This Week’s Industry News

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Top Stories

Google “Store Visits” Becoming an Important Metric

With less than 7% of US retail transactions happening online, marketers are searching for ways to measure the effectiveness of their digital advertisements offline. With the rise of smartphones’ ability to capture locations in the real world, they now have this possibility. Google has rolled out their new metric, “Store Visits”. Google has the ability to see when users go into stores based on store locations and store-perimeter geo-fences. Expect to see the importance of offline metrics rise in the near future.

Source: Marketing Land

Google Releases Update for AdWords Editor Version 11

Just a week after the initial launch of the new AdWords Editor, Google has released an update to fix a few bugs. The most glaring bug was that the click-through rate was often display incorrectly. This has now been fixed. Much to the chagrin of the PPC team, this update does not include a feature to add Campaign Labels.

Source: Search Engine Land

Facebook Removes Bing As Search Provider

This week Facebook removed Bing as the site’s search provider and announced that they will be releasing their own search tool on Monday. Facebook’s new search tool will allow users to search for content contained within past Facebook posts and shares. Microsoft expanded by saying that Facebook’s future is to contain search results within the social network and not direct people to outside websites.

Source: TechCrunch

Marketers Now Dedicate Over Half of Digital Budgets to Retargeting

The percentage of marketers that now spend over 50% of their digital ad budgets on retargeting doubled from 7% to 14% this year. Further, nearly three-quarters of marketers spend between 10 to 50 percent of their budgets on retargeting. Over 90 percent of individuals surveyed say that their retargeting campaigns perform the same or better than their search, email and other display campaigns.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Adds Widget to Make Countdown Copy Easy

Google has released an AdWords widget that allows advertiser to add a dynamic countdown features to ad copy. This gives advertisers the ability to show the days until a deadline such as the end of a sale. It is extremely simple to implement, the process is very similar to keyword insertion.

Source: Search Engine Marketing Land

Google Reportedly Working On a ‘Buy Now’ Button

The on-going battle between Amazon and Google continues to rage on. Google is preparing to launch a ‘Buy Now’ button next to product pages in search results. This button would allow a searcher to put the item in a shopping cart and check out with a single click. Google does not intend to open a fulfillment warehouse to support this button, the sales would be fulfilled by the third-party retailer.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Additional Headlines

See What’s Trending On YouTube and Google

Google Announces Plans To Close Freebase

Malware Forces Google To Block Many WordPress Sites

Connecting AdWords Scripts & The Advanced Calendar API

Google May Be Adding Images To Mobile Results

Notable Commentary

Not Provided Not So Bad

Most SEOs hated the news that most of their Analytics keyword data would forever more be (not provided). But Stephan Spencer argues that it’s actually benefitting SEO by shifting practitioners focus away from obsessively focusing on individual keywords.
Analysis: Stephan Spencer, Search Engine Land

3 Sneaky Ways to Bid on Competitor Keywords

Melissa Mackey, from Search Engine Watch, proposes three different ways you can bid on competitor keywords without getting keyword quality scores of 1 or 2. These include bidding on misspellings, bidding on terms involving the word ‘Cancel’ (e.g. Cancel Netflix), and suggesting creative ad copy ideas.

Analysis: Melissa Mackey, Search Engine Watch

Why the Best SEO Firms Don’t Guarantee Results

Joshua Steimle of Forbes discusses why the leading SEO firms don’t guarantee their results. The biggest reason: those that do promise rankings are the types of low quality SEO firms that use mass spammy email solicitations as their primary marketing tactic.

Analysis: Joshua Steimle, Forbes

5 New Year’s Resolutions for Paid Search in 2015

Diane Pease, of Search Engine Watch, suggests five PPC resolutions for 2015. In her resolutions, she suggests different ideas that can make you a more effective advertiser. Ideas include: expanding to other engines, stepping out of your comfort zone, and cleaning up your current campaigns.

Analysis: Diane Pease, Search Engine Watch