This Week’s Industry News
Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff
Top Stories
Bing Releases Auction Insights Reporting Globally
After first releasing auction insight reporting in November for the U.S., Bing has now launched this feature globally. Auction insight reporting can be found through the Ads interface as well as the through the Bing Ads Intelligence tool for Excel.
Source: Search Engine Land
Facebook Tracking Behavior Outside Of Facebook App
Facebook’s privacy policy has been updated and the big change suggests that Facebook can track your moves, including your online searches, even when you are logged out of the app. Of course, Facebook says this will improve user experience by serving more relevant advertising. The silver lining is that users can opt out of some parts of the new privacy policy in the user settings area.
Source: Search Engine Watch
Alpha Version Of Search Impact Report Released
A handful of webmasters are a part of a testing group for Google’s new Search Impact Report. Screenshots of the new report have been available and it appears it is set up to replace Webmaster Tools’ Search Queries report. New features include the ability to compare important search metrics using different dimensions that were previously unavailable in Webmaster Tools.
Source: Search Engine Land
Update to AdWords Tracking Features
Google has released new URL tagging options for advertisers. These include the capability to manage actual URL tags separately from landing page URLs. A shared tracking template can also be implemented at the account, campaign or ad group level. Custom parameters are also available; which will help advertisers identify new insights using tracking. Upgrades will be released to all advertisers starting this week. Google also advises advertisers to upgrade URLs manually before July 1, 2015 when they will be updated automatically.
Source: AdWords Blogspot
Google Adds Bulk Upload to AdWords Scripts
Google has announced new capabilities for AdWords Scripts. Advertisers will now be able to make bulk changes and additions to all campaigns with AdWords Scripts. This new feature could prove very helpful for those advertisers with many accounts and campaigns under one roof.
Source: Search Engine Land
Facebook to Add Relevance Score for Advertisers
Like Google, Facebook uses a mix of bid price and relevance scoring to determine which ads to show. Starting this week, as an incentive for advertisers to improve the quality and relevance of their ads, the company is going to expose “relevance scores” (RS) to marketers.
Facebook’s newly exposed RS is effectively an estimate of the ad’s targeted alignment with its intended audience. Facebook believes the exposure of RS will produce a “win-win-win.” Better ads will be more interesting to audiences, perform better for marketers and generate more revenue ultimately for Facebook.
Source: Marketing Land
Additional Headlines
Bing May Be Losing Mobile Search Share To Yahoo
More Defendants Winning Lawsuits In Keyword Advertising
No Whitelist For Penguin and Panda
Mother’s Day Search Trends In Bing
Common Health-Related Topics Added To Knowledge Graph
Additional Commentary
Old School SEO Doesn’t Work Anymore
SEO’s changed quite a bit in the past five years. Bill Hartzer points out a long list of techniques that five years ago may have gotten you results but now put you in risk of being penalized.
Analysis by: Bill Halzer
How Ad Rotation Settings Affect Ad Testing
In a recent post on Certified Knowledge, the merits of rotating ad tests indefinitely were discussed. It was concluded that sometimes Google makes decisions on ad winners too quickly when settings are on anything other than “Rotate Indefinitely”; which gives even impression percentage to each ad in the test.
Analysis by: Certified Knowledge
How Does Bing Differ From Google
Google is certainly the biggest search engine fish to fry in the SEO game and often, when we talk about optimization, we don’t really think or talk about the differences between search engines that make them unique. John Lincoln of Ignite Visiblity offers up some key differences that make optimizing for Bing its own endeavor.
Analysis by: John Lincoln, Ignite Visiblity
AdWords Script for A/B Testing
Columnist Daniel Gilbert recently published a post on Search Engine Land that shares how he helped create a script that would allow advertisers to do more even A/B testing in AdWords. This could be useful for any advertiser running ad experiments or settings tests.
Analysis by: Daniel Gilbert, Search Engine Land