This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Google’s Newspack Platform
The Google News Initiative has partnered with Automattic and WordPress to create Newpack – a fast, secure and low-cost publishing system targeted specifically for smaller, local news publishers that have struggled with traffic and revenue and don’t have a lot of technology resources. This is scheduled to launch in beta near the end of July, and you can apply before February to be allowed early access. It will be fully funded by Automattic through January 2020, but the fees will range from $1,000 – $2,000 a month after that. Source: Google Blog
Amazon Sponsored Product Ad Updates
Amazon has added more bid management features for Sponsored Products ads in its advertising interface. The new bidding tools include a manual option to set your own bids, or a choice between two different dynamic bidding strategies. Amazon may adjust the bid by as much as 100% up or down, unless the “down only” option is selected. Then the bids will only be adjusted when a conversion appears less likely. Amazon is also letting advertisers set placement bid adjustments for Sponsored Products ads for the top of the search page and for product page placements. Bid adjustments can range from zero to 900 percent. Source: Search Engine Land
New Features in Search Console URL Tool
Google Search Console has updated the Inspect URL tool with the ability to see a specific URL’s HTTP response code, JavaScrips logs and a rendered screenshot. To access this, enter a page in the Inspect URL Tool and do a live test. You will then be able to click on View Crawled Page which will show you a side panel. The More Info tab will show a page resources section to include a list of resources that could not be loaded by Googlebot. Under the Screenshot tab you can click Test Live URL and it will then render and display a screenshot of the page as to how Googlebot sees it. Once the page is rendered, you can go back to the More Info tab and click on JavaScript logs to see if there are any Errors. Source: Search Engine Journal
New Microsoft-Verizon Medial Deal
Microsoft and Verizon announced Thursday that Microsoft’s Bing Ads will be the exclusive search advertising platform for Verizon Media properties, including Yahoo and AOL. This means that advertisers can reach Yahoo and Bing audiences through one platform. Microsoft said it estimates the unified buying could lead to an increase in clicks of 10 to 15 percent in the U.S. Advertisers that are currently running campaigns on Oath Ad Platforms should continue to do so through the transition to avoid losing traffic. In the meantime, Microsoft recommends running parallel campaigns in Bing Ads to absorb the traffic and ad spend shifts. Source: Search Engine Land
Analysis:
Clearing up Confusing about Impressions, Clicks and Position
An impression is recorded even when it hasn’t been scrolled into view, for example if there are 10 blue links and your listing is #9 and below the fold, it still counts as an impression if the page was loaded in the search results. In the Image Search tab, the images will need to be scrolled into view before they are counted as an impression. If there is an image section on the main Search Results tab, and they are not in a carousel view, each image counts as an impression but they all share the same position. However, in the Image Search tab, each image has its own position, calculated left to right and then top to bottom. Listings within a carousel must be scrolled into view to count as an impression. They will count even if half of your card is showing in a carousel because it tracks as soon as your page loads. All listings in an AMP carousel and knowledge panel will have the same position and your knowledge panel will be counted after all of the blue links are counted on the first page, so it could be position 11. Source: Search Engine Land
4 Facebook Ad Mistakes to Avoid
- Setting the Bid Cap Too Low – this can lower the performance of your ads because some audiences will cost more than others. If you are see poor ad performance, try raising your bid cap to improve delivery.
- Poorly Distributed Budget – if budget is limited, try setting up campaign budget optimization. This will spread spend across campaigns depending on performance.
- Not Enough Conversions to Optimize Delivery – Facebook needs a minimum of 50 conversions a week to optimize and consistently deliver ads. If your campaigns don’t meet this mark, consider using target cost bidding rather than lowest cost bidding to keep delivery and costs consistent.
- Ad Fatigue – people who see your ad too often will increase costs and lower relevance scores. To avoid this, set frequency caps in your ad sets to limit the number of times people see your ads in a certain time frame
