This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Search Console Adds Products to Reporting
Google Search Console has added a new section to the enhancements section of the tools set named “Products.” This section helps you see how well your product markup is performing in Google’s search results. This new section will show errors, valid markup that has warnings and valid URLs in total. This section will show up under the Enhancements section if your site has added product schema markup. Markup can be used either on a page that describes a single product or on a shopping aggregator page that lists a single product, Once the issue is fixed, you can use the report to validate if your issues were resolved by re-crawling your affected pages.
Source: Google Blog
Google Moving Away From Average Position Metric
Google will be retiring the average position reporting from Google Ads later this year. The average position reporting will be replaced by 4 new ad position metrics that indicate the percentage of impressions and impression share your ads received in the absolute top (the first ad at the very top of the page) and top of page (above the organic results) ad slots. Google says that, “These new metrics give you a much clearer view of your prominence on the page than average position does.”
*Image provided by Google Support.
Source: Search Engine Land
Google Rebuilds “Test My Site” Tool
Google has launched a rebuild of Test My Site tool.
Updates include:
- Measure speed of entire site and individual pages
- Determine if site/page speed is faster or slower compared to prior month
- Find if site speed/page speed ranks fast, average or slow
- Discover how site speed compares to other in the industry – see potential impact of site speed on revenue
- Get detailed list of recommended fixes to increase speed on up to 5 pages on site
- Compile complete report to share
Google emphasizes the importance of mobile speed while citing The State of Online Retail Performance: a 1 second delay in mobile load times can impact conversion rate by up to 20%.
Source:Search Engine Journal
Facebook Offers New Ad Placements for Video Advertisers
Facebook is rolling out a premium ad program called Showcase, which lets advertisers target the highest-quality videos. Ads bought through Showcase show up in Facebook Watch, which houses the platform’s top tier of original and publisher content. Ads are bought upfront at a fixed price and are guaranteed to be shown to a specific demographic. On average, Facebook says nearly 100 million people in the US watch Showcase eligible content each month. The products offered in Showcase include:
- In-Stream Reserve: appear either mid-roll or pre-roll. These placements are bought in advance at a fixed cost and delivered to in-target audiences verified by Nielsen.
- In-Stream Reserve Categories: Includes all the features of In-Stream Reserve, and allows advertisers to reach people within contextually relevant content. Categories include sports, fashion/beauty, entertainment, food, and news.
- Sponsorships: Allow advertisers to be the exclusive sponsor of a program for US viewers, giving advertisers the opportunity to place their ads in specific shows.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Analysis:
eCommerce Pages Best Practices
Faceted navigation causes a problem because of the huge potential for duplicate content to be indexed, which also wastes crawl budget. The usual solution is to use rel=canonical to hint to Google that the faceted navigation pages with query string parameters are in fact duplicates of the canonical. If you are using canonical, don’t add noindex tags those pages otherwise the canonical will be ignored. For category pages with many products, Google identifies and crawls paginated architecture with rel-next and rel=prev in the <head> section of the page. Therefore, you should not set noindex tag on any of these pages and have self referential canonical tags so /category/2/ should have a canonical of /category/2/. You could also block search parameter pages with a wildcard user-agent in robots.txt if you don’t think these pages serve a search purpose. Source: Built Visible
3 Tips for Refining YouTube Placements
- Foreign Language Channels – with new visibility into what YouTube channels your ads are showing on, be sure to review foreign language channels. If your video is showing up on foreign language channels that video is not set up for, it would be best to exclude those placements from your ad.
- Vevo and Other Music Channels – there is the potential for a big mismatch in terms of if someone is ready to convert and if they’re even paying attention. Some ads may see very high view rates, which sends a positive signal to Google but they may just have their phone open playing music.
- Connected TVs – similar to music channels, connected TV ads may have a high view rate, but low conversions since people may not be paying attention. In regards to this medium, it may be more idea for remarketing than acquisition.
Source: Mike Matta, PPC Hero
