This Week’s Industry News

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Mobile Bidding-By-Ad Group Is Imminent In AdWords

Unsurprisingly, Google AdWords will soon include ad group bidding for mobile devices as part of its larger enhanced campaigns roll out. The feature should be available for everyone in May, and serves as a pretty significant change.

Existing mobile bids are solely made at the campaign level in enhanced campaigns, and Google’s motives for this change remain ambiguous.

Source: Search Engine Land

Bing Rolling Out Product Ads

Bing Ads revealed they’ll be rolling out Product Ads sometime this summer in the U.S. The ads will follow a format very similar to AdWords Product Listing Ads with a thumbnail, merchant information and optional promotional text. The ads will gather product details from the Bing Merchant Center.

Source: Search Engine Land

Matt Cutts Explains Why New Pages Often Rank On A Slope

In one of his pastel-colored webmaster question-answer videos, Google’s spam team captain Matt Cutts addressed the topic of ranking fluctuations for new pages on websites. Cutts said it’s common to see new pages rank extremely well immediately, at least until Google fully understands how that page fits into a site (and search topic’s) bigger relevancy picture.

Of course, this is all contingent on the query in question, but generally speaking, Cutts confirmed some assumptions many SEOs have about their “Query Deserves Freshness” practice.

Source: Search Engine Land

Sitelink, Ad Position Reporting Now Available in Bing Ads

In March, Bing Ads unveiled a few new reports for advertisers. Among them, Ad Extension Details displays sitelink performance by campaign (or ad group), and “Top v. Other” in the Keyword Performance Report shows advertisers how their ads are performing relative to positioning with the search results.

Source: Search Engine Land

Tablets Generate Lower Revenue Per Click Than Traditional Computers

A Q1 study conducted by RKG revealed that tablets generate 15% lower revenue per click when compared to traditional computers. The authors of the report predict that discrepancy will continue to grow moving forward. The finding comes in the wake of Google’s announcement that it’s combining tablets and PCs in enhanced campaigns. The report isn’t the first to call into question Google’s contention that user behavior on both devices in similar and will continue to blur together.

Source: Search Engine Land

User Account ‘Ad Preferences’ Are Now ‘Google Ads Settings’

Making it easier to for users to bulk edit their ad display options in their accounts, Google has consolidated the Ads Preferences Manager feature into Ads Settings. The new interface is much simpler, and makes it easy to say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ to personalized ad serving on Gmail, and the Google Display Network.

Source: Search Engine Land

The Shodan Search Engine Lets You Dabble With Dark Magic

Defrost a Denmark hockey rink with one click. Turn a car wash on and off without entering the facility. Convert a traffic control system into “test mode” with a single command line. All of these actions are possible if you have an Internet connection, thanks to the Shodan search engine.

Shodan was designed with the normal search engine mission in mind (help people find valuable information), but with one Kraken-sized catch: It opens a door to millions of online connections that are unsecured. Most users are security professionals and researchers, and the search engine’s founder said it’s irrelevant to most hackers/spammers because they already possess similar systems.

Source: Search Engine Land

Facebooks Knows How You Spend Your Money

Facebook is expanding way it gathers data outside the social network to better target advertising. On Wednesday, Facebook rolled out a new tool that allows advertisers to serve ads to users based on their online and offline spending history. The new tool combines information Facebook already gathers internally from users-like “likes” –and combines it with massive new amounts of data from third –party data marketers.

Source: Wall Street Journal

LinkedIn Adds Mention Feature In Status Updates

LinkedIn is taking a page out of Twitter and Facebook’s playbook, now allowing users to mention businesses, pages, and people in their status updates. In general, this seems like a good idea for networking and increasing user interactions on the social network.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Google Has A Better Malware Police Force Than Other Search Engines

Google has been defrocked as the “King of Malware.” Not three years after people christened the search engine with that moniker, Google has become the ruthless dictator everyone knows and loves when it comes to detaining the criminals in its search results.

