This Week’s Industry News
Compiled by the Rocket Clicks Team
Top Stories
Google Testing New Color Scheme on Mobile
While Google doesn’t do much color testing for mobile, this week some users noticed a new black UI for their mobile search results. For the most part, search results look normal but instead of the usual blue and green color combination for titles and URL breadcrumbs they are black. Source: TheSEMPost
Bing to Stop Supporting Standard Text Ads
Bing has officially announced that they will no longer be supporting Standard Text Ad creation or editing starting July 31, 2017. Similar to Google, following the previously mentioned date users will still be able to run standard text ads, but they won’t be able to create or edit them. To aid in this change, Bing does offer options for converting STAs into ETAs in both the Bing UI and Bing Editor. Otherwise, users can simply import their ETAs from Google. Source: Search Engine Land
Mobile Image Search Given New Quick Filters
Google continues to add features for mobile image search and the newest update has added quick filters. These filters appear below the search box and make it easier to sort results by latest images, GIFs, clip art, colors and copyright. At the end there is even a filter for images “labeled for reuse.” Source: Search Engine Land
AdWords Removed Bid Cap for Enhanced CPC
Users may begin to see a new notification in their AdWords accounts telling them about some new changes to Enhanced CPC. While this feature would previously only increase bids 30 percent above the max CPC, the ceiling has now been removed and ECPCs will be adjusted “to fully account for differences in conversion rates across dimensions like audience and location.” According to Google, these changes will gradually roll out in June. Source: Search Engine Land
How Geotargeting and Hreflang: Which One Promotes Your Site?
The Google Webmaster Help Forums were asked if “I can geo-target for one country while leaving another country not geo-targeted to serve the rest of the world?” During his answer, John Mueller, explained that with geotargeting Google will promote the localized version in search results, but a hreflang only acts as an indicator to Google to swap out the URL with the appropriate one for that country and language. Source: Search Engine Roundtable
Additional Commentary
Tips to Boost a Low Conversion Volume Account
Anna Shirley shares some tips on how you can be creative and inventive to push conversion volume in a generally low volume account. One vital tip she offers is to optimize your campaigns based on analytics data because you may not have enough valuable data on the AdWords end to even make insightful bid adjustment changes. Shirley also recommends using campaign-level audience lists with a catch-all long duration so it’s easier to see audience trends compared to applying these on the ad group level. Her closing thought is to not get overwhelmed with the lack of data and pick smaller targets so you have at least some clear focal point. Source: Anna Shirley, Search Engine Land
Winning with Google’s New Verified Customer Reviews
Reviews are a great way to boost your sites reputation and brand awareness. To help sort through the masses of reviews on the web, Google has launched Verified Customer Reviews and Search Engine Watch’s Amanda DiSelvestro provided three ways to take advantage of this new feature. Once you opt-in to this feature you can offer an incentive to your customers to leave a review, follow up with a personalized email and respond to negative reviews. Source: Amanda DiSelvestro, Search Engine Watch
