they need to market that content. Until and unless you don’t get revenue for your content, your content is useless.So there are many big companies which are investing more and more money for content marketing. With the help of content mar…

Wireless earphones are still in their early evolvement stage with some crucial issues like the mediocre battery or connectivity drops in a bunch of cases or the premium price tags. They haven’t yet faced the mainstream limelight, however, this year contained quite a few impressive launches. Samsung, today pushed their latest wireless earphones, the Gear IconX that do play your music wirelessly but what’s interesting here is that Samsung is pitching them as a fitness-first device.Let’s get the basics out, they work wirelessly with any Android phone running version 4.4 or up and sustains at least 1.5GB of RAM. The earbuds come bundled with a pill-shaped box that can store and completely charge them up twice. That’s actually a great benefit given IconX’s battery life which lasts only up to 1.5 hours or 3.5 hours if you’re playing directly from the 4GB of internal memory. They look truly elegant with three options and feature a hook design to lock into one’s ears. Exterior noise cancellin…