This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
YouTube is Adding New Metrics and a Redesigned Dashboard
YouTube creators will soon have access to impressions, click-through rates and unique viewer metrics to measure how their videos are performing. Impressions measure how many times a video’s thumbnail has been viewed. Click-through rate is the percentage of video thumbnails that turned into an actual view which helps determine which thumbnail images and titles are pulling the highest views, and unique viewers reflect the estimated number of people watching a video over a period of time. YouTube Studio will be moving out of beta and be the default hub for creators. The new dashboard features personalized content recommendations based on your channel’s needs. Source: Marketing Land
Bing Entity Search is Now Available in the U.S.
Bing Entity Search brings contextual information about people, places and local business to any application for a more engaging user experience. You can identify the most relevant entity results based on a search term. Developers can enhance their applications by exposing rich data from the Bing Knowledge Graph directly in their apps. You can use this technology for creating a messaging app for group planning, a social media app that augment’s user photos with information about the location of each photo, or a camera app that can provide more context about the images. Source: Bing Blogs
Google AMP Team Launches “Render on Idle” to Load Ads Faster
A new feature launched by the Google AMP team is called Render on Idle which is designed to increase ad impressions per page by speeding up an ad’s load time when a user is not taking action in a browser. This particular feature is available for advertisers using a DoubleClick AMP ad tag or any ad network that implements Fast Fetch, which is a mechanism that reduces the possibility of empty ad slots appearing. The AMP team stated that publishers testing Render on Idle have seen a 13 percent increase in impressions per page. Source: Search Engine Land
Why You Should Use GS1 SmartSearch Schema Markup
The new GS1 SmartSearch adds schema markup with an additional benefit of helping your products gain more visibility. It also allows you to highlight more elements than a normal markup and add details that can improve the discovery of your products. Using SmartSearch will lead to better search results for consumers in finding products and information they need, greater visibility of their products in search and improved online product information that will ultimately drive sales. This is fully independent of schema.org and has its own review process and infrastructure. Similar to regular schema markup, it has to live within the body section of the page where users can see it. Source: Search Engine Land
Analysis
Are You Ready for the AdWords Attribution Changes?
Author Mona Elesseily helps us get up to speed by providing an overview of other attribution models in AdWords following the news that Google will stop supporting last click attribution this year. There is the linear model, where every touch point that contributed to a conversion will get the same score. The time decay model gives the most credit to the closest touch-point in time to a sale or conversion. The position-based model will assign 40% credit to the first and last interaction, while distributing the remaining 20% credit evenly to the middle interactions. First click, as we all now, gives 100% credit to the first touch-point in the process. The final attribution model is the data-driven model which analyzes various data points to determine what the weighting should be when a conversion occurs. Source: Elesseily, Mona, PPC Hero
How to Tell Why There was a Drop in Organic Traffic
Writer Andrew Choco from Moz explains how to perform an audit to determine if a decline in organic traffic was due to poor SEO performance, an influx in competitors or a tracking issue. He says to look at the keyword rankings, top ranking organic landing pages, bounce rates and page views and see if there are any dramatic changes coordinating with the drop in traffic. A high number of page views and a low
bounce rate may be because users are being counted twice. You may have also lost rankings to a competitor because they launched a new page type or if a new competitor that has entered the scene. If there was a rise in direct traffic, make sure that organic traffic is not being reclassified as direct. Source: Moz Blog