A new study has found that just .0025% of Google’s results contain malware, compared to .0067% of Blekko, .012% of Bing, and .024% of Yandex. Of course, this is all relative to search volume and size, but it’s a huge improvement over Google’s lackluster police force from a few years ago.

Source: Search Engine Land

U.S. Mobile Searchers Purchase Really Fast Compared To Those In The U.K.

We often highlight studies showcasing the ever-evolving mobile search behaviors of United States smartphone users. But how do they compare to our previous rulers across the pond?

A recent study from xAd revealed that, when comparing mobile purchasing intent across the auto, travel, and restaurant industries, U.S. users were more likely to convert quickly. Notably, 87% of U.S. mobile users were intent on purchasing within the day, compared to 585 of U.K. searchers.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Knowledge Graph Now Displays For Non-Profits

Google’s Knowledge Graph has shown up for noun-based searches for a little over a year now, but searches for non-profit foundations returned normal search results. However, Google recently announced its Knowledge Graph will feature non-profit organizations, displaying the non-profits founder, year of origin, assets, revenue, and category.

Source: Search Engine Land

Notable Commentary

Ready For The Summer Solstice

Combining Social Media And SEO Metrics For A Holistic Approach To Marketing

As marketers, we’ve grown very accustomed to tying ROI to search analytics. For social networks…not so much. Jim Yu has a good primer on how to use social signals to determine the success and value of a campaign on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and how to combine that data with SEO KPIs to accurately ascribe full scale value to a marketing campaign.

Analysis By: Jim Yu, Search Engine Land

Trust, But Verify The Accuracy Of Your Data

Name a user behavior or potential site trend, and the odds are pretty high we can access data measuring it within five minutes. Matt Peters uses an SEOmoz case study to support six best practices for checking and double checking analytics to ensure they’re as accurate as possible.

Analysis By: Matt Peters, SEOmoz

Amazon Reviews, Semantic Tone, And The Future Of Search

The merger of search and social has clearly been given the green light. However, search engines and social networks still have problems differentiating between tertiary connections and similar interests. Pete Meyers has an excellent post at SEOmoz discussing this issue, and speculates how sites may do more than “review reviews” to determine relevancy and usefulness for users.

Analysis By: Pete Meyers, SEOmoz

A Holistic, User-Driven Approach To Citation Building

Citations are a very significant part of Google’s local search algorithm, so it only makes sense to ensure they are 100% accurate across the web, and your efforts in that area are easily traceable. SEOmoz has a lengthy, but useful post on how to streamline the citation building process.

Analysis By: Casey Meraz, SEOmoz

Doomsday Prepping For The Next Penguin Update

If you work on a website you know is going to get hit, sooner or later, by a Penguin Update, this article is for you. Glenn Gabe tracks all of his steps, from link discovery to removal request, and explains how you can do the same before the next Penguin storm unleashes its wrath on bad link profiles everywhere.

Analysis By: Glenn Gabe, Search Engine Watch

B2B Companies And Enhanced Campaigns

Enhanced campaigns are inevitably going to hit all AdWords accounts one way or another. As such, it’s important to start preparing for their launch, especially for B2B companies. Search Engine Land features an interesting article that points out a few specific parts of the change that are worth prioritizing before the switch.

Analysis By: Brad Neelan, Search Engine Land

A Four Pack Of Simple, Revenue-Boosting UX Changes

It’s often easier to get people to come to your website than it is to get them to become customers. Nick Eubanks offers a few small user experience changes that netted him a 50% increase in sales. Obviously, optimizing the “user experience” is all relative to the product or service in question, but it serves as a good example of how simple changes can have a big impact.

Analysis By: Nick Eubanks, Search Engine Watch

BuzzFeed And The Future Of Media

New York Magazine has a long but interesting piece about BuzzFeed and the implications its “native advertising” model has for old media moving forward.

Analysis by: Andrew Rice, New York Magazine